Deepak Chopra and Truth

In a debate on Nightline, Deepak Chopra said: "I want to seek the company of those who are looking for the truth but I want to run away from those who have found it."

(The debate should be available on the internet. Janelle and I watched the whole thing on youtube.com last night.)

This seems platitudinous to me. It's like searching for something so that, when you find it, you can deny it exists. That's a self-defeating exercise.

We don't approach science this way: while studying for an exam in biochemistry, I don't kick out of my study group the people who claim to know the answers to the problems, I seek them out and get them to teach me.

Or, if I was looking for something, if, for example, I lost Mr. Chopra in the mall and wanted to find him, I might go around asking people: "Hello, have you seen a pretentious man?" And give a brief description of the man's physical appearance. And they might say, "Ah, yes, I know exactly who you're looking for, he's doing a book signing at Chapters." I would not, then, go looking for him at Canadian Tire: I would go to Chapters.

Or, if I wanted to hire an electrician to upgrade the wiring in my house, I would look for one who knew the proper code and adhered to it. I would not hire an electrician who claimed not to know the code and avoided the company of those who did know the code. I would avoid such an electrician and perhaps take steps to have his license removed.

Why on Earth, then, should I apply this method to explore philosophy? It is foolish to simultaneously search for truth and deny its existence in so far as anyone else has experienced it. There are methods in philosophy for reasoning out truth with logic. If the truth that you eventually come to by logical and rational examination is unpleasant or does not square with your hypothesis, do not assume that your methods are unsound.

If, in science, our research and experiments continually disprove our hypothesis, we do not change the standards of critical examination and experimentation to prove our hypothesis. This is bad science. Instead we seek to reconcile the hypothesis with what we have learned through research and experimentation and emerge with greater knowledge: I previously believed that a+b=y but experimentation showed, and I now believe that, a+b=x. We do this all the time. Why approach one subject differently?

We claim that philosophical, moral truth is subjective. But if the universe is constructed around physical laws that are as rigid as we have found them to be, there can be no subjective area of knowledge or wisdom and the universe must be founded on rigid absolutes in every aspect.

(In my opinion. Of course it's my opinion. It's my blob, who else's opinion would it be?)