Deepak Chopra vs Richard Dawkins

[Ry]

Even though I think he can be a dick Dawkins is right here. You can't just decide atoms are conscious and that conscious beings are the result of a conscious universe. You can believe that if you want based on faith but don't try to call it science or dress it up in flowery metaphors and claim it is scientific. 99% of the universe so far as we know so far doesn't have any life and 100% of conscious life we know is from complexity and brains not magical parts.

Another Fallacy Deepak uses is the you don't know everything thus I have the right to make up whatever I want based on nothing and call it true, fallacy. You can't say ah ha X is the result of elves riding on unicorns. Let's say X is dark matter. And then I say, no it is not the result of elves riding on Unicorns. And you say well what is Dark Matter then and I say I don't know. Then you you say see you don't know so therefore it must be elves riding on unicorns. I don't have to know what something is in order to rule out many things that it is not. There could be a range of things that it might be that I can not say it is not because there isn't enough information but there is a much larger range of things that we can say with as much confidence as possible that is not an answer.

I found it insulting that Deepak actually tried the emotional ploy of saying have you have had a transcendental experience and he went on with about 40 flowery adjectives and historical names before making his point, about how awesome some experiences are and then tried to claim that nothing can be that awesome if it is "just chemical reactions". That's a very weak argument to just decide that if anything is great it must have a god quality because in his own world view the physical is lowly and everything good (spiritual) must come from god/conscious universe.

I was glad Dawkins said you don't have a monopoly of transcendental experiences. I am not a fan of Dawkins because his crew was Christopher Hitching (RIP) and Sam Harris a drunkard are detestable. One was warmonger and the other is a Zionist apologist who other than Iraq (which is already over) supports every other intervention and war and police state measure there is. This is why I left the Rational Response Squad. But on the issue of Religion Dawkins is right.

[Int'l man of mystery]

What is consciousness?

[Ry]

an emergent property of nervous systems in living organism

[haarp]

awareness

[Int'l man of mystery]

Those are two different answers.

[haarp]

Not really, you're aware of your environment because of your nervous system, you're a responding organism

[Ry]

Also reacting to the environment is not the same thing as self awareness. Fire reacts to its environment it also multiplies itself but it is not self aware.

[Int'l man of mystery]

Not really, you're aware of your environment because of your nervous system, you're a responding organism

But then awareness would be a product of a nervous system, so if consciousness = awareness, then is consciousness a product of the nervous system? If so, then does it also encompass the nervous system, as Ry seemed to be saying?

[haarp]

The term consciousness is misleading and not really appropriate, it implies it's just one thing. It's an empirical process that has relied on many things. There is no x = consciousness, unless you said all the mutations and events that have occurred since whenever = consciousness, but I'd still use the term awareness in place of consciousness. We aren't 'conscious' of things unless we've experienced them and we can only experience them because we have eyes, ears, muscles, nerves, nerve cells, etc etc. There are things we aren't 'conscious' of, that we cannot see using our own eyes, so tools that mimic human characteristics, extensionality, are used to cover for our inefficiency and make us more aware, but there is no 'one state of mind' or 'consciousness' that you're born into.

[Doronjo]

I couldn't stand Chopra and his "word salads", throwing fancy words around out of context to imply certain things, and then making conclusions based on those implications.

I liked this Dawkins video:
http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_dawkin ... ?quote=144

"Our brains have evolved to help us survive within the orders of magnitude of size and speed which our bodies operate at. We never evolved to navigate in the world of atoms.” (Richard Dawkins)