07.28.11
More on Harris/Chopra
http://www.thedailymaverick.co.za/article/2011-07-28-islamophobia-and-sam-harris-tyranny-of-reason
Same link again: the YouTube video of Harris/Chopra (and Michael Shermer?) et al. is of interest. I have always refrained from trying to use QM in the way Chopra et al. do, getting themselves in trouble. Chopra lives and learns, and comes from the TM/Maharishi world, which has made some notable blunders, and he has made some questionable statements over the years. He is very smart, and has a medical background, but, OK, Harris is perhaps right to challenge the misuse of QM. Or is he?
Again, I never use QM here to discuss consciousness issues but the issue of non-locality won’t go away. Again, I wouldn’t care to make any claims here, but at least we can see that QM touches the issue of placelessness, a classic, if not of New Age mysticism, then of Kantian discussions of the Categories, including those of space and time.
The problem Harris has is that QM, which should have liberated us from scientism, has been pressed back into the mould of reductionist thinking. It is no use demanding the rigor of science if buttoned down science types suppress the history of QM, or veil its extraordinary aspects with press release scientism.
It was not Deepak Chopra, but the creators of standard QM interpretation who, to the annoyance of Einstein, who opened the door to mysticism, of a kind. The stampede created there, then, is not New Age abuse, but the work of Niels Bohr (et al).
Having referenced Kant, I should bring in once more the case of Schopenhauer. One reason I don’t go hunting in QM is that the real work on these issues was done without QM by Kant, and then, more clearly, by Schopenhauer, with warnings about the noumenal boundaries to knowledge. The question then for me is whether QM shows any hints of this ‘transcendental idealism’. The answer is, are you kidding. The feetprints (sic!) are everywhere, witness the stunningly apt hint: the non-local, about which I will comment no further.
Shermer et al annoy Chopra no end by charging him with ‘woo’, but the standard fare of the ‘skeptics’ is hardly at a higher level than this ‘woo’. Harris talks a good game, but he is off the wall in a way that Chopra, for all his verbiage, is not.
I think that it is easy to enter a quagmire here, as Chopra shows, but it is hard to be as far off as Shermer and Harris, so bashing Deepak Chopra might have a sedative effect, but doesn’t amount to much. I think that Chopra forevever spoiled his credibility in the early years post-Maharishi by making dubious claims, especially for a doctor, about quantum healing. His critics have never let up since then.
As we have said here many times, the work of J.G. Bennett shows one way to harmonize typical New Age categories, and those of physics, and this work, revealingly, shows the influence of Shopenhauer (whose metaphysics of the Will confuses the clarity of his basic framework, which was that of Kant, in essence, and which was invented to mediate physics/metaphysics).
Here’s the deactivated YouTube link (remove the space before www).
http:// www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Mt4llz_WI9o#at=361
The Gurdjieff Con » Chopra, Bennett, and physics/consciousness issues said,
July 28, 2011 at 1:40 pm
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