Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Deepak Chopra, Menas Kafatos and Rudolph E. Tanzi — A Consciousness-Based Science



This is nothing new, but it is a pretty clear popular presentation of a trend in science that has been growing for the past hundred years at least, actually more, if one counts William James, for instance.

What it says is that the current way of doing science makes huge ontological assumptions that cannot be true based on what is now known scientifically and has been known for some time.

This is hardly new knowledge historically, since it is found in the oldest extant human records, the Vedas, and anthropological studies suggest that this POV is much more primitive than the dawn of recorded history. This is also suggested by the early records, where the view is already well developed in terms of its articulation.

This view in no way contradicts solid scientific knowledge, only certain philosophical assumptions that underlie the POV. Adopting a consciousness-based framework leaves all existing knowledge largely as it is but opens the door to a new way of looking that enables a broader and deeper perspective and allows for the integration of the spectrum of human knowledge and creativity — science, art, humanities, idealistic philosophy, and spirituality-based religion.

What would the effect on economics be? One effect would be less emphasis on "objectivity," that is, quantity, and more on subjectivity, that is quality, value, and creativity. Practically speaking, it would mean less emphasis on on the mainstream "orthodoxy," and greater openness to fresh ideas (which may not be new but merely excluded) and new thinking.

The Huffington Post
A Consciousness-Based Science
Deepak Chopra, M.D., FACP, Menas Kafatos, Ph.D., Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor in Computational Physics, Chapman University, and Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D., Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard University, and Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital

16 comments:

marris said...

> What it says is that the current way of doing science makes huge ontological assumptions that cannot be true based on what is now known scientifically and has been known for some time.


Hi Tom. Can you provide one such ontological assumption and one scientifically known fact which falsifies it?

Ramanan said...

Tom,

I am surprised you think Deepak Chopra is scientific.

It may be true he has something nice to say about the art of living etc. A lot of people get stressed in their path to success and even after achieving it early in life are not happy. They read Deepak Chopra and feel at peace. To them he is more important than any science. Hence he manages to do what science cannot in those people's life.

However, whatever he says generally about the universe etc is totally not "scientific" - correct me if I am wrong.

Tom Hickey said...

Can you provide one such ontological assumption and one scientifically known fact which falsifies it?

The materialistic approach to science is reductionistic. It is based in Hume's empiricism, which is based on the assumption that humans do not know things but rather sense data. It is opposed to the realism of John Locke, for example, who held that primary qualities such as extension and position are in objects and that we know these directly, although secondary qualities such as color, taste, smell, etc, are relative to perceivers.

Most scientists assume Locke's view that extension and position are inherent in the world that is described and are "objective." Everything that science deals with can be reduced to this level, independent of the vagaries of subjectivity. This contradicts Hume's empiricism, which they also profess as the basis of positive science.

Generally it's not considered good from to start with a contradiction in one's assumptions. To get beyond that contradiction, scientists would have to go beyond science into the realm of philosophy, which, of course, they aren't willing to do. So they sweep the assumption under the rug, without too much trouble since the vast majority of people are naive realists who have not thought through their beliefs (assumptions).

QM calls this view into question, since it suggests to some theoretical physicists, a few of whom I know personally and have discussed this with, that observation, i.e., subjectivity, is involved in extension and position as well. Admittedly, there is a great deal of controversy over what QM implies. This is based on the different interpretations of QM, of which there are several. See Nick Herbert, Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics. New York: Doubleday, 1985. Herbert also wrote Elemental Mind: Human Consciousness & the New Physics. New York: Dutton, 1995, which I have not read.

The authors of the post bring up another assumption also, that is, the assumption that consciousness is an emergent property of matter, when there is no evidence of how consciousness arises from complexity or that it does at all. There is no known causality, which means it is a belief.

One of the seminal works is David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order, London: Routledge, 1980. Bohm posits that consciousness emerges not from material complexity (nervous system) but as an aspect of the implicate order associated with wholeness.

See Quantum mind for a summary of developments in this field of explaining consciousness scientifically.

A number of physicists and other scientists have written popular books on this. Some of the them appeared in the film,

Tom Hickey said...

Ramanan, Deepak Chopra is no slouch. He is a medical doctor who taught Tufts, BU and Harvard, and served as chief of staff at New England Memorial Hospital. He is really quite a brilliant guy and an excellent speaker and presenter of science. He switched his career path after he met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to Ayurvedic medicine and became a chief spokesman in the West for it. He ran Maharishi Ayurveda for some time, and during this period he began writing books. Subsequently, he founded his own clinic with David Simon, MD, but continued his career as an author and "personality," becoming very successful.

This has resulted in an undeserved reputation as a hack. He's a cutting edge type that is strongly committed to what he is convinced in the coming revolution in science.

There's a lot that I don't agree with him about, but I would never say that he is a hack. But sometimes he is over-exuberant as a scientist. I am willing to cut him slack because the opposite extreme holds sway now with a lot of unsupported assumptions being passed off as scientific when they are just bad philosophy.

Tom Hickey said...

The truncated sentence above should read, A number of physicists and other scientists have written popular books on this. Some of the them appeared in the film, What the bleep do we know?

marris said...

Sorry, what is the ontological assumption that is being falsified? My understanding is that there are two "sorts of things" that people understand: objective stuff like neurons firing, and subjective stuff like qualia. It is not clear how the former creates the latter, but we know they are related.

Now where is the contradiction?

You're response is all over the place. My understanding of physics is that it attempts to be as reductionist as it needs to be to explain observed phenomena. But physicists have not told people working at a coarser level (chemists or bridge builders or whatever) to go home.

DAB said...

I may be totally wrong as I often am but after seeing Deepak Chopra comically try to debate science and after having sat in class next to countless complete knuckleheads in graduate school neither Chopra nor graduate schooling hold any water with me.

I'll take a read though...

Tom Hickey said...

marris, in your view does physics describe real things-in-themselves or what we infer from sense data?

If you say from sense data, they we do not know reality directly, as most assume, but only our own minds. This is known as "Humean empiricism."

If you say that we know real things directly, they it must be explained how we know that. There is not scientific explanation for that based on causal mechanism. There are reasons given, but they are reasons based on prior assumptions that are non-scientific. The earliest explanation in the West were advanced by Plato and Aristotle, and their explanations set the stage for the debate between idealism and realism that is still raging.

No one has overcome this explanatory problem, but many scientists, like most other people, "believe" (Hume) that they know real things when as far as science itself can show they are just knowing their own minds as epiphenomena of their physiology through a process that science is still mostly in the dark about as far as causality goes. No materialist has been able to explain scientifically how gross matter (physiology) gets translated into "fine matter" (mental phenomena), let alone how the "fine matter" replicates the gross matter that is apparently unassociated with it as perceptions of things -in -themselves composed of gross matter, or how mind "knows" universals.

This is not something I am submitting as an original observation. It was recognized as a fundamental issue requiring explanation millennia ago and there have been many explanations advanced but none compelling. This is what modern philosophy (Descartes to Hegel) is chiefly about.

Then when science eclipsed philosophy as the premier means of gaining knowledge, it was shunted under the rug because science has not way of dealing with it in terms of scientific method. As a result, the problem was assumed away (SKinner's behaviorism), or some magical mumbo-jumbo thrown in to mask ignorance, like "epiphenomenalism," whatever that means operationally. It's nonsense. Worse, many so-called scientists argue that because science cannot deal with something, then it can't exist. Meet our old friend, the fallacy of the excluded middle.

On the other hand, many of the physicists involved in the development of QM were aware of the philosophical history of the issus involved, and they fashioned different interpretations based on different ways of approaching epistemology at the quantum level.

None of those interpretations has been recognized as compelling, and the fundamental questions about the relationship of subjectivity and objectivity, realism and idealism, consciousness and matter, quantity and quality, fact and value, sense and reference, etc. are now still open. This is now being approached in a rigorous fashion through the interdisciplinary field of consciousness studies.

Tom Hickey said...

DAB, no need to just read Chopra. He is only really significant as a celebrity presenter of new ideas, not the originator of the ideas himself. Read the actual contributors. I suggest getting ahold of David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order, for example.

marris said...

> marris, in your view does physics describe real things-in-themselves or what we infer from sense data?

I think all individual knowledge is ultimately formed by what you call "sense data."

However, it does not follow that our minds are "all we know" and that we know "nothing" of the world. Our minds (like the rest of our bodies) were shaped by evolutionary pressures to be fairly reliable in many environments.

Example: I seem to have pretty good perception skills for food. If I think that a plate of food is in front of me and eating it will satisfy me, I am usually correct.

Physics seeks to build an explanatory model for the world as we are likely to encounter it. I'm not sure physicists care whether he is describing the "real" world or one that "he" and "us" (other perceived entities) are likely to encounter. Any systematic difference between his theory and his experience raises the need for new theories.

Tom Hickey said...

marris, if all we know is sense data, that is a conclusions that is a type of idealism, of which there are many types. But in general, idealism is the view that all experience is in and of consciousness. Human infer an world of objects external to consciousness but that inference has no causal basis, as Hume observed. This is the point that Chopra is making, that consciousness is primary because matter is the objective pole of experience, which occurs in consciousness.

Conversely materialists either ignore/deny the existence of consciousness (B.F. Skinner) or they account for it in terms of "matter," which they cannot explain either.

If we hold that experience is of consciousness, then these problems do not arise. Everything is accounted for in terms of the subjective and objective poles of consciousness.

Materialists will argue that there is no explanation for consciousness, but their objection is easily countered by pointing out that they have no explanation for matter either.

Why does this matter anyway. What difference does it make, a student of William James might say?

The difference it makes is in terms of worldviews that underlie universes of discourse that decide what context is admissible.

marris said...

> Human infer an world of objects external to consciousness but that inference has no causal basis, as Hume observed.

Yeah, so I think Hume's contribution is being overhyped here.

He's basically saying that "for all I *know*, I could be a brain floating in a vat somewhere" or "I could be a computer simulation." Or more abstractly, all of a sudden, things could start behaving very differently from how I've observed them in the past.

But it does not follow that consciousness (at least *my* consciousness) is primary. In the first example, we're really saying that rather than our head and neck and body (the stuff we see), a vat could be primary.

In the second, we're saying that the computer running our simulation and the simulation code is primary.

Every "alternate reality" explanation would need to bring in new primary "stuff."

If we ever see systemic evidence of these alternate reality theories (e.g. a chat window opens in space and we read "Hi, this is the user..."), then we will start building theories about that evidence (the chat window).

Similarly, I perceive lots of people walking around with bodies and limbs. I perceive that if the brain part of those bodies is damaged, the person (who communicates with me like another instance of my type) seems to behave differently. So I think this behavior has something to do with the brain. I don't have a reductionist theory, but so what?

Finally, we do seem to have an explanatory theory of matter. It is physics. The theory seems to predict well. It also helps us build cool new things. I don't know why matter exists, but I don't know why the universe exists either.

So far, no contradictions. Only gaps in our knowledge and barriers to our understanding.

Tom Hickey said...

marris, you seem to to be happy where you are so I'll leave you there.

Ramanan said...

Tom,

It is true that Deepak Chopra has a scientific background and that gives some credibility but some of his writings make no sense at all. They are vague usage of physics. The sentences which he writes make no sense at all.

Tom Hickey said...

As I have said, Deepak is presenting the work of others who are scientists and have thought about these issues. Science was a spin off of philosophy, and issues began in the West the Greeks, and came to a head in the dialectic among the Continental rationalists — Descartes, Leibnitz and Spinoza — and the British empiricists — Locke, Berkeley and Hume. Kant famously attempted to synthesize these two strains of thought. Subsequent thinkers were well aware of this. Werner Heisenberg wrote a paper on QM and Kantian philosophy, for example, reprinted in Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond.

Sir Arthur Eddington specifically focused on this issue:

Ian Barbour in his book Issues in Science and Religion (1966), p. 133, cites Arthur Eddington's The Nature of the Physical World (1928) for a text that argues The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principles provides a scientific basis for "the defense of the idea of human freedom" and his Science and the Unseen World (1929) for support of philosophical idealism "the thesis that reality is basically mental".

Charles De Koninck points out that Eddington believed in objective reality existing apart from our minds, but was using the phrase "mind-stuff" to highlight the inherent intelligibility of the world: that our minds and the physical world are made of the same "stuff" and that our minds are the inescapable connection to the world.
(my emphasis)

Against Albert Einstein and others who advocated determinism, indeterminism—championed by Eddington[8]—says that a physical object has an ontologically undetermined component that is not due to the epistemological limitations of physicists' understanding. The Uncertainty Principle in quantum mechanics, then, would not necessarily be due to hidden variables but to an indeterminism in nature itself.

I have mentioned previously the debate over ontological and epistemological uncertainty in economics.

William James held of a similar view in the emerging science of psychology, but that was overturned and dismissed from the academic universe of discourse by the dominance of B. F. Skinner's behaviorism until Abraham Maslow broke his monopoly on academia.

Similarly, the logical positivism of the Vienna circle was an active issue at the time of the development of QM and relativity, as well as the emerging fields of philosophy of language and philosophy of mathematics. Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica was major influence at the time, as was Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Janik and Toulmin describe the historical context in Wittgenstein's Vienna.

So what is coming to the fore recently in the popular literature has been the subject of sophisticated debate for millennia.

Admittedly Chopra and others are mixing this up with other popular themes, often "New Age," in order to gain exposure and to advance their appeal among the less sophisticated. But this is not a reason to dismiss the serious debate that has been going on and continues beneath, especially when the popular literature is filled with the opposite "scientific" view, which is not scientific at all but rather grounded in presumptions based on belief.

A similar situation is found in the area of religion, where for well over a hundred years scholars have been pursuing research that contradicts what people are taught from pulpits. Until recently, this debate has been confined to professional journals. Then some scholars started to write popular books debunking "the pious fraud."

Tom Hickey said...

I neglected to provide a link to the quotes above.

See Arthur Eddington-Philosophy at Wikipedia.