Deepak Chopra – Consciousness Drives Evolution
I take probiotics, and fiber, so I can multiply the biotics, the good bacteria in my blood, and they don’t like toxic substances like petroleum products insecticides. So, there’s a degree of sentience in bacteria and there is sentience in unicellular organisms like a paramecium. It avoids toxins, looks for food. It even has sex.
It doesn’t have a brain. You’ve got to go a long way up the evolutionary scale before you get a brain, and then of course there’s several levels of brain. You have the reptilian brain. You have the limbic brain. You have the cortical brain. There’s a long line of living organisms from bananas to pineapples to trees to other plants that display sentience. They look for sunlight. They eat the nutrients of the earth. They communicate with each other. They reproduce. Is this not a form of sentience? Why is sentience a privilege of a brain? Why do you need a brain? You know, in my debate with Richard Dawkins, I said sentience is there in the universe, and, of course, he lost his temper. He accused me of what you call willful obscurantism. He said sentience is an emergent property.
He basically very staunchly defended the prevailing world-view. But, I’m sorry to say he’s wrong. Freeman Dyson, one of the most eminent physicists of our times, said there are three riddles that have confused him all his life. The first is the unpredictable movement of atoms. The second is a universe that’s friendly to life and mind. And the third is our own consciousness. Then he goes on this book to say in all directions that some form of sentience it seems to pervade the entire cosmos and we are also part of it.
So, here’s my theory, the theory is that evolution of species is evolution of species of consciousness, that consciousness is the trigger for evolution, that different species are almost like archetypal ideal forms in the platonic realm of consciousness that actually then evolves seemingly in time. But, you could actually see that in some way the gaps in evolution – the so-called gaps – could be creative leaps of consciousness into complexity and emergence.
