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Deepak Chopra's Largely Ignored $1M Challenge

Wowbagger

The Infinitely Prolonged
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So, I was searching for a thread about this, on this forum, but surprisingly could not find one. Perhaps I missed it. (If I did you can point me to it.) Perhaps no one cares. Whatever.

Anyway, around June 14, 2014, our favorite intellectual imposter, Deepak Chopra, issued a $1M challenge of his own, to skeptics: Can YOU solve the Hard Problem of philosophy using the materialistic worldview as fundamental?!!!!

Here is the long, boring video of it:

My initial response was a tweet that stated: "Turns out that @DeepakChopra knows so little about consciousness, he has now asked @jref to solve the problem for him, with science!"

And, you can read my various other responses to both Chopra and his followers, from there.

Many of them were pushing the "Consciousness is fundamental, and matter is created from it" point of view, to which I want to KNOW MORE about it: How did consciousness arise, then? What can it tell us about mental disorders? What predictions about matter can we make from understanding consciousness as more fundamental?

But, no one was interested in answering any of those sorts of questions, for some weird and mysterious reasons.

Any other thoughts on this? It might be brought up at TAM, at some point, since this year's theme is all about the brain. (As if that was different from other years.)
 
Me, me, pick me!

From Wikipeda:
The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining how and why we have qualia or phenomenal experiences — how sensations acquire characteristics, such as colours and tastes. David Chalmers, who introduced the term "hard problem" of consciousness, contrasts this with the "easy problems" of explaining the ability to discriminate, integrate information, report mental states, focus attention, etc. Easy problems are easy because all that is required for their solution is to specify a mechanism that can perform the function. That is, their proposed solutions, regardless of how complex or poorly understood they may be, can be entirely consistent with the modern materialistic conception of natural phenomena. Chalmers claims that the problem of experience is distinct from this set, and he argues that the problem of experience will "persist even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained".
Click to expand...

if we take the materialistic worldview as an axiom, there is by definition no Hard Problem.

So, Deepak, where's my million smackers?
 
GH forum has a topic on it and I refer to JREF
here


:)
Edited several times - hope it's working now!
 
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Everything Chopra does and says should be ignored, in an ideal World. Sadly, he relies on the ignorance and credulity of his followers in order to keep his woo gravy train rolling.

Suggest he goes and repeatedly bangs his head against a large lump of granite, in order to test his claim that consciousness creates matter, or whether matter can create unconsciousness.
 
I didn't realize that Chopra is a full on Solipsist.
 
Chopra doesn't understand the JREF prize. Randi is not a debunker. Randi is offering the prize not to the first person who can offer phenomena that he cannot debunk, but to the person who can offer a demonstration, with a protocol agreed to in advance by the parties, that will have a self-evident conclusion with no judgment necessary.

Chopra's contest is for you to have an argument with him -- replete with word games and false premises -- and then, somehow, someone is judged the winner. That's just a waste of time.
 
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