He came to my workplace a few months ago to hand out his book and give a motivational talk. He was described on the event flyers as “one of today’s leading philosophers.”

I almost choked when I saw it. Philosophy is RIGOROUS and EXACTING. Chopra is almost the antithesis of a philosopher.

I quote

“The basic metaphysical issue that lies at the root of any system of philosophy [is] the primacy of existence or the primacy of consciousness.

The source of this reversal is the inability or unwillingness fully to grasp the difference between one’s inner state and the outer world, i.e., between the perceiver and the perceived (thus blending consciousness and existence into one indeterminate package-deal). This crucial distinction is not given to man automatically; it has to be learned. It is implicit in any awareness, but it has to be grasped conceptually and held as an absolute.”

My only problem was that I felt genuinely sorry for your having to read this garbage in order to present us with such a masterly dissection of it :=)

And I have a new favorite term: “magical thinking”.

I can see that being useful in a truly vast number of contexts.

If Chopra and his buddies can’t be clear and understandable the problem is not likely to be that they can’t express their complex ideas. The likeliest explanation is that if the words can’t followed, the ideas are wrong.

Beliefs are simply not doing me any good. Please don’t twist my words: I have a long list of ethics more complex than quantum mechanics.

I now live in the present, understand the past, and experiment with the future. I trust other humans but don’t “believe” in them. “Trivial” things like how to cross-validate experiments I have developed myself. It is only in last couple of years statisticians have started realizing reality.

In all facets of life I meet many humans who focus more on being like other humans, than finding out what “being” means. But I also nowadays see more and more humans who are trying to find out what “being” is. What surprised me years ago is the smallness of the correlation between human approach to thinking and their CV. Now, I understand why, but I still don’t understand why humans are seemingly uninterested in applying a tiny change to fix that problem. Would it be that humans are simply afraid of betraying the beliefs of their ancestors?

Why can’t Skeptical Societies in the US be skeptical about themselves? This is how a small rotten country in the north called Denmark works. And yes, we are not proud about our immigration policy.

Sure, Chopra is BS’ing, but why doesn’t mainstream medicine take a skeptical look in the mirror? Instead of wasting effort making useless lists of people like Chopra that one shouldn’t listen to.

I used to ask: Why do medical people stop talking to non experts when vitamine D and oxytocin/vasopressin are mentioned? When I got an answer it would often be something like “We, the experts, are working on it and we have the experience!” This is what I call a “para-normal” answer. The experts have now been working more than 50 years on those two topics. Could it be that the answer is simply too simple and therefore embarrasing? And I am definitely not talking about para-normal answers. I think I do know a large part of the rather important answers to those two interesting topics and they are correlated, benign and slightly embarrasing. I think that you will know them as well within something like 18 months even if you don’t ask. And no, I cannot cross-validate “18 months” because that would violate causality and be “para-normal”. One can only cross-validate scientific methods, not data nor conclusions.

The answers will quickly be verified using novel technologies like double-fMRI and 2-dimensional polarized near-infrared Raman spectroscopy. The most embarrasing about the answers will be that already in 1930′s humanity had both the technology and the theories to give the answers. But that is probably what life is about: Answers tend to come when they are needed.