Drivel from Chopra

A friend sent me an email with what she considered were the “profound” comments of Deepak Chopra. It was part of an interview with another creduloid, Larry King.  I’ll spare you the majority of it (full transcript) but get this:

And you know, there's lots of evidence, even scientific, that the earth is a living organism. The gaia (ph) hypothesis. Is it possible that our consciousness and the turbulence in our consciousness has anything to do with the turbulence in nature? Michael Lerner just referred to that. One of the very interesting things that happened with the tsunami was, no animal died. The elephants. The monkeys. The rabbits. The birds. They were so tuned in to the forces of nature that they escaped. They ran. Some of the elephants broke their chains and ran to the high level mountainous area where the tidal waves could not reach. We have lost that connection. Is there a way that we can collectively transcend to a level of consciousness where we see that the turbulence in our collective mind, possibly, is inseparable from the turbulence in nature? Because we are part of nature.

(snip)

…the idea here is that if we quiet the turbulence in our collective mind and heal the rift in our collective soul, could that have an effect on nature's mind, if nature has a mind? The gaia hypothesis says nature does have a mind, that the globe is conscious. So a critical mass of people praying or a critical mass of people collectively engaging in meditation could conceivably, even from a modern physics point of view, through non-local interactions, actually simmer down the turbulence in nature. And there are precedents for this in all the religions.

(My Bold)

No elephants died? Earth to Chopra: perhaps that is because there were no elephants on the tourist beaches. Or maybe because elephants are, you know, kinda BIG. Big enough not to get washed away by a wave, maybe? You think? I wonder why no birds got killed. Hum, tricky one that. Let’s see, what characteristic do birds possess that might have saved them from being killed by a tsunami? I dunno, you got me there.

Even ignoring those blunders, no animals died in the Tsunami? Hardly:

HIS Asia reports: “Among the ruble (sic) are also thousand (sic) of dead animals.  The smell is overwhelming.”

In The Telegraph, Jan Egeland, the UN disaster relief co-ordinator, is reported saying: "There are thousands of dead people, and there are tens of thousands of dead animals.”

The Times Online reports marine colonel Buyung Lelana, head of an evacuation team in Aceh province saying: "It smells so bad, fishy. The human bodies are mixed in with dead animals like dogs, fish, cats and goats."

(My Bold.)

What we have here is the anatomy of an urban legend being made. This is how it works. As far as I can tell, this story started with just a couple of people not seeing any dead animals.  The media like paranormal stories, and so numerous media outlets repeated it without doing any fact checking of the source. Big surprise. Eventually the story mutates to “animals are psychic”, and this is picked up and repeated as fact by new age nitwits like Chopra. It’s not true though, and so Chopra’s conclusions are also not true (or profound).

If you want to read something about the Tsunami that is both true and relevant, I’d recommend this from Richard Dawkins' letter to The Guardian:

...Dan Rickman says "science provides an explanation of the mechanism of the tsunami but it cannot say why this occurred any more than religion can". There, in one sentence, we have the religious mind displayed before us in all its absurdity. In what sense of the word "why", does plate tectonics not provide the answer?

Not only does science know why the tsunami happened, it can give precious hours of warning. If a small fraction of the tax breaks handed out to churches, mosques and synagogues had been diverted into an early warning system, tens of thousands of people, now dead, would have been moved to safety.

Let's get up off our knees, stop cringing before bogeymen and virtual fathers, face reality, and help science to do something constructive about human suffering.

So there you have it. Pontificating about “lost connections”, “collective minds” or the “gaia hypothesis” will not help one bit. Nor will Chopra’s standard misuse of Quantum Mechanics (that was the “non-local interactions” bit, for those unfamiliar with Chopra’s drivel). Science can already give us advance warning of tsunamis and one day may be able to predict earthquakes. The truth really is out there but don’t expect to hear it on Larry King.

Comments

[NoFixedAbode]

Chopra's observation differs from what other eyewitnesses report, which is that wild and untethered animals did indeed act strangly and make for higher ground well before the tsunami hit.

If instead of 'no animals killed' (a straw man argument, easy to refute) one substitutes the observation 'few wild or untethered animals were killed', it matches the accounts of eyewitnesses better (and seems more difficult to dismiss).

[Skeptico]

Well Chopra did say “no animal died”, so it’s not really a straw man if I correct him.

The reports I cited that “tens of thousands” of animals died, said nothing about them all being domesticated or tethered. But even if some animals did realize something was going on and ran away from the ocean, it is likely this has a perfectly natural explanation:

The underwater rupture likely generated sound waves known as infrasound or infrasonic sound. These low tones can be created by hugely energetic events, like meteor strikes, volcanic eruptions, avalanches, and earthquakes. Humans can't hear infrasound… But many animals—dogs, elephants, giraffes, hippos, tigers, pigeons, even cassowaries—can hear infrasound waves.

A second early-warning sign the animals might have sensed is ground vibration. In addition to spawning the tsunamis, Sunday's quake generated massive vibrational waves that spread out from the epicenter on the floor of the Indian Ocean's Bay of Bengal and traveled through the surface of the Earth. Known as Rayleigh waves …

Mammals, birds, insects, and spiders can detect Rayleigh waves. Most can feel the movement in their bodies, although some, like snakes and salamanders, put their ears to the ground in order to perceive it. The animals at Yala might have felt the Rayleigh waves and run for higher ground.

All perfectly natural. Compare that with Chopra’s drivel about the “turbulence in our collective mind”, “our collective soul”, the “gaia hypothesis”, “the globe is conscious”, a “critical mass of people praying”, and the inevitable “non-local interactions” – all very easy to dismiss.

[Ron Sullivan]

It's interesting that people sometimes do the equivalent of a Chariots of the Gods turn on other organisms. That is, they assume that anything other animals can sense and react to must be all mysterious and ESPish and mystical. It can't be that other animals have brains that have served them well so far.

Never mind that humans who haven't wasted brainspace on learning nonsense might be more likely to know what a sudden huge receding of tidal water might mean and run for the hills; I'm half convinced just by my own experience of heightened senses after a few days' vacation in the mountains that most of us spend most of our time mostly deafened and blinded and hampered in all our senses by the din we raise when we gather in large numbers.

There's nothing mystical or non-concrete about paying attention.

[Skeptic]

Very good post, funny too. The Gaia hypothesis is not what people think it is - As I understand it, it is a scientific concept and there have been some predictions made and tested. It is nothing about us all being one thing, it is about everything having evolved together and as a result of this evolution, the whole system tends to react to stabalise itself when something goes wonky.
Thus as we hasten to warm the globe, there will be other heat sinks and systems which will tend to correct this trend. However, like everything else when you push the limits too far and the self-reulaton breaks down, the negative feedback can rather suddenly turn positive.

[MBains]

…the idea here is that if we quiet the turbulence in our collective mind

I swear to you, he had me up to there.

The Earth is certainly coated with organisms, of which, of course, we're just one. But it's all the tech that kills people in tsunamis and earthquakes and etc.. Few other animals have to escape that kind of thing. Maybe some people can hear it. Just gotta CRT/MRI their ears to see they've got something extra/different in theirs.

So tech will have to get better to make obviously high intelligence people like this guy see it. It will if we keep our facts empirical and our minds open to patterns and lessening probabilities. Occom's razor is outside of time IMO, but no one's piled up the data high enough to tell... yet.

You write a mean report. Cool.

'few wild or untethered animals were killed'

would indeed have shown that his motive isn't his beliefs. Good catch NFA.

[Dev]

Dear vet,
What makes you think that science knows everything there is to possibly know in science at this point? You quote current stuff, but who knows what may be proven tomorrow. Why can't you keep an open mind about events? Why can't you remain neutral to unexplained phenomenons many people in the world have experienced? Why is your mind so small and doing dire injustice to our veterinary field? What did faith ever do to you that you repulsively slag it off? Who hurt you? Faith can't hurt you only people. This is not the way forward. Not this way. You disgrace our proffesion.

[Skeptico]

Dear Dev:

You seem to be a little confused. For some reason you seem to think I am a vet. I am not a vet (although I do know how to spell “profession”). Don’t know if that makes a difference to you.

Anyway, regarding “Why can't you keep an open mind”, etc etc, - heard it before. This is just a fallacious appeal to be open-minded.

Get some new arguments. We’ve heard that one before on this blog.

[BronzeDog]

"What makes you think that science knows everything there is to possibly know in science at this point?"

Logical Fallacy/Propaganda technique: Straw man.

No one claims science knows everything, or that everything has been discovered. That's what pseudoscience often claims, however. Just look at Intelligent Design pasting "goddidit" over every apparent gap in our knowledge.

"You quote current stuff, but who knows what may be proven tomorrow."

Logical Fallacy: Appeal to the Future.

Don't count your evidences before they're published.

"Why can't you remain neutral to unexplained phenomenons many people in the world have experienced?"

Logical Fallacy/Propaganda technique: Appeal to Balance.

There's no such thing as neutrality in most of science. Either a hypothesis has evidence supporting it, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, go get some.

Additional complaint: Most of those phenomena you talk about have probably been explained over and over and over and over and over. Unfortunately, most people who believe in them have closed their mind to those explanations.

"Why is your mind so small and doing dire injustice to our veterinary field? What did faith ever do to you that you repulsively slag it off? Who hurt you? Faith can't hurt you only people. This is not the way forward. Not this way. You disgrace our proffesion."

Logical Fallacies/Propaganda Techniques: Ad hominems, Straw Man.

Skepticism helps good ideas flourish by demolishing bad ones. If an idea survives all the skeptical arguments, we can be very confident (but never certain) in its truth. What do you think those p values in controlled tests mean?