Ah, the WooMeister keeps on giving LOLs! I won’t reproduce his many new tweets saying, “Read my new piece on radical skepticism” (he’s now published PART 4 in two different places: PuffHo and SFGate), but here are three choice tw**ts for the holiday.
First, the Gang of Five (Aurora Carlson appears to be a fan of Deepak):
I suppose that “pseundoskeptic” could be a clever neologism rather than a misspelling, but Chopra frequently makes typos when he tw**ts—and he’s not that clever.
Here’s a good one:
And I love this one:
I guess I’m in the first class since I’m now seen as a “pseundoskeptic.” But if consciousness is not an emergent property of evolution—or something that was an adaptive product of selection—what else could it be? Cyanobacteria don’t have it; later-appearing creatures do. Therefore it evolved.
Ladies and gentleman, we have our Thanksgiving turkey.
I see Michael Shermer has been added to Deepak’s kill zone. I guess he did see the latest Con Academy video then. 🙂
And why “gang bangers”? Someone give Deepak a thesaurus and dictionary set.
>
Radical skepticstheologians see evolution as emergent activity of consciousness<“…but Chopra frequently makes typos when he tw**ts”
True say. In that second one he wrote “‘Woo’ is the bark of the intellectually challenged”. A very astute observation. But then he went and accidentally typed a load of incoherent babble afterwards.
Clearly, he meant to type, “‘Woo’ is the Mark of the intellectually challenged,” but thumb-fingered it on his phone. The two letters are almost next to each other, after all.
Paging Dr. Freud. Woof!
b&
Ha ha – I actually started to try to figure out where he was going with the tree metaphor and just chalked it up to weird, incoherent Chopra speak.
I figured he was referring to those of us who call it “woo” as dogs.
Wait — he’s trying to suggest that Ceiling Cat is a d*g!? Dem’s fightin’ words!
b&
He meant unpseudoskeptic?
nonunatheistic theologians?
😀
Dude has a serious case of SIWOTI
Someone Is always Wrong On The Internet whenever he’s online.
You can watch the counter increment every time he goes online and decrement every time he leaves.
Where can I get that app?
How the hell can consciousness precede evolution, which is a product of evolution? I am totally confused.
Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2013 22:06:46 +0000 To: t_aid@hotmail.com
Your confusion arises in that you are stuck in the false belief of a reductionist universe where the macroscopic is necessarily ordered by time: cause and effect. If you could only transcend your puny understanding, you would see that past, present and future are all a part of a timeless reality that supercedes such arbitrary divisions. Relax… you are getting sleepy… let your mind lead it where it wants to go… try not to concern yourself with such difficult things as thinking… logic… it is all irrelevant… when you are finished reading this, you will want to navigate yourself to the self-help section of the nearest bookshop and buy something about cosmic consciousness… …or “Slaughterhouse Five”. OK now… WAKE UP!!!
WAKE UP and have a Pepsi.
It is only bad for your teeth if you think it is bad for your teeth. If you think your Pepsi is a nice tall glass of chilled organic broccoli juice, then who is to say it is not, in fact, a nice tall glass of chilled broccoli juice? This doesn’t mean it might not be good to put a drop of Beano in there, just in case.
But if you add in a little of Chopak brand Magic Agawasawi Juice ™ in that Pepsi, then at give you the benifits of Broccli Juice, while giving you the “wind of a lion”
All that for the low, low price of $49.99 an 9 oz bottle. Call today!
I heard that you can substitute Fugawi juice to achieve the same effect… if only I could find it… I just don’t know where it is… where the…
In the beginning is the WORD! Do you think word does not need consciousness?
😀
Seriously, consciousness definitely an emergent property of highly complex (neuro-)network inside things like our brain (or other sufficiently evolved mammals, or computer systems).
We do not yet know much of these emergent-thingies yet, so obviously snake-oil salesmen will still be around for some time .. money can still be made here …
Sir: don’t waste your time hunting this intellectual flea.
But the criticism is very needed. If Deepak wants to act like a scientist he shall be criticised like a scientists. When he responds like a child he shall be treated like a child. And it is quite funny.
I think we shouldn’t hold children in such low esteem. I think I was capable of more reasoned debate when I was one.
Children (most of them) can at least learn. I am not sure Chopra the charlatan can.
How bothered are you by Deepak? Lately it seems like very.
…
Damn it. I didn’t mean to post my three dots in this location. I wrote a reply to Andres explaining why Chopra & all other bullshit hustlers need to be ‘bothered’ not just ‘lately’, but constantly, incessantly, ceaselessly. The reply turned into a tirade. Condensed: dishonesty not countered is dishonesty ennabled.
I agree. Deepak and his ilk need to be challenged on their misleading BS ideas.
Me two. We live in a very troubled world where nonsense thrives. At this point in history, nearly all nonsense is dangerous nonsense. Shine a light on that cock-a-roach, is my motto.
I agree that “dishonesty not countered is dishonesty enabled” 100%, but from my vantage point, this little bickering between Coyne and Chopra seems adolescent. It isn’t respectable scientific or philosophic discourse, is it? I expect schoolyard blustering from Chopra, but more from Coyne.
Just a few days ago, Coyne was all like “I don’t even check my twitter!”
Chopra is the sleaziest, as he has a scientific background and is making money from gullible people.
People kill for the kind of money he’s getting …
People kill for 5 bucks and half a pack of cigarettes…
Deepak is truly an enlightened fellow whose mind is free of the fetters of common sense, reason, and all other self-“suppression of curiosity.” Unfortunately the result is a babbling lunatic. The sad thing is he got rich in the process.
& whose in the hell’s pic is that beside his toots? It surely doesn’t look like him.
Confucius say man who put cart before horse go nowhere. How can a product of the evolved brain exist before the brain itself?
I’ve a question (for anyone willing to respond).
If human free will isn’t free, and so we’re merely products of our biology and general environments (something I do believe), mightn’t it be true to say that consciousness and evolution are one in the same thing? Considering that we ourselves lack a free agent, nothing is (not even human productions) really intelligently designed, just designed. It’s not our will, it’s the universes (non) will. But we could call it will, because will is just a word we made up to understand change. A human projection, shined against the fabric of the universe.
Evolution just happened to “design” humans, and humans in turn just happened to design a whole heap of other shit. Ultimately, we’re all just turds of the universe, taking different sizes and different shapes.
So, in a way, everything is both and at once, intelligently designed, but not intelligently designed. It’s just that, we can experience ourselves… we are the universe experiencing itself, its own (non) design, so we are capable of understanding the these different patterns. (Please note – I’m high. I’m also an atheist – this post just got me thinking. I’d stop thinking, and writing… but, you know, I’m at the mercy of the universe.)
As Carl Sagan said: “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” But the cosmos did not know what it was doing.
The ambiguity is in “way”. Often “ways” are deliberate, thought out. As in the way to another city for a vacation might be which road to take. In that understanding, Sagan’s dictum is subjectivistic. On the other hand, “way” can just mean a mechanism by which something occurs, in which case Sagan’s statement is objectivistic.
I might add also that it takes some degree of intellectual advance to distinguish the two poles of meaning: this is why “dao” in classical Chinese philosophy is so confusing.
I was trying to figure out for a long time why I found Sagan’s statement true and useful, whereas the similar statement by the Minbari on Babylon 5 (and remarks by a departed friend of mine) rubbed me the wrong way. I finally figured out why; the above is the result.
“we are the universe experiencing itself” – this sort of idea has a tinge of the wacky – I recall reading von Daniken when about 13 & he said something along those lines, & he is a great peddler of woo. I don’t wish to appear rude but is really such a bland statement, & it imbues the universe with a sort of deistic element that we really do not need.
My advice, experience the universe sober & drug-free to really taste its indifference!
Remember that Sagan was as much a poet as an astronomer. If you think of that phrase as a reverse deepity, its profundity becomes apparent.
For, of course, there is no omnipresent overmind, no cosmic consciousness. The only consciousness there is can only be found in the minds that emerge from the brains of organisms such as us.
But…we are inextricable from the Cosmos. We are as much a part of the Cosmos as the dirt underneath our feet, the air we breathe, and the stars far overhead. And we are most special, for of all the great vastness of the Cosmos, it is only the insignificant specks such as us that are capable of even beginning to approach an attempt at understanding it all, of creating simplified mental maps of the whole. We are, each of us, concentrated miniature encapsulations of the entire Universe as a whole. Greatly simplified, much distorted, and quite incomplete, yes — but the semblance is unmistrakable.
Religions have long searched for meaning in Life, the Universe, and Everything. The great tragedy of religion is that believers are always looking outward for such meaning, and missing the fact that the only meaning that there ever could possibly be can only be found within themselves. It is, quite literally, consciousness that gives meaning to the universe, and it was the unconscious universe that, through a process that took a baker’s dozen billion years to unfold, eventually resulted in that — us — which can give itself meaning.
Or, as Sagan so eloquently phrased it, “We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself.”
Cheers,
b&
+42
Fantastic and undeniable.
A pretty lucid perspective if you ask me. It’s a bit frustrating that some people here, in the guise of “reason,” are quick to condemn this sort of thinking. They have no poetry. Whether they like it or not, biological organisms are examples of the Universe sensing itself.
And here I was (silly ol’ me) thinking the enemy of reason was people protesting at abortion clinics, stoning gays, treating women as second class citizens, and teaching kids that they’ll go to this place called hell if they make the sex before the marriage – all because some book, apparently written by a cosmic overlord, told them they should.
I must be way off! Who’d have thought?
By the way, wink wink nudge nudge for your *recreational* use. Lots of insights into consciousness there; epiphanic abstract thinking and such. Sober can get you there too, no doubt, but nothing wrong with a little head change here and there.
Poetry is fine. Deepak is no poet – or at least does not claim to be. He claims to be a scientist and desperately flaunts his science-y credentials the moment it is suggested that he is anything else.
Wasn’t talking about Chopra. Don’t agree with Chopra. Don’t care at all for Chopra. And yes to what you said.
Deepak is such a dope! I told him so in a tweet just now. You can find me under @lyonsnyc (I’d reproduce the tweet here but I’m unable to drag and drop anything to this reply window.)
Even when I was a woo for a decade or two I couldn’t stand Chopra. It’s beyond me why anyone would think this greedy, plodding literalist is somehow spiritual or mystical. He’s a crass reductionist materialist who just happens to believe that there are additional spiritual forces that have yet to be discovered by scientists but by some miracle he knows what they are.
Anyway, it’s kind of funny, and a bit disgusting, to see him publicly lose it and turn nasty.
Thanks for the ode to the load of old Chopra cobblers.
Photon shmoton
If it could think
Chopra would drive it to drink
Thank you but I better stop this.
All kinds of addenda are coming
to mind. Obsessing over Chopra
is probably not good for ones mind.
Anybody want a peanut?
b&
My holiday shout out to the meisters of woo
http://pictoraltheology.blogspot.com/2013/11/dr-woo-and-mj-theory.html
Hope you all have a great holiday and weekend.
Nice & I was going to suggest that you draw these “gangbangers” 😀
ouch! that’s too true
Just as a matter of interest, Mr In Between, but did you just go to the Campi Flegrei and have a bit of a coughing fit?
(Ref : Pliny the Elder’s death after helping in the evacuation of the area around the erupting Vesuvius ; the Campi Flegrei are a field of fumaroles sitting on the other side of Napoli from Vesuvius and saying really, really unhealthy things about what will happen to Napoli one day.)
The gravy of wootification is an emergent activity of the quantum casserole.
Very good.
Ladies and gentleman, we have our Thanksgiving turkey.
Great, I was hoping that Thanksgiving turkey would somehow be more appealing than that.
Don’t Americans serve their turkey with an apple to stop up his mouth? Or am I thinking of some other culinary delight?
Bluster. What a nasty man.
Woooo Wooooooo !
All aboard Chopra’s Unfalsifiability Train !
Chopra is The Little Guru That Could !
I think I can make it up !
I think I can make it up !
I can make it up !
I can make it up !
I can sell it !
I can sell it !
To the bank !
To the bank !
Woooo Woooooooo !
Deepak Chopra has rattled too many people, and you need to know why it is all a waste of time. He is an Indian mystic and Guru, from a three thousand year history of mystics and gurus on the Indian sub-continent. I know that it is baffling to Americans, because you really have to go there to understand the way in which it works.
To help you understand the true power and cunning of Indian gurus and mystics, I’ll tell you this story…
Up at Oxford in the sixties, when too many of the students were rich and thick, and from private schools, I met a young man who had been to India in his gap year. He told me an amazing story of meeting a mystic in a market who seemed to know his name and all about him and his life, all in impressive detail, and so subsequently became his guide and tutor, for a fee. I asked my friend many questions about his visit; who he had met and what he had done. And then I said…
“Would it surprise you that the ‘student’ you had met on the train while on the way, and with whom you had chatted about your life, was a cousin of the owner of the guest house that he had recommended to you, and at which you had subsequently stayed?”
“Would it surprise you that the cleaner of your room was another cousin, who ‘borrowed” your diary while you were out, and shared its contents with another man – the mystic?”
“ Would you be surprised to learn that the ‘mystic” was another cousin, who had followed you from your guest-house to a distant market, where he addressed you by name in the street, knowing full-well your life story and the contents of your diary?”
The Indian sub-continent of about 1.5 billion works by informal information distribution as described above, where cousins pass important information among themselves, for a small fee. For them, information is a means to a living, and not in any way a search for the reality behind everyday things. It could be said to be ‘another way of (not) knowing! You make money by getting strangers involved in your mystic persona.
The mystic, Chopra, in the West is doing the same high-level smoozing (networking) to build a network of gullible supporters, which seems to include Oprah. That is his power-base.
…………………………………………………..
Remember those gurus of the sixties and seventies who had their gullible followers buy them luxury cars? It is the same thing. Secret information revealed in dazzling ways to those who do not understand ‘free-association’. A tour-de-force of frottage, like a garbage dump rearranged and dressed to resemble a holiday resort.
Addressing Chopra’s ‘philosophy’; it is the old Indian rubbish recycled to the West where it is largely unknown. And it is comprised of two parts… the irrelevant buzz-words, like ‘quantum’ and ‘consciousness’, where those words are expanded into fresh meanings of a high level of generality. You must all know the Abstraction Scales by now. It is the feature of metaphysics and of all the Humanities, and all of astrology, that the more abstract the statements, the less truth or falsehood content. Say things of a high level of abstraction and it is impossible to detect any truth/falsehood content. Simples! No good trying to analyse Chopra; it is cleverly designed garbage through and through. Best regard it is a phenomenon, like a circus, or a dance, or pizza dropped face-down, leaving an imprint on your white carpet. All display and no content.
The important feature of Chopra is the use of seemingly random words excised from science books; words like ‘quantum’. This is a long tradition in Indian commerce and philosophy. Traveling in India in the eighties I spotted many cafes and market-stalls, labelled such things as ‘Disco Café’ (nothing to do with discos). ‘Sputnik Superstore’ (nothing to do with…) And ‘Computer Restaurant’ (nothing to do with…)
I suppose that now you may find ‘Higgs Bosun (sic) Tea-Room’, and Mars Curiosity Rover Sandal Shop’. It is a long tradition.
Finally, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan have a long tradition of mystics and holy-men, some of whom grow long nails or hair or stand on one leg for years. Look them up. They do not confine the delusional as we do. They are everywhere, making a living as pedlars of cures and treatments. For the equivalent in the West, do go visit your local Mental Health Facility and chat with schizophrenics and those with Manic Depressive bipolar disorders, as I have done. After an hour you will have a good grasp of paranoia and free-association, which are the operating mechanisms of mystics and gurus.
The only caveat is that if we engage with Chopra, it looks good on his CV but not on ours. Think… pizza imprint on the carpet!
I always think of his take on science as a form of Cargo Cult…
“Traveling in India in the eighties I spotted many cafes and market-stalls, labelled such things as ‘Disco Café’ (nothing to do with discos). ‘Sputnik Superstore’ (nothing to do with…) And ‘Computer Restaurant’ (nothing to do with…)I suppose that now you may find ‘Higgs Bosun (sic) Tea-Room’, and Mars Curiosity Rover Sandal Shop’”
You can travel America (and likely any country in the world, but I live in the US and can reference it with absolute certainty) and find curiously named places of business.
“Finally, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan have a long tradition of mystics and holy-men, some of whom grow long nails or hair or stand on one leg for years. Look them up. They do not confine the delusional as we do. They are everywhere, making a living as pedlars of cures and treatments. For the equivalent in the West, do go visit your local Mental Health Facility and chat with schizophrenics and those with Manic Depressive bipolar disorders, as I have done.”
You don’t need to visit a mental health clinic to find these “mystics and holy-men” in the West. Try your local church. Matter of fact, I see hucksters peddling snake oil on infomercials nightly. They may be dressed in different clothes, and have a stronger commitment to hygiene, but they are the same animal.
I’m no cultural relativist, but the level of condescension in your post is vulgar and inhumane. You sir, are an asshole.
We don’t call each other names here, and you could have made your point without using the last sentence. Apologize or I will ban you.
Chopra is a woo pseudomeister.
And a wee tiresome [twitter-some?] after a short while. If he had taken a minute off his fact-free life and googled “skeptics”, he would note that the large organizations are based on accepting basic science.
Those not so organized may be “pseudoskeptics”. Say how Chopra himself is skeptic, but without evidence, about biology and the biological foundation of neurological behavior such as consciousness.
Fascinating Aida have nailed it in song (sorry I cannot find a legal link to the audio):
My chakras are unblocking;
I feel the flow of chi;
Spiritual enlightenment is what I seek,
Plus environmental harmony.
I hear my tinkling wind-chimes
As I drink my ginseng tea;
I work night and day in a vaguely Taoist way,
On the crucial well-being of me.
For we’re pick-and-mix Orientalists,
Bit of Shinto and a dash of Tai-Chi;
Sprinkle on some Brahma
Add a pinch of good karma
And the one true religion is me.
Well, we flirted with becoming Quakers,
Till we realised they don’t drink;
And much as we admire the Jains,
We don’t want to ditch the mink.
And who’d want to be a Catholic;
That’s for Irish and Belgian peasants
Nor a Jehovah’s Witness –
They get no Christmas presents.
We’re à la carte now-and-Zen girls,
We pray beneath a willow tree;
We spend our summers
Banging with the Kidi drummers,
‘Cause the one true religion is me.
No more the Sunday Times crossword,
We prefer to compose haikus;
And when friends come round for dinner
We make them remove their shoes.
We went up a Himalaya,
Just Brian Blessed and us.
We didn’t stop and we got to the top,
But he came down in a truss.
That’s ’cause we’re lucky-dip lotus blossoms,
Big fans of Bruce Lee;
Our teeth can flex
‘Cause of tantric sex,
And the one true religion is me.
We’re studying the Kabbalah,
‘Cause Madonna says it’s cool;
And our pal Koo Stark comes to coo at the Koi carp
In our swimming pool;
We do astral levitation with
George Harrison’s pet fakir;
We’re cleansed in toto and wearing Yamamoto,
So we’re ready for Richard Gere.
Oh yes, we’re makey-uppy Eastern dabblers,
With an Ayurvedic potpourri;
Take a bit of Feng Shui
And a bowl of chop suey
And the one true religion is me.
We’re occidental tourists
In a yin and yang mystery;
Sing ho for origami
‘Cause we’re barmy for a swami
And the one true religion is me.
We’re smorgasbord philosophers
Of sushi and kedgeree;
As Vikram Seth saith
“Eatht ith betht”
And the one true religion is me.
– Fascinating Aida, “One True Religion”
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