From Tariq Moosa (via Matthew Cobb and Marc Abrahams), who labeled this “still the stupidest Tweet I’ve ever seen”:
I still have no idea what Chopra is talking about. It sure doesn’t qualify as a deepity, for it makes no sense on even a superficial reading.
Let me know what you think the Woomeister is trying to say. It sounds vaguely Ray Comfort-ish.
But where’s the crocoduck? There’s gotta be a crockoduck in there somewhere…
The first sentence is pure woo. But the second one makes sense. You eat things, digest them, they become part of you. Except for the bits that keep on moving through the system and drop in the toilet, of course.
Profound, eh?
Most of it moves through you.
I never did eat a chicken and a banana together – Maybe Chopra is on to something with that…
I think you might find a Jamaican recipe for chicken and plantains without much trouble if you’re so inclined.
b&
I think you might find a Jamaican recipe for chicken and plantains
The Nigerian dish Ground Nut Stew (chicken, peanuts, peanut butter, yams, etc.) typically had, when my mum used to cook it, dessicated coconut and sliced banana as mandatory sides. The banana and chicken go wonderfully together.
Hm. Starting to get hungry . . .
Pollo Saltado! Pretty common in Cuban an Peruvian. Absolutely delicious too.
It’s quite good. In fact, if you chicken and banana together, you get chicken that has appeal.
And I thought it was chicken with banana stuffing. How fowl of me.
Damn. I left out “eat”.
‘sokay – was funnier without ‘eat’ (like a new dance step?)
No worries – it still made a helluva lot more sense than Chopra !
As in “I accidentally a chicken and banana”?
LOL good one!
Yeah, this is what I came to say. I think this must be what he was getting at. I don’t know why he thinks that’s cosmically significant or profound, of course…
I always say my goal in life is to become bear shit, so yeah, I get it. I want to be one with the bear.
To hear Chopeypoo tell it , you will have evolved into the bear. Because of consciousness. Or something.
You forgot QUANTUM! Tsk, tsk! 🙂
You are what you eat. Poor old Deepak has clearly chowed down on a few %^&* sandwiches
Didn’t Chopra also once say that when we look at that moon that is only our perception & if we didn’t perceive it, the moon wouldn’t exist?
Chopra ‘s misunderstanding of QM leads him to think that consciousness is essential for collapsing the wave function. So, untill we look, the moon ain’t there.
Mad as a hatter.
That’s a low blow. I’ve never met an hatter as mad as Chopra….
b&
Oh, this one’s easy.
The translation?
“Buy my book and hire me to ‘inspire’ audiences by speaking at your next event!”
Incidentally, that’s what everything else he ever says or writes translates to, in case you were wondering.
b&
But I wonder…does he actually believe in the crap he dishes out?
Hard to tell. Doublethink is weird like that. People can phase in and out of belief over periods ranging from minutes to decades, depending on the person and the situation.
In Deepak’s case, it’s likely he had some sort of a transcendent experience either spontaneously or with the assistance of mind-altering substances, and he places a great deal of significance in it, that it somehow represents a glimpse into a deeper, hidden reality.
That’s where Sam Harris can be so helpful; he’s had those same experiences, but he managed to (mostly) retain his sanity.
b&
I get the impression that Chopra just uses a buzz phrase generator.
It means he has finally cracked.
I think it’s to do with reincarnation. You know: “I was a banana in a previous lifetime.”
Previous?
b&
Makes sense to me. Perhaps you speak a different branch of English — mine’s UK.
Sorry — I was going for the cheap shot and suggesting that he’s a banana in this incarnation, too.
b&
I was going for the cheap shot and suggesting that he’s a banana in this incarnation
Ah! Apologies. I thought it was a UK/US English thing. I’m kind of sensitive on this front since I’ve recently experienced the Editor From Hell, who kept telling me that my accredited US usages (See! Webster’s Collegiate!) were in fact ridiculously British.
For what it’s worth, except for pure reportage — and often even then — I always prefer when authors write in their own voice rather than mechanistically according to some stylistic authority. If you’re a Brit writing for an American audience, go ahead and write about how the bloke at the garage laughed at the way you stowed a jug of petrol in the boot of your lorry. We’ll figure it out just fine — we’re not complete idiots, you know!
b&
I would tend to agree with you, and more and more publishers seem to do so too: back in the day, when UK novels were published over here in the US, someone used to sit down and Americanize them (sometimes with hilarious results for us Brits). But nowadays most of the US editions I read of UK novels just leave them the way they are. (It’s especially noticeable among the Scandinavian thrillers, almost all of whose translations appear to have been done in the UK.)
Good one Ben!
Sorry to differ but I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about if he said something about putting “a jug of petrol (gasoline) in the boot (trunk) or your lorry (truck). A lorry doesn’t have a boot; a motor-car has one.
And every time your corpse rots and you are eaten by a fungus, you transform into a mushroom… not seeing the consciousness here.
He believes bacteria are conscious. In fact, he even believes atoms are conscious. I kid you not.
I think atoms are conscious… to a greater degree that that to which they have free will. 🙂
But seriously now: Whatever absorbs and emits radiation also processes information in between, so its internal states encode a set of perceptions and partly determine a set of actions. Can any human or cat claim to do more (qualitatively speaking)?
Of course the number of channels of input and output varies considerably, depending on how big a boundary you arbitrarily impose around an arbitrary centre to define your information processor…
So, just chickens and bananas? What about all our other food?
Chicken and banana is reincarnated human without exception. Other stuff: sometimes, sometimes not.
I take it all back. I got so involved trying to figure out a sensible reply as to why two food items are mentioned but no others I forgot Deepity C specifically referred to evolution. He’s Indian, but I don’t think he’s Hindu, and chicken and reincarnation fit in the same set but banana does not. So I am way off with my smart aleck remark and probably out of line to boot. Sorry.
So thats why the chicken crossed the road. To get killed so it could be eaten so it could be reincarnated as a human being to be asked about chickens crossing the road, and have no idea why the chicken crossed the road. BRILLIANT!
You forgot the banana.
The chicken slipped on the banana
Erm…you clearly don’t know chickens. I guarantee you that no chicken in the entire history of chickendom has ever had a thought even a minuscule fraction of a tiny percentage as sophisticated as that. Chickens are doing good if they can figure out how to not get stepped on during feeding time….
b&
Not so! Chickens are wonderful complex animals with richly dramatic lives, at least if they are allowed to roam around. I worked on the ancestors of chickens, jungle fowl, for my postdoc, and completely changed my mind about them. OK, they are not cats. But still.
Oh, I know. Mom’s got a half dozen hens that have free reign in my parents’s back yard.
But they’re still doing good to not get stepped on when you bring out a bowl of peanuts or popcorn or whatever for them to snack on. By either the human bringing out the snack or the other birds.
b&
The intense inanity of that statement is wondrous to behold. An old hippy adage was that you are what you eat.
How about some Deepak Chopra evolutionary genetics:
What to you get when you cross and abalone
with a crocodile, an abacrock or a crockabalone?
+2
I’m going to guess that he means using our consciousness to choose to eat a particular thing causes it to “evolve” into something else after it is eaten. Wouldn’t want to stake any money on it though.
So when you eat a banana and then a mosquito sucks your blood and then a bat eats the mosquito and an owl eats the bat and then pukes up an owl pellet, just what is the driver of evolution?
Puked up Pellets of Fur and Bone are the Driver of Evolution!
That makes as much or more sense, actually.
That’s a lot of consciousness!
Quantum Chopra strikes again! The chicken and bananas are wasted on Deepak Chopra because after getting transformed, all that comes out of him is shit from one end and precious manure from the other.
That reminds me though to watch his “debate” with Dawkins and with Sam Harris. That’ll be good entertainment for the evening.
Why do you think he is called Deep Pack?
I thought it was spelt “Deep Hack”…
It’s ‘Deep Kak’
Derp-ak…
Why did consciousness drive evolution into a wall so many times? A lot of extinct species roadkill throughout the history of life.
Yes! I think I know exactly what he means. He’s simply saying, “I’m batshit, freakin’ crazy and I didn’t take my meds this morning but this tweet should get me a spot on WEIT this afternoon.
I interpret that as: “I do not understand how evolution works. The Universe is all made of the same stuff… and I have a completely different definition of ‘Consciousness’ to the rest of the English-speaking world.” Or something like that.
I think he is referring to the Hindu and the Buddhist teachings that when one eats the flesh of an animal (or fruit or vegetable), the body through digestion and assimilation transforms it into human cells, and the essence of the animal (or fruit or vegetable) merges with the eater’s essence and becomes part of that essence (or soul, or spirit), thus raising the animal (or fruit or vegetable) to a higher level of existence. He expresses it rather badly, though.
By the same token, logically, that part of the animal (or fruit or vegetable) which is not assimilated but is excreted will lower the animal (or fruit or vegetable) to the level of feces… 😉
This is the “theory” behind the Eucharist too, andother forms of cannibalism
Hooray.
No-one else has said it yet so here goes: “NOT EVEN WRONG”.
Honestly, I find the guy hilarious.
Just point and laugh is the only way to handle idiots like him.
C’mon dude… Give the man a chance before ridiculing him… I know he usually talks rubbish but this might be a good viewpoint… What he means that the energy, the cells, all organic matter moves from ur banana or chicken to you and from you to the decomposers and so on… That kinda blurs the definition of an individual acc to the modern view of “human as a set of synchronized molecules”. The consciousness is the only “thing” that really defines who u r cos the molecules moving from one org to another… Now, if evolution and selection operate at the level of an individual, its really the “consciousness” which is being acted upon…
His statement is absolutely meaningless. Consciousness does not drive evolution. And while the second sentence is technically accurate, it is a complete non-sequitur to the first sentence.
Digestion is not a system for transferring consciousness.
Energy is not consciousness, otherwise lightbulbs are a seriously abused species.
He could claim that consciousness drives artificial selection if he really wanted to. But human consciousness, not cosmic consciousness.
He says that science doesn’t know everything and therefore that he could be right that the universe and atoms are conscious.
Perhaps we could have a collection to buy him a dictionary so he could look up the difference between “possible” and “probable”.
It also reminds me that Dara O’Briain’s excellent show where he pointed out that “just because science doesn’t know everything doesn’t mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairytale most appeals to you”.
“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDYba0m6ztE”
If his point is that the specific atoms that makeup our bodies are constantly moving in/out of our body then it’s true but trivial. What makes “us” is not the specific atoms at a given point of time but the organization of the specific types of atoms. Over the course of time all the carbon atoms in my body may get replaced by other carbon atoms (say from a banana or chicken I have eaten) but as long as the organization of those atoms remains stable or quasi-stable, “I” exist. So, no! The flow of atoms through our bodies doesn’t blur the definition of an individual.
The other problem is that you are putting “consciousness” into one category and “energy and matter” into another. There is just no evidence for that. Based on all the evidence so far, mind/consciousness is completely grounded in matter/energy. The specific organization of neurons in my brain makes who “I” (the self, consciousness etc.) am.
Or put in other words:
brain:mind :: gut:digestion
Deepak Chopra is a quantum genius and all of the rest of you are cosmically jealous. It really gripes you, ALL OF YOU (!!!) that the Brilliant Chopra eschews (look it up) cats and cowboy boots.
In protest of your filistineistic (look it up!) attitudes, I’m going to cook a banana curry and eat it up all myself.
So, there.
may your banana-consciousness be with you
Isn’t he a vegetarian? That would explain why he has cauliflower for a brain
A cynical person might look at this and think, “Oh, here he goes again, misappropriating a scientific term to make himself sound pithy and smart.” But he has brought a whole new meaning to the term “evolution.” Plainly this applies exclusively to chickens and bananas. The banana represents our kinship with the lesser primates, the chicken our origins in the dinosaurs. Since we cannot (or at least we Westerners will not) consume monkeys, and since there are no actual dinosaurs around for us to eat, humans have the sacred responsibility of showing our gratitude to our forebears by consuming the banana and the chicken. Is it merely symbolic? Is it an actual ingredient of literal evolution? It doesn’t matter! The important thing is that we can consume their essence in order to cause “evolution,” which is to say we survive to generate feces – which Deepak then accumulates and sells to the credulous as wisdom. The substantial portion of humanity that subsists on a chicken- and banana-free diet is unable to participate in evolution. They also cannot buy Deepak’s books! This is not a coincidence!
I think Chopra is saying that when we eat food, in this case chickens and bananas, we convert them into energy to fuel our bodies. What in the name of Beethoven’s balls that has to do with evolution I have no idea. Chopra is similar to Karen Armstrong I think. They both spew out meaningless drivel that has a patina of profundity. Perhaps they should get married? The combined might of their BS could create a black hole of banality, a singularity of stupidity, perhaps even a density of dumb, that could potentially swallow up the entire solar system!
Here I thought the process whereby my body uses consumed organic matter as fuel or construction material was called “metabolism”. But I learn from Chopra that this is actually evolution.
Boy did I have those two terms mixed up.
Oy, woo!
Never mind that eating evolved long before species with consciousness, making the “not even wrong” first part not segueing into something argumentative.
Also, “Cosmic Consciousness”? The man has an audience that must be devoid of consciousness to listen to that crap.
I assume Chopak has a minimum level of consciousness, since he manages to swindle his audience out of money. Else I would say he was devoid of much of what characterizes consciousness too…
Perhaps we have overlooked a possibility: Deepak is channeling Colonel Chiquita Sanders, the inventor of the Go-Cup, the most highly evolved fast-food container!
The first sentence is pure B.S. The second sentence descibes what we all know, which is you are what you eat.
How he sees some correlation there, between sentence 1 and 2 is beyond my understanding. I guess there is some sort of quantum quantum-ness there I don’t see, because the quantum is in the way.
A Deepity according to Dennett is a statement that has two interpretations: a literal one that is trivially true, and a metaphirical one that is wrong. Chopra just didn’t make the effort to combine the two in one statement
The Deepak quote generator: (http://www.wisdomofchopra.com/)
Ha! I was scrolling down to see if anyone had posted the Deepak generator. That thing is awesome!
It’s effin hilarious….I keep cracking up every two seconds. 😀
“Interdependence is inherent in dimensionless timelessness”.
Yeah, I was looking to see if anyone had already posted it. My theory is that he’s just gotten lazy and begun using his own quote generator for tw**ts.
I wonder whether whatever is going on in his head is really much different from the algorithm used by the generator anyway.
Now that’s actually a fascinating thought. You’ve proposed something of a reverse Turing test for Chopra — and Chopra clearly fails!
b&
Deepak is a Chalmers Zombie. Ironic that he talks so much of consciousness.
Ok, after the third or fourth random quote my eys started crossing and I felt a headache coming on. I had to stop.
Still on my 1st cup of coffee this morn, It’s probably just me…
“Awareness is the path to descriptions of space time events”.
It’s Chopra on the Cobra; Deepak on the Prozac. In the spirit of the sixties, a love-child synthesis of Edward Lear and Wittgenstein; proof of syntactical sense and practical nonsense.
The man’s a genius. It write a lot of sentence to takes a meaningless practise, especially without a end at the full-stop
Slaínte (Irish for £10,000 fees for me talk b*ll*cks at your New Age Festival).
Are there people who actually follow this *? (I was going to write loon, but that would be an affront to loons.)
I can honestly say that if it wasn’t for WEIT, I never would have heard of this guy. Is this a benefit of not having cable and/or being happier running a chainsaw than tw**ting?
I can honestly say that if it wasn’t for WEIT, I never would have heard of this guy
You lucky person. I read some of his books in the name of research:
Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine (1989)
Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old (1993)
Life After Death: The Burden of Proof (2006)
I’m still suffering PCSD.
Many years ago, I made the mistake of buying Quantum Healing, on someone’s recommendation. I couldn’t finish it.
Other delights involved in that particular project were:
Lépine, François: Quantum Buddhism: Mahajrya Bodhana Sutra/Teachings on Awakening to the Great Field, F. Lépine Publishing, St-Raymond, Quebec, 2008
O’Murchu, Diarmuid: Quantum Theology: Spiritual Implications of the New Physics, Crossroad, New York, 1997
At Univ of Ariz, there is a psych class taught by a “Dr” on “religion and spirituality” and his book is forwarded by this guy. His book, as well as the class were somehow both entertaining and hard to sit through, also full of quantum word soup references to “science”. (Tuition money well spent…NOT!)
You’ve gotta be shitting me. “The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old”? Seriously.
Oooh…if that one was published 20 years ago, seems all we have to do is see if Chopra looks 20 years older than he did when he wrote the book. How much do you want to bet that he does?
b&
The Deepak in this universe may be getting older, but…
There’s one sure way he can stop getting older …
/@ | Barcelona
…and I’m sure he has special quantum shackras for sale to help embody your consciousness after you emulate the pollo saltado!
b&
Quantum shakras sound like an instrument in a mariachi band.
Either that, or it is a mariachi garage band….
b&
The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old is to eat a banana. Or a chicken.
I so keep wanting to quote The Princess Bride at that man….
b&
I too am happy to say I know very little about Deepak, but WEIT has pointed out far too many occasions where the guy is spouting nonsense about a field I definitely know a lot more than he does…namely physics.
I find him humorous…demented, but I can’t help thinking he is going to have a heart attack arguing his points about peace and tranquility, and inner whatever-ness.
I think, from time to time, that we would be better of if particular people were living on welfare, rather than working for a living.
Fantastico!
Thanks for laughs. It’s so true though.
I think His Royal Deep-hak-ness might have been on LSD whilst watching the latest transformer movie and having snacks. His assistants should fix a new embarrassment saving protocol for him… no communications devices until he comes down from his consciousness melding with the universe thingy.
“It sure doesn’t qualify as a deepity, for it makes no sense on even a superficial reading.”
That’s right. Perhaps we need a new word, for something that is likely to have been intended to be profound but that makes no sense at any level. Deepakity?
+1
b&
Sounds like something from “Attack of the Crab Monsters”, where the imbibed victims become part of a collective(crab)mind.
He clearly got the joke wrong… it’s supposed to be about a snake, a cookie and a banana.
Ooops… I meant a *tapeworm* and a cookie and a banana.
Surely someone else out there knows this joke?
It was Mars bars in the version I heard. Long ago.
/@ | Barcelona
🙂
He must be joking. It is the only reasonable explanation. Funny guy. I find him fantastically amusing.
Oh, he’s laughing all right.
…all the way to the bank….
b&
So what are we telling the universe when we poop out what is left of the chicken & banana ?
Not sure Deepak would have any idea, but a trained medical practitioner or physiologist could tell you a lot.
Well, I do know that some wildlife biologists do spend their time collecting and analyzing scat, but that’s because you can learn something from it.
Deepak, not so much.
Brilliant! You can learn more from crap than from Chopra.
It’s not the dumbest thing he’s said…
How van you tell?
Deepak occasionally desends from deepity territory into full-blown absurdity, such as claiming to have caused an earthquake through meditation.
I have a theory – the Fridge Magnet Theory.
Woosters write all the words and phrases that pull in the suckers onto plain fridge magnets. Then every day they choose at random a word from list A, a connecting phrase from list B, and another word from list C.
Sometimes woosters get confused… and pick two words from the same list. Or from their partners shopping list, or art work from kindergarten.
‘The Universe’ ‘is’ ‘Quantum’ ‘Bananas’. List A, list B, list C, shopping list.
Bertie Wooster?!
#CosmicBollocks
Dude’s baked.
That would explain a lot, but if you watch his debate with Dawkins, he’s clearly not baked…way too angry, aggressive, and uptight.
Clearly, DC is saying evolution is like a car, and that we are the driver. It seems, however, that he is confused about which came first, the chicken or the banana, which leads to an existential crisis regarding the crossing of a road along which we are driving. Obviously, the answer is
Why did the chicken slip on a banana peel while crossing the road?
Maybe we could wordsmith this into something that makes sense. How about “Competition is the driver of evolution….”
Found on Goodreads:
“The brain, which operates on electromagnetic impulses, is as much an activity of the universe as are the electromagnetic storms in the atmosphere or on a distant star. Therefore science is one form of electromagnetism that spends it time studying another form…science is god explaining god through a human nervous system…isn’t spirituality the same thing?”
― Deepak Chopra
Any time spent trying to figure out what woomeisters like Chopra really mean is time wasted (or better spent in your local pub with a pint of ale).
I think he meant to use the hashtag #ComicConsciousness 😀
Blimey. I’ve just wasted 1 hour of my life watching Chopra debating with Dawkins on the Mexican (?) Dangerous Ideas video. What strikes you is how dishonest his oral presentation is compared to the laughable written tweet above.
And how pre-materialistic and metaphysical he is. He reminds me a lot of pre-Schweitzer, Victorian editors of early Christian writings. They all use the same type of language.
He and they use many Latinate adjectives and abstract nouns: sublime, creativity, transcendent, beauty, imagination, consciousness, etc. Particularly attractive to his Spanish-speaking (hispanophone?) audience. And especially useful if you want to appear deep, or, as Deepak would say, profound. In foreign language teaching, it’s called ‘going home’; the solace and comfort of the cognate, or directly translatable syntactical structure.
Watching that video, I can’t believe that a materialist like Marx wouldn’t have immediately recognised the importance of Darwin’s materialist conception and confirmation of nature’s workings; despite what I have been told that Marx, contrary to the popular story, did not write to Darwin to congratulate him on the publication of ‘The Origin…’.
Slaínte.
Evolution drives consciousness.
Every time you eat a chicken or banana it transforms into a human.
That wouldn’t be wrong, although it’s still a weird conjunction. Even if that’s what he meant, which he didn’t, he would still be one weird banana eater.
Chopra’s claims for scientific support for his beliefs stem from Hameroff-Penrose, I believe. I’ve been reading up on their ideas recently as they have a new paper out. I came across one paper by Hameroff and Tuszynski published by SPIE May, 2004, with some interesting content.
“Innumerable small, randomly chosen steps of incremental changes in proteins to form tubulin, and tubulin to form
microtubules, and microtubules to form centrioles, cilia and flagella would seem to offer no advantages “along the way”.
Consequently centrioles, cilia and flagella have been suggested as examples of “intelligent design”. Designed by what,
or by whom? This question leads some to “Creationism”. But there is also the view that intelligent design reflects the
type of Platonic information embedded in the Planck scale suggested by Roger Penrose. If so, then via quantum states living systems are in touch with a deeper reality.”
So Hameroff seems to think there is a problem for evolution which which needs a non-Darwinian fix. Quantum information in the fabric of the universe is the hypothesis.
So here perhaps is a possible source of Chopra’s inane tweet.
The paper is called:
Quantum states in proteins and protein assemblies: The essence of life?
Lawrence Krauss went after Hameroff in the Beyond Belief conference 2006, viewable on youtube.
Slaínte.