Is Consciousness Ultimate Reality?
In this video, Robert Lawrence Kuhn interviews Deepak Chopra, Donald Hoffman, Neil Theise, Fred Alan Wolf, Frank J. Tipler, and Charles T. Tart about consciousness and the nature of reality. In it, Deepak Chopra, MD, founder of the Chopra Center for Wellbeing, describes the central role of Mind and experiences in our reality:
Consciousness, defined as awareness, is ultimate reality. It’s truth with a capital “T.” Now, scientists give labels to their experiences: electromagnetism, gravity, strong and weak interactions. Some of them are perceptual experiences. Gravity is a perceptual experience. . . . Electromagnetism is a word to describe certain behaviors. So everything that we call the four forces of nature, all mental, mathematical activities in consciousness, they are words we have created, and now we hold these words to represent fundamental truth. But all they are is perceptual and conceptual experiences in consciousness. There’s no reality to any of that. Okay, that’s what science does. It creates a language; it creates a description of a conceptual or perceptual experience. It says this is what reality is. Reality is none of that. What’s a particle? It’s a space-time event in consciousness. It’s a happening in consciousness. There’s nothing outside of consciousness.
Closer to Truth
Robert Lawrence Kuhn, “Is Consciousness Ultimate Reality?” Closer To Truth, May 2, 2020. Video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ske-PYBCq54.