Readers may recall that recently Deepak Chopra took Darwin’s man Jerry Coyne to task after Coyne boasted that allies of his had gone after Chopra’s and Rupert Sheldrake’s Wikipedia sites.
Why anyone bothers about what is said on Wikipedia sites, some of us will never know. Wikipedia is the Titanic of encyclopedias, a disaster by its own standards. Happy are those who starve trolls by not having a listing.
That said, it appears that Coyne has a supporter at Forbes, one Steven Salzberg, who tells us,
Deepak Chopra is upset.
Why? Well, it all goes back to statements like this one, from Chopra himself:
“Consciousness may exist in photons, which seem to be the carrier of all information in the universe.”
Chopra is upset that evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne pointed out how absurd this statement is. More specifically, Coyne wrote that:
“[Chopra’s] lucrative brand of woo is finally exposed as a lot of scientifically-sounding psychobabble.”
Interesting. Why pick on Chopra? Quite apart from the fact that great physicists have had some similarly forbidden thoughts about consciousness, where were Coyne and Salzberg when the latest new theory of consciousness whistled into town, announcing that humans, worms, and the Internet are all conscious? The next-to-last one we heard was that rocks have minds too.
And so why not photons? Actually, the study of human consciousness has gone nowhere for decades, apart from demands for more time. Methodological naturalism guarantees that the researchers will get nowhere, so they can have all the time in the world. They may as well interview rocks and photons.
More recently, some seek a compromise between materialist and non-materialist neuroscience theories.
Now, those people might indeed get somewhere, but they will have to do it without Coyne’s and Salzberg’s permission.
That, at least, is a good beginning.
Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose