Except for the “my mind” part, Deepak Chopra really blows my mind
Nope.
We live in an age where massive amounts of money are spent for research into the brain and almost nothing into researching the mind.
Oh, that was a rhetorical question. Shoulda known on account of all the text underneath it.
This represents a huge demotion. In prior centuries the mind was exalted.
Well, yeah, but in prior centuries we were hella ignorant, so you always want to factor that in before getting all nostalgic.
It was the mind that perceived beauty, experienced love, and reached for God. Can the brain really do all those things on its own?
Not if you take it out, no.
Neuroscience says yes, but that’s a leap of faith.
Deepak Chopra would like to caution against taking undue leaps of faith. His website offers a crystal pendant whose mystical properties will tamp down those pesky leap-of-faith-taking impulses for just $39.99.
Why would a neuron have any interest in beauty, love, and God to begin with? Its whole life is spent exchanging chemical and electrical signals with other neurons.
Y’know, I’m a bit of a simpleton myself. Would dressing nattily and adopting a nonthreatening accent help, y’think? Because I’ve said stuff almost as dumb as this but I certainly never got away with it.
On the fringes of speculative thinking, the mind is coming back into its own.
The fringes of speculative thinking, he says. What’s mainstream speculative thinking? “Thinking?”
Instead of trying to rehabilitate the mind, we think it’s more fruitful, and far bolder, to put the mind at the very center of reality.
Yeah, good, because the problem with our species is, we’re just not self-involved enough.
Nothing exists except in your own awareness. If you can’t see, hear, touch, taste, and smell a thing, if you can’t even think about it, the thing cannot exist.
Swear to God, if I ever see Schroedinger, I’m gonna tear his fuckin’ cat limb from limb.
Yet even without a world of things, consciousness does exist, and it has enormous untapped potential. That was proven decades ago when physicists discovered the observer effect. Technically, the observer effect applies to light. Light can act like a wave or a particle, but not both at the same time. It defies ordinary logic, but Einstein and his colleagues discovered that light “decides” whether to act like a wave or particle depending on the observer.
I vaguely remember that being the case with light. I’m pretty sure he’s misrepresenting something crucial here, but the last time it came up I was a teenage boy in a co-ed classroom, so, y’know, priorities. Now I feel bad, though, because all those cute girls I went to school with must be wheelchair-bound since I’m not observing their legs anymore.
Until it is observed, light exists in suspended animation, so to speak. It doesn’t take the form of particle or wave until an observer tries to measure it. After that, there’s no turning back. Whatever the observer sees is reality. This implies that observation is a creative act, and quantum physics has lived with that fact for two generations or more. Only for ordinary people, the observer effect hasn’t had much to do with their lives.
Ain’t that the truth!
Or has it?
Wha?!
Children who are raised under a disapproving eye, who are made to feel bad, worthless, and unlovable, are very likely to grow up to feel that way permanently. Isn’t a judgmental parent a kind of observer, creating the very flaws he sees? On the other hand, children raised under a loving eye have a far greater chance of loving themselves and developing the good qualities seen in them.
Hold on a sec, I have to go headbutt the refrigerator. Desks just don’t have the “give” my skull requires in situations such as these.
Okay, I’m back. So uh… in addition to the mistake of conflating family dynamics with the nature of reality, does he not get that the “disapproving eye” is metaphorical? It’s not the parents’ corneas doing a crappy job of child-rearing.
You can come up with many examples of how the observer effect might influence daily life.
Not a stupider one, I can’t.
But what if we are missing the forest for the trees? What if consciousness is creating much more than we suppose? It could be creating something as basic as time and space. At the quantum level, Nature isn’t bound by either one. Not only is time relative, but certain phenomena travel faster than the speed of light, needing no time at all to cover billions of light years in distances. That, too, is well known in modern physics. But few thinkers have applied the same effect to the mind.
I’d take a swipe at this paragraph but now I fear being sent to the cornfield.
Here things get tricky. Let’s say you are an observer. You watch an event unfold such as the action of light deciding whether to be a wave or a particle. Since your brain is composed of quantum interactions, it isn’t a stable observer.
Much like any given ticketholder at a Deepak Chopra event.
Waves are watching waves, particles are observing particles. Which implies that your brain only “decides” to be a brain at the moment you perceive anything. This quirky notion drops us immediately into the quantum soup, where nothing is stable at all.
To get out of the soup, we need to know why time and space look so stable. I don’t expect the room I’m sitting in to collapse a minute from now, and I don’t expect my car to shoot off at the speed of light, even though photons and subatomic particles are the basis for my car and my room. The reason we have a stable sense of time and space isn’t because they are “real,” in the sense that time and space don’t need an observer.
You could criticize my approach here in that I’m just making snide wisecracks instead of actively engaging with the ideas he’s presenting, but in my defense, these aren’t ideas, they’re stoner jokes.
They absolutely do, for without a mind, nothing exists but randomness and chaos at every level.
That last line there’s a pretty good explanation, actually. Not for what he’s talking about, but you shoulda seen the Ricky’s in Hoboken on Saturday afternoon.
The mystery of how time and space become real is tied to the mystery of mind. Some cosmologists, looking at the evolution of the universe, can’t tolerate randomness. They don’t believe that the explosion of the Big Bang could create the complexity of DNA, any more than
Please don’t use the tornado-junkyard-747 metaphor please don’t use the tornado-junkyard-747 metaphor please don’t use the tornado-junkyard-747 metaphor
a hurricane blowing through a junkyard could create a 747 jetliner.
Oh, Christ, that’s even worse. At least a tornado doesn’t blow everything away laterally.
Okay, he just tipped his hand, he’s using creationist logic word for word. That means we can just stop here and get on with our lives, right?
WRONG. I already read the whole thing and I’m takin’ everybody down with me.
It has been proposed that the visible universe is matched to our own minds. The events we observe that lead to our existence here on planet Earth are precisely the events that can be observed by the human mind. One can imagine life forms on other planets that see an entirely different universe, the one that led to their existence.
I wonder what their anti-intellectual crackpots are like.
Calling an idea tricky doesn’t make it absurd.
Well, no, and neither does calling it “absurd,” since they’re just words. Still, I gotta say, I like the odds!
This so-called “anthropic principle” rests upon an irrefutable basis: Nobody can observe anything that the mind isn’t set up for. Silicone crystals may be vibrating in a language that sings and makes up poetry, but we have no means of eavesdropping since our minds can’t conceive of minerals leading complex social and artistic lives. Now let’s go a step further.
A step further than suggesting rocks might be like loft-dwelling outer-borough twentysomethings? That’s further, all right. That’s about as furth as it gets.
Instead of hogging the limelight by saying that the mind must be human, what if we posit that life is in charge of the universe? This was certainly true before the rise of science. The creation emanated from a living God, and since God was everywhere, life was everywhere. Science traditionally considered this a matter of faith rather than reason. They could point to atoms and molecules, amino acids and enzymes, proteins and primitive life forms, all the way from blue-green algae to human DNA. Isn’t it obvious, they say, that life developed from non-life over billions of years?
I’ll tell ya, Deepak, the leading way in which you ask that question would seem to indicate that this isn’t the answer you’re looking for, but be that as it may, HELL FUCK YES IT’S OBVIOUS ARE YOU KIDDING ME WITH THIS SHIT is really the only logical answer I can come up with.
Actually, no.
Yeah, I figured. Any chance you can back that up with, oh, say, a silly analogy that illustrates nothing and serves only to muddy the waters? Got anything along those lines?
The tracks of evolution are just that, footprints to show that something or someone has passed here. A radio playing Mozart is just such a footprint. It proves that Mozart once lived, but you can’t tear apart the radio and find Mozart inside. You and I are the children of evolution, but only part of our evolution is visible; the rest, the most mysterious part, is invisible.
To a T, my man. To. A. T.
Therein lies the answer to how we became masters of space and time.
What’s this “we” business? Everybody knows Tom Baker is the one true Doctor.
(To be continued.)
Not if I don’t observe it, it won’t be!
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 11/02/09 at 07:34 PM • Permalink
Categories: Geek Speak •
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