07.29.11

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

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More on Harris/Islam

Posted in General at 1:00 pm by nemo

http://www.thedailymaverick.co.za/article/2011-07-28-islamophobia-and-sam-harris-tyranny-of-reason

We already cited a link at Truthdig where Harris defends himself from charges of Islam-bashing, but here is another article on this.
We will wait before re-comment here.

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The axial age, evolution, and its clues to human emergence

Posted in General at 12:57 pm by nemo

http://history-and-evolution.com/whee4th/chap5_1.htm: Chapter from WHEE on the Axial Age:

Too see why I resist using the term ‘evolution’ in the context of ‘new age’ spiritual practice, review this long chapter on the Axial Age in antiquity. Then see the Axial Age iin the context of the larger pattern of what I call ‘evolutionary’ action in the emergence of civilization.
We can see that ‘evolution’ in this context, which I claim is the real sense, refers to something stupendous, here the synchronous action of a mysterious something across the whole of Eurasia over an interval of about three centuries. We see the results in China, in India, in the Middle East (Israel/Canaan), and Greece/Italy (and we may have missed parts of it). This is precisly the clue needed to suspect how earlier (human) evolution occurred, perhaps in the transition to early homo sapiens. The historical ‘eonic effect’ shows veiled hints to all the puzzles that obstinately prevent a theory of evolution: it shows the way a macro effect is involved in language, issues of consciousness, religion, and much else, from art to politics.
It is a reminder that we are outclassed complexity by the real action and complexity of evolution. We can barely follow its action in a limited range where we have evidence at the level of centuries.

To presume to think that yogic meditation is what is driving evolution is a disservice to yoga (since ancient yogis never made such claims) and a delusion of misplaced emphasis.

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Cohen’s confusion over evolution

Posted in General at 11:23 am by nemo

The Path of Evolutionary Enlightenment: From Minus One to Zero to Plus One

Andrew Cohen’s attempt to link evolution and enlightenment is an ongoing confusion we have commented on many times, here and at The Gurdjieff Con. Cohen, next to ‘secular buddhism’, which we have exposed, is another brand of the fake being used to undermine western New Age spiritualities. Here is one paragraph:

Enlightenment means consciousness beyond ego and evolution means development in time. So Evolutionary Enlightenment means the development in time of consciousness beyond ego. The path, in the context of evolutionary enlightenment, is, at least in theory, quite simple. It is a journey from identification with ego to identification with the evolutionary impulse. It is a radical transformation of our relationship to the human experience, from one that is fundamentally negative, narcissistic, compulsive, and rigid to one that is inherently positive, liberated, consciously creative, and perpetually evolving.

This explanation doesn’t make sense, and we have to wonder whether Cohen really understands ‘englitenment’. Enlightenment is not a ‘state of consciousness’, although it might well generate a companion state as some kind of consciousness reflecting that state beyond states, enlightenment. Enlightenment is beyond states of ‘consciousness’, and is even beyond states of ‘self-consciousness’, in the progression given in classic form: sleep, consciousness, self-consciousness, ‘state four’, or turiya, vulgarly hyped as ‘enlightenment’, a useful term nonetheless. One can make these statements without being enlightened: one can easily enter ‘default enlightenment’ by understanding the mere definition of what it is: you realize you already know what it is despite the fog veiling it.
Enlightenment is closer to a process of ‘understanding’ than to a state of consciousness. If you understand that
you are larger than a mere consciousness in a body, then a very crude state of enlightenment is the case for you. This ‘default’ realization of enlightenment should be embraced by all as a freebie that can help toward a deeper ‘englightenment’, one and the same, and yet the ‘real thing’ so to speak. But basic enlightenment is a state that is already the case, as you can sense from this depiction of ‘default enlightenment’.
Read our post Schopenhauer on Death (use the searchbox) to see that being beyond ego is a already the case for all.

Evolution is development in time, OK. But that doesn’t make ‘becoming enlightened’ a form of evolution. If anything evolution deepens illusion, and takes the consciousness away from itself into world alienation.

It is possible some future man will have a different relation to his potential enlightenment, but it is hard to see how he can do anything to reach that new condition. To say he must evolve to that state is a phrase that has no meaning. It is a situation controlled by Greater Nature, and we don’t have any real options here. But we do have the options to become enlightened.
The potential for enlightenment ‘evolved’ (or was evolved in him) in the earliest men, and the evocation of that potential is one of the dramas of man’s historical development, especially visible in India. In a real sense, man is already enlightened: all he has to do is realize it. That realization, which is a form of understanding rather than a state of consciousness, cannot be achieved as an evolutionary given (as far as I know), but only as a potential. But the sad fact is that historical action tends to degrade to lower states of consciousness, mechanical states not even at the level of self-consciousness.
Perhaps it is this that confuses Cohen et al. into thinking that meditation toward enlightenment can induce a new evolution of man. That’s an illusion. Man is perfectly capable of enlightenment as he is, but the path to that is an arduous search for a method that works, or for the secret to making methods (e.g. meditation) really work.

Man has thus already ‘evolved’ that potential to become enlightened, and is already enlightened by the nature of the case: it is his job to realize it. Cohen is strangely confused here, but in all fairness, I should point to the source of this kind of thinking in Blavatsky and the Theosophists. It is absent in the ancient sutras which did not have the data for evolution that we have now. Possible anticipations of the evolutionary category are undoubtedly present in ancient India, but the details are not clear to me, and are often presented in a muddle contrasting ‘involution’ and ‘evolution’. At the risk of still another muddle of that distinction (which I tend to avoid) I might note that Cohen’s confusion might arise from thinking that ‘ego shows involution’, therefore surpassing ego is ‘evolution. But he has abandoned the distinction (which is pretty muddled), which has increased his confusion.
Blavatsky correctly saw the problems with Darwinism, and was an early dissenter, but the standards of rigor she adopted were so ragged (to put it midly) that the resulting critique did more to discredit critics than anything else. This New Age confusion of the evolution category and the self-development category is chronic and in some cases harmless, since anyone can change the meanings of words for use in other contexts. The use of the term ‘evolution’ has become so common in New Age circles as to be beyond repair. But it then requires an understanding of the different usage being adopted.
Why not stick to classic texts like Patanjali’s yoga sutras which have their own consistent usages and don’t use the term ‘evolution’.
Evolution as development in time is likely to be the opposite of enlightenment, which terminates the connection with rebirth in time.
The real early evolution of man is a true enigma, and we should respect that enigma to the extent of not letting tom-dick-and-harry gurus like Cohen come along and try to control the idea for their personal power by saying they understand evolution, when they do not.

It almost seeems as if the real evolution of man is ‘kept hidden, under lock and key’, as I have always suspected, precisely to prevent this attempted take-over by the guru types who stand to profit from the fiction they know/control the evolution of consciousness. Anyone who really understands the evolution of early human consciousness should be able to give us the ‘facts’ of how that happened. And that they can’t do. We just don’t know how it happened, and can be pretty sure it wasn’t the result of homo erectus doing meditation under the guidance of gurus.
It is possible that the evolution category is inappropriate altogether here, for man. The ‘evolution’ of man may only be applicable to the basic hominid frame, the coming of ‘consciousness’ (or the spectrum of consciousness, involving the self-consciousness) being something else, as many have suspected changing the discussion with (equally confused) terms like ‘cosmic consciousness’ to express the fact of man stepping into a larger universe. J.G. Bennett, frequently cited here, adopts this approach, in a variant.

But if the ‘power of attention’ is present in animals then it is probably correct to use the term evolution from low to high, with the high end showing this mysterious explosion of consciousness in early man onwards.
But as with the issue of ‘attention’, the question is larger than that of ‘consciousness’, it is also a question of the ‘will’ of an individual, and the emergence of ‘individuality’ and the potential ‘will’ of a free agent.

We really don’t understand ourselves well enough to dogmatize about how man evolved. It is a riddle and a half, and even ‘enlightened’ men are doubtfully able to expound on the ‘evolution’ of man.

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Comment on Breivik

Posted in General at 10:38 am by nemo

Comment on Breivik, plus link to Manifesto

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Breivik: The Professor and the Madman

Posted in General at 10:36 am by nemo

The Professor and the Madman

While the establishment media look to fundamentalist Christianity and various right-wing sources to explain the ideology of Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik, they have completely ignored his virulent scientific fundamentalism and Social Darwinism, including a far-ranging proposal for a revival of eugenics inspired by Princeton University evolutionary biologist Lee Silver.

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Texas evolution debate

Posted in General at 10:31 am by nemo

Intelligent Design Faces Test in Texas Board of Education Debate

This kind of confusion is partly the fault of the science community, whose dogmatic stance disallows a critical look at Darwinism. Scientists themselves need to be the critics here, and to stop trying to force their Darwinian propaganda on the schools, who have a right to demur, but who keep getting confused by the religious slant that enters the critique and spoils it.

Every student deserves to know that Darwinism has problems and critics. That doesn’t have anything to do with ID.

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Tundra Fires

Posted in General at 10:26 am by nemo

Tundra Fires Could Accelerate Climate WarmingScienceDaily (July 27, 2011) — After a 10,000-year absence, wildfires have returned to the Arctic tundra, and a University of Florida study shows that their impact could extend far beyond the areas blackened by flames.

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New Material Lets Electrons ‘Dance’

Posted in General at 10:25 am by nemo

New Material Lets Electrons ‘Dance’ and Form New StateScienceDaily (July 27, 2011) — A team of Purdue University researchers is among a small group in the world that has successfully created ultrapure material that captures new states of matter and could have applications in high-speed quantum computing.

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