When Quantum goes Woo.

[travric]

Re:"Chopra has a holistic approach to science. His view is that to understand science in its totality you have to account for consciousness. The difficulty and frustration that Dawkins and many other scientists have, as is made clear here, is that Chopra constantly switches between metaphors and scales. One minute he is talking about biological organisms, the next he is talking about the universe, the next he is talking about quantum particles. In a nutshell, basically to him, it's all the same thing.
Chopra accuses Dawkins (and science in general) of having a very fragmented approach, which of course is true. We need specialised experts in each of the scientific fields - that's how we continue our scientific endeavor"


Very interesting and fascinating discussion. In listening to Chopra though I thought he was pretty eloquent in his conceptual views on experience in our universe and thought Dawkins simply did not have a case as to Chopra's misuse of language or confounding terms. He appeared to be speaking understandable English.

We saw that Dawkins did not believe an atom had 'awareness' nor the universe being sentient. Chopra did remarking that in the case of atoms they did indeed respond to their environments. Thought he had a case there with QM. Why else would we see them apparently changing their behavior indicating either wave or particle effects when changes are made to experimental activities?

One area I think Chopra does bring in well is the fact of focusing on the observer who is in a in 'reality' and how consciousness married with that role mediates perceptions within our obviously strange and mysterious universe. In the kinds of problems here the brain 'fires' up the synapses materially but it is the conscious mind in tandem with it that will perhaps hold and present some insights in solving the hard problem. Not sure if science can get down to the nitty-gritty when things get 'mystical'. Plenty of 'dark matter' there as well as in the universe. Dawkins, Hawking, Penrose etc have their work cut out for them.