Richard Dawkins Facepalms at Deepak Chopra

[Rick O'Shez]

If you object to his hypothesis's than that is fine by me I am no material scientist , .....each is entitled to their own perspective .

Sure, we all have different ways of looking at the world. My frustration with Chopra is that he tries to pretend that science agrees with him when it most certainly doesn't.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

isnt it amazing how people love to shoot down anyone who has won public aclaim

Not particularly, but more importantly this isn't about shooting down someone who has won acclaim. It's about someone who uses his credentials to mislead people who don't possess the requisite knowledge/background to judge the veracity of his claims and the fact that he exploits the fact that the subject matter he misrepresents is largely inaccessible to most people to rip them off and make money off of lies.

prehaps it would be better to look at the subject in question rather than the personalities involved .

I have. So have many others. Which is why those who understand the subject matter in question know he's a fraud.

 

[ratikala]

namaskaram

Not particularly, but more importantly this isn't about shooting down someone who has won acclaim. It's about someone who uses his credentials to mislead people who don't possess the requisite knowledge/background to judge the veracity of his claims and the fact that he exploits the fact that the subject matter he misrepresents is largely inaccessible to most people to rip them off and make money off of lies.

just because someone is saying something from a prespective that another canot understand that does not make him a liar , ....it may well be that being a Medical Doctor rather than a Swami he is a little less elequent in his explanations , ....equaly that does not make him a liar .

I have. So have many others. Which is why those who understand the subject matter in question know he's a fraud.

the subject in qustion is whether or not Conciousness exists out side of the Brain?
Dawkins seems to posit that consciosness only comes about with the formation of the brain , ....from a western scientific veiw point this may be so as conciousness to the western mind equates to what we know as sence consciousness , ...to understand if idividual atoms have conciousness one has to look at consciousness in a very differnt way .

the eastern mind has a very different understanding regarding consciousness veiwing sence consciousness to be a temporary consciousness of the embodied individual , ....in other words you have two oposits facing one another the eastern mind which naturaly accepts there to be an eternal continium of life and the Western mind which is not accustomed to such veiws , having rejected Christianity Atheists like Dawkins see nothing beyond the self and matter .the western mind seems to have great difficulty with the idea of an all pervasive consciousness .

one may dislike someones style , but to call them a fraud because they do not agree with ones conception of reality is un gentlemanly behavior ....I could call Dawkins a fraud , because to my mind he claims to hold authoritive knowledge which trumps all other knowledge , however many eastern minds would regard this to be due to his limited understanding , then in such an instance I do not think that he whittingly missleads , ...he actualy beleives in his Hypothesis's ... a fraudster deliberately missleads .

 

[ratikala]

namaskaram

Sure, we all have different ways of looking at the world. My frustration with Chopra is that he tries to pretend that science agrees with him when it most certainly doesn't.

I think this is a problem of east meeting west , whos science is Chopra claiming as supporting his veiw ? ....we must remember that the vedic traditions have a very different veiw as to what constitutes a science , and that western Science is only just begining to recognise many things known in the east for countless millenia , ....

 

[Rick O'Shez]

Atheists like Dawkins see nothing beyond the self and matter .the western mind seems to have great difficulty with the idea of an all pervasive consciousness .

That's simply because there is as yet no scientific evidence for it. Such ideas are present in some religious traditions, but then it's a matter of belief rather than fact. I don't have a particular problem with such ideas in a religious context, but trying to pretend that they have some scientific validity is just dishonest, because they don't.

 

[Sunstone]

Everyone knows Chopra pretends to speak authoritatively on "Western science." Besides, the whole notion that science is "Western" is bogus. Religions are Eastern, Western, etc. But science is universally true. Electrons don't lose their negative charge when they reach India.

 

[Rick O'Shez]

I think this is a problem of east meeting west , whos science is Chopra claiming as supporting his veiw ? ....we must remember that the vedic traditions have a very different veiw as to what constitutes a science , and that western Science is only just begining to recognise many things known in the east for countless millenia , ....

Chopra regularly mentions quantum mechanics for example, and implies that this science supports his theory, which it certainly doesn't. As for western science "catching up" with ancient eastern wisdom, could you give some specific examples?

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

just because someone is saying something from a prespective that another canot understand that does not make him a liar

True. Lying does.
I may have trouble understanding many religious mindsets, but I have never written any off, and have devoted a significant amount of time to studying, practicing/experiencing (to the extent I have been able), and communicating with followers of many different practices from Hare Krishna & & Baha'i to Goddess worship and different forms of Wicca.

Were he offering a perspective that he didn't support by reference to both his credentials and to scientific research that were based on lies, I wouldn't have a problem with his "perspective". When he states things about quantum mechanics and physics that are simply false, he is not offering a perspective he is misleading people who lack the ability to evaluate the veracity of his claims. I have entertained many a very (from my perspective) radical, religious cosmology and while I have disagreed so long as the proponents/authors/speaker(s) do not state that physics or scientific research has shown things it hasn't and have been as clear as any such literature about where speculations are being made and what they are based upon, then I don't have a problem with them as I do here.

, ....it may well be that being a Medical Doctor rather than a Swami he is a little less elequent in his explanations , ....equaly that does not make him a liar .

Depending upon the program, there are undgraduate physicists or early graduate physicists who could point out how full of crap his bunk is whenever he tries to support his positions with references to scientific research. He isn't that stupid (one doesn't build the kind of franchise he has and go through medical school by being dumb). So he isn't stupid, and he isn't accurately describing scientific findings, which makes him a liar.

from a western scientific veiw point this may be so as conciousness to the western mind equates to what we know as sence consciousness

The origins of Western intellectual thought began with Plato and Aristotle (more or less; those that came before didn't have that much impact). Neither one held reductionist views and both believed in things like the soul and mind as disparate from the body. "Dualism" almost always refers to the Western formulation of mind-body dualism that Descartes developed. In other words, that the mind/soul/spirit/etc. was distinct from the body reigned supreme in Western though for some ~2,300, and has most certainly not died out.

the eastern mind has a very different understanding regarding consciousness veiwing sence consciousness to be a temporary consciousness of the embodied individual

Much of modern Eastern thought is based upon interactions with and incorporation of Western via colonialism:
"The notion of ‘Hinduism’ is itself a Western-inspired abstraction, which until the nineteenth century bore little or no resemblance to the diversity of Indian religious belief and practice. The term ‘Hindoo’ is the Persian variant of the Sanskrit sindhu , referring to the Indus river, and as such was used by the Persians to denote the people of that region...Although indigenous use of the term by Hindus themselves can be found as early as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, its usage was derivative of Persian Muslim influences and did not represent anything more than a distinction between ‘indigenous’ or ‘native’ and foreign (mleccha). For instance, whe Belgian Thierry Verhelst interviewed an Indian intellectual from Tamil Nadu he recorded the following interchange:

Q: Are you a Hindu?
A: No, I grew critical of it because of casteism ... Actually, you should not ask people
if they are Hindu. This does not mean much. If you ask them what their religion is, they
will say, ‘I belong to this caste.’​

Indeed, it is clear that the term ‘Hindu’, even when used by the indigenous Indian, did not have the specifically religious connotations that it subsequently developed under Orientalist influences until the nineteenth century. Thus eighteenth-century references to ‘Hindoo’ Christians or ‘Hindoo’ Muslims were not uncommon"
King, R. (1999). Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial Theory, India and the 'Mystic East'. Routledge.
See also e.g.,:

McMahan, D. L. (2008). The making of Buddhist modernism. Oxford University Press.
Pennington, B. K. (2005). Was Hinduism Invented?: Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion. Oxford University Press.
Turner, A. M. (2009). Buddhism, Colonialism, and the Boundaries of Religion: Theravada Buddhism in Burma, 1885--1920. (Doctoral Dissertation; University of Chicago)
Harrison, P. (2002). 'Religion'and the Religions in the English Enlightenment. Cambridge University Press.
De Michelis, E. (2005). A history of modern yoga: Patanjali and Western esotericism. Continuum.
Bloch, E., Keppens, M., & Hegde, R. (Eds.). (2009). Rethinking religion in India: the colonial construction of Hinduism. Routledge.
Numark, M. W. (2006). Translating Religion: British missionaries and the politics of religious knowledge in colonial India and Bombay (Doctoral Dissertation; UCLA)

, ....in other words you have two oposits facing onanother the eastern mind which naturaly accepts there to be an eternal continium of life and the Western mind which is not accustomed to such veiws

Regardless of how thorough Western influence was in the creation of modern Eastern traditions, I'm not concerned with his account of consciousness per se (in fact, there are many Western views of consciousness I find equally poorly founded). Had he presented his view and his rationale for it (as many philsophers, theologians, mystics, and more do) I wouldn't have a problem. It is the deliberate distortion of scientific research that he abuses and the fact that such abuses are used to mislead others that I find abhorrent.

one may dislike someones style , but to call them a fraud because they do not agree with ones conception of reality is un gentlemanly behavior

That's true. And were I doing that, it would be different. I'm calling him a fraud because he uses scientific notions, misrepresents them and distorts them, and packages up these distortions to sell to whomever he can by exploiting the largely inaccessible actual nature of the scientific topics he refers to.

 

[Bill Van Fleet]

That's simply not true, Dawkins had it spot on, something about how individual atoms and molecules do not have consciousness until they assemble into a brain.

So some well-recognized entities in the universe assemble (come closer together in space/time) and (poof!) a new entity suddenly appears in the universe, an entity that cannot be detected by any of our scientific instruments and that cannot be located within space/time, and that does not behave according to the laws of the universe (has "free will"), and causes things to happen, at least here on planet Earth. Woo!
MIND-BODY PROBLEM: Introduction

 

[Sapiens]

So some well-recognized entities in the universe assemble (come closer together in space/time) and (poof!) a new entity suddenly appears in the universe, an entity that cannot be detected by any of our scientific instruments and that cannot be located within space/time, and that does not behave according to the laws of the universe (has "free will"), and causes things to happen, at least here on planet Earth. Woo!
MIND-BODY PROBLEM: Introduction

There's that classic argument from ignorance ... again!

 

[Bill Van Fleet]

Freed from the classic argument from ignorance error, I am now free to believe anything. No matter how strange it may seem to me, that is simply because I do not yet understand due to ignorance.

 

[outhouse]

So some well-recognized entities in the universe assemble (come closer together in space/time) and (poof!) a new entity suddenly appears in the universe, an entity that cannot be detected by any of our scientific instruments and that cannot be located within space/time, and that does not behave according to the laws of the universe (has "free will"), and causes things to happen, at least here on planet Earth. Woo!

Can you expand on this?, I cannot understand what you are trying to say here.

Can you describe new entity?

 

[Monk Of Reason]

So some well-recognized entities in the universe assemble (come closer together in space/time) and (poof!) a new entity suddenly appears in the universe, an entity that cannot be detected by any of our scientific instruments and that cannot be located within space/time, and that does not behave according to the laws of the universe (has "free will"), and causes things to happen, at least here on planet Earth. Woo!
MIND-BODY PROBLEM: Introduction

No new entities are created. To help understand how atoms cannot have consciousness and yet a brain made of atoms does imagine which brick in a factory building can make a car?

 

[Bill Van Fleet]

Can you expand on this?, I cannot understand what you are trying to say here.

Can you describe new entity?

The new entity, as I understand it to be, is "consciousness." A specific collection of this substance is a "mind." This "mind," having now appeared in our universe, has what is called "free will." It is invisible and opaque, but it reports to others what is going on inside of it, and it makes some of the atoms and molecules in our universe move around. At least that is what I am told.

 

[Bill Van Fleet]

No new entities are created. To help understand how atoms cannot have consciousness and yet a brain made of atoms does imagine which brick in a factory building can make a car?

I have yet to see a building make a car. But also, both a building and a car consist of atoms and molecules arranged in space/time. How is that related to consciousness?

 

[Monk Of Reason]

I have yet to see a building make a car.

Many run fully automated or with minimal human interaction. Or if you don't like this example which atom in a bridge holds it up? Which ant in the colony made the whole of the ant hill? Which relay in a computer sent your message?

 

[Bill Van Fleet]

Many run fully automated or with minimal human interaction. Or if you don't like this example which atom in a bridge holds it up? Which ant in the colony made the whole of the ant hill? Which relay in a computer sent your message?

Can we clarify that there is a difference between a label and the thing being labeled, and that a label can exist for a thing that does not exist? Note that there is no question that "God" exists, but there is a question as to whether God exists.

 

[Bill Van Fleet]

Mary and John exist. That is two entities. Mary and John get married. They are now a married couple. So now we have three entities existing, right? There is Mary, there is John, and there is a married couple, right?

 

[Monk Of Reason]

Can we clarify that there is a difference between a label and the thing being labeled, and that a label can exist for a thing that does not exist? Note that there is no question that "God" exists, but there is a question as to whether God exists.

A label can be put on things that do not "exist" but it doesn't fundamentally change the question of gods existence.

 

[outhouse]

The new entity, as I understand it to be, is "consciousness."

This is something that evolved, required to survive. It started out very basic, and increased with brain size.

and it makes some of the atoms and molecules in our universe move around

Not good enough. To vague and misleading.

The conscious mind, free will, is a product within the brain, and factually does not exist outside the mind at this time.