I find it extremely amusing that when Radovan Karadzic, Serbian war criminal and fugitive from justice, wanted to disguise himself with an assumed identity in a suburb of Belgrade, he chose such an interesting occupation for his alter ego — purveyor of New-Age quantum nonsense.
No one knew quite how to react when it emerged that he had been selling “human quantum energy” diviners on the internet from a flat in surburban Belgrade, speaking at conferences for alternative health and maintaining an intimate friendship with a rather good-looking younger woman.
And this wasn’t just some cover story to fall back on when strangers inquired about what he did for a living; apparently, Karadzic really went all-out. (Including a website. Every international fugitive needs a website!)
He threw himself into the role. His articles in Healthy Life, a Serbian alternative medicine magazine, show a man who was fluent in new age thinking. “It is widely believed our senses and mind can recognise only 1% of whatever exists around us. Three per cent we understand with our hearts. All that remains is shrouded in secrecy, out of the reach of our five senses; however, it is within our reach in the extra-sensory manner,” he wrote in one article.
I love the quantification. Three percent we understand with our hearts! Hopefully, improved experimental precision will enable us to pin the correct figure down to the nearest tenth of a percent.
But he was devout, you have to had him that.
He was also interested in healing through the optimal use of ‘vital energy’, a quasi-mystical, non-physical dimension of the body, similar to the Chinese notion of ‘Qi’ and the Indian concept of the ‘chakra’ centres of energy in the body. “He was very religious,” said a woman who works at the magazine and knew him. “He had his hair in a plait in order to be able to receive different energies. He was a very nice man.”
At least, when he wasn’t ordering the Srebrenica massacre. That wasn’t really very nice.
Neil,
The electron makes sense to me as a expanding shell, or wave. I don’t get the obsession with reducing everything to interactions of particles. Entangled particles exhibiting action at a distance would make more sense if they were two points on the same wave.
The distinction between the head and the heart might better be understood as left and right brained thinking. One analytical, the other existential. I think the relationship between consciousness and the intellect is similar to that between analog and digital. While the intellect focuses on reductionistic distinctions, the consciousness is constantly blurring them into some larger whole. This isn’t always a positive function either, as it would be the basis for cognitive breakdowns, such as ADD, as well as the basis for herd behavior and pack mentality overcoming the individual’s reasoning capacity. So the two sides work in conjunction.
cynic, I think it is crazy. Just as I think Barack Obama’s religious views are crazy. Your point being?
Another crazy thing is to characterize the slaughter of thousands of people as “not sharing one’s politics.”
2 is the magic number—
that is, it only took two posts to pose the deep question: who is worse, karadjic, or bush?
i prefer pieter kok’s “he’s not only a war criminal, but a science criminal!”
and anyone who confuses the war crimes of the B with those of the K should probably look for new work. will you recognize science crimes when you commit them yourself?
“Another crazy thing is to characterize the slaughter of thousands of people as “not sharing one’s politics.””
About as crazy as describing the Srebrenica massacre as “n’t really very nice” and finding the antics of its alleged instigator “extremely amusing”.
And the point is : self congratulatory sneering at the belief systems of others (a major defect here at CV) is rather out of place in an assessment of an unprincipled murdering bastard – or (c.f. Blair) Radovan Karadzic.
Whoops – I forgot that you guys have a selective whimsy bypass.
Neil B. wrote:
I get that “the heart” doesn’t really mean “the heart”, just like when these New Age types talk about “energy” they don’t mean “energy” in the sense we use it in physics. But my point is that they’re using these terms in such a way that they have no well-defined meaning at all.
It’d be one thing if they defined their terms — e.g. “Here we are using the ‘heart’ as a metaphor for mental processes involving the right hemisphere of the brain” or the frontal lobe or whatever. But they don’t. Making precise quantitative claims (e.g. “three percent of the world we understand with our hearts”) without giving equally precise definitions of the terms in those claims is one of the hallmarks of pseudo-scientific bulls***.
I take this to mean you don’t agree with Karadzik’s metaphysical views, which is good because so far as I can tell they’re nothing but vacuous nonsense. I only asked because you brought up the idea of QM having to do with consciousness in a discussion of Karadzik and his views.
For what it’s worth, I do think the question of whether QM has anything to do with consciousness is an interesting one, as is the question of whether different interpretations of QM can lead to different observable consequences.
But what bothers me is when people say “Well, science doesn’t fully understand X” as a defense of crackpot pseudoscientific “theories”. (I’m not saying this was your intention, just that this is a very common way of defending these viewpoints.) The fact is we have a much better, more quantitatively precise and predictive understanding of the physics of atoms than we do of consciousness, or for that matter turbulent flow or high-temperature superconductors or a whole host of other phenomena.
But even for things we really don’t understand, it doesn’t mean we should take seriously claims that are not based on evidence, or which are simply not stated precisely and coherently.