Deepak Chopra's Challenge
Deepak Chopra, a well-known spiritualist, does not like physicalism. Physicalism says that everything is physical and can be entirely explained in non-mental terms. So, according to physicalism, consciousness can ultimately be explained in physical, non-mental terms. Chopra says this view is an unreasonable dogma, and that it makes much more sense to believe that thoughts are non-physical. When we think, he says, non-physical phenomena affect the workings of the brain. To add muscle to his position, he has issued a challenge: According to the New Statesman , he will award a prize of $1 million to anyone who can demonstrate, in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, that human consciousness is created by the brain. This is not a challenge to demonstrate that Chopra has misunderstood physics, nor is it an invitation to critique his own arguments about consciousness. The challenge is to scientifically demonstrate that brains create consc...