Deepak Chopra - Prophet of the Flakes
Deepak Chopra is upset.
Why? Well, it all goes back to statements like this one, from Chopra himself:
“Consciousness may exist in photons, which seem to be the carrier of all information in the universe.”
Chopra is upset that evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne pointed out how absurd this statement is. More specifically, Coyne wrote that:
“[Chopra's] lucrative brand of woo is finally exposed as a lot of scientifically-sounding psychobabble.”
Prof. Coyne’s main topic was another pseudoscientist, Rupert Sheldrake, but he also criticized Chopra, whom he called “Sheldrake’s American counterpart.” As a result, Deepak Chopra is very unhappy, as he makes clear in his very touchy response published last week in the New Republic. I didn’t know Deepak Chopra had such thin skin.
So how did he respond? Well, his entire indignant riposte is essentially a list of his credentials:
“I regularly write articles and books co-authored by full professors … at Harvard,” Chopra protests.
And he tells us that he is regularly invited to give talks at conferences sponsored by Harvard Medical School, and he’s an Adjunct Professor in the business schools at both Northwestern and Columbia. And more!
With such impressive credentials, how can anything Chopra says can be wrong? But hang on a minute: Jerry Coyne is a Professor at the University of Chicago, and he got his Ph.D. in evolutionary biology at Harvard, under renowned biologist Richard Lewontin. So he must be right too!
What’s wrong with Chopra’s defense is that it’s a classic argument from authority, a logical fallacy that amounts to little more than saying “I have impressive credentials, so I must be right.” As Coyne explains in his rebuttal at the New Republic,
“Science doesn’t work that way. Scientists don’t defer to authority and credentials. We defer to the quality of one’s arguments and the evidence that backs them up.”
Chopra's claim that photons have consciousness, I have to say, is the purest nonsense. Does Chopra even know what a photon is? (Doubtful: he’s been throwing around the term “quantum” for decades with apparently no understanding of what it means.)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2013/11/24/deepak-chopra-gets-upset-tries-the-harvard-gambit/#1f405a5d7e63
Painting by Xe Cheyu - beautiful chinese girl
Speaking at the Skeptic Society’s Conference at Caltech last week, biologist and author Richard Dawkins was asked about the recent Pew Research poll which saw a rise in religiously unaffiliated adults (also known as “nones”) which increased by around 19 million people since 2007.
“That’s 56 million religiously unaffiliated adults of all ages,” Skeptic magazine publisher Michael Shermer noted. “That’s more than Protestants or Catholics. Are we winning?”
“Well, that’s very good news,” Dawkins replied, before joking that “nones” sounded far too much like “nuns.”
Both Dawkins and Shermer noted, however, that many of these adults who have given up religion may not have simply given up god of spirituality, and many call themselves spiritual but not religious.
“One of the problems is that the so-called ‘nones’ often give up religion for something even worse,” Dawkins said. “I mean, they take up Deepak Chopra or something like that.”
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/danthropology/2015/06/richard-dawkins-says-deepak-chopra-style-spiritualism-is-worse-than-religion/