and they are laid off concrete finishers in vermont and they are everywhere. this book is about them. it is for them. it happened to be in my backyard, the microcosm, the capsule that i tried to tell. and they don't have any champions. they are as close to forgotten as anybody i know. >> host: what did the mill closing due to their sense of self? they take so much pride in building and working with their hands what did the mill closing due to them? >> guest: one fellow went to make cat food. other guys had trouble finding work at all. a lot of the older folks retired. they did not build around going woe is me. they cut firewood. they found a way to make a living. they were very capable. there is a difference in getting by and making a living. they're getting by. a lot of them -- a lot of land in jobs that paid the bills just barely and give them insurance which is the key to everything. but if you ask them if they are still cotton mill workers that hard work millworkers they will tell you know. like my brother. if you ask him are you still a mill hand he will say no, of course not. but if you go in his closet and open it up, all these jackets that he was awarded for perfect attendance for working without missing a day, pushed out at you. if you open one of his force it is stacked with t-shirts from bass tournaments and company picnics. he didn't wear them anymore. i think there is incredible pride in these jobs like there was at being a steelworker and building houses, driving a tractor. there is incredible pride in these things. my brother sam said a beautiful thing. it is funny. i am supposed to be the one that deals with words and he is supposed to be the one that is capable. he told me once, he said pretty soon the only thing we are going to make in this country will be money. and he doesn't figure it takes a lot of people to do a job like that. i think he has a good point. >> deepak chopra and leonard mlodinow debate whether science or. and forms the best foundation for understanding the world. this is about 50 minutes. >> i am one of the founders of the synagogue and the welcome you to would be a very interesting evening. the building we are sitting in is 103 years old and in the space of spirituality, gives deepak chopra a little bit of an edge in this discussion. i am confident it will be very even-handed at the end of the day. the building has gone through a number of iterations. it was a regionally the first, second homer of the addison road congregation for 50 years and home of the turner memorial church for 40 years and has been the sixth and ninth synagogue on seven years. tonight's event is typical of the type of event we try to do. great people beleaguered interesting topics and things people are interested in. jackie leventhal who runs the cultural programming wants me to announce when i do upcoming events and generally i have done but are have to tell you this. i look at the author's coming tonight, six great things but we have bill bryson coming, jeffrey huge entities and jeff stevenbrier and john paul stevens and diane stevens. we really get some great stuff. i have to thank jackie for that. [applause] tonight we are honored to have leonard mlodinow and deepak chopra, author of more and 60 books including numerous new york times bestsellers and among his many distinctions he is a fellow of the american college of physicians. time magazine named him one of the 100 heroes and icons of our century. pretty impressive. dr. leonard mlodinow is not going to be a pushover. he will be teaching at caltech. he is a renowned physicist, author of several books including the drug and walk:how randomness rules our lives. and interesting subject on the new york times best-seller list. he is a writing collaborator with stephen hawking. the moderator tonight is timothy shriver. we are lucky to have him tonight. he is chairman and ceo of the special olympics and social leader and educator and activist legal film producer, entrepreneur additional one street over from me. we're very connected. we will have questions from the audience. they will be on index cards at 7:15. we will have someone pick them up. after tonight's talk we will have a dessert reception downstairs sponsored by david smith family foundation. we thank him for that. and it should be an interesting moment because we hear interesting things tonight from our guest and carry on this conversation downstairs. please join me in welcoming the three gentlemen, deepak chopra, leonard mlodinow and tim shriver. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you very much. thank you. good evening. thank you. the evening. unlike to add my welcome to everyone here and say right at the outset that i feel i have been in many, many distinguished environment in my life but i have never been as out of my league as i am tonight. have any of you read the book? be honest. good. so that means the fact that it took me three times reading it to understand it doesn't make me feel bad because none of you have anything over me. at least i have tried. it is actually an extraordinary book. i hope you will all get copies tonight or in the near future. it is titled war of the world views. michael lee gripe with the book is the word war. i would like -- i don't think -- -- i don't think tonight we will have a war. at least i hope not. extraordinary rich discussion with the two people who have arguably as good an insight into the science and spiritual world. whar my credentials? i prayed that i would be the shortstop for the boston red sox. it didn't come true. i prayed that i would win wimbledon. that didn't happen either. i have a lot of experience with frustration in religion. and i read the book going 600 the earth and you can't help but remember -- drinking a cup of coffee as most of you have done in an airplane. someone -- you can't help but be reminded that everywhere we go today of the extraordinary, unbelievable achievement of science. so we stand in a world hungry for the spirit and fascinated by science and conflicted about those two ideas lead us. without any further talking from me i will turn it over to the experts and i am going to start by asking a very broad question which is to say first, what is really good about science and what is really good -- what is really good about spirituality? >> why did you laugh? >> what is really good about science is precisely what tim was mentioning. life would be impossible today without science. we are here because of the jet plane to must talking about. we have eliminated a number of epidemics of disease. we have social networks that instantly are connecting us because of science and technology. we have the capacity today to rewire the global brain and create a planetary civilization for the first time. i could go on and on about what is good from science but what is really good for science is it enriches the possibilities and magnificence and awesome this of god. that is really good about science. why imagine creating a universe in an instant instead of taking seven million years? imagine creating a big bang that simultaneously appears everywhere. the big band wasn't in a particular location of space and time because before the big bang there was neither space nor time. it appears everywhere and we know that because background radiation in all sites. that is omnipresent. imagine taking a doctor, a period at the end of a sentence and stretching across billions of light years of space and time. that is omnipotence. imagine precise laws, so precise that if they were off by a fraction of a fraction we wouldn't have a universe. that is omniscience. i think we have done got great injustice by squeezing got into the volume of a body, the span of a lifetime. giving him a male identity and putting him somewhere in an ethnic background and saying this god is the creator of the universe. god is much more awesome thanks to science. [applause] >> you ask what is good about spirituality. their two levels after that question. one level of spirituality is general. and very important to people's lives to be spiritual. if you are a scientist, very important that people realize being a scientist doesn't mean you are not a spiritual person. the other level is spirituality, i admire that spirituality as it relates to the human condition. framing yourself from the baggage of your past, treating other people with respect and meditating. it is good for you. i recommend it and i also agree that spirituality, being able to appreciate the human condition at your place in the world makes science of a much more awesome. there's a great complementary there. nothing you can see, touch, feel proven to be true and therefore should not be accepted. >> i talk about science as a way of looking at understanding the world and when you try to understand the physical world you should exclude your subject to the and science is a way of understanding the world as it is without interference or the way we like it to be. thousands of years ago -- always the same questions they have today. why is the world away it is? what is behind them? why are there earthquakes and floods? what are those lights in the sky? thousands of years ago people would make up stories of a wolf coming across the sky chasing another wolf and blocking of the sun and after a while we developed philosophy which is a way of approaching the same questions but the last few hundred years we developed science. another method of understanding these issues and the things science has is when you have a theory in science you don't just give an opinion. we require the theory that they make predictions and the testable and falsifying. the progress in understanding the way the universe is that has come in the last few centuries based on that idea has been enormous. much more progress than we made in thousands of years before that. but science should not be asked to answer all the questions of life. science does not explain the meaning of life. science doesn't explain why you feel love. science doesn't explain why human beings are here. science should be required to do that. on the other hand spirituality answers other questions often not just spirituality but organized religion often gives answers to physical questions and those the answers often contradict what we observe in science. in the book i argue about that. why would you believe the creation story in the bible? religion can offer something to people but when they talk about the physical world face a things that are clearly not right. people tend -- i always wonder. someone who believes literally in the bible. the bible says homosexuals should be killed, children who disrespect their parents should be killed. we have no one left. people who talk about creation, taking the bible literally -- i don't know how they get around ignoring that. but then they take the other parts about the physical universe literally. i don't understand that. they should recognize in some pretty powerful case that science has unlocked secrets beyond anybody's imagination even a couple hundred years ago. how the brain functions, how the universe is exploiting an extraordinary pace, we know how it started and how it will end. you are suggesting that consciousness is a concept that you can't measure, can't see or touch or get a microscope around it but it is there. everyone knows it is there but nobody can measure it. it is fanciful. >> this is the dilemma really accurately. that is what is so difficult to talk about consciousness because consciousness is what is talking right now. if i wasn't a conscious being i couldn't articulate what i am saying and you wouldn't be able to listen to me or understand what i am saying. we are conscious. the mistakes science is making about consciousness and science admits it. towards the end book leonard says science does not explain consciousness. he also adds for now. >> but it will sunni enough. >> but here is the basic problem. okay? this is an accepted problem. it is called the hard problem in consciousness. here is the hard problem. imagine the sun sets on the ocean. can you all see it? can you see a picture? >> i can. >> the place of your mother. if i went inside your brain there is no picture. there is electrochemical activity. you are having a subjective experience. we see the correlation between the picture and electromagnetic activity science doesn't even have a model to explain how that electrochemical activity creates the subjective experience which is what life is about. you don't have so many units of particles being secreted, right? love is an experience. , is an experience. the taste of red wine is an experience. auld experience in our consciousness and science can't find it by looking at the brain. the reason is because consciousness is doing the looking. how do you find something that is always the observer in the object of observation. >> look in the mirror. >> that is it. so all scientific validation of consciousness, look in the mirror. the only experience of consciousness is self awareness. that is it. consciousness is itself. the self can no itself by looking at itself. so right now i want you to have a brief experience. as you are listening to me turn your attention to listening. are you listening to me? turn your attention to who is listening. that awareness that you experienced right now is consciousness. even though while you were experiencing that awareness you were saying what is that disturbance? that siren? i wish i had gone to the bathroom before the lecture started. that experience occurs in your consciousness. this is what all spiritual traditions have said. this is not -- the scientifically based philosophers says is a hard problem. and other people accept that. it is a hard problem. because we are looking for consciousness there when it is doing the looking. >> so when deepak chopra talks that way i was thinking -- you have to really work hard up here. i was struck and remembered the quote from the great scientist of the early part of the scientific revolution pascal who said the heart has reason that reason doesn't no. i thought to myself at some level it seems pascal is just saying -- a great scientist. one of the important scientists of his time -- saying there's more than one way of knowing. the way in which science knows might be complemented by a completely different way of knowing. is that possible? >> i believe that. i said earlier a way of knowing yourself and the physical world but you have to be careful because sometimes you're itself tends to overlap. deepak chopra believes the mind separate from the brain. that there is some other realm he can talk about that everything is connected. and i believe that the consciousness whatever it is, the human mind and scientists believe comes from the brain and there's a lot of evidence that the consciousness of the human brain comes from the brain. you get people to have fought and memories and experiences color. we are beginning to learn where the emotions come from and how the brain works. i am not saying by doing that we are learning the meaning of life, we're learning about ourselves. >> is there a meaning to life in science? >> science doesn't address the meaning of life. science addresses issues of the physical world. science is about telling you here is the universe, here is a situation. i am going to tell you what will happen a second or a minute later. i will tell you how this operates. doesn't address the question of meaning and i don't know why that should be required of science. to me -- [talking over each other] >> if i'm an athlete you can say i love athletics the cooking is very important. why doesn't athletics address cooking? it is a separate issue. a separate problem. when we get into problems you get into difficulties when you try to make science something it is not. i don't know for what -- >> he says explicitly in the book what he said right now that science cannot explain consciousness. >> i said signs could explain conscious of this. as of the mind and body -- [talking over each other] >> please don't interrupt me. no brain scientist can tell you right now. in the previous book he has denied with stephen hawking the existence of free will. we all think we have free will. no brain size can tell you the mechanics of creativity or imagination. as we have been explaining today, with a geneticist and a narrow scientist at harvard who is the joseph p. kennedy professor at mass general who explicitly says he is at the neuroscience conference with former scientists, where and how memory is stored and after -- they all said we don't know. >> is spirituality just finding what science doesn't know and saying -- >> spirituality is also say what is the meaning and purpose of my existence? do i have a soul? does god exist? what is the meaning of the desk? if god exists does he or she or it, care about me? >> are there any right or wrong answers? >> i think there is one thing i want to make clear. science does not explain everything yet and it may never. the ku mind might not be capable of understanding everything but this goes back thousands of years. people did not understand what causes an eclipse. people came along and said if we don't understand it must be wolves jumping across the sky. i am saying just because we don't understand consciousness or another aspect of human beings we shouldn't grab on to any explanation like wolves jump across the sky. science leaves blanks in explanation, you want to interrupt but you won't. science leaves blanks in understanding of the world but doesn't mean we are free to fill those blanks with any answers we want. >> bill ahead. of reality that will never be accessible to wes. >> i didn't hear him say that. >> where do the laws come from? science cannot answer that because if you answer that how would you answer where the loss came from you have some other law or principal and derive those laws and say where do those laws come from? physics by definition starts with some for principles and the rise the consequences that physics never asks the question where did those laws come from what created those laws. that is outside the realm of physics. >> why does physics not acknowledge there's a first cause? >> first cause of the universe? >> of the laws. of anything. >> stephen hawking and i explicitly said physics can't explain revel laws come from. if you want to call that job -- god we have no judgment of that. universe. physics. [talking over each other] >> thomas aquinas and aristotle, first, the leaders will first mover. >> what we are saying is the universe cannot move the weedy board. >> not quite the same as saying the universe -- physics can -- the creation of the universe. the universe and the laws of physics are two separate things. i don't think thomas aquinas was talking about the laws of physics. but what do we get -- what do we gain by saying that is fine? what do i get -- >> it gets us into humility and reverence. it gets us into -- >> you quote -- physicists have a lot of ideas. .. >> experimentation and observation. it's conceived in consciousness, where is experiment designed in consciousness? where is observation made in consciousness? we have no scientific explanation for consciousness. right there you're ignoring the white elephant in the room, you know? you are saying that we can have an explanation in the absence of consciousness when all explanation science needs conscious to explain anything, and consciousness doesn't need science to explain anything, all it needs is self-awareness. >> i would just like to correct a couple things. one is that deepak seems to be characterizing scientists as unable to have an awe in nature even as he was quoting einstein. you're a smart guy, you could go to law school, make a ton of money, instead you choose to sit in some dark office working on equat