THE GREAT DEBATE: DEEPAK CHOPRA VS. MICHAEL SHERMER

Thank you, Michael.

Nice to find some clarity on this sight once more.

How can one say the mind can’t exist apart from the brain, since the production of a conscious and subjective phenomenon (consciousness) by an objective, non-counscious substrat (matter) is, in my view, absolutely illogical.

Mainstream scientists say it’s just a matter of understanding precisely how it works, but to me, this is pure blind faith. It’s not just some kind of mechanical mystery. I’m convinced there’s a very real and gigantic logical gap between the objective and the subjective.

Anything a susbtrat which only has objective properties should be able to produce should be purely objective as well. If the universe is made of matter, and matter is really what mainstream science says it is, then the universe should only exist “in the dark”, whitout anyone knowing it’s there…without any observer. It’s more than time for a new paradigm of consciousness

Chew on this…this is a direct response to “es’s” baloney post here regarding consciousness from the master himself. Michel Shermer.

Deepak Chopra and others will counter that there is, in fact, a perfectly cogent theory of ESP, and that is quantum consciousness, which was recently featured in the wildly popular and improbably-named film, What the #@*! Do We Know?! University of Oregon quantum physicist Amit Goswami, for example, says: “The material world around us is nothing but possible movements of consciousness. I am choosing moment by moment my experience. Heisenberg said atoms are not things, only tendencies.” Okay, Amit, I challenge you to leap out of a 20-story building and consciously choose the experience of passing safely through the ground’s tendencies.
According to the physicist Roger Penrose and physician Stuart Hameroff, inside our neurons are tiny hollow microtubules that act like structural scaffolding. The conjecture is that something inside the microtubules may initiate a wave function collapse that leads to the quantum coherence of atoms, causing neurotransmitters to be released into the synapses between neurons and thus triggering them to fire in a uniform pattern, thereby creating thought and consciousness. Since a wave function collapse can only come about when an atom is “observed”(i.e., affected in any way by something else), neuroscientist Sir John Eccles, another proponent of the idea, even suggests that “mind” may be the observer in a recursive loop from atoms to molecules to neurons to thought to consciousness to mind to atoms.
In reality, the gap between sub-atomic quantum effects and large-scale macro systems is too large to bridge. In his book The Unconscious Quantum, the University of Colorado particle physicist Victor Stenger demonstrates that for a system to be described quantum mechanically the system’s typical mass m, speed v, and distance d must be on the order of Planck’s constant h. “If mvd is much greater than h, then the system probably can be treated classically.” Stenger computes that the mass of neural transmitter molecules, and their speed across the distance of the synapse, are about three orders of magnitude too large for quantum effects to be influential. There is no micro-macro connection.
Subatomic particles may be altered when they are observed, but the moon is there even if no one looks at it.