10.04.11

Chopra/Mlodinow now, and Bennett/Schopenhauer’s superior formulation

Posted in General at 12:59 pm by nemo

You can follow the Chopra/Mlodinow debate now at Huffpost:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/29/science-vs-spirituality-war-of-the-worldviews_n_987121.html

The format of most such debates is of the type here: consciousness versus materiality.
Blah, blah, as the scientists try to demolish non-reductionism, and spiritual types wring their hands over materialism.

The problem was reformulated by (kant, first) Schopenhauer, and this was picked up by Bennett who saw the connection with Samkhya, where the triads there become forms of will. We don’t need those details, or speculations. The basic point is the triadic set of basics, in a very ancient distinction (I think most Samkhya yogis have forgotten the meaning of their subject, thus people like Chopra have no real reference point in their own tradition, hence his eclectic New Agism): in Bennett’s take, ‘being, function, will’. Some would find this too abstract, and ask what happend to ‘spirituality’ and ‘materiality’?? They are recast in another form, which is fortunate, since the terms are too confused for correct use.

These debates are futile, thus, and I give you the link, but I will skip watching. Schopenhauer lived over a century ago, but the current celebrity circuit is a decline from that, science or New Age. note this point. The whole culture is going nowhere, maybe downhill. And scientists can’t grasp the limits of their subject.

Richard is right: Chopra wastes time trying to mix mysticism and quantum mechanics. It never works. I do agree however that quantum mechanics is a riddle connected to larger issues, it is simply that we can’t get it straight. Standard physics paradigming tends to hide the real implications, but in fact, what are they. Chopra tends to confuse the issue.

The triad of being function will is very ancient, and can sweep away most of these confusions (it can’t solve QM problems) and has nothing to do with Gurdjieff.

You can read Schopenhauer as showing the ‘will, function’ duality, without the ‘being’ completion of the triad. It works fine. Being is like the degree of illumination in a room, as the ‘will’ operates on function.
Will, however, can become very obscure: it is, is not, the same in both usages in Schopenhauer, the cosmic will in nature, and the ‘will’ in man, in the common usage. So the clarity tends to become lost.
That is the sad fact about man: he has a fantastic potential and a hypercomplex organismic apparatus, but he can’t use it because he doesn’t understand it, starting with the elementary bells and whistles of his own ‘common prescence awareness’, or consciousness/will. He plugs along in low gear like a sad sack case, which he is.

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