This has got to be a devious plot. My wife has been known to tell me to dress more formally (it’s a polite way of pointing out that I’m a slob), and in particular, that I should wear…a tie… more often. Now a reader sends me a link to ties with cephalopods and brains on them, and it’s the month before Cephalopodmas. This is horrible. I don’t want to even be tempted by a tie.
Look at this card a reader wrote me about. It’s a sweet, cute, innocent card, perfect for Cephalopodmas.
On the other hand—O Great Old Ones, this is so horrid I shudder to mention it—another reader sent me an ad. An ad so ghastly, I won’t put it on the front page here…you’ll have to click through to see it. If you’re squeamish or delicate of constitution, do not read the rest of this post. The War on Cephalopodmas is on.
After South Park made such a botch of its portrayal, this might be some vindication: Salon names Richard Dawkins as one of the sexiest men living. It’s a bit gushy, I’m afraid.
Wonder is sexy. Knowledge is sexy. And embodying both as much as any man in the world today is a man in a tweed jacket riding his bike around the Oxford University campuses, the damp English breeze sweeping a curtain of silver hair from the delicate bones of his face. Yes, those cheekbones, those piercing eyes, that pursed bow of a mouth — but that brain, oh that brain, oh, god, that brain — is what makes Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and the most famous atheist in the world, the sexiest man around.
Dawkins is the professor I never had an affair with, whose very sentence structure threatens to weaken my concentration on the content of his words. Call me deluded: I ache for his atheism; I reel from his reasoning. He is my James Bond, a well-attired, fearless seeker of truth in the face of nihilism. And yet, for all his pedigree, he enthusiastically appeared this fall on “South Park” to spread the gospel of science, his dashing cartoon figure covered in the feces of a teacher who scoffs at evolution.* While scatology isn’t my thing, straddling the highest of the ivory highbrow with the glorious lowest of the low: Now that’s sexy.
I dream of his perfectly-accented voice — Oxbridge softened by a childhood spent in, sigh, East Africa — whispering to me from his latest book, “The God Delusion,” a defense of endless curiosity in the face of omnipresent theism. “If the demise of god will leave a gap, different people will fill it in different ways. My way includes a good dose of science, the honest and systematic endeavor to find out the truth about the real world.” Take me with you, Richard: You put the “sex” in sexagenarian. Let us clinch in a godless embrace, crying out to what we know does not exist, searching, searching evermore.
Personally, he’s not my type…but still, it’s good to see an atheist and a scientist described in such flattering terms.
*The article is incorrect to assume that Dawkins had anything at all to do with that South Park episode, though.
I’m not nominated for anything, praise Jebus.
Well, if they can have Mother Teresa in a bun, or Jesus in a tortilla, we can have an image of Charles Darwin in a tree.
I fear it might be a case of mistaken identity, though—it looks more like Karl Marx to me.
Japanese researchers prepare the first enlistee in the robot cephalopod legion. If we could only bring together robot cuttlefish and zombie cyborg squid, we could rule the world! Prepare to be subjugated, flimsy, limb-deficient hu-mans.
This could be a lively free-for-all: we’ve got one commenter who was visited by Steve Irwin’s ghost, another who believes in astral projection, and now Deepak Chopra claims to have ‘proof’ of an afterlife. I think that, by the mystic Rule of Threes, that requires that I respond, so let’s take a look at Chopra’s seven pieces of evidence for an afterlife.
1. Near-death experiences. Thousands of patients have died, almost always from heart attacks, and then been resuscitated who experience some aspect of the afterlife. One Dutch study put the percentage at around 20% of all such cases. Amazingly, these patients were brain dead, showing no electrical activity in the cortex while they were dead. Yet they experienced sights and sounds, met deceased relatives, felt deep emotions, etc.
NDEs are utterly meaningless. Humans are good at interpolating and constructing mental experiences to fill in gaps; when someone dies and is resuscitated, all we have are accounts generated after the fact of what happened. Also, Chopra’s second point actually invalidates his first claim.
2. Near-death experiences in traditional cultures. The most famous of these are the delogs of Tibet, people who die and come back to life with detailed descriptions of the Bardo, the intricate Buddhist realm of heavens and hells.
Whereas Americans who die confabulate memories of meeting family and Jesus. Isn’t it obvious that this is a culture-dependent ‘memory’ generated by dreams of wish-fulfillment?
3. Children who remember their past lives have now been studied in detail at the Univ. of Virginia. In some of the most striking cases, the child was born with a birthmark that matched the way he had died in the previous life (for example, entry and exit wounds from a bullet). The number of cases is now over 2,500.
This is the Stevenson bunk. It’s simply not credible, and the investigator has the same supernaturalist biases Chopra has. And can someone please explain how an immaterial spirit transports the damage from its previous physical body to a birthmark in its new body?
4. Evidence of mind outside the brain. If consciousness is created by brain chemistry, there is little likelihood of a conscious afterlife. However, many intriguing experiments now exist to show that a person’s thoughts can move beyond the brain. Besides the various experiments in telepathy and ‘remote viewing,’ which are much more credible than skeptics will admit, there is a replicated study from the engineering department at Princeton in which ordinary people could will a computer to generate a certain pattern of numbers. They did this through thought alone, having no contact with the machine itself.
His evidence for duality is telepathy and remote viewing, a couple of phenomena which have not held up under any kind of scientific scrutiny?
The random number stuff is an exaggerated version of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research experiments. They showed that ordinary people couldn’t do what he claims, but one person who was not only a participant but also a researcher in the work could somehow be responsible for the bulk of the positive hits. I don’t think it shows any mysterious mental powers; I suspect something more mundane.
5. In the area of information theory, a rising body of evidence suggests that Nature preserves data in the form of information fields. The most basic units of creation, such as quarks and gravity, may be interrelated through information that cannot be created or destroyed, only recombined into new patterns. If this is true, then it may be that what we call the soul is a complex package of information that survives death as well as precedes birth.
New Age quantum crap. This is not evidence, this is Chopra waving his hands and babbling.
6. Then there are mysteries that no scientific theory can explain without consciousness. Foremost among these is consciousness itself. Inside the brain a hundred billion neurons register chemical and electrical signals. The brain contains no sights, sounds, smells, or tastes. It is a dark, semi-solid mass about the consistency of cold oatmeal. And yet this conglomeration of inert atoms somehow produces the entire visible, tangible world. If this metamorphosis can be explained, then we may find out how the brain might create subtler worlds, the kind traditionally known as heaven. If the secret lies not in brain chemistry but in awareness itself, the afterlife may turn out to be an extension of our present life, not a faraway mystical world.
Maybe Chopra’s brain is like cold oatmeal and is made up of inert atoms, but mine isn’t. I do believe we can now diagnose his problem.
Again, this isn’t evidence for anything. Chopra has merely made up an improbable rationale, and is now asking us all to assume it is correct.
Note the weird game he plays, too. The brain isn’t an organ that responds to stimuli from the external world, oh no…it creates the world. That’s more New Age nonsense.
7. Finally, there are traditions of spirituality–going far beyond organized religion–that tell us about consciousness from the viewpoint of wisdom. Science isn’t the only valid way to extract knowledge from nature. The ancient Vedic rishis of India provided a clear, coherent worldview that fits perfectly into advanced concepts from quantum theory. The merging of wisdom and science has much to offer.
A New Age triple whammy: ancient, revealed wisdom + quantum abuse + a claim that his view is a synthesis of science and mysticism. Nope, sorry, Deepak old boy…there isn’t a speck of science in what you say.
Cody visited the creation science “museum” near Glenrose, Texas, and came back with a photo of the mural portraying Adam and Eve. Adam looks…familiar.
I knew he was old, but that old?
I’m not sure who Eve resembles. Anita Bryant? Skeletor?
Mark your calendars—Cephalopodmas is on the 22nd day of December, and you need to start rehearsing those Cephalopodmas carols.
I have to say, though, that the continuing neglect of this important holiday by the media is another sign of the War on Cephalopodmas. Don’t believe me? Walk into your local Wal-Mart, and I promise you that the greeter won’t say “Merry Cephalopodmas!” to you. You won’t see any civic displays draped with tentacles. The school pageants won’t be full of songs about squid. The smell of kelp won’t be in the air, nor will you be hearing the mournful, melodious tones of the foghorn. Outrageous, isn’t it?
I want everyone this year to give their best Bill O’Reilly glare to anyone you meet who doesn’t affirm your personal beliefs with a verbal recognition of the validity of Cephalopodmas. Temper tantrums are good, too. Of course, it should go without saying that you shouldn’t have to explain why you’re walking around always looking so pissed-off; truth be told, when you have to explain that you’re upset because people aren’t reciting some ritualized formal greeting at you, you sound a bit like a pinhead. So don’t.
Here’s a useful tip: if ever you are attacked by giant monsters, you want to call a Minnesotan for help. I think it’s the summertime practice in fighting off insectoid swarms that helps.
