As [PZ](http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/pharyngula\/2006\/11\/chopra_go_play_with_steve_irwi.php) pointed out, Deepak Chopra is back with *yet another* of his clueless, uninformed, idiotic rants. This time, he’s written [an article trying to “prove” that there is an afterlife](http:\/\/www.intentblog.com\/archives\/2006\/11\/what_happens_af.html). Normally, when PZ comments on something like this, I have nothing to add; he does such a good job fisking
\ncredulous morons. But this time, I actually have something to add.<\/p>\n
\nWe’ll start with the trivial, and move on to the egregious:
\n>Thousands of patients have died, almost always from heart attacks, and then been resuscitated who
\n>experience some aspect of the afterlife. One Dutch study put the percentage at around 20% of all
\n>such cases. Amazingly, these patients were brain dead, showing no electrical activity in the cortex
\n>while they were dead. Yet they experienced sights and sounds, met deceased relatives, felt deep
\n>emotions, etc.
\nYes, a whopping 1 in 5 people who’ve been “clinically dead” have had so-called “afterlife experiences”. If you’re trying to claim that we all have souls that continue to exist after our body dies, the fact that only 1 in 5 people who’ve *been* dead have experienced anything isn’t exactly compelling evidence for life after death. 1 in 5 people reporting an experience is a large enough number to say that people who have near-death incidents remember *some* sort of experience; but it’s *not* good evidence for the idea that the experience was what everyone goes through when they die – because the *vast* majority of people *didn’t* experience anything.
\nAnd people who are “brain dead” do not come back to life. If your cortex *dies*, meaning that the cells are dead, then you’re dead. You’re not going to come back because someone zapped you with a big electric shock, or anything else. And people whose hearts stop because of a heart attack *are not* brain dead; their brains *do not* show no electrical activity. When electrical activity in the brain stops is when they stop trying to bring you back. Chopra is an M.D.; it’s scary that he doesn’t know this.
\nMoving on…
\n>If consciousness is created by brain chemistry, there is little likelihood of
\n>a conscious afterlife. However, many intriguing experiments now exist to show that a person’s
\n>thoughts can move beyond the brain. Besides the various experiments
\n>in telepathy and ‘remote viewing,’ which are much more credible than
\n>skeptics will admit, there is a replicated study from the engineering
\n>department at Princeton in which ordinary people could will a computer
\n>to generate a certain pattern of numbers. They did this through thought
\n>alone, having no contact with the machine itself.
\nYes, he’s citing *PEAR* as *evidence*. You know, PEAR, the idiots whose work I
\n[thoroughly](http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/goodmath\/2006\/07\/pear_yet_again_the_theory_behi.php) [mocked](http:\/\/goodmath.blogspot.com\/2006\/05\/repearing-bad-math.html) on [several](http:\/\/goodmath.blogspot.com\/2006\/04\/bad-math-of-paranormal-research-pear.html) occasions for being sloppy, dreadful crap based on deliberately
\ninvalid mathematical analysis? The guys who *admit* in their own papers that their
\nmeasurements are *not* statistically significant? Who do things like pick a supposed
\ntime-stamp, and then go back and retrospectively *select* samples that match their
\npredetermined conclusions?
\nYes, that’s what he considers a good study. And he even claims that it’s been replicated – which not even the PEAR folks are bold enough to claim!
\nAnd now for the crown jewel of his nonsense:
\n>In the area of information theory, a rising body of evidence suggests that Nature preserves data in
\n>the form of information fields. The most basic units of creation, such as quarks and gravity, may be
\n>interrelated through information that cannot be created or destroyed, only recombined into new
\n>patterns. If this is true, then it may be that what we call the soul is a complex package of
\n>information that survives death as well as precedes birth.
\nRemember how I always say “The worse math is no math”? This is a perfect example. Chopra *wants* to use information theory to support his argument. But his argument is gibberish – he absolutely
\n*can’t* express his claims in the actual mathematical language of information theory. But he
\nwants to claim the *credibility* that comes from the field of science and math that studies information. So he just randomly strings words together, and asserts a connection that he can’t actually make.
\nPeople like Steven Hawking *have* studied how things like elementary particles can be viewed in terms of information, and the properties of that information. [Hawkings had a long-standing bet concerning whether or not *information* can ever escape from a black hole.](http:\/\/www.hawking.org.uk\/info\/iindex.html) The difference between Hawking’s discussions
\nabout information theory and quantum physics and Chopra’s babblings is: if
\nyou go to Hawkings writings about the subject, you find *lots* of very careful math, setting out
\nexactly *what* information is carried by particles, what it means for that information to
\nbe preserved or lost, what the implications of that are, etc. Hawkings *does the math*.
\n(Not to mention that Hawkings has the dignity to admit when he’s wrong. He *lost* that bet. But
\nwhen the *math* showed that he was wrong, he accepted it.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As [PZ](http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/pharyngula\/2006\/11\/chopra_go_play_with_steve_irwi.php) pointed out, Deepak Chopra is back with *yet another* of his clueless, uninformed, idiotic rants. This time, he’s written [an article trying to “prove” that there is an afterlife](http:\/\/www.intentblog.com\/archives\/2006\/11\/what_happens_af.html). Normally, when PZ comments on something like this, I have nothing to add; he does such a good job fisking credulous morons. But this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-woo"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-3r","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}