Someone’s gonna have to explain these to me:
On a jealous note, Sam’s new book, Waking Up, is doing really well. Note, too, that Randall Munroe’s book (he’s the creator of xkcd), is #3 on the Times list, which is great.
And from the New York Times:
Another tw**t at Deepakity
September 23, 2014 • 9:31 am
“Waking Up” isn’t as disruptive as his other books; nothing really interesting in it if you’ve read some other stuff on meditation. I do appreciate the removal of all the woo that you find in almost any other book on meditation.
Is anybody else wondering why a book about a collegiate rowing crew is selling so well?
There must be many oar fans in the world. 😉
That hit me right in the skull!
Different strokes for different folks.
FINALLY: a story of INTEREST from the 1936 Berlin Games! So little else to talk about there.
Right. That’s exactly what I thought of too.
The story – Boys in the Boat – is gripping from beginning to the very end. It has human drama, history (of the era as well as history of rowing and boat-building), almost poetic writings of legendary rowing shell-builder (George Pocock from England). Even though the full title gives away the ending, the writer does a fantastic job of keeping you on the edge of your seat – at least was the case for me.
So it’s just a well spun thread then. I’ll have to give it a read then. I do like sports books on the odd occasion that they’re actually well done. Anyway, thanks for the recco.
Thanks! I would have had no idea how interesting that book is if you hadn’t written this. I think I’ll get it for my Dad for Christmas.
The draw is really the awesomeness that is the University of Washington. OK, so I’m a bit biased.
I need you guys to be good at football again. I’m just not that into UCLA and Oregon so I’ve got nothing good to watch for the 1030 games on Saturday night anymore. So get on it. I like U-dub, you all have a nice stadium and snazzy uniforms, not like those hideous Ducks.
I have not read Brown’s book, but plan too. As a member of an community rowing organization in Poughkeepsie, NY, I saw Brown speak about his book, and those who have already read it say it is wonderful. Brown himself was never a rower but appears to have exactly captured the spirit of competitive rowing.
Randall should do a strip on existential qualia. I can set it up for him: a shoe box filled with nothing but a neutral hydrogen atom that computes all states of Deepak’s mind simultaneously.
Get ‘What If’ if you have not already.
I think Sam is humorously answering a word salad with a play on words. Either that, or he’s using subliminal advertising to promote a New Delhi-based “fusion” band. (more like “world music”; not “fusion”, by my standards)
I think he’s asking the deepster to put his “self” on hold for a while and maybe re-read some of the philosophies he’s trying to plagiarize.
+1
Makes sense. Kind-of like: “put some consciousness [Advaita] into your Hindu philosophy [more general meaning of Vedanta]” (?)
Oh… and by the way, here’s some India-themed fusion. for realz.
Groooooovy. 🙂
Vedanta is not a general term for Indian Philosophies, but for a specific set of philosophies, which mark the end of the Vedas. The Upanishads, Aranyakas and other commentaries etc are part of the Vedanta. Advaita Vedanta is a specific subset of the Vedanta. Besides Advaita (non-dual) Vishistadvaita (Special non-duality) and Dvaita (duality). The duality and non-duality has to do with the individual with respect to the Brahman, which is specifically not a deity.
Thank you, Subramanya. I obviously know only what I read in the wiki, always a dangerous proposition. The use of the word I was referring to, though, was in the context of the 19th century reform, where much was packaged for western universalist types. I have no clue if the attribution / interpretation in the paragraph I linked to has anything to do with reality though.
Which is extra appropriate, as Chopra fuses pretty-sounding nonsense with chicanery in a way that fuses money with his bank account quite successfully!
From Advaita’s ReverbNation page: “Sounds Like: Pink Floyd, Massive Attack, Zero 7, Porcupine Tree, Seal”
That’s pretty eclectic! Now on my iTunes wishlist.
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How does the Trilok Gurtu (above) suit you? (I tend to get restless and uncomfortable when the time signatures and tonal motifs get too easy for me to wrap my head around – but with most others the opposite is true)
Oh, I’d happily add that to my playlists. I see he’s collaborated with John McLaughlin, whose Mahavishnu Orchestra stuff I like.
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Yep. The “Royal Festival Hall” album would be my fave with John McLaughlin. Has some of the most polyrhythmic drum soloing I’ve ever heard in my life. (beginning of said solo is around 20:45 — with the entire thing in strict time – I think a 10-count meter). The album’s drum solo was on a different set (perhaps different night); in the video, it ends around 24:46 – but on the album, there’s another 5-8 minutes of the most mind-blowing subdivisions of that meter, while John and Kai concentrate on keeping it together. John would later remark that Trilok could get more music out of a bucket of water than most percussionists could get out of an entire kit.
He’s also worked with Joe Zawinul (right after Weather Report dissolved, unfortunately, so the overall content is not quite as amazing as could be, IMHO). Some work with Scott Henderson came out of that…
I first heard of him though, when Ralph Towner & the “Oregon” crew promoted Trilok to replace Collin Walcott (student of Ravi Shankar, among others), who had recommended Trilok as his understudy should anything bad happen. Well, the bad took Collin’s life in an auto accident while on tour in East Germany in late 1984, but by 1987, the band had regrouped, shrugged off the horror – and released this highly recommended gem. Not my fave from the album, but the whole album (minus perhaps one track) is great. The above was the only cut I could find online Mastered by Bob Ludwig at Masterdisc (about when my sis-in-law started working with him), the vinyl is outstanding. http://www.discogs.com/Oregon-45th-Parallel/release/2033748
“Brown eyes turn to green, the monster within whispers, I wish I was him!!
Taken from fictionpress.com Jealousy. Slightly adapted to suit Deepak.
Whats a qualia? We have qualises in india. very popular as people carriers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Kijang
One is a shiny, hollow vessel an Indian uses to take care of his family and make his living … and the other is a Toyota minivan.
Qualia:
A weaselword designed to mean the ineffable stuff of consciousness that can never be explained by reductionistic mechanistic means.
At least that is what I gather from my minor readings in the philosophy and science of consciousness, people usually take up the “what is it like to see a colour or be something” question when talking about qualia, but usually the moment you get busy trying to work it out, they say: “No, that is not the magical element of my experience, so you are not explaining it.”
Shifting the goalposts comes to mind.
Seems to be just a fancy word for ‘experience of’ or ‘experience.’ Color as irreducible qualia – sounds deep, but it really just means that the explanation for how you see color is not the experience of seeing it.
Right. Qualia are simply subjective phenomena. The redness of red or the experience of hearing a sound are qualia, whereas the interaction of light with your eye’s retina or the interaction of sound waves with your ear drum are the objective phenomena which correlate with and give rise to these qualia. Nothing supernatural or woo-ey about it. Which is not to say that there is no mystery remaining.
+1. There is a mystery but it’s not wooish. We’ll figure it out when we figure out the hard problem of consciousness.
Unbroken is still up there, amazing.
Sam’s new Waking Up is excellent and beautifully written (as usual). I’m halfway through the book.
I think Sam was just telling Chopra to “Get Real”
That Deepak tweet mirrors an argument I got into on FaceBook this past weekend where some guy told me that science would never solve the hard problem of consciousness because science only uses the 5 senses and the quantum world was a gateway to spirituality.
Ugh. So much fail.
I explained that we know a lot about consciousness and that very smart people are working on it (I’m just now reading Christof Koch’s book Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist; I like that he mentions The Matrix and Rammstein), just because we don’t have the answer that doesn’t mean “spirits dun it”, the quantum world is explained well with quantum mechanics – and even makes predictions & if science deals only with the 5 senses (ignoring that we wouldn’t know about the quantum world if that were the case), then how did we develop the Germ Theory of disease or broadcast signals over the invisible RF spectrum?
This person told me I should remain “agnostic” about consciousness so I asked him where he thought we’d be if we “remained agnostic” about what caused diseases (holding on to sprits dun it).
It’s Deepak’s fault that I end up taking time out of my day to fight people on FaceBook.
The Churchlands (founders of neurophilosophy) have pointed out that changing the metaphysics from materialism to anything else *does not solve the problem eitehr*. Suppose some form of dualism is true. Then the idea is that your qualia are somehow “mind stuff”. But how? Why are they connected to us in the right way? Can’t one imagine a zombie ghost and run the “knowlege argument all over again?” I dare say one can.
An objective idealist/panpsychist like Chalmers has similar problems.
Only the *subjective* idealist has no problems from qualia, perhaps, but then again, SI is ridiculous on other grounds.
When people stop using their medical training and start peddling woo, they should renounce their medical licenses (or have them revoked), just to end the confusion for lay people.
as usual, Deepfried leaves me speechless
I may be breaking one of the Roolz here as this is a tad off topic but does anyone know exactly why Sam Harris cancelled his book talk Tuesday night at the Westminster Town Hall Forum in Minneapolis? These Town Hall Forum presentation are usually broadcast live on NPR. The THF website says that it was cancelled due to “threats to his personal safety by religious extremists.” I had really been looking forward to hearing him speak.
I suspect that the reason given is the real reason. Sam has security at every talk, and for good reason. He’s constantly threatened by members of The Religion of Peace. It can’t be illness as he’s not ill.
It makes me crazy that Sam needs security! What a ridiculous world we live in. 🙁
Ohhh…I guess that’s why there were two bodyguards at the book signing in NYC. I thought they were just general security guys.
“just general security guys”
That’s what ninja’s often want you to think.
“Sam Harris’s Ninja” has got to look good on a resume!
We live in Minneapolis and planned to go, were very disappointed that it was cancelled, but in a community with this many radical Muslims, it is not a huge shock that he should be threatened here, especially. I assume it was more for our safety than for his; if he wanted to be safe, he could just stop saying Things That Are True.