Deepak Chopra – Consciousness Drives Evolution
But, now of course there are conferences on consciousness, and neuroscience consciousness, and physics consciousness, and mathematics. So, scientists are coming to some consensus on consciousness. The last definition I heard where scientists did agree on a definition for consciousness was consciousness is first person experience.
So, right now you are having a first person experience of speaking to Deepak on the phone and only you can have that experience. I could have a second person guessing of that experience by putting you in an MRI machine and then looking at which part of your brain is being activated, and if I had enough information I could say, oh, you know, his auditory cortex is being activated. He’s probably having a conversation.
I could check the various GPS devices in the world, could even guess that you’re having a conversation with Deepak Chopra and he’s in La Jolla, or Carlsbad in California and where are you right now?
Christopher Buck: We are in Oil City, Pennsylvania.
Dr. Deepak Chopra: Okay, so, given enough data we could actually tell people what was going on right now. But, that wouldn’t be first person experience. That would be, second person description, or even third person description. So, I think we all know what we mean by first person experience.
How we experience the taste of a strawberry, how we feel the emotion of a story that we read, or how we feel when we think of somebody we love, or an image that we experience somewhere in our consciousness, a sensation, a thought. That’s first person experience. So, that’s a good definition for consciousness that everybody agrees on.
In Eastern wisdom traditions though consciousness is a little more than that. It’s what is the source of that experience? We can say that experience can be perceptual, which means I see an object. I see a sunset. I see a mountain. I see another person. I hear a song. I taste chocolate ice cream. I smell a rose. Those are perceptual experiences. In one way or another they have to do with what we call the outside world. So, we can say sound, taste, smell, texture, color, for: these are perceptual experiences, but then there’s another variety of experience, which is mental, which is just thought or emotion, or you might say an image in consciousness, or an idea, or imagination. Those are also experiences, but what is the source of them? Where do they happen? Is there something prior to experience?
