Deepak Chopra happily claims “King of Woo” title
From Chopra’s column in the execrable Huffington Post*:
I realized that I would much rather expound woo woo than the kind of bad science Shermer** stands behind. He has made skepticism his personal brand, more or less, sitting by the side of the road to denigrate “those people who believe in spirituality, ghosts, and so on,” as he says on a YouTube video. No matter that this broad brush would tar not just the Pope, Mahatma Gandhi, St. Teresa of Avila, Buddha, and countless scientists who happen to recognize a reality that transcends space and time. All are deemed irrational by the skeptical crowd. You would think that skeptics as a class have made significant contributions to science or the quality of life in their own right. Uh oh. No, they haven’t. Their principal job is to reinforce the great ideas of yesterday while suppressing the great ideas of tomorrow.
Chopra is a quack, a hack, and a giant turd floating in the punchbowl of human knowledge. Nearly every improvement in the human condition over the last few millenia has been due to the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the natural world. Supernatural thinking has given us nothing of value, and in many cases causes outright harm– it is at best useless, at worst dangerously insane.
We have reached the state where Shermer’s tired, out-of-date, utterly mediocre science is far in arrears of the best, most open scientific thinkers — actually, we reached that point 60 years ago when eminent physicists like Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrodinger applied quantum theory to deep spiritual questions. The arrogance of skeptics is both high-handed and rusty. It is high-handed because they lump brilliant speculative thinkers into one black box known as woo woo.
In classic style, after shitting all over the science which has given us a world in which Chopra gets to live far longer than his ancestors and preach his shtick electronically to every corner of the globe, he then goes on to misrepresent the ideas of some of the greatest scientists of the last 100 years with a gall that would cause them to spit-take were they still around to hear it.
Speculative thinking is not believing whatever you want to believe. It has to start somewhere, and ultimately to be of value it has to lead somewhere. Speculating on something without having the slightest interest in discovering your idea might be a stupid one is a trap that everyone falls into at some point, but most people don’t label this character flaw as “brilliance”. Chopra wants to turn his intellectual laziness into a virtue; he doesn’t know the first thing about relativity or quantum theory but he will happily throw the words about if it makes his rather woolly and unoriginal ideas sound more cutting edge.
He just can’t accept that sometimes it’s better to just accept you don’t know something (eg “what is consciousness”) than to pointlessly hypothesize a transcendental quantum cosmic mind that makes a flower beautiful so that it might be appreciated by Deepak Chopra. What’s really sad is that he’s not just shit at science, he’s shit at speculation too.
Update: Speaking at the Indian Astrology Conference, Chopra said:
“Western science is still frozen in an obsolete, Newtonian worldview that is based literally on superstition – and we can call it the superstition of materialism – which says you and I are physical entities of the physical universe.”
Ah yes, tough crowd those Astrologers. And now, a quiz from way back:
1) Which of the following was most responsible for dragging western civilization out of the dark ages?
a) Astrology
b) Religion
c) Politics
d) Science
2) Which of the following is the most self-critical/self-correcting?
a) Astrology
b) Religion
c) Politics
d) Science
2a) Which of the following eagerly anticipates revolutionary reform?
a) Astrology
b) Religion
c) Politics
d) Science
3) Which of the following exploits people′s fears and insecurities the least?
a) Astrology
b) Religion
c) Politics
d) Science
__________
* The Huffington Post is a bothersome place that reinforces the rather frustrating link between liberalism and new-ageism. It stands as a great exemplar of the old aphorism: “Be open minded, but not so much so that your brain falls out”
** I personally find Michael Shermer to be a bit of a dick, but not because of his skepticism, rather his free-market libertarian politics. Skeptics and scientists alike would be well advised to try to keep their politics out of it when advocating critical thinking.
“Chopra is a quack, a hack, and a giant turd floating in the punchbowl of human knowledge.”
The beauty of your words transcends even the poetry of Shakespeare.
Hi, I am from Melbourne.
Hooray for Deepak say I.
And the Huffington Post too!
Please check out these references which will probably get right up your nose.
http://www.aboutadidam.org/readings/asana_of_science/index.html
http://www.aboutadidam.org/lesser_alternatives/scientific_materialism/index.html
http://www.adidam.org/teaching/aletheon/truth-science.aspx
http://www.dabase.org/spacetim.htm
I got as far as here:
“The common presumption of daily human life is that there is an objective world, but this presumption is simply a convention of egoic life and of present-day society.”
Ya ya ya there’s no objective reality, and wow maybe you see red as blue and I see green as polar bears… except that if I cut myself I bleed, and if I poke you in the eye it hurts.
Maybe everything is upside down but we don’t notice because we are too!
We may all be figments of some universal entity’s imagination, but since our entire sensory experience can be understood through materialistic processes then it really doesn’t matter.
“You conceive and you perceive and therefore you presume an objective world, but you do not in fact have any actual contact with the world itself.”
Wow, my mind is blown… come to think of it, I also speak to people on the phone, but how presumptive of me to assume that they actually exist on the other end of the line!
Ooo oo I read some more, and I’m not even sure what your hero is arguing for in this paragraph, because this is the WORST anti-science argument I have ever seen.
“When it first appeared, science was regarded as heresy by the Catholic church. Then it became thought of as just craziness, and scientists were always depicted as mad. Madness and science were regarded as the same thing in those days. When science first began to become prominent, before it became really official – at that crossover point from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance into the so-called Age of Enlightenment and then the Romanticism of the nineteenth century – science was regarded to be possibly aberrated. Many stories, such as the tale of Frankenstein, appeared during that time. Science was regarded as a kind of balminess, or madness.”
Bring back the dark ages!
PS Skeptics in India really must have their work cut out for them
lulz