Let’s start off the week with something light and amusing, and by that I mean the recent lucubrations of Deepak Chopra, always good for a giggle or guffaw. This PuffHo Live video was made last November, so I’m late to the party, but I haven’t seen it posted anywhere else.

Click on the screenshot below to hear Deepak excoriate Richard Dawkins for his “militant atheism” and for calling non-militant atheists “stupid”. Chopra then talks about the things that he considers “real,” goes off on his usual tirade about “consciousness”, and argues that scientists’ concept of reality has been “bamboozled by the superstition of materialism.”

I asked Richard about Chopra’s “militant atheism” quote; he responded that “I don’t recall saying I was a militant atheist although I may have. I’m pretty sure I would never say that anybody who wasn’t a militant atheist was stupid.” Dawkins did add that it was possible he said that and just forgot, but, given Chopra’s history of distorting and misquoting New Atheists, I think the Deepakity is just making this up.  I challenge Chopra to provide the source of Dawkins’s quotes.

But on to the philosophy.  Chopra’s stalking horse is, as he notes in the video, the notion of  “naive realism,” which, as he argues is the incredibly immature notion that there is nothing more to the world than matter and energy. That is, materialism. Chopra, of course, feels that there is a Great Numinousity above it all; that the whole fricking universe is conscious in a way that can’t be described, even in principle, by the laws of physics. Here is a precis from the PuffHo notes:

“He’s a fundamentalist,” [Chopra] told host Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani. “His version of realities is what we call empirical realities. That if you can see it, it’s real. If you can’t see it, it’s not real.”

“But we know, you can’t see your thoughts, feelings, emotions, desires, imagination, creativity, choice — and they’re real,” he continued, making a case for a non-visible God. “Your inner world is real.”

Here Chopra conflates two notions of reality, and I think he does it on purpose. Although I can’t speak for Richard, I’m pretty sure he would agree with me that “thoughts, feelings, emotions” and so on are real in one sense: they are experienced by people and described by them. If someone says his stomach hurts, his feeling is a real feeling—if he’s not lying, that is.

What I would deny are two things: first, that those emotions are not anchored in the physical substance of our brain and thus do not reflect brain activity produced by chemistry and physics. That is, I would deny that emotions and “choices” reflect something beyond and not reducible to the material. Second, I’d deny that the experience of having feelings and emotions itself says something about reality. That is, feeling the presence of God is not conclusive—or even strong—evidence that there is a God.  To arrive at that conclusion one needs empirical evidence that can be supported by multiple observers: the kind of evidence that Chopra abjures. The belief may be real, but not the object of that belief.

Here’s a 7-minute clip from The Young Turks deftly demolishing Deepakity’s inanities. I like the idea that Chopra is promoting “religion for the nonreligious.” One of the convergences between Chopra’s craziness and Sophisticated Theology™ is the notion that consciousness will forever lie beyond the ken of science, and therefore provides some evidence for both nonmaterialism and the numinous.

Finally, here is one of Chopra’s tw**ts from yesterday. It could serve as the illustration of the dictionary definition of “deepity”: