Deepak Chopra: What Is Consciousness?

Deepak I like you have been obsessed with consciousness my whole life and I began with a doctorate in neuroscience thinking that would help me and it didn't and what I realized is that everybody has different definitions of consciousness what's yours first of all I'd like to tell you Robert that if you want to understand consciousness then the last thing it would be is a new design okay because it doesn't give you a clue of course consciousness is defined in so many ways and I could give you a number of definitions but I think the simplest would be it is what makes experience possible it is what makes perception possible it is what makes thinking possible so everything that we call reality whether it's perception cognition thinking personal relationships social interactions biology interaction with nature is the ultimate reality so in the Vedanta which I'm a student of consciousness cannot be seen but makes impossible it cannot be heard but makes hearing possible cannot be tasted or smelled but makes tasting and smelling possible it cannot be touched but it makes touching possible it's the ground of experience it's not perception okay is the awareness in which perception happens because perception may be different for different cultures for different species the perception that I have of you would not be the perception and an insect with a hundred eyes will have of you or a bag two navigates through the echo of ultrasound or a chameleons whose eyeballs oval on two different axes I don't even remotely know what the experience of Robert would be like to a chameleon but the awareness of consciousness is the common ground just like the common ground of the is me you know these contraptions that I'm wearing my watch my iPhone the television said the people who are watching us on the program people who hear us on the radio people to navigate the internet the common ground there is the electromagnetic field the common ground for every possible experience in the universe is awareness consciousness now perceptions cognitions experiences are almost infinite so what you're saying is that the cognition perceptions all these things are reflections of consciousness or are enabled by consciousness consciousness is a is is there's a force of how do you distinguish between the the things that consciousness enables which you describe and consciousness itself consciousness is the common ground of all these different experiences it is prior to subject object split so right Dreier prior because the subjective experience of course you're the object of my experiment of your experience when I look at the world I see a tree I see a star sta galaxy both are the objects of my experience but of course there must be something that's more fundamental to subject an object to experience so you know science as we practice it is a subject object split exercise yeah and also not only that the scientist is observer not never mind if you cannot find this observer you know the observing self cannot be located by science okay but consciousness the scientist is the observer but of course the scientists consciousness is the observer and the universe is the observed that already leads by the way to an incomplete view of reality right there because you excluded one huge component of the observation process the observing self so now there's an universe somehow out side of you and so and that's the true universe how could it be because you excluded half the half the element of the experience right so I don't think consciousness is the observing self either a consciousness is prior to the split between object and subject there's there multiple observers multiple modes of observation and multiple objects of observation the common ground of that is prior to subject objects would try to experience but the ground of experience the fundamental aspect of consciousness is this inner feeling of experiences of knowing what it's like to see your very colorful shirt and that makes it impression is no section I I know what that is but this color would be nothing to observing self that did not have the apparatus those colors are not in the real world that's how I perceive and of course of course how pervasive it is consciousness as you've defined it the entire animal kingdom that how far do you go down and how how pervasive that does it go if you describe to subject our placement as I have mentioned that it's infinite it's unbounded it's eternal it is timeless some would claim that if you define consciousness so grandly you really destroy any possibility of truly understanding it and you make it so mystical that you can say anything you want so I must then defend mysticism because mysticism you're not embarrassed that we call the mystic oh no I think the essential experience of truth is only through mysticism truth cannot be a system of thought no system of thought can give you knowledge of truth why because the system of thought is a map science is a system of thought based on observation experimentation validation peer review also but it has certain rules it's a system of thought philosophy is a system of thought ok epistemology ontology etc religion is a system of thought Islam Christianity Buddhism etc Hinduism the all systems of thoughts in other words their ideologies therefore they are dogmatic in their insistence on the validity of their map which they mistake for the territory and thirdly they are always they have some commonalities but they're always at odds the mistakes within religion are the rebels they say no system of thought can give me the truth because the system of thought is a map okay so the what's the common thing between the Sufis and the Christian mystics and you know almost all of them kind of relegated to the outskirts or the fringes of their religion because not excepting is they realized that in order to know fundamental truth to understand fundamental reality you cannot depend on perception and you cannot depend on cognition or a system of thought or a map you have to actually transcend to an experience where there is nothing scientists would say that I agree with everything that you've said except you cannot classify the scientific method as part of these ideologies because the scientific method is not a system of thought as much it's a process to access truth and it's the only one that you can be sure of because of the process the other systems we have no way to validate them somebody says this atomistic says this yeah maybe they feel that but I have no way of independently confirming the scientific method which you articulated very well is the only way that you can know that you and I can both know that truth as opposed to the mystic who I believe that you feel that way but I can't feel it scientific method it's the only way that you and I together can believe in an independent reality I've several problems with that science is not a method for doing the truth science is a method for doing partial truth if he knew the truth we wouldn't be making atomic bombs and we wouldn't be proliferating biological weapons of mass destruction we wouldn't have created mechanized death we wouldn't have caused climate change we wouldn't be messing up the ecosystem with GMO foods or petroleum products in what we put inside our body we call them insecticides they're supposed to kill insects so we share the same DNA why wouldn't they kill us so science as we practice it today is a map for partial truth it looks at the universe as an activity that is independent of me but me me the observer is also an activity of the universe okay so when I go inward I'm going to an activity of the universe as much as I go outward so I watched her recently some little documentary on Lawrence Krauss he said why do we have to believe people who went inward thousands of years ago in the Iron Age we have all these instruments to look outward well he's forgetting that what is happening inside is also an activity of the same star stuff that makes the galaxies and the universe and by going inward I can also access the truth in fact if I transcend the subject objects blue split I may get at the closer as you would say closer to the truth because then I see that I am NOT okay I'm an activity of that which I observe and this is this is what science doesn't recognize also there are limitations to science okay limitations epistemological limitations we depend on a nervous system that has evolved over 13.8 billion years why do we suppose it's not going to keep evolving okay monkey doesn't have the same access to the truth as you and I have so that's a bit of arrogance that I know it's a totally anthropomorphic not even anthropic view it's an anthropomorphic view of you but I am this privileged species in the universe that has a nervous system that can access the truth how do you know what's going to happen in a thousand years from now if provided we don't cause mass extinction of our species and all other species through the technology is developed by science so I find it totally ridiculous when somebody says that science is a map of the truth you know what happened at the Planck scale what happened in Planck time do you even know there were no constants the laws of physics break down okay why did the why did the Big Bang occur when it occurred and what do we mean by when where there was no time how can you have a dateable event in time when time doesn't exist and yet everybody buys into the Big Bang Theory okay because if you're not buying into it if you don't buy into classic modern newer Darwinist interpretations of evolution if you don't buy into the Big Bang as explained currently by science you are subject to ridicule you are stupid you do not understand how science works explain to me how do you have a dateable event in time when there was no right tell me the location of the Big Bang not only in time but in space because space didn't exist you know I asked you know I asked one of the authors of the double-dog theory of of the universe I said where did the Big Bang occurred he said everywhere I said everywhere Oh Romney presents I said and now we have how much energy he says almost limitless they said oh I'm the omnipotence yes and I said where did it come from isn't nothing I said omniscience you know you guys have created your own mythology and we buy into it without even questioning your mythology we don't understand you know so you are willing to propose 10 to the power of 500 universes you know even a computer would take eternity to count them because you can't actually explain what's happening and then you finally ask various science happen you know the activity that we call science where our scientific theories conceived in consciousness where our experiments designed in consciousness where our observations made in consciousness what is empirical evidence it's a species specific mode of observation it has nothing to do with fundamental truths you know this is I have done science in my life and I am amazed how we create truth and then bind to it and call it truth when it is an ideology you know I observe a moving biology the biology is not a constant it's a moving thing okay I observe it I freeze it I kill it I then identify something that I call a molecule which actually doesn't exist because it's a movement it's a flow now I call it I give it a name okay oxytocin then we all agree now it's reality it doesn't exist you know what you observe it really does exist the only the observer actually is giving it a label that's all and what is political evidence it's a species specific mode of observation that we agree on