The ever-charming Sam Harris has smarmily connected me to Deepak Chopra, so now I’m getting a flood of both smug, superior cluelessness from the Vulcans of Planet Sam, and the spacey vacuous nonsense of the Chopralites. Thanks, Sam! Although, I must say, so far Chopra freaks are doing a better job of actually saying something. Which isn’t saying much.
They seem to be impressed with this fatuous defense of dualism from Chopra. I’m going to skip virtually all of the noise to focus on one point that I found particularly annoying.
In the case of brain science, there will be much better knowledge about the mind once we question the assumption that the brain is a physical thing that produces the mind. Here are the reasons that the brain-as-mind model is crumbling:
1. The model is self-referential. The very thing you need to define (the brain) is also the thing doing the defining.
…
4. Mapping the brain is not sufficient to understand a qualitative experience, since everything we know about the brain is an experience. The brain is gelatinous, dark, gray, moist, and zapping with tiny electrical shocks. Those qualities are simply there, like the hardness of a rock. You can’t get beyond them, and yet you need to if you want to know what’s real.
This last point is the toughest, so let’s go into it. The Sun is bright. The brain is dark. Is the brightness of the Sun produced by the darkness of the brain? Neuroscience says it is, but clearly it can’t be. If you put the brain to your tongue, it will have its own taste. But in that taste you won’t find sugar, salt, chocolate, fish and chips, etc. As long as you stay inside the brain’s thingness, the vast range of color, taste, sight, sound, and smells that constitute our experience of reality cannot be explained. Many cultures have a saying that the eye cannot see itself. This is a metaphor that applies to the brain: If everything we know is produced by the brain, we are trapped inside its processes. Any attempt would be just another brain process.
The first point is actually correct. If you just sit around trying to think understanding of your mind into existence, you’ll fail. What Chopra doesn’t seem to understand, though, is that that is precisely what he and his wanking circle-jerk of pompous gurus are doing — rather than trying to find external evidence to test their hypotheses about where their mind comes from, they just bloviate and meditate and parrot theologians. He has no external frame of reference.
But science actually provides a way around this problem. We have multiple minds taking different approaches to the problem of the mind; we have tools to probe the functions of the brain that provide verifiable, objective evidence; we use experiment to tease apart how it all works. We don’t rely on just our unaided perception or preconceptions about the mind to explain it. We aren’t the ones trying to bootstrap knowledge straight out of our minds with no external assistance — we’re working on the problem, rather than dreaming about it.
His fourth point, the one he thinks is the toughest, is just silly. Why would you even expect an object that processes sensory information about other objects to look like them? He seems to be shocked that he can look at a chocolate bar, and his brain doesn’t turn to chocolate; that when he flips a light switch on, his brain doesn’t start glowing. Your brain is the perceiver, not the perceived.
When he opens up a computer, and sees that it’s bits of shiny metal and plastic, with wires all over the place, and that it gives him shocks if he paws at it, does he think it can’t possibly get beyond the material qualities of his uninformed perception to function in subtle and complex ways? (Well, maybe not after he’s poked his fingers into it and shorted everything out.) We know that if organic disease or injury erodes the physical structure of the brain, the mind is affected; we know we can take drugs that modify the chemical makeup of the brain, the mind will operate in different ways.
As for his metaphor of the eye not seeing itself…has he ever heard of a mirror? A photograph? We can get confirmation that we have eyes from other people. We can touch our own eyes and determine that they are there. We know that the eyes are the organ that permits sight — lose them and you are blind, grow old and they become weaker. There is no ghost carrying images to your mind, but simply the absorption of photons by opsin triggering resistance changes in photoreceptor membranes that translate into voltages — those tiny electrical shocks — traveling up a pinkish gray cable of fat and protein and salt water to your brain.
Your optic nerve doesn’t turn into chocolate, either. In Chopra’s world, that must mean it doesn’t actually work.
To put it concretely, the eye can indeed see itself with the help of instruments. And it’s even easier to see the eyes of others like ourselves, to dissect the eyes of cadavers, experiment on other related animals, and so on, and hence we understand a lot about how the eye and the associated visual processing system work. Granted all that, I still think that the space between neural processing and conscious perception is mysterious. That’s what’s really baffling them even though they seem to have a hard time stating it clearly. I find it pretty baffling too, honestly.
PZ:
I saw what you did there
So let me get this right … Sam Harris, the thinky-brain special rational dude because dude, is – what, petty? Vindictive? Pettily vindictive? – enough to send spam/trolls your way because you comment on his sexism, among other things?
Way to go in proving he’s not sexist, or immature, or (gasp) EMOTIONAL!
Gee, now who’s the other thinky-brain speshul snowflake Great Leader that reminds me of …
Seriously, fuck these guys.
If the mind isn’t the manifestation of the wetware of the brain (with solid and conclusive evidence it is), then what is it?
What Chopralites need to define is the transfer particle/wave for their imaginary mind construct, define how to detect it, then go and detect it. I won’t be holding my breath.
A living brain isn’t grey. It’s pinkish-red. (And it tastes like fresh brain.) The grey color everybody thinks of is that of a dead brain in formaldehyde. If the Chopra is that far off, maybe “brain-dead” is accurate.
“Chopralites” :)
So the brain can’t be the thing sensing other entities because it doesn’t have their physical traits, while the non-brain mind they postulate can, because it has no physical traits?
“He seems to be shocked that he can look at a chocolate bar, and his brain doesn’t turn to chocolate”
Maybe he did and it did. That would explain a lot! (Especially if it was that cheap, nasty chocolate with too much sugar and some horrible fillers in it.)
::wonders apprehensively if Menyambal ever wanders around groaning “Brains! Braaaiiinnnnsssss!”::
Can we just add a footnote about the brain? If it is damaged in one part then in most cases some other part of the brain will pick up its former function and learn to do it as well or almost as well. We can confirm this now with fMRIs, though it was known from observation centuries ago.
There seems to be some evidence that how successful this transfer is depends on the attention paid to making it happen. That would explain why medical best practice shifted from aspirin and bed rest to active and intense rehabilitation from the earliest stage. Though there are techniques to aid the process what we have here is the brain working upon itself to reallocate its functions.
A Google Scholar search on “stroke recovery of function” produces 1.5 million possibles. This one will do for a start – http://stroke.ahajournals.org/content/30/4/749.short – noting that in one case (very small sample) an important element for speech shifted between brain hemispheres in 3 days!
Ugh! When I came out atheist to my Mom’s Protestant side of my family, one of them decided to sign me up for a bunch Jesus-freak mailing lists. My inbox was flooded with Christian bullshit that took hours to track and unsubscribe from. When I confronted them about it and demanded that they stop lest I contact their ISP to report the harassment, an older cousin whom I suspect was the ring leader replied, “we are trying to help you,” and that my efforts to report their abuse would “be laughed out of the courts.” (They aren’t a very bright bunch of semi-to-illiterate redneck hicks.)
Since that episode, I don’t talk to or associate with those fuckers anymore, and hope they all die in agonizing and humiliating ways. The fact we share some genes in common is a technicality.
I recommend PZ do something similar with Harris.
Sheesssh, doesn’t Sam Harris know that you didn’t choose to call him out on his behavior, because neither of you have free will? Why he thinks “he” chose to involve himself in this debacle is beyond me. Clearly he doesn’t “believe” his own nostrums! Why, he should have simply said “well this is what PZ must do. I shall nod knowingly and go on.”
I seem to recall an early scientist (Sir Isaac Newton?) deliberately manipulating the lens of his own eye to see what happened to his vision. Again, another way we can infer our own eyes, despite needing them to see.
Turning something into chocolate just by looking at it?
BEST. SUPERPOWER. EVER.
I could be wrong here, and please correct me if I am, but it’s my understanding that “mind as something non-physical/ non-material/ as spiritual” was the way of (no pun intended) thinking for millennia, with a few exceptions, and that it was only fairly recent that the “mind is what the brain does” mode was adopted. So my question would be, if the former is what Chopra wants to go back to (even though he frames it as something new and novel), what did it ever produce that was worthwhile that could only be explained by that way of approach? As far as I can tell, even in the short time that the latter was adopted there has been exponentially more progress than in the millennia under the former with far better explanations.
I think we can pretty well sum up the arguments of the “mainstream” “name” atheists as such: “I’m smart, dammit! SMART SMART SMART SMART SMART!”
Chopra, et al.:
“They” are wrong, modern geniuses or not. Also, Einstein never said any such thing. Also, even if they were right, this also has no relationship to “qualia” or “qualitativeness.” So packed in there is a non sequitur, what looks like an argument from authority, and at least one falsehood. (Two if you count calling this bullshit “profound,” and we could quibble about some others.)
PZ:
Because supernatural minds are really, really, really, really real. An experience isn’t simply a representation of something else, which implies it may not have all of the properties of that thing — it’s literally what makes everything what it is. All of those properties are supposedly “really there” in your mind, because you’re “really” fucking ignorant about how our thoughts actually do work (which is by representing things, without sharing all of their properties, or sharing in their substance, etc.). This is one of those “assumptions” Chopra and his buddies drone on about, but don’t worry: they think it’s one of the good ones, so it must be.
Best superpower ever?
Only if the chocolate is 70% dark with cranberries and bits of nuts in it.
I, for one, am glad brains don’t taste like chocolate. We have enough trouble getting along with each other.
Well, you can mix it with rum or oranges or almonds or raisins as well.
rq @ 16 and laurentweppe @ 18
I’m down with nuts or peanut butter in chocolate, and covering strawberries or oranges with chocolate, but why would you befoul something as sacred and perfect as chocolate with cranberries? or worse, raisins?!?
(Raisin cookies masquerading as chocolate chip = scourge of our time.)
My mental image of zombies has been forever contaminated by Plants vs. Zombies. Sometimes they say “Brains?” in a high-pitched voice that’s so adorable.
Dark chocolate. Or chocolate biscuits (what USians call cookies).
Or chocolate-coated strawberries.
I’m not greedy, those superpowers will do for me. Doesn’t need to get fancier than that.
Vaiyt – speaking of zombies again, did you see who’s going to play Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? Matt Smith!
Dark-chocolate brains, floating in a vat of banana custard.
So next time someone says to you, “Let me pick your brain”…
I’ll have the one in the third jar from the left please, the one with nuts in it.
Sooooooooooo mere physical brains can’t be the cource of thought, because if brains are the source of thought, and we are thinking about brains, then that would constitute brains knowing about brains. And he has declared that impossible, citing a pithy phrase that applies to eyes rather than brains.
Divide by brain error. Makes perfect sense.
This inability to understand the concept of representation is baffling to me. It’s like demanding that ink or pixels transmute into chocolate in order to express the idea of chocolate. In our brains, we have varying ideas of chocolate stored as brain chemistry and/or electric signals. It’s also commonly inaccurate and/or incomplete since most people think about how our tastebuds signal its detection, how our eyes perceive its color and common shapes, how our sense of touch notes its texture, and so on. We don’t objectively sense its chemical composition, which I would expect to be required for our brains to transmute themselves into chocolate like Chopra demands.
Lofty @ 24:
Hey, that’s mine!!
(Ambiguity intentional…..)
@Holms: it’s particularly bizarre because apparently we must be able to understand brains, so that the idea that the brain can’t understand itself (because that’d be self-referential, as if self-reference is somehow forbidden?) shows that the brain isn’t what does understanding. But… then can our non-brain mind (NBM) understand itself? Yes? How? No? Then why can’t the brain be the thing that does the understanding after all, and be incapable of understanding itself, if self-reference is so awful?
Inevitably, whatever gives rise to consciousness cannot itself be conscious. Saying your mind works because of some insubstantial mind-substance that has mind-ness as an innate property is no more sensible than saying vision works because there’s a homunculus in your eyes that does the seeing for you.
Chopralite. Works two ways: the scatalogical pun, of course, and also “Chopra Lite”, as in the weight of the eponymous intellect.
Just pointing out the obvious. It’s a calling.
“The model is self-referential. The very thing you need to define (the brain) is also the thing doing the defining.” Of course the brain can’t define the brain. Just as humans can’t define humanity.
For the rest, TLDR.
@rq #16
And sea salt.
As a fully paid up member of the Society For (not “of”!) pedants, I can’t help but wonder what a non-wanking circle-jerk would consist of.
“so far Chopra freaks are doing a better job of actually saying something. Which isn’t saying much”
–
No, it says plenty…Just not what you wanted to hear… : (
Yeah. So we look for correlations and causations between qualitative perception and anatomical function. Can someone tell Deepak we have lots of kinds of receptors for different kinds of touch, pain, taste and such? Wait, that hasn’t worked yet has it?
Don’t do it Deepak! You’ll burn your tongue!
I think that it’s rather that we can develop mindware to learn lots of different processes including self-correction processes. Cognitive debiasing can be a learned process. How can we be trapped if we can come up with new processes? Especially as a group?
There might be in interesting tangent here on the difficulty of understanding unintuitive processes outside of our personal experience such as quantum mechanics though. But whenever Deepak starts using the word quantum my brain turns to chocolate.
So, now I’m picturing a YouTube video of a zombie that’s singing “Chocolate brains!” Thanks.
(Just Googled. Of course someone’s already done it. More than one someone, in fact.)
I’m pretty sure he didn’t send them – they came on their own.
FIFY.
I think the anthropology department of your university would love to have access to your spam folder. What a study of tribal behavior it would make.
They believe that the mind is just mind. They do not believe that it arises from non-mind.
F.I.F.Y.
Concerning the OP… there was a time when the strong nuclear force had already been discovered, but how it worked was so mysterious that some people actually wondered if brains, which function by the electromagnetic fore, are capable of understanding it in principle. Then, in the mid-60s, the theory of quantum chromodynamics was developed and, well, explains it all.
The pun. X-)
Nice try, Daz. :-)
I think my brain turned into chocolate trying to work round that piece of truly fatuous logic. Maybe Deepak’s onto something after all!
Adding to the appreciation for the brilliance of “Chopralites”.
Fossilization of putrid crap? Something once easily dispersed – for instance, expose it to sunlight and it dries up and blows away, disappearing – becomes remarkably resistant to outside forces.
For these dingbats who parody themselves yet express outrage at not being taken seriously, that sounds even more apropoe.
@Daz & David Marjanović:
I hope you are laughing with each other, b/c otherwise I’ll feel bad laughing when someone’s feelings are getting hurt.
But they do’t htink anything “gives rise to” consciousness. They think it simply exists. That also means that such homonculus is not similar to their beliefs.
CD #44
Yep, tis definitely of a joking nature. Never fear.
Has no one considered this to be a metaphor!! Chopra thinks this is literal? That the world exists only in our “mind” (not the brain, just the mind)?? Does Chopra not understand the concept of metaphor? And he complains that “the eye cannot see itself”, I suppose he disqualifies mirrors and photographs as only “aids”, he only recognizes “direct” seeing. [ever try looking at your eye in a mirror and your pupil is always in exactly the center? Try looking at your eye in the mirror while looking out the corner of your eye –> impossible. So, Chopra, eyes cannot move! QED!!]
Going off the deep end now: –> Is Chopra going even more woo-woo and saying that reality only exists because one perceives it? That YECs have just as strong a concept of reality as “regular” people? That people who see the Moon as cheese are just as correct as those who see it as rock, and both are wrong cuz what we call the Moon is just the light reflecting off of some Thing out there that is too far to taste/touch/hear?
So what Chopra is saying is that any property of a thing that he can’t determine by chewing on it or smelling it must be literally magic (or religion presumably)?
I suppose that’s a fair enough endpoint if you are that determined to reject science.
I step away from the Internet to breathe in.
Ouch.
I always thought that Chopra’s followers were Chopraphages.
Please note that Sam Harris has just this month published a new book, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion.
People here have speculated that Michael Shermer, having – they think – blown his credibility in the skeptosphere, is now cozying up to various new-agers to open up a new market for his verbiage. If so (I kinda doubt both premise and conclusion), Sam Harris has gotten way out ahead of him. The apparent alliance with Chopra gives us only a hint of the wonders to come from this miraculous transformation.
You mean my search for a table-shaped tape measure has been a waste of time? D:
2kittehs:
Jaffa Cakes!
@PZ
What did Harris do?
Harris seems vewwy vewwy fruwstwated at being caught between you and Chopra. PZ, what did the patronizing, civility-loving Michael Nugent tell you about being nice to people?
twas brillig (stevem) @ 47
Oh, he’s been saying that for years. He often brings quantum mysticism into it, too.
Possible counterargument: If things exist only when perceived, that means things must be popping into and out of existence as one’s perceptive field moves. However, nobody has ever perceived this process, and therefore it doesn’t exist (since only perceived things exist). Since we perceive things as existing, and they can’t be switching from existent to nonexistent, that means they exist all the time. This directly contradicts the initial premise, which must therefore be false. (Proof by contradiction.)
It’s 3am here and I’ve probably overlooked something. Any thoughts?
@Snoof #57:
Yeah. Whatever you do, don’t blink!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images
says it all and this is from the 1930’s
uncle frogy
I don’t really get his problem with this. Yes, everything we know is produced by the brain. Yes, we are trapped inside its processes, though I would rather say we are its processes.
So? That’s just the human condition, nothing Chopra offers can change that.
I just recently watched Willy Wonka (with Gene Wilder), and Chopra’s concept of the brain seems to borrow from Wonka-vision, with what the camera as what he thinks is the brain and the monitor as the mind. They even use it to transmit an actual chocolate bar.
Completely wrong, as PZ explains in the OP. You are not your brain, or your brain processes, nor trapped in either, because your brain is in continual interaction with the rest of your body and the outside world (which includes other people and their brains, as well as the institutions and technologies of science and other forms of rational enquiry). Your brain is necessary to your experiences, sense of self, and understanding of the world and itself, but certainly not sufficient.
1. The model is self-referential. The very thing you need to define (the brain) is also the thing doing the defining.
Wow, I can’t wait to show him the definition of the word “dictionary” in a dictionary, his head will explode!
Well either that, or he’ll conclude that dictionaries must have souls.
As for the rest, it really does seem like he doesn’t just not have a theory of representation; he has no concept of representation whatsoever. That’s a pretty fundamental part of any theory of mind, and if you don’t have it, you really shouldn’t be in the philosophy business at all.
Chopra is a posturing charlatan. Sam Harris has begun an authentic enquiry, and could certainly help some of you guys. All this stuff about brains and qualia is obscuring the (too) simple truth which anyone can discover for themselves, directly.
Consider how you know that you’re conscious, not intellectually but experientially: can there be any doubt? Now consider your knowledge about the external world, obtained through your senses: can this be doubted? Obviously the latter might be illusory, at least in some aspects: what you experience is never 100% reliable, but the fact that you are experiencing is utterly certain. How strange. So all suggestions that consciousness is dependent upon sensory experience (or its physical infrastructure) must explain this contradiction: how does something which cannot be trusted give rise to absolute certainty?
Clearly this certainty about your own consciousness must come from a different source to that which informs your other knowledge. Scientific rationalists love to ridicule “other ways of knowing”, but their conclusions are implicitly embedded in their methodology. The comical attempts of philosophers like Daniel Dennett to prove consciousness to be imaginary are transparently futile to any intelligent person, even a small child. So “intelligent” here implies a willingness to look within when investigating the nature of reality; and the real surprise is that hardly anyone does.
Not a problem. You don’t, and won’t, ever have absolute certainty. That is for deities alone. DUH. Good enough works for evolution, and that is the case.
Dennett does not attempt to prove that consciousness is imaginary, he disputes that certain supposedly primary features of experience, like so-called qualia, are meaningful ways to understand consciousness. The “comical attempts” are the crude strawmen constructed by his critics, who seem nearly pathological in their insistence on giving his work the least charitable reading possible.
@Vijen:
I know, right? Like when I had an ear infection and my sense of balance was **completely** screwed. I couldn’t trust my body to know where it’s own center of gravity lay.
And yet I was completely certain that I fell on my ass.
…AND I was completely certain that the infection had reached my inner ear.
……AND AND I was completely certain that lying in bed and asking for help was less risky than getting up to cook food for myself!
………AND AND AND I was completely certain that I still HAD a center of balance, even though I couldn’t reliably identify it!
Holy cannibal crackers, batman! I just realized that because I lost my balance, but not my certainty that I still had a center of gravity…
…I MUST BE GOD!
Thanks, Vijen! I would never have had the insight into my own divinity without your contribution to this thread.
I hope in future years, someone will explain this contradiction: how does a commenter spouting crap which cannot be trusted give rise to an absolutely certain divinity?
Vijen:
Well…the fluffy pink beings inhabiting the planet orbiting 70 Virginus have let me know that you’re full of shit. That’s good enough for me!
Prince only wants to see you thinking with that chocolate brain… Chocolate brains, chocolate brains…
Wait, wait. Chopra thinks it’s somehow impossible for an organic brain to know about brains, but he implicitly has not problem with a nonmaterial mind knowing about minds? Why is the former somehow impossible but the latter is perfectly okay?
Lofty
Abby someone … Abby Normal.
Iyéska
Arnott’s Chocolate Monte!
::hurries out to check supply in fridge::
Nick Gotts
Completely wrong, as PZ explains in the OP. You are not your brain, or your brain processes, nor trapped in either, because your brain is in continual interaction with
the rest of your body and the outside world (which includes other people and their brains, as well as the institutions and technologies of science and other forms of rational enquiry)chocolate.FTFY
@davek23
Keyboard. I need a new one.
I wonder how this rates on the Chopra scale?
No, no, pedantry is fun :-)
Well, no. :-| Nothing is ever absolutely certain in a world where it’s not even possible to disprove solipsism.
Advaita, man. Only the Sith think in absolutes.
Vijen
You are the expert on that subject.
I highly doubt that Sam Harris is helpful on any subject. Sorry.
Classic Vijen word games. If what you are “experiencing” isn’t actually there, then no, you aren’t really experiencing it!
There is no absolute certainty. Well, that “contradiction” was easy to resolve! I don’t think you are bringing the biggest puzzles in the realm of mind and consciousness, honestly.
That’s great. “Other ways of knowing” have NO methodology. Their conclusions are pretty much just outright assumed. “Implicitly embedded in their methodology” is quite a bit better than that, from my perspective.
First off, you just irreparably damaged my irony meter.
Second, you praise Sam Harris and then flat out dismiss Dan Dennett? That’s….curious.
Intelligent also implies a willingness to look outside of yourself and actually being willing to look at other people, the world itself, other people’s ideas, and to consider other perspectives while seeing how they mesh with logic and the evidence you actually have. The real surprise is that you think you are the only True Intelligence in the room for looking within when that is ALL you do. You spend so much time looking in yourself, self-absorbed armchair theorist that you are, that you have spent next to no time actually trying to look at shit in the real world. Including figuring out what other people think, feel, and experience, and WHY.
Well said. With a lot of woo psychobabble going on about one’s inner self, a lot of them utterly neglect their outer self and how they relate to the people around them. The common result is arrogance born of navel gazing and impenetrable layers of fallacious rationalizations to close themselves off from contradictory evidence.
2kittehs@71,
Well yes, that too!
True, but he when it comes to posturing charlatans, Osho was in a class of his own.
Yawn, still not any peer reviewed scientific literature from Vijen. Back to the pretend it is hushfiled for utter and total inanity.
The description of that video:
Sure, the “assumption” that consciousness is dependent on the body. Sure.
Fucking projection level is through the roof.
@anteprepro: when you find your way out of those quotes, we can begin to have a conversation.
“Rabia el Adawiya is one of the rarest women in the whole human history…One evening people saw her searching for something on the street in front of her hut. They gathered together — the poor old woman was searching for something. They asked, ‘What is the matter? What are you searching for?’ And she said, ‘I have lost my needle.’ So they also started helping.
“Then somebody asked, ‘Rabia, the street is big and night is just descending and soon there will be no light and a needle is such a small thing — unless you tell us exactly where it has fallen it will be difficult to find…She said, ‘The needle has fallen inside my house.’
“They said, ‘Then have you gone mad? If the needle has fallen inside the house why are you searching here?’ And she said, ‘Because the light is here. Inside the house there is no light.’ Somebody said, ‘Even if the light is here, how can we find the needle if it has not been lost here? The right way would be to bring light inside the house so you can find the needle.’
“And Rabia laughed, ‘You are such clever people about small things. When are you going to use your intelligence for your inner life? I have seen you all searching outside and I know perfectly well, I know from my own experience that that which you are searching for is lost within. The bliss that you are searching for, you have lost within — and you are searching outside. And your logic is that because your eyes can see easily outside, and your hands can grope easily outside, because the light is outside, that’s why you are searching outside.
“‘If you are really intelligent,’ Rabia said, ‘then use your intelligence. why are you searching for bliss in the outside world? Have you lost it there?’ They stood dumbfounded and Rabia disappeared into her house.”
(Osho, 1977)
“Attention Walgreens shoppers, we’re running a spiritual nonsense special on aisle #82.”
From the video:
“Through thought, we know something called mind, and through sense perception, we know something called matter. Conception and perception.”
That makes it sound like you can perceive your own mind, like thought is a kind of perception, like conception is just perception directed inwards.
That’s manifestly not how the real world works. You can’t watch your own mind; it doesn’t come with a progress bar that you could see. You make your decisions before you become aware of them – you can watch that in other people, perceive it by the intermediary of an MRI scanner (NMR as the chemists call it), but you can’t feel it happen to yourself.
Later, the claim is made that nobody has experienced a limit to their consciousness. What does that even mean? What would a limitless consciousness be like?
A lot is made of the point that we don’t know each other’s perception (in full detail anyway – that part seems to get swept under the rug). Why jump from that to “we can’t know anything about the outside world ever”? That plainly doesn’t follow. And that’s before we even start quining qualia.
“But the you that are having them [your thoughts, experiences, perceptions], how do we know that that isn’t shared?” Well. Is there any evidence that it’s shared? Is there any reason at all to think it’s shared? Is it more parsimonious to think that it’s shared than that it’s not?
The stuff about “more existence” is just nonsense. It’s a silly word game, not exactly science theory – which he claims it is by claiming it’s a fundamental assumption “of our culture”. Nobody believes existence or awareness is chopped to pieces and the pieces dealt out to objects or brains – that’s just a strawman; it’s a word game that wouldn’t make any sense. Spira’s just playing with the meanings of “have” and the grammatical behavior of uncountable nouns, and thinks he’s discovered something about reality at large instead of just about language.
And then he throws “I think, therefore I am” (in different words) into his language game and believes he’s explaining some great insight.
Then he drones on about how “you can’t imagine” anything that would divide your awareness. It’s of course possible to divide one person’s awareness: with a scalpel. That turned people into two persons each, one mind into two, each of them not knowing what the other was doing. Follow that link, Vijen, and let it sink in: The conclusions of the video follow logically from its premises, and the premises happen to be wrong. The conclusions are contingent on not knowing something. Spira is making a giant argument from ignorance.
However, the conclusion that awareness must have come before everything else because you only experience stuff when you’re aware – that does not follow unless there’s a premise that literally everything that has ever happened was an experience, and that premise is neither stated in the video nor at all defensible. Here we have a leap of faith.
“The thought arises inside awareness, yes?” No. As mentioned above, your thoughts form before you become aware of them.
“I’m just talking experience, I’m not talking philosophy, yeah?” No. Not remotely. Spira’s talking pure philosophy – he’s talking epistemology and ontology. Too bad that he hasn’t even noticed he’s conflating epistemology with ontology. He seems to be sort of saying that we should equate them, but he’s not clear about it, and he doesn’t present a reason for why we should equate them; “because that’s our experience” is not a sufficient reason, because first we need a reason why our experience couldn’t simply be wrong.
Then he waffles around “ceci n’est pas une pipe” and “Jack Slater IV” without using those words or any clear ones… again believing he’s explaining some great insight.
Rupert Spira has tried to come up with a complete epistemology from scratch. Unsurprisingly, he hasn’t gotten as far as the current state of philosophy has.
Y’know, if you’d stopped there, it would have a been a passably amusing joke.
*singing*
Some stay dry but others feel the pain, chocolate brain!