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Norton
climber
The Wastelands
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Deepak Chopra has an abundance of woo...and has made a good living selling it
*His treatments generally elicit nothing but a placebo response,[6] and have drawn criticism that the unwarranted claims made for them may raise "false hope" and lure sick people away from legitimate medical treatments.[17]
He is placed by David Gorski among the "quacks", "cranks" and "purveyors of woo", and described as "arrogantly obstinate".[22] Richard Dawkins has said that Chopra uses "quantum jargon as plausible-sounding hocus pocus".[23]
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Woo: "In the absence of a conscious entity, the moon remains a radically ambiguous and ceaselessly flowing quantum soup."
I suppose age and experience can and do add to the confusion, the lack of discernment, the difficulty of discernment and what not. We can imagine a climber visiting this site and this thread and this intriguing question who is only 16 years old or who never in high school finished a chemistry or biology course (let alone a dozen) yet nonetheless knows some science (just ask him) through Facebook (so-called Facebook Science).
So a quote as above to some could seem legit. But MikeL and Largo, for eg, don't really fit these categories.
Has anyone ever asked. How much rigorous, serious science has MikeL had? Has anyone ever gotten an answer? a solid, truthful, full-disclosure answer.
It's too bad these issues can't be worked out, I suppose to everyone's contentment. Because I sense some really meaningful conversations could be had here just as in other internet venues. In the spirit of Sean Carroll's video message above, for eg.
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The basic problem with the woo, and this extends even to the very abstract far-out speculating ala philosophy or physics, is that it obfuscates the huge separation, the daylight so to speak, that actually exists between, for instance, the traditional religious worldview (of Abrahamic religion) and the modern scientific worldview. We need a lot more of the public to discern this separation, to see this daylight, imo, for sociopolitical reasons, for unifying reasons, for informed decision making reasons, for national and international reasons - and not be confused by efforts and activities, intentional or not, to obfuscate it.
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He is placed by David Gorski among the "quacks", "cranks" and "purveyors of woo", and described as "arrogantly obstinate". Richard Dawkins has said that Chopra uses "quantum jargon as plausible-sounding hocus pocus".
Creatures of habit. They learn this. They go with what works. Our world cultures have a long tradition in this vein.
Great concepts: 1 fiduciary responsibility 2 the fiduciary responsiblities that arise from respecting science and science education, that arise from respecting reason and good argument, evidence-based of course; that arise from one's interest in advancing, else just maintaining, civilization (against a backdrop of a nasty brutish history red in tooth and claw).
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Ward hit on something earlier. A fun one to ponder: the whole shebang popped into being for no "reason" at all.
Yes sir my well-fed friend, it was a quantum probability which upon the instant it became probable it precipitously, without messing around, leaked into existence, and everything with it.
Its quantum nature did not proceed the universe but was a causation that caused itself after the fact.lol
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 5, 2018 - 01:09pm PT
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Woo: "In the absence of a conscious entity, the moon remains a radically ambiguous and ceaselessly flowing quantum soup."
Worthy issue: It could be helpful to distinguish between artificial intelligence (AI) and artificial consciousness (AC).
Worthy issue: The difference, if any, between (a) construction by evolutionary means and (b) construction by engineering means. Another: the inclination of naysayers or deniers or partisans of one side or another to conflate the two - as if in modeling intelligence or modeling consciousness the difference in these TWO DISTINCT construction modes doesn't matter.
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Fruitcake, you're nothing if not entertaining. On the one had, your scientism is showing. On the other hand, Ed is quick to chastise you as a faux mouthpiece of actual science. I don't much care so long as your ideas are logically coherent and you ease off your religious rants.
Your first example of woo above is hardly nuanced thinking. It touches on the difference between perception and whatever is "out there." Per this question you have on the one hand the classical, Newtonian idea that the moon we see is exactly the moon that is out there. We have exhaustively examined the fact that the light waves we "see" out there are not in fact the "blue" we consciously experience, and if you say as much you are left with some scrap of identity theory which in my book is the biggest woo going. You might want to look at a little Kant - oh wait, there's new data that excuses Kant from the conversation. As though Kant was talking about data.
Mercy...
Now with Strong AI, it's the real zealots who insist that conscious machines are just a few key experiments away, once we fully understand how consciousness is an output of the brain. We simply construct the parts and bits and processes into the machine and Dr. Frankenstein is all smiles. That fact that at least some believe this, is to me the quintessence of what Mr. Barnum said about a fool being born every minute. Read what Madbolter said earlier.
Artificial intelligence is quite another thing, but the "intelligence" aspect of a processing machine is still in hot dispute because it implies understanding. Searl's Chinese Room experiment brings this row into focus. The refutations to Searl's thought experiment are in many cases the purest howlers - I especially like the one claiming that the "room" understands. Here we have daft old gaffers holding onto first assumptions at all costs.
But I believe Fruity is correct in pointing out that this distinction needs to be drawn. As I've always said, runaway conflating is the turd in the punch bowl per all mind conversations. That and unexamined first assumptions.
But perhaps the biggest woo of them all is the belief that the universe "created" itself, or that if it arouse from "potentialities," we don't have to account for the cause of those potentialities. And that if we can't, universals don't need to be dealt with and "explaining" anything is still a valid concept.
Then there are those who want it both ways, who insist that this is not a real investigation into real world issues because it doesn't arrive or conclude anything testable. In other words, it does not offer a mathematical or "scientific" explanation. The fact that there might not be one is for many, an impossible idea. This, as Madbolter pointed out, is a default position equal to "God did it."
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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The basic problem with the woo, and this extends even to the very abstract far-out speculating ala philosophy or physics, is that it obfuscates the huge separation, the daylight so to speak, that actually exists between, for instance, the traditional religious worldview (of Abrahamic religion) and the modern scientific worldview. We need a lot more of the public to discern this separation, to see this daylight, imo, for sociopolitical reasons, for unifying reasons, for informed decision making reasons, for national and international reasons - and not be confused by efforts and activities, intentional or not, to obfuscate it.
And this passage is an example of why it's difficult to take YOU seriously in these sorts of discussions.
1) You define "woo" to basically fit your model. Anything that doesn't fit your model is "woo" and is to be treated as "second-class thinking."
2) You repeatedly use pejorative phraseology, like, "very abstract far-out speculating ala philosophy or physics," that totally conflate what are really the hard questions with the "far out." Yet, as in theoretical physics, "very abstract" philosophy is hard (and they don't give out Ph.D.s in that field like candy) BECAUSE the hard questions necessarily don't fall to the "easy answers." Practitioners in such fields have to have a very high tolerance for and embracing of the fact that you're typically not "talking about it" on anything resembling the level that most people "just know the way it is." YOU, however, repeatedly treat "the way it is" as a replacement for doing the actual hard work.
3) As always, you are utterly dismissive of "Abrahamic religion," but in doing so, you perpetually conflate "the way it's practiced" with "its logical underpinnings." Furthermore, it's not ever clear to me what you even think that the logical underpinnings of so-called "Abrahamic religion" even are! I bet that whatever you'd say on that point would be rejected by a large body of actual believers, and you'd find that there are VERY FEW logically necessary points defining so-called "Abrahamic religions." But you perpetually lump all "Abrahamic religions" and their practitioners into a big blob, so that you can sweepingly dismiss all that "woo".
For my part, I'm not engaging in any "very abstract far-out philosophy" to say that empiricism HAS NOT and I argue WILL NOT account for universals and general terms. Yet "intelligence" and "mind" depend fundamentally on the fact that entities such as human beings live in a reality populated by general concepts, and our manipulation of them is central to "thinking" itself in our form of self-consciousness.
Whether you agree or not is irrelevant to my above points. The point I'm making is that you continually try to "reframe the terms of the discussion," but you do so in a way that slants things as you wish while conflating key distinctions.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 5, 2018 - 03:50pm PT
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Its quantum nature did not proceed the universe but was a causation that caused itself after the fact.
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Now Ward, this is one of the finest, hand-tooled, Five Star, Fork-tongued spoofs on creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing) I've ever heard. It's like saying, "I gots your flat universe right here, chump."
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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And I agree with yanqui. Not necessarily a waste of time, because that, too, is a fraught phrase, but trying to match up an atomic description with a mental perception does not seem a sensible scientific endeavour.
As is evident here I am happy to waste my time and will question but not castigate others for doing the same.
Not a total waste. I have really learned on this thread.
First off, I apologize to any identity theorists if I am interpreting this wrong, but the way understood it (from the article I referenced, because I really don't know anything about it) is that there are two "sets" of values: set 1 consists of "mental states" and set 2 consists of physical states of the brain. Then identity theory says there is a bijection between the two. What I am calling "atomic" mental states are the values that occur in set 1. I imagine this should include things like "seeing red" (or maybe a subdivision into seeing various shades of red), thinking of the number 5, etc. In set 2 we have the corresponding brain state.
I just can't imagine that anything like this is a correct (from my experience) and I certainly can't see any reason to justify it on metaphysical grounds. I mean, certainly, when different people feel pain, we probably should expect some similarity about what happens in the brain. (The question about what is going on with people who feel pain when there is no apparent physical cause then becomes interesting) but to accept identity theory as an apriori truth strikes me as absurd. And I really don't think it could characterize most of what is going on in my head. Not that what goes on in my head (mental states) has nothing to do with the physical states of my brain, but that trying to understand everything that is going on in the restricted framework of identity theory will not be fruitful.
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WBraun
climber
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No money can buy the help this topic needs.
Yet gross materialists will throw endless time and money at it with no return except to reinforce their own illusions they masquerade as reality .....
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 5, 2018 - 05:39pm PT
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More then just ripping on Identity Theory, I think it's important to understand the first assumptions and the thinking that drives it. You can see that at play in the desperate and to me, goofball attempts to try and float what seems so patently absurd.
First, there's the problem of consciousness not being observable or directly measurable. A physicalist can hardly admit such a non-thing into "reality," and what's more, what are they supposed to do with their yardsticks? And if there IS something to mind, and it IS unobservable, then that puts a limit on measuring, and that can't stand.
The other thing is that in virtually every other instance of scientific inquiry, you can either measure or measure the effect of whatever it is you are talking about or investigating. To a physicalist, there is no "extra" to physical reality. There's only physical reality. Ergo "mind" does not exist in any normal (physical) way, or if it does, the entire story is told by way of the brain believed to create it.
To the best of my knowledge, this is the belief system driving those rooting for Identity Theory: THIS, in fact, is THAT.
Go figure...
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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the determined physicalist stance inevitably leads to the conclusion of identity theory - that mind states and mental content are identical
What is a determined physicalist? If you can't explain what you mean by that phrase, how do you know that there is such a thing?
What exactly are mind states? Can you explain what they are? If not, how do you know that they are not identical to to mental content?
And what do you mean by identical?
You need to give better descriptions and explanations of your stance.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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MB1: I'm an anti-realist about humor.
Huh? I’m not sure what this means. Humor, or its referents, is not real?
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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Huh? I’m not sure what this means. Humor, or its referents, is not real?
In others words, there are no mind-independent facts about what's funny. Funny is in the eye of the beholder.
;-)
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 6, 2018 - 09:45am PT
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What is a determined physicalist? If you can't explain what you mean by that phrase, how do you know that there is such a thing?
What exactly are mind states? Can you explain what they are? If not, how do you know that they are not identical to to mental content?
And what do you mean by identical?
You need to give better descriptions and explanations of your stance.
All of these questions are readily available in most any introductory gloss of Philosophy of Mind articles. Perhaps I should be flattered that you think I concocted terms like "mind states," physicalist (reality IS physical and only physical), determinism (every thing and phenomenon is determined by prior/existing (to allow for randomness) physical causes, and that mind states are not identical to brain states. But verily these are all well-established threads in the cloth of mind studies.
There seems always to be a vague troll aspect to your "questions" which makes you a tricky read. But putting that aside, I've noticed that you seem to be enamored with Identity Theory, that brain states ARE similar if not identical (the same) as mind states.
I expect you to disagree, because that's what you do, but perhaps you could describe you understanding of how, for example, an EEG signal IS subjectivity itself, which is the inescapable conclusion to I.T.
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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You stand by it still?
I was obviously speaking from the perspective of scientism, not expressing my own personal perspective about values.
And this seems to be a significant drift. Let's keep it on "mind," please, rather than value-theory.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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MB1, thanks.
MEMORIES AND SENIORS
For every decade after 50, the brain supposedly loses 2 percent of its weight. The motor area loses between 20 and 50 percent of its neurons, the visual area loses about 50 percent of its neurons, and the sensory areas lose about 50 percent of its neurons. Yet, the higher intellectual areas of the cortex have significantly lower neuron loss and appear to increase their activity after maturity.
Is this evidence of what could be considered wisdom in advanced age? Is wisdom a shift in focus from “facts in everyday life” (information) to the understanding of one’s character in “life reviews” made in the latter part of one’s life?
Long-term and short-term memory seem to exhibit a inverse correlation in growth or effect. When one increases, the other is decreased. The memory warehouse keeper seems to be using the LIFO method (last in, first out), holding just enough emotional space to add new memories that would be helpful for evaluating what’s been there for a long time in old age. Old people seem to spend a lot of time taking stock in “life reviews.” They remember and review long-ago life events more than they remember where they placed their keys.
“Recherche du temps perdu” (Proust). Proust showed us how our subjective sense of time (and self) are folded and transcended by the mind.
Recently I got to revisit a fishing camp in Canada I visited 8 times with my dad 55 years ago. With 35 years of contemplative experience making mind observations, I saw this time around that 80-90 percent of my memories were simply emotions. It’s led me to think that even what I remember of yesterday is essentially the same.
According to things I’ve recently read, people aging into their senior years invariably return and review their memories as means to understand their lives, their character, to increase their insight and intelligence about their lives, to commemorate events and achievements that have left their mark on them. Seniors hold dear what is “old-fashioned” and “artistic” so they can review what their lives were. The life reviews of seniors bring understanding to what appeared to be deciding events. Dignity in old age means seeing that one coped with his or her situation with courage, grace, goodwill, and humor.
What is new or novel attracts seniors less and less. Ho-hum. You see the behavior in seniors *all the time,* and you fear it’s a sign of rising dementia in those you care fo. Seniors may not recall the day of the week, a niece’s name, or the place where they need to turn; they tell the same story over and over again, they can’t keep track of facts and figures of today’s world; they lose track of the details of everyday life; they see current things and events as reminders of how things were decades ago; they don’t seem to hear details that seem unimportant to them, etc. (Why do they continue to *do* that?)
“History / heritage is bunk” to many moderns. Youth finds it difficult to embrace or understand history compared to the “facts,” “news,” and “technology” in contemporary living today. The humanities, however, rely upon memory to deepen and refine thinking—but not so much “factual” memories.
One of Freud’s contribution to psychology was the insight that memory is imagining qualified by time. Indeed, aged people have images that they often re-live and review (often to listeners’ chagrin). Without images, it seems, memories would fade fast. Memory seems to be a richly packed and interrelated set of images.
Life reviews that seniors undertake appear to be re-writes of the stories of their lives—or writing lives into stories. Without the stories, there can be no understanding, no art, and no character.
Life reviews do not come early in lives. They can’t. If attempted early on, they appear to produce inflated subjectivities of immature egos.
People can talk about memory as neurons, nets, and brain functions, but that’s not how we experience memory. Memories appear to largely emotions, employed differently for different purposes at different stages of life.
If memory is not nearly as factual and physical as some would have us believe, then what of mind, thoughts, feelings, and even physical systems that *are* psychological fields of meaning?
Grandma used to tell us the same story over and over about her and my grandfather. Finally after so many years of this as a kid, i finally told her, “Grandma, you’ve told us this story over and over. We’ve heard it already.” Without skipping a beat, she responded with a smile: “. . . and I like telling it again.”
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 6, 2018 - 10:35am PT
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If memory is not nearly as factual and physical as some would have us believe, then what of mind, thoughts, feelings, and even physical systems that *are* psychological fields of meaning?
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I think this harks back a simple physicalists mindset that believes the real stuff, what is really there, so to speak, is brain matter, and that mind, thoughts, feelings, wisdom is just "what the brain is doing." Of course we don't explain basketball or music as "what humans are doing," but some still insist that music itself is no more then output by the physical brain, "you only think it is more."
All of these lines of reasoning are based on some form of Identity Theory."
As always, the sticking point is awareness.
Anything that defies direct physical measurement will generally be explained away as "we don't need that to do science." Look at the big bang. The standard line is we can't talk intelligently about what came "before" the big bang because time (linear causation) was "created" at the big bang. The whopper in this silly conceit is" What went BANG. That's when the conversation gets rare indeed...
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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MikeL, I found myself smiling broadly at the "... I like telling it again" line, which actually conveyed SO much!
Thank you for sharing that. My in-laws (that are really my family) are getting very aged, so they moved into the North Denver area to be near us, and I see the same sorts of things you described. It's a bittersweet experience to be close to them in this time. Much more sweet than sad, though.
We're all getting there, some faster than others.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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All of these questions are readily available in most any introductory gloss of Philosophy of Mind articles.
That's interesting, but what about answers to the questions? I would prefer to see your own answers since you are the one who used the terms I am asking about.
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