Deepak Chopra is unhappy with my brand of skepticism--the type that identifies woo-woo nonsense and calls it for what it is: baloney.
Last week Deepak and I debated life after death on Larry King Live, which did not include Larry King and was not live, but did feature guest host Jeff Probst, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Dinesh D'Souza, a reincarnation researcher, a young boy alleged to be a reincarnated World War II fighter pilot, and Deepak rolling his eyes and mumbling to his table-mates in the New York studio while I was alone in the Hollywood studio trying to get an edge in wordwise. You can read my account of the show at TrueSlant.
No one uses fuzzy language more adroitly than Deepak Chopra, who has an uncanny knack for stringing together words and phrases that, with his punctuated delivery style, actually sounds like something intelligible is being said. (All quotes are from the complete transcript of the show available here.) Deepak Chopra is obviously a smart guy, and maybe it's just me, but what do you make of Deepak's explanation for Near-Death Experiences?:
"There are traditions that say the in-body experience is a socially induced collective hallucination. We do not exist in the body. The body exists in us. We do not exist in the world. The world exists in us."
Maybe I'm dim witted, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what this means. Likewise this ditty on life and death:
"Birth and death are space-time events in the continuum of life. So the opposite of life is not death. The opposite of death is birth. And the opposite of birth is death. And life is the continuum of birth and death, which goes on and on."
Uh? Can someone please tell me what this means? Likewise this gem of obfuscation:
"And life is, as he said, it's a process. It's one process. It's perception, cognition, emotions, moods, imagination, insight, intuition, creativity, choice making. These are not the activities of your networks. You orchestrate these activities through your synaptic networks. But if I ask you to imagine the color red or look at the color red, there's no red in your brain. There's just electrical firings."
If these "are not the activities of your networks" what are they? Oh, they are "just electrical firings." Uh? Isn't that a contradiction? What am I missing here?
During the show segment on reincarnation, I asked Deepak if the little boy's body is now occupied by the soul of a World War II fighter pilot, where is the boy's soul? Chopra offered this jewel of Deepakese:
"Imagine that you're looking at an ocean and you see lots of waves today. And tomorrow you see a fewer number of waves. It's not so turbulent. What you call a person actually is a pattern of behavior of a universal consciousness. There is no such thing as Jeff, because what we call Jeff is a constantly transforming consciousness that appears as a certain personality, a certain mind, a certain ego, a certain body. But, you know, we had a different Jeff when you were a teenager. We had a different Jeff when you were a baby. Which one of you is the real Jeff?"
Guest host Jeff Probst looked as confused as I felt.
Deepak has challenged me to a debate. I accept. I'm looking forward to collecting many more quotable maxims from the master of Deepakese.
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"There are traditions that say the in-body experience is a socially induced collective hallucination. We do not exist in the body. The body exists in us. We do not exist in the world. The world exists in us." --> I read this as..... There's a disembodied something called 'we'. It exists outside human bodies. It hallucinates. It imagines things called bodies. Each of these bodies thinks it's real. --- The problem with this agglomeration of ideas is that it's all (1) hypothesis, (2) there's no way to verify or falsify it. One might just as well claim that there's a green man who dreams up the disembodied something called 'we' and that the green man lives on a houseboat supported by four elephants. None of us can prove all this is false (just try!!). BUT there's no way to prove it's either true of false, either. It's just a speculation.....
I fear that the general public doesn't really understand that all good scientists are skeptics. A skeptic is someone who attempts to be open-minded and unbiased when making an observation. Scientists observe the world and seek to explain it in a methodological and reproducible way. Chopra must not have any real understanding of the scientific method, or science in general to claim that Shermer represents some form of outmoded science. As a physicist, I can certainly say that he is interpreting quantum mechanics in a "woo woo" way, which the physics community does NOT endorse. There is no evidence that what he says has merit, and he should at least recognize that his philosophy is unproven and based on a supposition. He's welcome to believe what he wants, but just because he thinks it doesn't make it so. However, saying things that have no factual basis clearly earns him a hefty income, and there are many people out there who like the bedtime stories he tells.
Deepak, at least from my impression so far, takes the opposite approach. He assumes everyone skeptical of his ideas is just being closed-minded so he doesn't bother trying to support his ideas reasonably. When someone asks him for clarification and consensus criteria for testing his ideas, he shrugs them off with vague metaphysics and accusations. He's welcome to his philosophy, but he's not welcome to misrepresent himself as being open-minded, and skeptics and scientists as being closed-minded just for finding him vague. He is the one that refuses to clarify and test his ideas with experts in the fields he claims to be revolutionizing and instead hides behind amphigory and ambiguity. There are examples of successful scientific dialog on unconventional ideas, and Chopra seems to deliberately avoid those models and hide behind metaphysical debates.
To learn my teachings, I must first teach you how to learn.
He who questions training only trains himself at asking questions.
I think what actually happens, is that some of those nonsense one liners actually hit home emotionally, to a few in the audience. People don't necessarily care what is true as long as it makes them feel good. Dee's woo woo makes people happy with not knowing.
Sadly most are incapable of seeing how beautiful reality actually is.
Thanks for your post. The logical inconsistencies in Deepak Chopra’s normal rambling discourses are certainly the first argument that should be used to point out the foolishness of accepting his pronouncements as useful wisdom. All people, except perhaps the most confused, would expect even claims about supernatural wisdom (the basis of his groundless speculations about science) to be consistent.
But the more important dividing line to me (that seems hopelessly muddled by Deepak Chopra) is the one between supernatural revelation – what I understand to be the basis of what he talking about – and science and logic. I’ll group science and logic together because both can be confirmed as part of reality by anyone who cares to. Logic has provided us with moral standards like equality under rule of law, the Golden Rule (in terms of an admonition to be unselfish to initiate cooperation and obtain, on average, cooperation’s benefits), and human rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Science has provided the technological mastery of the world we all enjoy.
If people are going to count as wisdom supernatural revelations and unsupportable speculations about science based on those revelations, then they should recognize that they have abandoned logic and science which are demonstrably the most useful tools ever developed to reveal true wisdom. When I compare the useful products through history of supernatural revelation with the useful products of logic and science, supernatural revelation is a pretty pathetic horse to hitch your wagon to.
Part 2 of 2
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Here is the quote in context from the six page article
The Unexpected Science to Come; December 1999; Scientific American Magazine; by Sir John Maddox
"The catalogue of our ignorance must also include the understanding of the human brain, which is incomplete in one conspicuous way: nobody understands how decisions are made or how imagination is set free. What consciousness consists of (or how it should be defined) is equally a puzzle. Despite the marvelous successes of neuroscience in the past century (not to mention the disputed relevance of artificial intelligence we seem as far from understanding cognitive processes as we were a century ago. The essence of the difficulty is to identify what patterns of the behavior of neurons in the head signal making a decision or other cognitive activity. Perhaps decision making has several alternative neural correlates, which will complicate the search. Yet there is no reason to believe the problem is intractable. Even nonhuman animals (such as rats in a maze) make decisions, although they may not be conscious that they do so, which means that observation and experiment are possible. But it will be no shame on neuroscience if these questions are unanswered 50 years from now."
Copied from page 67 second paragraph at
http://pluto.fss.buffalo.edu/classes/dms/berna/dms434/readings/JohnMaddox.pdf
" - Maybe I'm dim witted, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what this means."
It's easy Mike, drop the hair-trigger snide, open up some comparative religion texts (and maybe one or two of Deepak's NYT best sellers) and try again minus the auto-pilot dismissiveness. You might find your consciousness expanded more than you thought possible.
Woo-woo means invoking quantum mechanics without A> providing a sufficient explanation for what QM *actually* states and B> ignoring the inconveniently small size of the Planck length (10^-43m) which confines quantum mechanical effects to non-macroscopic objects (in other words if you need to use the term 'molecule' or larger to discuss the object, quantum mechanics treats the object as a classical (Newtonian) object).
Woo-woo means invoking physics to bolster your religious/spiritual position and then dismissing those very same physicists the minute they say "umm, but that's not what the theory states--in fact the theory states something rather different and here's why..."
I could go on but I won't.
Please cite the instance of "new data" that you mention.