His Tweet:
"Empirical measurement is a description of a mode of observation not of fundamental reality."
This is a tricky one. Dr. Chopra implies that what we perceive empirically is not real. Such a stance makes the world impossibly opaque, and leaves us in a state of perpetual not-knowingness, and not the good kind.
What is amiss here is not the underlying sentiment, however, but the notion of reality. Consider this alternate idea --
"Everything empirically perceived is real but not all encompassing."
This idea liberates us from the blind pawing at an unknowable fundamental reality . . . it acknowledges the realness of our perceptions, the accuracy (and the limits) of our science and measuring capabilities, and gives us a basis from which to explore further, building upon what we know to have already established as real.
However, the further implications are, well, staggering.
1. Everything empirically perceived . . . meaning, there is no such thing as a hallucination. How this can be true is embodied in the idea that --
2. . . . not all encompassing. Meaning that reality in its totality contains many unknown aspects, and possibly some unknowable aspects.
Taken together these two concepts at the same give us a basis and shake that basis to its foundations, but without simply denying the (very real) existence of that basis.
This idea does not make things easier. It makes things much harder, because it prevents us from dismissing aspects of reality that we don't want to deal with, or can't account for ("things that go bump in the night" for example). But at the same time our state of not-knowingness is at least informed by the small percentage of fundamental reality that we have been able to work out thus far.
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