A response to Deepak Chopra

In a recent post at his web site, Jerry Coyne reports that he has received a request from an assistant to Deepak Chopra:

• Chopra wants me to officially endorse his new paradigm of consciousness

I have not received my own copy of this request, nor do I expect one.  But I will comment anyway.

You can read the full document at by following the link above.  I’ll quote parts and respond to those.

We are concerned, however, that the old scientific paradigm is not adequate to provide answers to either question. The old paradigm, under which we were trained, along with every working scientist, reduces difficult problems to smaller, more manageable parts. Experiments are conducted, data is collected, and findings are reached. In this way objective knowledge emerges that a consensus can accept, whether it concerns the behavior of moving bodies in Newton’s time or the existence of the Higgs boson in ours.

No, this so-called “old paradigm” is not how science works, though it might be close to how some philosophers of science say that it works.  You need only look to Kuhn’s book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” (1962, 1970, University of Chicago Press) to see an analysis of where science fails to fit that description.

On scientific realism

In my last post, I hinted that I might comment on the videos that John Wilkins has posted.  Here, I will be commenting on John’s video on scientific realism.  That’s the second video HERE.

This post isn’t really a response to John.  I shall also be referencing the Wikipedia page and the SEP page on scientific realism.  I am puzzled by the discussions of scientific realism, so I’ll be illustrating that puzzlement.

The Wikipedia page begins with:

Scientific realism is, at the most general level, the view that the world described by science is the real world, as it is, independent of what we might take it to be.

That sounds about right to me.  And, with that as a definition, I could call myself a scientific realist.  But, as I read further in that Wiki page, I begin to run into statements with which I cannot agree.  In discussion on other internet sites, I have had philosophers suggest that I am anti-realist, though that seems wrong to me.  So perhaps you can see that I might find it all a bit puzzling.

The Wilkins videos

John Wilkins has recently posted a short series of videos, where he talks on topics related to philosophy of science.  Here are links to the posts where he presented the videos:

• Wilkins on philosophy of science
• Wilkins on demarcation
• Some more videos

I found these worth watching.  I am tentatively planning a future post where I comment on some of the videos.

What I liked about these videos, is that they give a better picture of what John Wilkins thinks about the issues he mentions.  Take, for example, his video on “Frequentism vs. Bayesianism.”  I have seen John mention Bayesian methods in earlier blog posts, and they left me a bit puzzled as to John’s position.  In the video, he makes it clear that he is very uncertain about these views (which I see as a respectable position).  I found that clarifying.

Constrained invention

This will mostly be a copy of what I recently posted in a Yahoo groups discussion.  And, incidentally, Yahoo badly mangled that post (stripped out most of the formatting).

As background, I’ll note that in an earlier Yahoo groups post, I had indicated that I was opposed to the view that perception is passive.  This seemed to puzzle some participants in the discussion.  So my post — the one I am quoting — was intended to explain what I mean when I say that perception is active.

The quoted post

You guys need to get out more. You are trapped in a world of logic, and unable to think outside that box.

You both seem committed to God’s eye view thinking, though you may be in denial over that. So you see perception as a system to report to you what is seen by the hypothetical God. But how could that ever work?

ID thinking

I’m posting this as humor.

There’s a truly bizarre post at Uncommon Descent, by johnnyb:

• Do Darwinists Think that Women are Closer to Chimps than Men?

Yes, that title is already weird.

In that post, johnnyb asks a series of questions.  I shall list the questions and give my own answers.  Johnnyb did ask that we write down our answers immediately, before reading the entire post.  I will be giving what were my immediate answers, though I did not actually write them down.

Quick question – do you think that women are closer to apes than men? Do you think that Darwinian evolution (i.e. common ancestry by happenstance mutation and selection) is consistent or inconsistent with your answer?

My answers are “no” and “yes”.

If you are a Darwinist, you think that humans and chimps evolved from a common ancestor, correct?