Oh, joy. Deepak Chopra is mad about being called an evolution denialist, and to disprove the accusation, he fires back with a whole long letter full of misconceptions about evolution. As usual, he relies on painting himself as the brave pioneer at the very edge of science, with a hooting mob of regressive scientific dogmatists haranguing him.
…in a recent blog, Valerie Strauss goes beyond catcalls, accusing me of being an evolution denier, which is absolutely false. I work and write with high-level scientists, including physicists, geneticists, and others who believe, as I do, that mainstream science, like mainstream medicine, has a lot to gain from keeping the flow of ideas moving.
As far as evolution is concerned, there’s a cadre of strict Darwinists who will push back against any encroachment into their field, but neo-Darwinism, which tries to address glaring gaps in Darwin’s original theory (after all, he knew nothing of DNA, genes, and the chemical basis of mutations) is a respected field, too. I often think that my interest in genetics, which has led to a book being published this fall, arouses vehement objections because scientists want to protect their turf, and seeing an interested amateur write about troubling issues they haven’t resolved causes them to cry, “How dare he?”
Isn’t it just adorable how he veers wildly from describing himself as an interested amateur
, begging to be cut a little slack, and puffing himself up as a co-worker to high-level scientists
? Pick a position and stick with it.
But really, this isn’t a question of established scientists being affronted by a clever upstart — it’s about someone who knows nothing about evolutionary theory pretentiously telling competent people what they are supposed to do. He’s Choprasplaining, and it gets old fast.
To demonstrate that he’s an ignoramus, he gives us a list of Major Problems in evolutionary theory. Would you be surprised if I told you that none of them are problems for evolution at all?
Here are some of the problematic issues that evolutionary theory currently grapples with.
1. No one knows the biological basis of mind; therefore, linking the physical nature of the brain with actual thinking is totally unproven.
Well, since most of the products of evolution do not have a brain and are completely mindless, I think we can safely say you can study evolution quite well without ever having to contemplate consciousness at all.
We also do not have to have a complete understanding of how minds work to recognize its biological basis. I know my television uses electricity to work because if I unplug it from the wall, it stops working; similarly, I know my my mind is the product of biology because if I physically damage my brain, or change its chemistry, my mind gets scrambled. It’s entirely clear that there is a strong physical component to the mind, and it’s quite likely that it is entirely natural and mechanistic.
2. Applying Darwinian principles to the meteoric rise of Homo sapiens confronts the bald fact that as a species we have leapt ahead far faster than random mutations can account for.
This is simply false. We have compared the genomic sequence of humans and chimpanzees, for instance, and the number of nucleotide changes since our divergence is entirely within the bounds of normal rates of genetic change. He’s just making stuff up.
3. Without understanding consciousness, one cannot understand human beings.
Does Chopra understand consciousness? I rather doubt it; I get the impression he uses “consciousness” as a buzzword, in the same way he uses “quantum”. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but gosh, it sure sounds profound…until you realize that he’s just babbling fatuously.
We could also ask…did Shakespeare understand consciousness? How about Sappho and Basho? How about Homer and Shelley? Yet I would argue that not understanding the biochemistry and electrical activity of the brain did not seem to impair their understanding of human beings.
4. Because we are self-aware, human beings construct societies and thought structures that impact our evolution far more than natural selection, which is based on securing an advantage in two areas: securing food and gaining mating rights.
There’s more to evolution than natural selection, and most biologists would agree that genetic change is driven more by chance than selection. Darwin himself thought it extremely important that individuals make choices — look up sexual selection — and that construction of an environment that modifies the effects of selection is not just a human trait. Quorum sensing in bacteria, for instance, is an example of non-human creatures modifying their environment to have an effect on the propagation of their genes.
And that is the most peculiarly narrow definition of selection that I’ve ever read. Here’s Futuyma’s:
It is important to recognize that “natural selection” is not synonymous with “evolution.” Evolution can occur by processes other than natural selection, especially genetic drift. And natural selection can occur without any evolutionary change, as when natural selection maintains the status quo by eliminating deviants from the optimal phenotype.
Many definitions of natural selection have been proposed (Endler 1986). For our purposes, we will define natural selection as any consistent difference in fitness among phenotypically different classes of biological entities.
Viruses evolve. It’s hard to whittle their existence down to “food” and “mating rights” — a lot of evolving organisms don’t even bother with that mating and sexual reproduction business.
5. Human evolution long ago escaped the physical pressures that other species are entirely bound by—the discovery of fire was just a link in a chain of advances that set prehistoric man on the road to self-sufficiency, eventually leading to the fantastic notion, now at the very heart of science, that humanity can conquer Nature.
If there were one simple misconception that I could eradicate from the public mind, that one’s near the top of my list. We have not escaped from evolutionary processes at all. Even an ignoramus who thinks that selection only involves food and mating rights ought to be able to recognize that people still starve and people still fail to reproduce and children still die of diseases.
I concede that there probably were scientists who thought they could conquer nature — most of them villains in bad novels — but it’s not exactly a popular idea at all in scientific circles nowadays. It’s certainly not at the heart of science
. Especially given that the major trend of scientific discoveries over the past few centuries has been to dethrone humanity from its egotistical view of itself as the Pinnacle of Creation and Center of the Universe.
6. In order to settle any of the preceding issues, evolutionary theorists are at an enormous disadvantage. They can’t do experiments to validate what they believe happened in the distant past, and when it comes down to certain fundamental beliefs, such as random mutations, their experimentation is largely confined to micro-organisms and primitive species like the fruit fly, conducted within the tiny, sterile confines of the laboratory.
Oh. Fuck you too, Deepak Chopra.
We can do experiments to figure out what happened in the past. There are all kinds of cool experiments done, inferring ancestral states of molecules, and then making genetic constructs to test their properties. We look at a phenomenon like limb evolution, for example, and then ask what developmental processes drive digit identity and formation.
Mutations occur in humans, too — we’ve measured the rate. They are random, as well.
I experiment on fish. Others do too; there have been remarkable strides made in understanding the evolution of variations in sticklebacks (that’s variation in the wild, not the lab). There are a huge number of experiments done on our fellow mammal, the mouse.
There are institutes of human genetics in Utah, California, Iowa, Germany, India, Japan, China…everywhere. What does Chopra think they do there?
I’m just going to have to piss on the anti-scientific stupidity of calling Drosophila a primitive species
. Fruit flies are highly derived, intricate products of evolution. We are learning a great deal studying them.
How much do we learn studying Chopra’s bizarre New Age ideology? It’s clear that he is an evolution-denier, since he wants to replace well-grounded, evidence based concepts with wacky amorphous blather about “consciousness”, and doesn’t know the first thing about evolution itself.
Argument from authority fallacy
Science and medicine gain from ideas, duh. Note that said ideas are a subset of all ideas. We call that subset “the good ones.”
Anytime someone confuses Evolution with “Darwinism,” you know they’re full of shit. Hell, any time someone uses “Darwinism” to label someone else, you know they’re full of shit.
Huh, a 150-year-old paper has gaps? Wait, GLARING gaps??! Oh woe be us! Our knowledge, which has been stagnant for 150 years, is mummified. I hope those “Neo-Darwinists” (whatever they are) can add the tiniest morsel of learning to that venerable subject.
Bah, I can’t huff enough paint fast enough to read this drivel.
I think what makes this idea so sticky is that human technology has changed the selective pressures at work. People who would probably die without offspring in a neolithic world, now live full and productive lives. The classic example given a few decades ago [by eugenicists] would have been eyeglasses; folks with severe visual impairments probably had poor life expectancy in a hunter-gatherer society without corrective devices.
It’s obvious how that does NOT translate into saying that natural selection is dead, but it’s easy to see how one casually generalizes that if technology can neutralize any given selective pressure (which is vaguely sorta almost true), then it must be able to neutralize all of them at once (which is horse hockey).
I seem to remember a high school biology text saying nearly this. If my dim memory serves, it was actually saying that technology has drastically changed the selective landscape, but again IIRC it worded it poorly so it seemed to say that natural selection is no longer applicable. I believe it cited bedouin wearing protective clothing, canceling out the selective advantage of darker skin, and suggesting that naked paleolithic bedouin would have had to evolve [back to] very dark skin.
I almost feel bad for the guy…
I mean, it’s not just that he’s dead wrong. It’s that he’s so woefully unoriginally so. It’s about as interesting as watching an 80s comic doing a standup routine on airline food.
Suspect he’s still laughing all the way to the bank, anyway. So, hey, play those mouldy old hits again, I guess, guy.
You can always tell a crank when they believe in the SF meme of the talented amateur showing the professionals how to get limitless energy, or some other bunkum. But real life is different. Sorry Chopra, time for you to acknowledge you have nothing cogent to say, your blather is simply hot air, and your indignation is manufactured.
Deepsix Deepak???
he keeps saying “random” in way that does not fully entail the use of random in evolution. As in, he appears to use it to represent a random walk through the phase space of all possibilities. Evolution does not work that way. The walk is constrained, as every point in the phase space have weighted probabilities with unequal outcomes and evolution depends on the accumation of each step by generations of walkers.
The statement of is understandable when referring to us culturally rather than biochemically (as PZ noted). He might have a point about how it is difficult to derive all that “culture” from biochemistry (without going the evopsych route).
Then again, there is the concept of “synergy”, that once a function is acquired, its interaction with previously acquired functions, gets accelerated more than additively (e.g. exponentially).
To justify my apologia above: it is fine to ask questions, postulate conjectures, but to declare is arrogance with little value.
I have no problem with pointing out the idiocy of Chopra, but PZ is equally ignorant, and distinctly less open-minded, about the nature of consciousness.
Blatant bait and switch, or what?
Evidence to the peer reviewed scientific literature needed. You know that. So, why didn’t you provide one?
If you get to redefine your terms you can deny that you’re “denying” anything. Chopra’s argument falls into the same area as the anti-vaxxers who insist they’re not against vaccinations at all, they’re only in favor of “safe” vaccines. Which, when you dig down far enough, turns out to be no vaccines. Surprise.
Like a lot of people who think cutting-edge science is finally proving what the mystics have been saying all along, Chopra is living in a bubble. You can find PhD scientists who endorse any form of bullshit you want to bring up. That doesn’t make their beliefs a legitimate scientific position. Surround yourself with these guys, though, and it will sure look like it is.
Or in the same way natural philosophers before the mid 19th century used the concept of “vitalism.” “Consciousness” divorced from the brain is like elan vital considered as something separate from biology and what living things actually do.
It’s so easy to use reified abstractions to “explain” things when all you have to do to explain them and how they work is invoke them. What is Consciousness? It’s an essence. It’s made out of Consciousness except its not made out of anything, and it didn’t develop from anything else because it always was and is irreducible and basic. We get human consciousness from Consciousness by way of Consciousness action — or maybe its Consciousness INaction — which grants or impresses or manifests itself in the physical world through no method at all — because mechanisms are reductionistic and we like to slide around on the top of ideas and call ourselves deep.
Chopra doesn’t understand evolution. He doesn’t understand science. And he doesn’t even understand philosophy. An explanation has to explain. You can’t just move the question around and triumphantly declare you’ve successfully answered it.
Wait, what? Someone correct me if I am wrong, but “neo-Darwinism” is the “modern synthesis”. It is, like Chopra says here, Darwinian evolution put into the context of genetics knowledge discovered, post-Darwin. The “strict Darwinists” of today ARE “neo-Darwinists”, not a different group. I am pretty sure this is Chopra just trying, poorly, to pretend that there is a Bad Regressive Evolutionist group keeping him down, while there is a Good Progressive Evolutionist group doing better science that also agrees with him. Umm, nope.
As for his points:
1. This reminds me of when creationists say evolution fails, because abiogenesis is unproven. That’s a tangent not even in the main scope of what evolution looks at. You fail.
2. The “meteoric rise” he refers is about our civilizations and technology and human supremacy and exceptionalism, not genetics. It is most likely not strictly a matter of biological evolution and I imagine Chopra knows that. And just doesn’t care, because MAGIC
3. Fortune cookie plagiarism aka standard deepity.
4. Society isn’t just about food and mating rights. Nor is evolution. The man calling out for finding More is such a reductionist.
5. I honestly can’t tell whether he is praising or condeming the idea that “man can conquer Nature”.
6. Shades of “Were You There?” with some mockery of the idea that experiments on one species can tell us something general that applies to different species, and some blatant anti-science jabs to boot.
Ugh. When will Chopra just go away?
odd… in my summer reading I have quite a few scientific books and papers on consciousness, and none of them share Chopra’s view. Now, it is true that Chopra’s idea of consciousness is one that is incompatible with biology as it currently stands, but the simple explanation for that is that Chopra’s idea is full of shit.
Oh yay. Vijen is here to tell us all about how consciousness is really really truly obviously certainly a Spirit Borg. But he will do so as coyly as possible, in the most tiny, drawn-on, piecemeal fashion he can muster, complete with vague waffling while still insisting that they are obviously Right. Great. Super. Not anything we have seen before at all.
Chopra works and writes with all these high-level scientists and apparently learns nothing.
I don’t even know how he would know they are high-level scientists. I guess other people tell him that. Evidence from authority – doesn’t sound very new-agey to me.
@2 is written:
*raising hand*
I’ll add in. I too have a vague memory of similar, to which I’ve assigned the name Stephen Jay Gould. something about how evolution “in nature” is basically linear, while humans have thrown intelligence (which produces technology) into the equation as a kind of feedback loop that makes evolution non-linear and impossible to predict (being embedded in the process ourselves).
I admit, this could just be some conflation of many sources of partial ideas (sorry SJG).
just throwin it out here into the ether.
Chopralalia.
I have had surgery. Anesthesia for most people (sometimes brains respond strangely, like how Valium makes me agitated and aggressive ) basically shuts off consciousness in a way that is entirely unlike sleep. If you turn the brain off, consciousness goes away entirely. If you damage the brain you can change the personality. There is no woo there.
#7, Vijen: Please explain the nature of consciousness to us ignorant plebs!
@16 Rowat vet-tech: Pfft. All high-level scientists know that personality changes are caused by demon possession. I mean, it’s obvious. Have the Darwinists proved that demons don’t exist? No, they have not. Have the Darwinists proved to creationists’ satisfaction that consciousness is a product of biochemical processes? No, they haven’t! Therefore, it’s demon possession. QED.
@7 Vijen: Alas, analytical minds tend to be rather closed to nonsense.
I’m pretty sure Chopra is not talking rates of nucleotide change, that would be him at his most biologically specific. He’s talking about our technological rise to planetary domination, and how it can’t be explained through strict Darwinian effects, to which I’d reply: NSS, there are other forces at play, evolution is not the only game in town.
He makes it sound like consciousness was a requirement for forming societies? Does he not know about animals? Like, many of them? Also, why wouldn’t species that form societies be subject to natural selection? The selective criteria are just different than they would be outside of societies.
PZ Myers #17 wrote:
What is the nature of consciousness? Consciousness is the ‘what’ of nature.
Oh, wait, that question was for Vijen. Never mind.
As with intelligence, it’s hard to discuss consciousness in a rational way without defining the concept. That’s what irritates me about shallow thinkers, who go into long-winded hyperbole without employing the basic building blocks of a rational argument: definitions of things we are talking about.
What is consciousness? Is it self-awareness? Is it something closer to the medical concept of “alert and oriented times three”? Is it capacity for abstract thought? If it IS tied to abstract thought, how much of it is necessary to be tantamount to consciousness? Is it the use of tools? The creation of technology? The ability to form emotional bonds? Is consciousness an either-or proposition, in other words, a species either has it, or it doesn’t? Or is it a spectrum? Chopra never tells us, but something makes me suspect that he would probably define it in a circular fashion: describe consciousness as something inherently human, then claim that humans are the only ones who have consciousness.
For those of you are already toked up and can’t wait for the sweet flow of mental molasses from Vijen’s harmonious electric mouth, I deliver unto you, Mind Blowing Spoilers:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/03/06/for-shame-tedx/
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/11/16/can-i-see-an-fmri-from-a-man-jumping-over-a-shark-next/
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/05/26/a-curse-in-miracles/
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/02/03/another-really-stupid-argument-from-william-lane-craig/
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/08/22/whos-conscious/
I give it 7 “Whoa, dude”‘s out of 5.
Yours in Mind Trips,
Anti Preppo
———————————————–
“They call them fingers, but I have never seen them fing. Oh, there they go.”
God damn it, anteprepro! You made me spit out my coffee. You can’t write something that funny before noon.
Did he seriously try to defend himself with “I’m not a quack! Some of my friends are real scientists!”
Hahaha never change Deepak
Chopra said in his point 5 that humans long ago escaped evolutionary pressures. I think that by “long ago”, Chopra means “NOT long ago”. Specifically, while cooking meat is a big benefit of fire, the biggest change in human diet and society happened when we gave up being mainly hunters for settled agriculture, maybe 15-20,000 years ago. That was long ago in terms of RECORDED culture, but not long ago in terms of the 6 million year separation from chimps who are 99% identical.
By Jove, he has tumbled to it! There are research labs everywhere where be-whiskered gentlemen arrive in the morning, hang their top hats and cloaks on bentwood coatstands, and peer into their brass microscopes to study barnacles. And should anyone dare to utter any concept discovered after 1882, they are soundly thrashed with a riding crop, the blackguards!
Unfortunately, many people, like him, think that they understand evolution, when they in fact don’t, and they are very resistent to comprehending and acknowledging that they have an indredibly flawed and often factually incorrect “understanding” of the subject. Thankfully, most aren’t impervious to learning and correcting mistakes if given the chance, unlike Chopra who is too much of a narcisist to contemplate the posibility that he might be wrong about something.
You are pathetic, Chopra…you really, really are….
Translation:
“I can’t be a quack, because I’m right! I was right about gobble gobble quantum woo wah and I sure as hell was right about woo hoo wah consciousness gobble gob. You are so close-minded!”
That Chopra has an ego as big as the universe.
I’m amused by the way he shoves the word “therefore” in between two versions of the same assertion.
Except that we do know the biological basis of mind. It is the brain. And this is obvious even just looking at what the brain is like: neurons that signal to each other and alter each other, and bridge the gap between our sensory input and our motor outputs, just like our mind does! And given all of our data about how the mind changes exactly as the brain does, and it’s clear this is exactly what it is all doing. I’m pretty sure that’s all of the angles that need to be covered.
He won’t. He hasn’t changed in over 30 years since he first discovered that quackery and nonsense can be sold more profitably than skepticism and science.
Of course he doesn’t understand evolution — and if he ever did, you can be sure he’d keep damned quiet about it, because his paychecks depend on continuing to promote his anti-science creed served up with an old and wilted “cutting edge” scientific word-salad.
His entire schtick has always been the primacy of consciousness. In his ideology (which is quite popular) chance cannot be sufficient, because it cannot even exist. Everything is directed by consciousness, which precedes biology and even the physical world. While evolution explains how order and complexity build from the bottom-up, he’s selling faith in a universe where they are imposed top-down. It’s the essence of mysticism dressed in pseudo-scientific jargon.
I think what he’s going for here isn’t just the evolutionary nature of our brains, but is also pointing at our huge surge in technology and other acts of intellect, and including that under the banner of evolution. Yes, our technology has “leapt ahead far faster than random mutations can account for,” but that’s because it isn’t evolution at all, and hence evolutionary theory doesn’t need to account for it.
Our brains however did indeed arise as part of normal evolution, and yes our technology and such is contingent on that, but none of our discoveries require any further evolution of our biology beyond the intellect we gained however many tens of thousand of years ago.
Likewise, people engaged in the study of consciousness and human behavior – cognitive neuroscientists, psychologists etc. – don’t seem to be hampered by lacking knowledge of genes, gene expression, molecular biology and such. Inf act, things tend to turn …weird… when they try to put everything into evolutionary terms.
Dreaming of an Atheistic Newtopia #29 wrote:
And unfortunately many people like him are still counted in the statistics as “pro-evolution.” Which means that it’s even worse than we think.
Scientismist #32 wrote:
Yes — and technically it’s virtually the same damn belief found in more traditional religions like Christianity, Islam, etc. The “primacy of consciousness” is just another vague description of God. The quibbling is only over the details.
I’ve been exposed to Chopra for decades (due to his massive New Age empire my son calls him Deep-pockets Chopra), and he’s been reading from the same script since the beginning.
It’s a story we’ve heard before: 1) Start with a belief system (Conciousness woo, in this case); 2) Search the world for ideas that can be said to support that belief system; 3) co-opt science-y terms to valid it; 4) Ignore any evidence that refutes it.
Depok Chopra, meet Ken Ham.
One of the most impressive discoveries of science was identifying the quirks of how the mind works, and why there need to be safeguards in place to make sure those quirks don’t lead us astray.
Also, I should mention how our “private thoughts” can be spied upon and reconstructed by technology that senses our brain activity.
at one time long before this dud started on his career of media stardom I would have found it comfortable to use those ideas and that language but that was back in the 60’s and 70″s when the ideas of turning on and dropping out were more popular along with the activities promoted by certain advocates of those ideas.
It is Hinduism and Consciousness I would have to say is ultimately what the westerner would have to call god which permeates all things and is in reality is all things. He is just trying to use the language and jargon of science to sell what in essence is a religious viewpoint derived from his cultural upbringing and background.
A “scientific Maharishi” if you will.
uncle frogy
I have absolutely no idea how much Chopra actually knows about any of the subjects he jabbers on about. By that I mean how much of what he says he knows is patently false or misleading. I have no idea because of how blisteringly obvious it is he has been engaged in a spirituality based scam for profit.
He has, what, 80 or 90 million reasons why he says the things he says and claims the things he claims and “questions” the things he “questions”. He has a talent for inspiring fuzzy thinking people by saying fuzzy, content-free shit they take as deep and lofty, and he uses this talent to fleece morons.
@PZ #17: anteprepro #24 has helpfully curated some earlier remarks of mine, but if you want it from the horse’s mouth:
Now Vijen, what other bits of corroborated *snicker* knowledge to the benefit of mankind have been discovered due to this bit of bullshit?
Vijen #39 wrote:
No, I think we really would prefer that you “explain the nature of consciousness” in your own words. Or perhaps pick out the best quote from the video — or yourself, if you haven’t changed or improved upon your earlier views.
Scientists have decided that the fundamental particle of the universe is the quark, coming as it does in various flavors. Clearly the fundamental particle of consciousnessness is therefore the quack, which also comes in various flavors. The Deepak quack is currently one of the most visible flavors of quack. The Vijen may be another.
@Sastra #41: The video is consciousness per se explaining consciousness. Francis Lucille no longer suffers from the delusion that he exists as a separate self, and his mode of expression is readily accessible to this audience (he was a nuclear physicist, then a physics professor). Your understanding, like mine, is corrupted by unexamined assumptions about subjectivity: here is an opportunity to spend 20 minutes investigating.
nothing to investigate. NOT ONE INSTRUMENT READING TO BACK UP ANY CLAIMS. And you expect to be taken seriously????
I made it to almost 4 minutes. Too vacuous. Too much babbling.
Vijen #43 wrote:
Well, the Cosmos will be half-pleased that I watched exactly half of the video. 11:23 None of this was new to me (as you may remember.) He speaks in deepities: true but trivial statements running rapidly into extraordinary but false ones. And its a very old and tired belief.
The horse’s … mouth … never really got around to explaining the nature of consciousness in the part I watched. It wasn’t actually addressed. Perhaps the relevant part was at the end. It may be too much to request a specific quote on topic from your good self, given that the self is an illusion. But what I did note was a very bad argument — or lack of one — against the brain having anything to do with producing thoughts because the brain is embedded in the network of reality. That doesn’t follow … you know?
This sort of thing is really much less impressive than you seem to think it is. The listeners import the profundity into the stagecraft/lecture.
“…which has led to a book being published this fall…”
Oh, I get it…Advertising! There’s gold in them there lies.
Bruce @ 27: You mean (somewhere around) 6 million years ago at the moment of human and chimp’s last common ancestor, right? ;)
PZ made it four minutes? I just read the first sentence of Vijen’s 43 and my eyes started rolling uncontrollably. I cannot even begin the chore of watching that video.
(Also, from what I understand about other people’s investigation about Vijen’s ideology before, I am surprised The Horse who has The Mouth that spews out The Truth was not Osho: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajneesh)
2. Applying Darwinian principles to the meteoric rise of Homo sapiens confronts the bald fact that as a species we have leapt ahead far faster than random mutations can account for.
Right — it’s not just evolution, it’s evolution plus aliens. That’s where Darwin went wrong: he didn’t account for the aliens who taught us how to build Stonehenge and the pyramids.
The listeners import the profundity into the stagecraft/lecture.
What, I gotta bring my own profundity? In addition to paying a fee to get in? Isn’t that what they say about Ayn Rand and Camille Paglia? How about if I just bring some good weed instead?
PS: is that pic at the top of the page of Chopra? The guy looks like a younger Henry Kissinger with a better tan.
My question is this, possums: when is Deepster going to return those spectacles to Dame Edna?
Run out of new things to criticize?
Let’s make fun of his appearance!
Love how this cloth-eared dim-bulb just flatly asserts that “we have leapt ahead far faster than random mutations can account for.” First: no, we haven’t (and citations, please), second: it’s like asserting that human technology has leaped ahead far faster than Bronze Age technology can account for, third: it sounds uncomfortably like Dembski.
And of course it’s bollocks: once a particular kind of technological leap is made, technology based on that leap will advance at a rate far faster than technology advanced previously. Take steam power: once it was shown in the mid-17th century to be able to drive pistons and pulleys, it was barely a couple of generations before it was powering the entire world. Ditto the internal combustion engine, powered flight and electronics: somebody watching the Wrights at Kittyhawk in 1911 could well have been watching Armstrong at Tranquility Base on their TV in 1969 – and in between have witnessed the birth of commercial air travel, air combat, the jet engine, the first people in space and the breaking of the sound barrier. And I’m sure many of us here are quite familiar with how much more complex, powerful, adaptable and indispensable the humble PC has become within living memory.
All it takes is a particular advance at the right time and of the right sort to catalyse all sorts of associated leaps in the original direction and in every other direction possible. Technological advances don’t breach any “laws” any more than does a genetic leap in a particular direction at a particular time; our little skip during the divergence from the human/chimp common ancestor gave us a little edge which soon turned out to be a boon in so many ways it’s scarcely quantifiable – yet Chopra wants to give the credit to a ghost in the shell. It’s facile and childish; if he had a shred of integrity he’d be ashamed by it.
Hank_Says #53 wrote:
Yes, if several critical factors are in place, one of the most significant being communication between “inventors” in different areas. They criticize mistakes and build on what others have done. The more wide and open the community, the greater the progress.
Which spells death for the mystics, since objective criticism is anathema. They worship the subjective. You’re supposed to sit obediently at their feet and “learn” from them like a child. In a modern world that will always result in small, privileged, self-contained clans of insiders passively-aggressively sneering at the folks who “don’t get it” because they’re all trying to control everything from the wrong level.
Sastra @54, I can dig it. Mystics, while often touting their cool & groovy cred, are far too often as authoritarian and dogmatic as rigid theists. They are the ones who get to meter out enlightenment and grooviness; try and locate or define your own in some non-approved way and you might as well be a Dark Ages heretic. I copped that attitude personally in my teens in the mid-90s while hanging out with some new-age Pagan patchouli-burning sweat-lodging hippie types. While they presented as totally accepting of everything, man and down with whatever, any deviations from the unwritten acceptable hippie pastiche they lived by was met with silent yet palpable hostility. Shit, I even got looked at sideways when they learned I was into metal. Well, shit, I can’t force myself to like fucking Marillion and fucking Enya, okay?
Now, apologies for the blogspamming, PZ, but I expanded on my blog comment and, rather than blurt a thousand words in a comment, made it a whole thing (https://almosteverythingsucks.wordpress.com/2015/07/31/pzmyers-scientist-swings-at-deepakchopra-non-scientist-home-runs-ensue/).
How many peer-reviewed evolutionary biology papers has his name as coauthor?
I really hate this stuff. Conflating the results of social cooperation and education and technological development with basic biological evolution and claiming therefore that either
1) we’ve evolved to be able to do such things and the reason we didn’t invent calculus or microwave ovens or steel scaffolding umpty thousand years ago was just because we were too dumb or disorganised or “unevolved” … or
2) our forebears were too stupid, too primitive to be able to do stuff like work out weights and engineering tricks and work arounds so it must have been aliens who worked all the details out for those ignorant innocents to build big buildings or sea-going ships or whatever
… or both,
overlooks just how hard we work to educate ourselves and our children to get up to speed with all our accumulated social, technical and educational whizbangery.
We don’t just stand on the shoulders of giants, we put a lot of effort into staying there. We don’t notice it because it’s what we all do and we take it for granted. We would notice it if we, here in Australia for instance, went to live with indigenous people living off bush tucker. Day in, day out, women and men go out with the kids and point out to them all the things they need to notice to collect today’s harvest of eggs or fish or roots and to keep an eye on fruits that are getting closer to harvest in the next week or month. How to start a fire and cook a lizard, a fish or a kangaroo. How to select suitable grasses and reeds for weaving. How to grind grains for making damper. Skills they’ll need to keep themselves and their group living off the land, and living well, for the rest of their lives.
It’s exactly the same as we do with littlies teaching them colours and shapes and numbers and language to ready them for their further formal schooling and provide a secure basis for success in adult life in the society we know and expect them to live in.
We’ve always had the intelligence to learn stuff and the drive to share the knowledge we acquire. Evolution has nothing to do with the accumulation of knowledge and its further elaboration within societies that maintain and enhance that knowledge. The simple fact that we have societies and communities living side by side with other societies and communities that teach their young different, sometimes completely opposite, things about how the world works should be evidence enough of that. Nothing to do with innate abilities passively acquired through evolution, all due entirely to active social teaching and approval.
@Sastra #46: alas, I was unable to read as far as the end of your post, but I remain confident of my own rightness…
If you find me reluctant to argue, this is a recognition that our premises diverge: you believe that only objective phenomena can be observed with the scientific method; I believe that the subjective is also amenable to a very similar discipline of structured and persistent enquiry. You have, I’m sure, assiduously pursued the characterization of these objective phenomena; so have I, but I have also spent decades pursuing a parallel enquiry into the subjective. The results of this investigation are, by definition, intransitive, at least between those who identify as limited, localized, and separate selves, but since all of those phenomena generally taken to be objective are by now established as unbounded, cosmic, and profoundly interwoven, isn’t it remarkable how our models of the subjective remain mired in the pre-Copernican?
I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything, I’m merely encouraging a broader investigation into reality-as-a-whole, and the nature of consciousness is key to this project. Any certainty you feel about objects – that there is a computer in front of you, or that gravity follows an inverse-square law – can never approach to the absolute certainty that someone is conscious of these objects; moreover, the way in which this subjective certainty arises is disconcertingly inaccessible to mental analysis. Surely this is a mystery which deserves investigation?
Vijen
Are you a vegan?
@Vijen
Well yes of course, I don’t think anyone has argued against that. So your attempt to compare your own position to that of others is a failure.
Look at your first post. You claim there is some “blatant bait and switch”. Do you have the ability to describe this supposed bait and switch? I don’t think you do.
Except that you are. This is obvious based on the rest of what you say right after this, that we should see that “consciousness is key”, and “Surely this is a mystery which deserves investigation”, and obvious based on the first post you made which claimed something was a “bait and switch”. Honestly, why would you even say something so blatantly false? Maybe because you don’t even understand the words you yourself are typing.
Anyways, you say:
Indeed. Whenever we have a hypothesis about the outside world, it is only probably true or false. But it is undeniable that there is awareness of present experience. Here’s a post that kind of ties that all together.
@chigau – I’m hoping you’re not implying some kind of correlation. I’ve been vegan over 30 years, and my appreciation for a purely naturalist worldview has only increased over that time.
Of course we home-schooled our kids until middle-school (we were the only non-theists amongst several home-schooler groups we were part of), so we’re strange in many ways.
Use the tools of science, not the tools of nonsense talkers. Then you might get some where. You need to invent the consciousnesstron model 100, to measure consciousness. Until then, you can only go in circles.
Vijen #58 wrote:
Heh, point taken. But please remember that my original request was for you to put your definition of “Consciousness” into your own words, not post a video we’re supposed to watch and see if we can discern what that person might say if we had asked for a clear, direct response to a specific question and he was capable of doing that. You may not be a self, but give yourself more credit.
No; as Brian Pansky just said, we actually agree on that. Our problem is that your form of “parallel inquiry” is too limited. It can’t take alternative theories into account. It can’t distinguish between shades of gray. It can’t entertain outside criticism. It involves personal story-telling and an eagerness to fall prey to deepities. Yes, everything is connected. But that does not mean everything is the same. And taking a different “cosmic” perspective is not necessarily going to be useful on every level. Just because we can’t be certain of anything with 100% certainty doesn’t mean we know nothing and must always go back to square one. The perfect is the enemy of the good.
In other words, you seem to be doing the same things you accuse us of doing. What do you know.
As mentioned above, you are now no longer among the crowd of folks who have convinced themselves that trying to convince anyone of anything is disrespectful, so you can drop the jargon. And if you really mean you want to encourage a “broader investigation” then you need to bring yourself into the group.
And if you really mean that the “nature of consciousness is key to this project” then you really need to explain, clearly and simply, what you think “consciousness” is. Not the story of its significance, but a definition. That is a start to understanding in every investigation. Your word.
You have, I’m sure, assiduously pursued the characterization of these objective phenomena; so have I, but I have also spent decades pursuing a parallel enquiry into the subjective.
So what, exactly, did you do in all those decades, and what useful result do you have to show for it?
The results of this investigation are, by definition, intransitive, at least between those who identify as limited, localized, and separate selves, but since all of those phenomena generally taken to be objective are by now established as unbounded, cosmic, and profoundly interwoven, isn’t it remarkable how our models of the subjective remain mired in the pre-Copernican?
Oh. So apparently you have nothing to show for your work. (And how do you know MY models of the subjective are “mired in the pre-Copernican?” Maybe I’ve been using different hallucinogens than were available back then.)
Does Chopra understand consciousness? I rather doubt it; I get the impression he uses “consciousness” as a buzzword, in the same way he uses “quantum”.
Is he talking about “quantum consciousness” yet?
What Deepshit doesn’t understand about quantum mechanics could fill libraries. And actually DOES!
@ Sastra #64:
Being unfamiliar with the subjective investigation you are, understandably, adducing many false analogies from objective investigations: none of these points is both accurate and germane. I’m not trying to accumulate results in order to establish an explanatory theory, I’m trying to experience reality directly, so that no explanation is necessary. Everyone experiences consciousness in just such a direct way, and if you follow this thread…
The subjective investigation proceeds by noticing and discarding uncountably many false understandings of reality. This reiterated process of disillusionment is sometime referred to as “neti, neti”. As Feynman said: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool”, and this issue is even more acute for the subjective investigation, hence all these idiots, like Chopra. But the process is not entirely futile, nor is it endless.
If I could say more about the results of the subjective enquiry, I would; believe me, I’m trying. But how would you explain epigenetics, say, to a child home-schooled by young-earth creationist evangelicals? You’d have to unpick so many layers of falseness before you could begin to convey any truth. But by working indirectly, perhaps by befriending the child, you might inspire them to educate themselves.
A definition of consciousness? Surely that would be the ultimate oxymoron! Consciousness is intrinsically experiential, in a way that nothing else is. Has anyone ever experienced the absence of consciousness? According to Francis Lucille: “Consciousness is that which is hearing these words right now.”
@Vijen:
No, an oxymoron is something inherently contradictory, such as “an intelligent utterance by Vijen”. A definition of consciousness might be difficult, but it isn’t necessarily contradictory.
Are you saying that “consciousness” and “experience” are the same thing?
You’ve been asked for your own words, not someone else’s.
Vijen:
Why would experiencing anything mean explanation isn’t necessary? I can see an object has a certain shade of blue, in a certain situation in which I’m looking at it from a certain perspective. I’m doing that “directly,” if that word has any useful meaning here. That doesn’t mean I’ve got an understanding of what it is, why it is or how it is. And it doesn’t mean that I don’t want or couldn’t use an explanation of it. I could learn how it is that certain colors of light are produced and how that interacts with my brain when I’m perceiving that light, and that would be explaining my experience.
You may claim things you don’t experience don’t need an explanation, as far as you’re concerned, because you don’t care or know anything about them. But such things might be explained if you did have experiences of them, on the basis of what your experiences of them are like, and I can’t understand why you would claim actual experiences of things are precisely the sorts of things which don’t need explanation. Having some kind of access to real thing in the first place is a reason why you’d explain that thing, while having no access to it wouldn’t be a motivation to explain it or require explanation, because that’s not even a thing that’s included somehow in your perspective, much less something you have a reason to be curious about.
Maybe what you mean is that you’re not interested in understanding how (when you see a shade of blue) light happens or how brains perceive it, etc. You don’t want explanations of that, and obviously they’re not necessary for you to simply be a person who is aware of that phenomenon. But when you’re effectively claiming there is no objective physical world to be aware of, only your awareness (somehow not awareness of something), that’s simply false. Of course you can’t handle explaining that, because of how utterly inadequate your framework is at doing anything like that (and maybe you just don’t care). But that doesn’t mean others, whose heads aren’t shoved so far up their asses, can’t have or don’t need or couldn’t use such explanations for themselves.
“meteoric rise” suggests a poor understanding of basic astrophysics as well! I’m pretty sure meteors fall, due to the force of gravity.