I respectfully disagree with what I understand my friend Deepak Chopra's position to be in the above blog. I claim to have solved the "hard problem" of conscious qualia (as defined by David Chalmers) in terms of physics back in 1996 in my talk at Stuart Hameroff's Tucson workshops. The hard problem is now the easy problem. Briefly in a nutshell, quantum physics in my variation on David Bohm's interpretation divides the world up into mind and matter in a very precise mathematical way that agrees with all experiments on simple configurations of dead matter. Orthodox quantum physics is only an approximation to a more general theory called post-quantum physics. Post-quantum physics is to quantum physics as Einstein's general relativity is to his special relativity. Just as special relativity violates Einstein's action-reaction principle, so does the orthodox quantum theory for dead matter. In special relativity, the spacetime continuum tells matter how to move on force free weightless "geodesic paths" or worldliness, without matter back-reacting on the rigid spacetime continuum. Einstein fixed this by adding direct back-reaction of matter on the spacetime continuum and the result was the general theory of relativity of the gravitational field as curved spacetime. Spacetime tells matter how to move, and in return, matter tells spacetime how to curve in a two-way feedback loop.
It's the same idea in quantum theory where now the "spacetime continuum" is replaced by David Bohm's mental mind-field called the "quantum potential" Q. Q is beyond spacetime with all the weird "spooky telepathic" (Einstein's words) nonlocal entanglement properties. In orthodox quantum theory Q also tells matter how to move without any direct back-reaction of matter back on its pilot mental field Q. This has resulted in the new industry of quantum cryptography to protect us from hacker cyber-terrorists. Unfortunately, the new post-quantum physics with direct back-reaction of matter on its pilot Q field provides a way to hack into the not-so-secure quantum cryptographic scheme. Anyway, it is the direct back-reaction of matter on its mental pilot Q that excites "qualia" (direct conscious subjective experience) as excited states of Q out of its sleeping unconscious 'ground state." It's simply Einstein's battle-tested idea in a new setting that I have applied to make the hard problem into the easy problem.
For more background details see MIT physics professor David Kaiser's award-winning book "How the Hippies Saved Physics" and Michael Towler's free on-line course in Bohm's Pilot Wave theory at Cambridge Universiy - especially slides 25 and 31 of Lecture 8 where Towler specifically discusses my ideas above to the Cambridge students & faculty.
On Sep 7, 2014, at 7:33 AM,
Deepak Chopra <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > wrote:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/getting-real-about-brain-_b_5745968.html