{"id":1994,"date":"2014-03-03T13:00:39","date_gmt":"2014-03-03T18:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/intentchopra\/?p=1994"},"modified":"2014-03-03T13:00:39","modified_gmt":"2014-03-03T18:00:39","slug":"hidden-truths-going-beyond-common-sense-reality-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/intentchopra\/2014\/03\/hidden-truths-going-beyond-common-sense-reality-part-1.html","title":{"rendered":"Hidden Truths: Going Beyond Common-Sense Reality (Part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Deepak Chopra<\/strong>, MD,\u00a0Menas Kafatos<\/strong>, Ph.D., and\u00a0Subhash Kak<\/strong>, Ph.D.<\/p>\n

Despite their many divergences, science and philosophy are both led forward by reality. This is inevitable if facts, concepts, axioms, and other mental models are to be reliable. There are two ongoing projects, thousands of years old by now, that sprang from a different response to reality and where it leads. Roughly speaking, they are materialism and idealism. Materialism is fact-based, data driven, and wedded to the notion that \u201creality as given\u201d is essentially trustworthy. Idealism cannot accept \u201creality as given\u201d but looks to a hidden intelligence or level of Nature (if not God or the gods) that invisibly originates the physical universe.<\/p>\n

To anyone who isn\u2019t a professional scientist or philosopher, this divergence is mystifying, as if reality was a Chinese menu offering Platonism, Christianity, and Buddhism in column A and Aristotelianism, Einstein, and the Higgs boson in column B. As a practical matter, however, the ordinary person, including ordinary scientists, lead common-sense lives that depend implicitly on trusting the five senses and accepting \u201creality as given.\u201d A quantum physicist drives his Honda Civic to work, not the ambiguous cloud of subatomic particles that he knows, professionally speaking, to be the substrate of every physical object, including automobiles.<\/p>\n

Yet reality cannot be approached as Solomon\u2019s choice. It isn\u2019t tenable to divide it between materialism and idealism, each getting half. (For the moment, we\u2019ll set aside the obvious disparity by which materialism got the whole baby while idealism was left with a teething ring and hints of a soul.) Understanding the nature of reality is too important to be left to specialists; the ordinary person deserves to know that certain first principles are true, applicable to reality itself, not a model of reality that exists to satisfy one stream of intellectual curiosity or the other.<\/p>\n

The problem for the \u201cmatter first\u201d position is that no one has credibly described the point at which unconscious particles acquire consciousness. That they somehow did is simply an unproven assumption. The problem for the \u201cmind first\u201d position is exactly the reverse: how to describe the mechanism by which consciousness morphs into physicality. These matching dilemmas would be of purely academic interest to ordinary people except for their practical implications, if any. If reality is leading us to see it in a different, more comprehensive way, there can\u2019t help but be practical outcomes. But that\u2019s a secondary issue, which we will address in our conclusion.<\/p>\n

In the early quantum era, a number of seminal thinkers suspected that the link between materialism and idealism could only be found by exploring the role of consciousness. A handful of notable quotes summarizes their suspicions:<\/p>\n

Erwin Schr\u00f6dinger: \u201cTo divide or multiply consciousness is something meaningless.\u201d
\n\u201cThere is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of minds or consciousness\u2026. [I]n truth there is only one mind.\u201d
\nMax Planck: “I regard consciousness as fundamental. We cannot get behind consciousness. ”
\nWerner Heisenberg: \u201cThe atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.\u201d<\/p>\n

It has taken a long time for these intimations to be recognized as profound insights. The lag time was due to various things \u2013 consciousness wasn\u2019t considered a valid scientific subject; quantum theory had other fish to fry (for example, reconciling quantum mechanics with relativity); and in general the excitement of the quantum era was being generated by a complex set of new facts. Consciousness could be conveniently relegated to metaphysics and ignored. The triumph of one monism, the \u201cmatter first\u201d worldview, seemed inevitable.<\/p>\n

Yet at bottom the common-sense world of solid tangible objects fixed in space and time had been fatally undermined by quantum theory. This changed the status of facts per se. A fact could be accepted as a certainty in the classical Newtonian model, deriving from Aristotelian mechanics. Quantum facts were entirely different, taking into account the uncertainty principle and Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s equation. It was valid to describe quantum behavior as a field of possibilities governed by mathematical probabilities. Thus a fact became a mental calculation first and foremost, with experimentalists struggling at great expenditure of time and money to gather fleeting evidence that a set of mathematical predictions was supported by data.<\/p>\n

With startling speed, skipping over myriad complexities, we arrive at the present situation, where despite the astonishing accuracy of quantum mechanics (touted as the most accurate scientific theory ever developed), there is more doubt than ever about the nature of reality. By definition reality is more complex than any model can portray, and once a model runs into phenomena it cannot explain, we are compelled to follow wherever reality leads next.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been well said that theories are right about what they include and wrong about what they exclude. We take that as axiomatic. To follow reality\u2019s next hints, it is necessary for materialism and idealism to both abandon their prejudices, the chief of which is to protect the ground they\u2019ve already won. Science has no reason to abandon its demand for data. The upholders of idealism (found in a loose aggregation of religion and spirituality, with a sprinkling of outlying philosophers, perhaps) have no reason for abandoning the inner world of subjective experience, with its remarkable capacity for insight, intuition, art, etc.
\nSince science dominates the current view of reality, we are more or less forced, as a provisional measure, to accept its demand for data, even though facts as such have been seriously undermined. There are some new hypotheses that bridge the gap between the quantum and classical worlds, making it possible to glimpse an underlying connection. Such a connection would justify seeing reality as a unity, after which we can decide which unity, the materialistic or the idealistic, is more credible. If reality\u2019s hidden dimension is actually open to us, everyday life will be radically transformed, as we\u2019ll discuss in the next post.
\n(To be cont.)<\/p>\n

Deepak Chopra<\/strong>, MD is the author of more than 75 books with twenty-two New York Times bestsellers including\u00a0Super Brain<\/a>. Join the\u00a0weightlessproject.org<\/a>\u00a0to eradicate obesity and malnutrition. For more interesting articles visit\u00a0The Universe Within<\/a><\/p>\n

Menas C. Kafatos<\/strong>\u00a0is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Computational Physics at Chapman University. He is a quantum physicist, cosmologist, climate change researcher and works extensively on consciousness and the above fields. His doctoral thesis advisor was noted M.I.T. professor Philip Morrison who studied under J. Robert Oppenheimer. Kafatos’ studies involved quantum physicists Hans Bethe, Victor Weisskopf and cosmologist Thomas Gold. He is co-author with Deepak Chopra of the forthcoming book, Who Made God and Other Cosmic Riddles. (Harmony)<\/p>\n

Subhash Kak<\/strong>, Ph.D., Regents Professor of Computer Science, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Deepak Chopra, MD,\u00a0Menas Kafatos, Ph.D., and\u00a0Subhash Kak, Ph.D. Despite their many divergences, science and philosophy are both led forward by reality. This is inevitable if facts, concepts, axioms, and other mental models are to be reliable. There are two ongoing projects, thousands of years old by now, that sprang from a different response to reality…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":125,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,12],"tags":[999,998,503,479,368,84,494],"class_list":["post-1994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-consciousness","category-science","tag-erwin-schrodinger","tag-idealism","tag-materialism","tag-philosophy","tag-reality","tag-science-2","tag-werner-heisenberg"],"yoast_head":"\nHidden Truths: Going Beyond Common-Sense Reality (Part 1) - Deepak Chopra and Intent<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/intentchopra\/2014\/03\/hidden-truths-going-beyond-common-sense-reality-part-1.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Hidden Truths: Going Beyond Common-Sense Reality (Part 1) - Deepak Chopra and Intent\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"By\u00a0Deepak Chopra, MD,\u00a0Menas Kafatos, Ph.D., and\u00a0Subhash Kak, Ph.D. Despite their many divergences, science and philosophy are both led forward by reality. 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