What a matchup! One one side, defending the proposition that “God has a future” is writer/philosopher Jean Houston and Woo-Meister Deepak Chopra. On the other, Michael Shermer and Sam Harris. It’s a Nightline “Face-Off.” Although the first video looks to be a bit over eight minutes long, it actually continues on to give the whole segment.
I can’t watch because I’m in San Marcos, Texas, about to give a general talk on evolution (and why religion is responsible for its rejection in America). And me without a Kevlar vest . . . .
h/t: Otter
Knock ’em dead, Jerry. Or rather, fortify the clever and knock some sense into the denialists.
I was just kidding about not mentioning evilution down there. I knew nothing could stop you.
I posted over at RD.net:
Chopra showed up as a fool with his hand caught in the cookie jar. Houston was very impressed with herself, even though she said little of any relevance.
Shermer was very good and Harris was fantastic.
This about sums it up!
Watch Shermer and Harris try to avoid rolling their eyes when Deepak is blathering.
Jean never even discusses the subject
I just watched it. Depak is simply hilarious! Ein sophistry posted a quite accurate description Depak’s perfomance on Dawkins website:
“Chopra was generally, rude, belligerent, obfuscatory, and occasionally funny (intentionally and unintentionally). He really doesn’t like Shermer (apparently, for all the back and forth they’ve had over the years, this was the first time they’d actually met) and was constantly trying to interrupt him.
Some of his many gaffs:
1. Incorrectly used “autopoiesis” in place of “abiogenesis.”
2. Quote-mined Einstein (the old “science without religion is lame”)
3. Misused John Searle to support his [strikethrough]argument[/strikethrough] assertion that consciousness must be more than physical (happily, there was a former student of Searle’s in the audience to correct him during the Q & A period).
4. And, of course, there was his deliberate misinterpretation of quantum mechanics (apparently, he’s only heard of the Copenhagen interpretation and doesn’t even seem to understand that. Fortunately, there was a theoretical physicist in the audience to point out this nonsense).”
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Sam managed to put Depak in its place on several occasions (with his very distinguishable verbal wit) and Houston simply didn’t seem to disagree with much of what was said…Really fun to watch!
I’d rather watch reruns of Barney Miller. Chopra and Huston are not only out of their league, they’re out of their element.
This was so hilariously one-sided; I think Harris & Shermer’s greatest achievement was not bursting out laughing at the nonsense coming out of Deepak Chopra, e.g. ‘In the absence of a conscious entity, the moon remains a radically ambiguous and ceaselessly flowing quantum soup.’
Woo indeed.
Jean Houston, on the other hand, seemed to be at another debate entirely – unless she was there to try and make Deepak seem more grounded and on-topic.
Yep, that is a severely misunderstood (“quantum soup”) classical Copenhagen (“conscious entity”).
Already the concept of decoherence, AFAIU pioneered by Schroedinger but researched from the 1970s, brings the overwrought insistence on consciousness as sole wave function “collapse” cause in severe doubt.
And the latest research that not only observes decoherence, but that a system can continuously go in and back out of it as controlled by the experiment, makes on the contrary any role of consciousness problematic. Brain processes are considerably synchronized (for example vision) and time rate coarse.
Decoherence is, like entropy, a process where the environment plays an irreplaceable role. Here as the system with which entanglement of the original system decohere the later.
[It is amusing to note in this context that, contrary to what lay people claim, it is quantum mechanic which is the continuous dynamic and classical mechanics the discrete!
Decoherence shows this by replacing classical definite and discrete start and end states with continuity.
In fact, Lucien Hardy axiomatizes both classical and quantum mechanics analogous to bayesian pre- and post state probabilistic theories and shows that continuity is the fundamental difference:
“Axiom 5 (which requires that there exists continuous reversible transformations between pure states) rules out classical probability theory. If Axiom 5 (or even just the word “continuous” from Axiom 5) is dropped then we obtain classical probability theory instead.”]
I had no idea what Chopra and Houston were saying. It was a bunch of “woo woo” in the words of Shermer.
Watching…definately warm-fuzzies coming from one camp…
Woopra has invented his own semantic nomenclature. Way to go!
I’ve posted elsewhere these two lines spoken by Harris that made my night:
Sam to Deepak: “You are not a physicist, as every single sentence you just said demonstrates!”
or
Sam to Deepak as D raised his voice in anger
“Deepak, repeating it more loudly and relentlessly doesn’t make it true”
This guy is seriously a joke..
Chopra is so transparent. He screws something up and when confronted with it he changes the subject and then tries to score a win with the most ridiculous false equivalence imaginable. But is not the grass green? I win!! Is 2 + 2 not 4? I win again!!
Now quote-mining by woopak. I’d kick him off the debating team.
Deepak was so annoying with his disruptions and belligerence I had to take a break from watching.
Sam Harris was magic, Deepak Chopra was really bullying and arrogant, Michael Shermer was good and Jean Houston seemed to have accidentally missed the way to the poetry reading!
So, I’m going through my second read-through of Richard Dawkins’ “Unweaving the Rainbow”, and I really wish Harris or Shermer could have provided a better rebuttal to the erroneous view that science and scientists are cold and unpoetic. (though it’s difficult to form the argument when the opposing side keeps on interrupting – deepak being the most obnoxious of them all)
Deepak states that it’s more wonderful to just call things mysterious and to state that love is love and nothing less, and that it adds nothing (but instead subtracts) to try to figure out the mechanics behind love and creativity. In other words, it’s better to swim in easy ignorance and vagueness than to take the hard road and try to figure things out, and in his view, take away from the beauty of the mysterious.
“Unweaving the Rainbow” totally rebukes that lazy notion, while at the same time, showing the much deeper poetry of actually trying to understand nature.
And that lady really said nothing of relevance or importance.
You can’t even analyze it or try to flesh out, or heck, even take away any real meaning from the things she said.
I don’t think you can even call them arguments, just superficial poetic-sounding vacuous inconsequential nonsense…
Well
That’s a relief. I thaught it was my bad english, that I couldn’t figure out what the heck she was talking about. Now it’s clear that was she that had no idea of what the heck she was talking about. Or what anybody else was talking about, FTM…
At one point Harris had repeated his “pretending to know things we don’t actually know” line as a criticism of Chopra, who responded that he did not mean to do that. He was not saying that his metaphysical claims were true, only that it is possible that they were true. Harris caught on to that jump in position of his, but unfortunately was not given time to explore it. Chopra contradicted it every other time he spoke, as well, since he made actual assertions about what the nature of the world is (and not just what it “might be”).
I loved the look on the faces of Harris, Shermer, and even the moderator when Jean was speaking. At rare times they were able to extract some kind of actual meaningful statement from it to discuss, but for the most part they were just as befuddled as everyone else, and just ignored her.
Brian
I think my favorite reply to Chopra in the whole thing came from the physicist in the audience, with a befuddled “I know what each of those words mean”, in response to quantum-woo explanation of consciousness.
after watching this the main thing i came away with is that Deepak has no real idea what normal people think that “God is.when the bible was mentioned he consistently said “that is the past!”um,…..no.most people subscribe to the personal “God”the amorphous version he promotes is a minority at best.jean on the other hand seemed to be more of a deist,and nether one advanced their position.
That physicists in the audience is one Leonard Mlodinow, the author of the book I am currently reading, ” The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives.”
He also wrote,” Feynman’s Rainbow,” recalling the time he spent with the late great physicists.
Both are easy to read and very enlightening.
Deepak is never going to be mainstream if he keeps up those lines about the current 99.9999% of religions being relics of the past-I guess he wants to be a new prophet, sorry but I am not buying…
I hope that Chopra was suitably embarrassed with the manner in which Sam Harris and Michael Sherma demolished his ‘woo-woo’.
It was a pleasure to watch.
First, thanks for posting this. I recorded it to see the “debate” and was unable to endure more than a few minutes.
These “debates” seem to follow the current bipolar model; i.e., pitting representatives from the fifth sigma against each other.
It may be good theatre for the true believers, but it does nothing to advance understanding. What a shame, but thanks again for the heads-up.