Deepak Chopra – Consciousness Drives Evolution
It’s up for grabs. What is that invisible realm, but you might say you have a huge, huge, huge iceberg and the tip of your little finger is the tip of that iceberg, which is the physical, observable world. So, that’s the number one unanswered question.
The second unanswered question we ask today is: what is the biological basis of consciousness? And here there’s also a problem because everybody assumes that there’s a biological basis of consciousness. That’s the prevailing scientific paradigm: that your thoughts, your imagination, your perceptions, your everything that you experience every day as your feelings, intentions, introspection, intuition, rational thought, imagination, and also everything that you experience as a perceptual world is a biological phenomenon.
But there’s a problem with that because first of all that’s an assumption. Nobody has ever actually proved that biology produces consciousness, or any experience. When you look at a beautiful rainbow, or you look at the golf course, or you look at a room, or you look at an exquisite building with intricate architecture, all that’s going to your eyes as photons.
Those photons are colorless and have no dimensionality whatsoever. When they reach your eyes, your retina or your brain, all that happens is – all that goes is an electric current – whether it’s any of the five sensations, all that happens in your brain is electrochemistry. You don’t experience electrochemistry or photons or electrical currents.
You experience a three dimensional world, which is evolving in time. And no one knows how that happens. It’s called the hard problem of consciousness. If I ask you to imagine a beautiful sunset and you see a picture of that sunset, there’s no picture of the sunset in your brain. There’s just electrochemistry.
So, where does experience happen, any experience? People will say it happens in the brain. You say, “why?” And they say, “Well, if you knock somebody on the head, then they lose consciousness,” or “If you give the man anesthesia, they lose consciousness, or, you know, if they take a drug, or a hallucination, they experience a shift in consciousness.”
