Readers may recall that recently Deepak Chopra took Darwin’s man Jerry Coyne to task after Coyne boasted that allies of his had gone after Chopra’s and Rupert Sheldrake’s Wikipedia sites.
Why anyone bothers about what is said on Wikipedia sites, some of us will never know. Wikipedia is the Titanic of encyclopedias, a disaster by its own standards. Happy are those who starve trolls by not having a listing.
That said, it appears that Coyne has a supporter at Forbes, one Steven Salzberg, who tells us,
Deepak Chopra is upset.
Why? Well, it all goes back to statements like this one, from Chopra himself:
“Consciousness may exist in photons, which seem to be the carrier of all information in the universe.”
Chopra is upset that evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne pointed out how absurd this statement is. More specifically, Coyne wrote that:
“[Chopra’s] lucrative brand of woo is finally exposed as a lot of scientifically-sounding psychobabble.”
Interesting. Why pick on Chopra? Quite apart from the fact that great physicists have had some similarly forbidden thoughts about consciousness, where were Coyne and Salzberg when the latest new theory of consciousness whistled into town, announcing that humans, worms, and the Internet are all conscious? The next-to-last one we heard was that rocks have minds too.
And so why not photons? Actually, the study of human consciousness has gone nowhere for decades, apart from demands for more time. Methodological naturalism guarantees that the researchers will get nowhere, so they can have all the time in the world. They may as well interview rocks and photons.
More recently, some seek a compromise between materialist and non-materialist neuroscience theories.
Now, those people might indeed get somewhere, but they will have to do it without Coyne’s and Salzberg’s permission.
That, at least, is a good beginning.
Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose
Chopra is a fool. But ‘can photons have consciousness?’ sounds like panpsychism, which – to be dead honest – is vastly more reasonable than the inanities Coyne spews out on a regular basis.
Dr.Chopra has the right to say what scientists have been saying all along.Of course photons and rocks can’t have consciousness but why should a evolution biologist object to a statement which is bandied around as truth by his own tribe?
OT: Twenty Intelligent Design Resources: A Christmas Shopping List – Janine Dixon – November 27, 2013
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....79631.html
Oops ‘xcuse HTML error! How foolish of me 😉
There are many interesting properties about photons/light that I have been made aware of, but consciousness is NOT one of them. Here are some of those intriguing properties that I have been made aware of (of which I am certain there are many more enigmatic properties that could be elucidated that I am not aware of). First, I was amazed to learn that an ‘uncollapsed’ photon, in its quantum wave state, is mathematically defined as ‘infinite’ information:
Thus every time we see (observe) a single photon of ‘material’ reality we are actually seeing just a single bit of information that was originally created from a very specific set of infinite information that was known by the infinite Mind of omniscient God!
Some materialists have tried to say that the ‘infinite dimensional’ quantum wave state of a photon, that takes an infinite amount of information to describe, was merely an abstract description, (of which I would have at one time been inclined to agree with them), but the following experiment actually encoded information while it was in its infinite dimensional superposition state thus undermining that materialistic belief that the photon is merely a point-like particle:
In fact the double slit experiment itself, which was somewhat integral to the preceding experiment, reveals some fascinating things about the photon: In the following video Anton Zeilinger, whose group is arguably the best group of experimentalists in quantum physics today, ‘tries’ to explain the double slit experiment to Morgan Freeman:
Prof. Zeilinger makes this rather startling statement towards the end of the preceding video:
I was struck with how well the preceding statement by Professor Zeilinger agreed with the ancient ‘first mover’ argument by Aquinas:
Or to put the ‘First Mover’ argument much more simply:
Moreover another very interesting property of light is that time, as we understand it temporally, would come to a complete stop at the speed of light. To grasp the whole ‘time coming to a complete stop at the speed of light’ concept a little more easily, imagine moving away from the face of a clock at the speed of light. Would not the hands on the clock stay stationary as you moved away from the face of the clock at the speed of light? Moving away from the face of a clock at the speed of light happens to be the same ‘thought experiment’ that gave Einstein his breakthrough insight into e=mc2.
And this ‘eternal’ time framework for light has much empirical support:
This following experimental confirmation of time dilation for light is my favorite since they have actually caught the physical effects of time dilation on film (of note: light travels approx. 1 foot in a nanosecond (billionth of a second) whilst the camera used in the experiment takes a trillion pictures a second):
Moreover it is found that visible light is incredibly fine-tuned for life to exist. Though visible light is only a tiny fraction of the total electromagnetic spectrum coming from the sun, it happens to be the “most permitted” portion of the sun’s spectrum allowed to filter through the our atmosphere. All the other bands of electromagnetic radiation, directly surrounding visible light, happen to be harmful to organic molecules, and are almost completely absorbed by the atmosphere. The tiny amount of harmful UV radiation, which is not visible light, allowed to filter through the atmosphere is needed to keep various populations of single cell bacteria from overpopulating the world (Ross; reasons.org). The size of light’s wavelengths and the constraints on the size allowable for the protein molecules of organic life, also seem to be tailor-made for each other. This “tailor-made fit” allows photosynthesis, the miracle of sight, and many other things that are necessary for human life. These specific frequencies of light (that enable plants to manufacture food and astronomers to observe the cosmos) represent less than 1 trillionth of a trillionth (10^-24) of the universe’s entire range of electromagnetic emissions. Like water, visible light also appears to be of optimal biological utility (M.Denton; W.Bradley; G.Gonzalez; J.Richards).
Further fine tuning of light for biological life is discussed in the following video:
As well, there are many remarkable ‘coincidences’ found in/for photosynthesis that allow biological life to be possible. The following is a fascinating talk on the topic by Dr. Michael Denton:
Moreover, photosynthesis itself requires a non-local, beyond space and time, cause to be appealed to in order to explain its’ ‘quantum coherence’. At the 21:00 minute mark of the following video, Dr Suarez explains why photosynthesis needs a ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, cause to explain its effect:
As to pantheists, such as Chopra, who maintain that the photon itself is conscious (or even a rock), I find that consciousness precedes all of material reality and is not reducible, or co-terminus, to any particular material states within this universe. There are many lines of experimental evidence backing this conclusion up (i.e. Legget’s, Quantum Symmetries, Delayed Choice, Quantum Zeno effect).
Supplemental note: It is found that ‘the Light’ in Near Death Experiences is of a different (higher quality?) of light than we are normally use to:
Verses and Music:
Perhaps the most important verse on light/photons for a Theist is this one:
of note;
Could someone kindly tell me what they heard a rock dreaming? (Including the chips of doped silicon in our PCs.)KF