Sam Harris Thinks He’s Going to Meet Aliens

I think we’ve all experienced this kind of thing at some time: You’re surrounded by people who believe that “X” is true, but you know that “X” is false. What do you do? Speak out and make enemies? Tactfully hint that you’ve noticed some difficulties with “X”? Or stay silent?

I’ve tried all three. Staying silent can be truly horrible. Being diplomatic is tricky. Speaking out can be scary, but it’s easier if there’s at least one other voice agreeing with you. And it’s great if that other voice is articulate and well informed.

It was in this kind of context that I viewed the so called new atheist movement in the early 2000s. I appreciated the fact that atheists were prepared to tackle religion despite the hatred and condemnation they would inevitably provoke. Likewise, I accepted that they might sometimes look like bigots or trolls, but if a culture has developed a wall of denial around a certain set of beliefs, it might be necessary to use harsh language to break through it and open up space for discussion.

I trusted, however, that although some prominent atheists occasionally made me wince, they were sincerely promoting science, reason, and human rights. I assumed they were not merely addicted to grabbing attention by finding a bunch of people who believe “X” and taunting them about being wrong.

I also assumed that once the new territory for discourse had been opened up, the discussion could move on to more tricky topics. How, for example, to maintain one’s culture and personal identity in the face of ever-advancing scientific knowledge? How to retain the value of ritual and mythology without losing touch with science?

Instead of that, unfortunately, it seems most of those who rose to prominence as atheists have simply moved on to different variations of the “X” is wrong and I am right scenario. Whatever the case, I think it would’ve been better for everyone if a few of those fellows had simply said their piece as atheists and just got off stage.

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But maybe I’m wrong on this when it comes to Sam Harris. Maybe he’s really not just a professional concern troll who’s addicted to going up to a group of people who believe “X” and trying to needle them into submission with his supposedly rational takes. Maybe he is indeed just a particularly smart person whose freely roving mind will always make him uniquely right in a world of wrong people.

So tell us Dr Harris, who is the latest group of people who believe “X” and need to be righted?

It’s scientific skeptics.

They (or we, if I’m allowed to count myself in), will soon be faced with a humiliating climb down.

Why? Because….. Well…… Ummm….. “Someone” has reached out to Dr Harris and assured him that….

“I’m going to be on a Zoom call with former heads of the CIA and Office of Naval Research and people whose bona fides are very easy to track…”

Okay, so this must be big…. It is big… It’s

“…either the most alarming or the most interesting thing in the world…”

Okay, I apologise for the dramatics. The reader has already seen the title of this blogpost and probably didn’t believe it, but it’s true. It’s aliens.

Yes, aliens. Aliens.

Dr Sam Harris, well known atheist (though he has problems with the term atheist), former member of the atheist “Four Horsemen” group (though he saw himself as the outsider among them), New Atheist (though he rejected the term New Atheist), member of the Intellectual Dark Web (though he later withdrew his membership), is announcing the imminent arrival of aliens.

Hang on a minute, why the hell would the CIA want to share top secret information with a droob like Sam Harris? Well, it’s because…

“…they’re concerned about the messaging around all of this to the public…”

They want to “dampen down panic” by introducing this stunning truth slowly and sensitively to the world…. So they chose Sam Harris, a man famous for his communicative skills and ability to deftly weave a palatable narrative out of potentially divisive issues. Of course they did.

And that’s why Sam is suddenly getting in the face of skeptics. Because we have been laughing at people who claimed they’d been abducted by aliens. Well soon the abductees will be proven right so we’ll have to apologise for “laughing at them for the last 50 years”.

Never mind the fact that alien abductions were in fact investigated seriously, even rather sensitively at times, by skeptics. Carl Sagan for example wrote about it, and even wrote a book and film about possible contact with aliens. (The film Contact is well worth seeing.)

I also find it interesting that Harris leaps to the utterly illogical conclusion that if his particular aliens are real, then the abductions 50 years ago must have been real too. It’s also worth noting that Harris is only concerned with the embarrassment of having to admit being wrong about something.

“…It’s not a representation of the facts that will give scientific skeptics any comfort. We’re faced with the prospect of having to apologise to the people we’ve been laughing at for the last fifty years who have been alleging that they’ve been abducted or that cattle have been anally probed…”

Oh yeh, the probing of cattle posteriors by aliens will also be proven real.

And the technology!

“It sounds like the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Pentagon are very likely to say to Congress at some point in the not-too-distant future that we have evidence that there is technology flying around here that seems like it can’t possibly be of human origin.”

And while the Pentagon is trying to convince the government, Sam Harris will be tasked with breaking the news to the public.

“Now, I don’t know what I’m going to do with that kind of disclosure. That is such a powerfully strange circumstance to be in, right?”

Sam hasn’t actually spoken to anyone from the CIA or the Pentagon yet. What he does have though is a trusted source, a colleague, who has assured him that he will be contacted by them soon. According to Rebecca Watson, this colleague is probably Eric Weinstein, the right wing loon who founded the aforementioned Intellectual Dark Web. At least one other member of that group, Joe Rogan, also knows about it because Eric went on his show to tell him — and tens of millions of listeners — about the aliens.

Weinstein has apparently been waiting for three years — yes, three years — for the phone call inviting him to the secret location where the alien technology is sequestered. He keeps a bag packed for the great day. But for some reason they still haven’t called.

How will this end? Is an announcement from the US government imminent? Or maybe the announcement will have to wait until after the next election when a more suitably-minded president comes to power?

Or maybe poor Eric has been pranked, and then unwittingly pranked Sam, who, despite his vast intellect and personal integrity swallowed it whole and wants to get in early for the potential gloating rights.

Cleverly though, Dr Harris has covered both possibilities with the usual surreptitious disclaimer to cover his ass:

“This is probably premature to even talk about, but…”

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To find out more about atheism and the value of reason and science, visit… oh hang on the link has gone dead…

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Sam Harris Doesn’t Understand Meditation

This is certainly one of the oddest products I’ve covered here. Sam Harris is selling a meditation app that he claims will help you erase your racial identity. The result is a bizarre form of New Age political quackery.

Why anyone should even be instructed to renounce their race is a valid question, but it is outside the scope of this blog. (For coverage of the implications for racial politics, see the footnotes.) The focus here will be purely on Harris’s claims about meditation.

For someone who has been a practicing Buddhist for three decades, Harris displays an extraordinary degree of ignorance about what meditation is and how it works. He also displays a most hilarious lack of self-awareness, and confuses meditation with something that is simply an egoistic attachment to certain ideas.

In short, Harris makes three fundamental errors.

1. He thinks you can simply force yourself to meditate;

2. he assumes that insights gained from meditation can be directly carried over into everyday mental life; and

3. instead of helping you dis-identify from their race, he is really coaxing people into identifying even more strongly with a set of (utterly fatuous) ideas.

These are beginner’s mistakes, though they also tend to be replicated by meditation teachers who exaggerate the efficacy of their product.

I’ve previously praised Harris for the way he dealt with Deepak Chopra’s spiritual bluster (see the footnotes), but here we will see Harris making exactly the same errors that he criticised Chopra for, as well as pulling all the standard New Age promotional tricks. Here is the classical 5 Step approach to promoting spiritual quackery that we are about to watch Harris implement:

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1. Find a problem (and if there isn’t one, invent one or exaggerate an existing minor one)

2. Find a single simple “cause” for that problem

3. Find a single simple “cure” for that cause

4. Exaggerate, oversell, or even fabricate the effectiveness of that “cure”

5. Treat all criticism of the product as a personal and unjustified attack on the teacher themselves

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Sam Harris is best known as a “New Atheist” and a member of a right wing thinkers’ club, the hilariously pompous “Intellectual Dark Web”. A light touch, a practical approach, and a gently self-ironic attitude to his own foibles are not part of Harris’s character.

In his 5 minute ad for his app, Harris compares himself to Jesus; calls religion a perversion — a perversion of his own “true” meditative experience; claims that he himself possesses “genuine compassion”; and claims that the real reason why he is often accused of bigotry is because people don’t understand meditation. Ninety-nine percent of people, Harris complains, misunderstand the role that meditation plays in his political and philosophical thinking…. That’s 99% of the people in his own audience! Obviously, it’s them who need to change, not him. They need to start meditating so that poor Sam can have his ideas understood by people in the manner he wishes.

This is clearly a rather demanding child……

Oh yeh, and he claims his meditation app will grant you “meditation on demand”. Dis-identifying yourself from your racial identity has never been easier.

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It is true that meditation, especially the Buddhist type that Harris likes, can be said to involve a kind of “dis-identification” with one’s idea of “self”. But the way Harris talks about it is completely mad. Despite thirty odd years of Buddhist practice, he doesn’t seem to know the most basic aspects of meditation and it effects.

Here is Harris’s version of the 5 Step sales pitch:

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1. The problem is hypersensitivity to racial discrimination on “the Left”

2. The cause is over-identification with racial identity

3. The cure is Dr Sam’s meditation app

4. The exaggerated sales pitch is “meditation on demand”

5. Any criticism is treated as a personal attack on Harris himself

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It’s all laid out in his short podcast titled A Few Points of Confusion.

As always in his podcasts, Harris opens by expressing his shock and bafflement that he has yet again been misunderstood by a great many people. As always, he will he have to correct everyone. The “points of confusion” that people have been suffering from concern the role that meditation plays in Harris’s life.

Sam Harris’s subjective experience of his own consciousness is of course very important to “people”, but sadly, they get confused, so that needs to be cleared up pronto. Harris explains:

—> Unless you’re deeply into it, the term meditation almost certainly conjures the wrong ideas in your mind.

Luckily for me, I am deeply into meditation. In fact I’ve been meditating about as long as Harris has. I was even in India in the 1990s at the same time as him, and in a similar milieu. I’ve also read his book Waking Up and had thought that I was in broad agreement with his approach. But it turns out that I’ve been “confused” all along.

—> Meditation is just a bad word for the recognition of specific truths about the mind.

Hang on — what??? So meditation doesn’t mean awareness, but rather a “recognition” of certain “truths”??? That’s insane! That’s not meditation by any normal definition. That will only lead to being egotistically identified with a set of ideas, only now with the added mistake of taking them to be “truths” instead of just ideas. That’s not even what his own book says!

I’m stunned. I can’t believe he said that. But yes, that is indeed a direct transcription of what he said.

According to the Buddhist/Vedanta style I thought he advocated, meditation is, more or less, simply awareness. Or if you want to get technical, awareness of awareness. Meditation is not centered around conceptual thought like that — recognition, specific truths, etc. That’s stupid.

What Harris just said is like saying that swimming is just a bad word for conceptually understanding what it feels like to get wet.

He continues:

—> It’s a process of discovering what is already true of your mind.

Which “mind” is he talking about here? The mind with a lower-case m, or the capital-M Mind that some translators use for various Buddhist terms for consciousness? He seems to be conflating both these meanings in an odd way. This will become clearer below.

—> People can’t understand positions I take on this podcast without understanding your mind.

Harris is really pissed off that communication involves an awareness of other people’s existing knowledge and perspective, rather than just being able to blab out whatever is going through his mind at the current moment. I thought meditation makes you less egocentric, not more!

—> And these are positions which, on their surface have nothing to do with mediation. My experience here [he means his own experience with meditation] is often the key to understanding my criticism of specific scientific and philosophical ideas….

No wonder 99% of his audience gets confused.

Harris then uses the examples of free will and the illusion of “self”, as insights that can be gained through meditation. And this is where he really goes off the rails.

He thinks that you can not only discover these “facts” through meditation, but then also simply ram this awareness into your everyday non-meditative consciousness. In fact he demands that people do this. And he calls resulting dogma, born of the interpretation of a memory, “knowledge”.

Sure, I can remember that while I was meditating my self or my feeling of free will disappeared, and I can intellectually believe that they must be illusions. But in normal everyday consciousness, I can’t keep on experiencing that absence of self or free will. The actual experience in the moment it is happening is one thing; the memory of that experience is something completely different. And the interpretation of the memory is yet another step removed. But Harris sees none of these distinctions. In fact he thinks it’s merely a lack of courage that prevents people from dragging their meditative experience into their everyday consciousness.

He thinks that people–

—> ….don’t really have the courage of their convictions, because they still feel like selves that enjoy free will.

Nope. You can’t simply decide to stop “feeling like a self” or “feeling like you have free will”. Note the use of the verb. And the pronoun.

There is no escaping this, with or without a meditation app. As soon as you start doing, meditation ends. Nor can you force yourself to stay in a meditative state. Ask any Buddhist for the last 3000 years. The mere attempt to do so instantly destroys meditation. There are no verbs inside the Gates of Eden, (as Dylan might have sung).

What you can do, however, is convince yourself that you believe that you don’t have a self or free will.

That will make you a very special meditator indeed. Instead of getting out of the mind, you can simply inflate the mind so that it includes all the great ideas like “I have the consciousness of Jesus”, “I have no self”, “I have no free will”, and then you can walk around smugly all day babbling about how non-egotistical you are.

—> I can say this because there’s nothing hypothetical to me about the kinds of experiences that people like Jesus were rattling on about to anyone who would listen. And if you’ve had these experiences, and can have them on demand…

And there it is folks — Meditation on demand!

Seriously, has this guy EVER meditated?

I recall hearing a talk by one of Joseph Goldstein’s rather smug followers (maybe Stephen Levine), who was laughing about people thinking Goldstein’s institute was called “Instant Meditation” instead of “Insight Meditation”. Well, Harris isn’t an innocent newbie. He is an experienced meditation teacher with some rather grand claims about his own degree of spiritual development. Yet here he is making exactly the same mistake.

We could really just stop this right here and save this fellow from further embarrassment. But, as Harris thinks he’s really onto a great new product that will save civilisation from “the Left”, it’s worth plowing on.

Harris continues:

—> When it’s absolutely obvious to you that the conventional sense of self is an illusion…

Um, Dr Harris– “absolutely obvious” to WHOM exactly? Has he even realised that his own illusory self is currently addressing your and my illusory self?

Sam Harris thinks his grand godly capital-M Mind of Buddhism has comprehended the illusory nature of his lower-case-m mind. The bad news for Harris is that he has merely convinced himself that he is in a permanent state of Jesus-consciousness.

This is exactly the same mistake that every channeler, conversationalist with God, Angelic Healer, every Pope, priest, faith healer, and snake-handling speaker-in-tongues makes. The promised land of the Higher Self gets colonised by the lower self and proudly proclaimed and blabbed about in public.

Harris continues, saying that if you can get these experiences on demand, then you won’t get dependent on a religion. And now that he’s cleared up that “point of confusion” in 99% of his audience, he moves on to politics.

….. Racial politics…… What could go wrong?

—> How can I be so sure that the explosion of identity politics that we see all around us isn’t a sign of progress. How can I know that it’s an ethical and psychological dead end to be deeply identified with one’s race?

Before asking “how can I know” it would be better to demonstrate that it is really the case, rather than just assuming it.

Whoops, that sentence is still going. He’s shoehorned a few more assumptions into it–

—> …and that all the people who are saying that there’s no way to get past race in our politics are just confused?

Hang on, what is he talking about? This is the “problem” his app will fix, but who exactly is it who says you “can’t get past race in politics”? What does that even mean?

—> Well it’s because I know that a person need not identify with the face he sees in the mirror each day.

Howwwleeee shit.

Well that was stupid.

Yep, stare at yourself in mirror each morning and repeat the affirmation “I don’t know who the hell I am.” That will improve your mental health no end.

—> How unnecessary is it to identify with millions of strangers who just happen to look like you in that they have the same skin colour. In light of what’s possible, psychologically and inter-personally, in light of what is actually required to get over yourself…

Does anyone know what he means by this?

—> ….and to experience genuine compassion for other human beings…

The Grand Master of Meditative Compassion speaketh.

—> It is a form of mental illness to go through life identified, really identified, with one’s race.

Yes, your racial identity is a mental illness….. Now please don’t tell Sam that he’s barking up the wrong tree. Or that he’s climbed up the wrong tree and is sitting there happily, blowing on a dog whistle.

—> Of course to say that as a white guy…

And here it comes. Point five on the standard model for the promotion of quackery — to treat all criticism as a personal attack.

—> Of course, to say that as a white guy, in the current environment, is to stand convicted of racial insensitivity, and even seeming indifference to the problem of racism in our society.

Poor Sam — all he said was that racial identity is a form of mental illness and is selling a product to cure you of it, and now people are calling him insensitive. …So let’s all talk about his victimhood now, rather than any of the problems with his ideas about race or the product he is selling.

He continues, saying that “most well intentioned people” have been “successfully bullied” into dismissing his ideas on race because he’s white.

Then he adds that the white people who criticise him — like me for example — are only doing so because there are “massive incentives” on offer. This shoehorning of assumption upon assumption, each with an implicit accusation of bad motivation in his critics, is really just about the only thing that Sam Harris’s statements ever consist of.

—> But to insist on the primacy of race is to be obscenely confused.

Who, exactly, insists on the “primacy of race”? Does he mean me?

Whoops– the sentence was still going.

—> …obscenely confused about human potential…

Hang on — what? Human potential? The Golden Age, the Promised Land awaits if we only fulfill our potential. This is seriously weird. I really didn’t know Harris thinks like this.

—> …and society’s potential. And I’m not going to pretend to be unaware of that.

The accusation here is of course that everyone else is just pretending “not to be aware” of human and societal potential, despite it being so obvious, whatever it is.

—> …So when I’m talking about racial politics I am also talking about meditation.

We got there finally. All that was just to explain why he sees a connection between meditation and politics. It’s all so simple– all the confused people think Sam Harris is talking about racial politics, but really he’s just talking about meditation. The undeniable FACTS of meditation that you would know are facts if only you would use his app. Really, I don’t know why 99% of people find this so hard to follow…

Harris continues with his usual lucidity.

—> There are certain things that I actually understand about my own mind, and about the mind in general [he means your mind]. And the idea that racial identity is something that we can’t get past is total bullshit.

Get with the program people! Stop this obscene confusion about your own identity, and listen to Dr Sam. Force yourself to understand him. He is right. He knows the facts, the scientific and meditational facts. He is offering you meditation on demand. Use the app and force yourself to dis-identify with your race and get identified instead with the fact that you have no self and no free will.

And if you believe — if you truly believe — a Golden Age will dawn. And the people shall rise up and attain the peak of human and societal potential– namely, they shall correctly interpret the role that meditation plays in Sam Harris’s political and philosophical thinking. And their confusion about this shall be no more. And they will stop calling him a bigot, a fool, a klutz, an ignoramus, an enabler of white supremacy. A racist. A white guy.

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Footnote & Links: I used to follow Sam Harris and have praised him in the past–

see this article

–until I got bored with his habit of making long-winded complicated arguments and then whining about being misinterpreted, and making the whole issue about himself. Then, when he took up with a–

right wing pseudo-intellectual Christian scammer

–I started ignoring him as completely as possible. A recent series of podcasts called Woking Up alerted me not only to this ridiculous meditation scam, but also to Harris’s constant and completely hysterical attacks on “the Left” and his inexcusable support for white nationalists. Links to the series (which bullied me into writing this blogpost and benefiting from the massive incentives from doing so) can be found here

Part 1 — Some of my best friends are…. (and intro to Harris’s worst takes disgracefully ignorant conception of racism)

Part 2 — Steal-manning Champion

Part 3 — Election Aftermath (this deals especially with Harris’s claim that “White supremacy is the fringe of the fringe” and that “Wokism” is a far greater threat to civilisation)

Part 4 — Nothing to do with racism

Part 5 — Sam Harris loves identity politics

Eiynah’s ‘Polite Conversations’ podcast can be found here

UPDATE: Excellent article on this topic that goes into far more detail than mine can be found here–

Sam Harris is Right About Things Because He Likes To Meditate

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Posted by Yakaru

“Not knowing” and failure to prevent harassment (A brief statement about Lawrence Krauss)

Update/Note — I should have made it clearer in the text below that Sam Harris took a principled stand, in real time, rejecting Lawrence Krauss’s denials and making it clear that an appropriate apology from Krauss is necessary. I linked to Harris’s statement and wrongly assumed that readers would not only know its contents, but include them as context for this blogpost. Thus, what was intended to be a few minor disagreements and points for discussion looked like a very deliberate and unfair attack on Harris. I should have clearly stated Sam’s position, and my general agreement with- and appreciation of it.

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Shortly before the recent exposure of Lawrence Krauss’s apparently habitual sexual harassment behavior, I referred to him on this blog for the first time. Had I not mentioned him, I wouldn’t have written anything about this issue, but I have decided to put a few things on the record.

The video posted below is from Cristina Rad, who is fairly well known in the skeptic network. She describes a simple incident in which Krauss groped her. She says it “wasn’t a big deal” and it didn’t leave her scarred; but it ruined her image of Krauss, who she had been pleased to meet.

The only reason, as Rad notes, that she made this video about an incident that occurred in 2011 is because she was so pissed off with Krauss’s denials. She shouldn’t have had to risk exposing herself to the hordes of sexually incontinent males in the atheist network.

It is obvious to me that someone who one time behaves as Krauss did has already behaved like this before. Krauss seems to think his fame entitles him to just grab women. Women have been warning each other about him for years, but mysteriously, none of his male colleagues knew anything at all about it. That can only be down to willful blindness or odd chimp-like tolerance of a separate set of morals for supposed alpha males. Whatever the reason, it should be seen as a general failure.

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I only know of Krauss via his books and You Tube, but I already had suspicions about him. He was on the record for an extremely stupid statement in 2011 about his friend, the convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. I had also heard him (on You Tube) repeatedly talking about Richard Feynman’s promiscuity, in a way that I found obsessive, objectifying of women, and just weird.

So why did I refer to him? Because I hadn’t heard anything more about off-putting behavior from him since 2011. It’s not a big deal, but wish I had have trusted my intuitive judgment and not associated my blog with him.

But seeing as I did, and as I also sometimes refer to others who have made public statements about this, I will take a moment to put a few things on the record.

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Sam Harris, who I also refer to here fairly regularly, knows Krauss and put out a statement on You Tube.

He says he has done many events with Krauss and “never seen him misbehave”. Okay, but even I knew of accusations against him — and that was back in 2011. Sam Harris must have known of these too, and if so, must have wrongly dismissed them, as I also did. I can’t see any way around that. He should have said something to explain why he dismissed such information and concerns.

[Update 28.3.2018: Commenter E-R S has argued below that it is entirely plausible that Harris really had never heard of the accusations against Krauss — “I personally had absolutely no idea that people had said this about him, ever, and I’ve spent many years running one of the biggest online skeptical pages…”  The link in the previous paragraph goes to Sam Harris’s complete statement. I only refer to parts I want to discuss. I should have already noted that Harris convinced Krauss not to appear with him on stage the night the accusations broke; that Harris effectively disassociated himself from Krauss’s “blanket denials”; and that he has encouraged Krauss to apologize.]

Harris has a talent for noting how bad ideas can lead to bad behavior. Here is Krauss’s idea of evidence for why Epstein shouldn’t have been convicted of pedophilia. Why didn’t Harris see this as a red flag? Krauss:

As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.

(Gulp. I confess I’d read that warning about him on the Skepchick blog in 2011 and must have blotted out the details from memory. Ouch. Ouch. Mea culpa. Holy heck.)

Then Harris casts doubt on the allegations, and says we shouldn’t “rush to accept all of them”. This is remarkably stupid from Harris. Who has been “rushing”? This was in plain sight in 2011. By the time Buzzfeed put out their article, it became immediately clear that Krauss is a habitual, serial harasser, who needs to apologize and stop. But instead, Harris focuses on the article. Yes, it was poorly written, but the issue is that your friend gropes women and you didn’t know enough to stop him!

Then Harris says that he is “not in a position to judge the truth of such allegations”, but says he has since sought and accepted some private confirmation that Krauss does indeed act like that. Again, that’s a bit late.

Then he starts going on about the importance of recognizing “gradations of sexual misbehavior”. Here he is complaining about excesses he perceives in the #MeToo movement. But is this really the time for that? Anyway, he could have saved his breath. The quickest way to stop this spinning out of control would be for Krauss to admit what he’s done, show that he understands why it is wrong, and apologize sincerely and unreservedly. Which didn’t happen.

Even better of course, would have been for other prominent male atheists in 2011 to quietly tell Krauss in private to get a freaking clue. Which also didn’t happen.

Is there a good reason why only women knew about Krauss since at least 2011, and his male peers only found out about it in 2018 after Buzzfeed alerted them?

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Jerry Coyne, who I also sometimes refer to here, (and whose work I admire very much) has taken a stand on this. He put out a statement that was, I thought, much better than Sam Harris’s. Coyne was less equivocating, and did at least find time to generally condemn sexual harassment — something which neither Harris nor Krauss bothered to do. But I did find Coyne’s tone somewhat reluctant and perhaps petulant. I’m sure, however, that Krauss would have read it, and it must have stung (and rightly so).

I don’t know how much Jerry Coyne has to do with Krauss, but I must also wonder why he didn’t know anything about it until Buzzfeed told him. And, as with Harris, some private inquiries cleared the matter up very swiftly. That could have happened in 2011 too, couldn’t it? (It certainly should have been enough for me, and I failed to take it seriously, or wrongly assumed he’d improved.)

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So, why did all the other prominent male atheists fail to stop Krauss?

Richard Dawkins, who I also refer to here sometimes, has said nothing at all. Not good.

I will continue to refer to him here, but let me put it on the record concerning an earlier matter: his pathetic and disgraceful behavior towards Rebecca Watson makes me feel a sting of embarrassment each time I refer to him. If his writing wasn’t so extraordinarily good, I’d use someone else.

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All I can say to anyone who wants to complain about how Krauss has been treated: grow a pair. Krauss’s male colleagues failed to protect women from him, and him from himself. They let him carry on like this in public until so many women were pissed off with him that the lid blew off. Now the story has been picked up by people trying to hurt the atheist movement. It’s too late for whining about that now. It’s their own (our own) stupid fault.

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Posted by Yakaru

Medieval Quantum Theology with Deepak Chopra

I finally got around to watching the debate between Sam Harris & Michael Schermer (on the skeptic side), and Deepak Chopra & Jean Houston (promoting the cause of New Age unaccountability on the other). It aired way back in March on ABC’s Nightline.

It was a lesson in devious obfuscation from Chopra; and clarity, sincerity and intelligence from Sam Harris. Schermer was ok, but nowhere near as impressive as Harris. New Age self-important blitherer Jean Houston, could easily have been replaced with Sammy the Performing Dachshund without detracting from the intellectual level of the debate.

Chopra spoke his usual pompous mess of arrogant bullshit, alternately attacking science and claiming science for his own. He thinks his particular type of spirituality (which he sees as the only universally correct brand) can “upgrade science”. And he accused scientists of living in the “dungeon of scientific orthodoxy”.

Then he claimed that science itself(in particular, quantum physics)has actually confirmed that “we live in a sea of consciousness”, and anyone who denies this is a “scientific jihadist“.

Sam Harris calmly pointed out how foolish it is for non-physicists to lecture people about quantum physics, especially in an audience of a thousand at CalTech. Chopra angrily asserted his credentials as an MD and as someone who has repeatedly spoken with real proper scientist people, so he has the right to use “specialist language” – by which he means his special redefining of terms like non-locality, for example.

Harris:  If you are saying that non-locality is an operant concept in neuroscience, then that is woo woo.

Incredibly, Chopra countered that non-locality is indeed a valid part of neuroscience, and claims that not only the brain, but even a pace-maker (yes, a freaking pace-maker!) functions according to the principles of the aforementioned non-locality.

Yes, he really said that.

Any Chopra fans reading this should let that sink in.

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Chopra was very insistant on this point, that it his work is a valid part of science. As he once explained to Richard Dawkins, “The aficionados in the world of quantum physics have somehow hijacked the word for their own use.”

Yes, he really said that. Any Chopra fans, etc. etc.

There is a marked contrast between D-Bag Chopra’s pig-ignorant deceitful waffle and Sam Harris’s well-informed awareness of the limits of his own knowledge, and the current stand of science. In fact he made a better case for research into spirituality than Chopra himself did. Harris:

We need a scientific discourse on the possibilities of human well-being, and you can get as esoteric as you want there. You can talk about self transcendence, the ego being an illusion, you can ask what is the relationship between consciousness and the rest of the physical world.

And the truth is that when you get out to some of those fringe areas, you are getting to an area of real scientific ignorance, and the first thing you want to do in the spirit of intellectual honesty is admit ignorance, not claim that you, by closing your eyes, can realise your identity with the entire cosmos, and that you can get to before the big bang with your unguarded intuitions. That’s not how you discover what happens.

And therein lies the fundamental difference between Chopra’s idea of science and the thing which the word usually refers to. Chopra has a foregone conclusion that he has “intuitively grasped” through subjective experience:

Chopra: It’s called [neural] binding.
Harris: It’s called absolute ignorance of what is actually going on outside your subjective consciousness.

Of course, being prepared to recognise your ignorance, study hard, take risks and wait for answers is of no use to New Age teachers. The market wants answers NOW and there are profits to be made. Science, just like ancient mythology and indigenous cultures, is there to be plundered for marketable ideas and concepts.