Deepak Chopra – Consciousness Drives Evolution
So, consciousness must be a brain phenomenon, which is a pretty good argument other than when you go and say, then how does the brain do it? How does the brain produce imagination, or creativity, or intention, or any volition, or a thought, or even the color red, when all that comes is colorless photons, or the experience of a sound or a taste? And then we get stuck. We don’t know where to go, and that is the essence of the hard problem.
Now eastern traditions and many other systems of science or philosophy where there is not the assumption of a physicalist ontology – physicalist ontology means that we do not assume that the essential stuff of the universe is something physical, they’ll say there’s no hard problem. There is just consciousness, and its excited states. There’s just consciousness and its modulations. If that is so, then our mental experience is an excited state of consciousness. Biology is an excited state of consciousness, and our experience of the world is an excited state of consciousness. And, so, there is no hard problem. You’re just assuming that the world is physical.
If you assume that the world is consciousness, then the universe is consciousness as well. It’s the objective experience of consciousness as biology, etcetera. So, then if this is true, if this philosophical assumption or ontology is true, then we are a species of consciousness, as is a microbe, as a bacterium, as is a paramecium, as is a monkey, etcetera.
Then the evolution of species is in fact the evolution of species of consciousness.
We are all conscious agents coming from one universal domain of consciousness. That would be a new interpretation of evolution. I think Charles Darwin’s great contribution was that he introduced the word evolution. Now when I used this to say consciousness meaning a driver of evolution, of course my critics immediately jumped on, you know, putting me in the same bandwagon as creationists.
I have written articles in the past on creationism and why I believe it’s not a viable theory of at all ; it’s just an excuse for dogmatic religious agendas. So, definitely, I’m not proposing a creationist theory. I’m just saying evolution is true, but evolution of species is evolution of species of consciousness.
