Here’s a question: If Chopra were put in a box, could he pass the Turing test? After all, we do know he love boxes!

At any rate, he’s supposed to be on a safari in Africa but he’s tw**ting as furiously as ever. The first tw**ts below weren’t generated by the automatic Deepak Quote Generator, but they could have been. If I had a million bucks, I’d offer it to anyone who could explain them to me. At any rate, it shows how you can’t distinguish between Chopra and the computer.

This morning, though, Matthew Cobb (who sometimes works with physicist Brian Cox on his broadcasts), emailed me that Chopra had a flare-up of Maru’s Syndrome, and got into a box with Cox. I love the fifth tw**t below, by Cox.

That’s gotta sting! Poor Chopra—he just can’t win. But he tried:

There’s that passive-aggressive behavior again: stroke with one hand and slap with the other. I’m not quite sure what a “naive realist” is, but I suspect, from Chopra’s history of deepities that it’s someone who’s simply too wedded to the naturalistic worldview of science to realize that there is no reality independent of consciousness. Chopra is, after all, a man who said that the Moon simply isn’t there unless we look at it. It would help Deepak a great deal if he could tell us what he means by claiming that the Universe is conscious, and that consciousness and that, “top down” gave rise to all reality. For surely Chopra’s definition of a conscious Universe is not a universe that experiences “qualia,” or subjective sensations. Yet that is what he means by consciousness when applied to humans.

I’m torn between advising Brian Cox to not to catch his own case of Maru’s Syndrome, for there is no way that Chopra will ever change his mind. So what’s the point, except to either engage in Chopra-baiting (which has its own small joys), or to hope that the people on the sidelines see what a charlatan the man is?

Nevertheless, after the fifth tw**t in the second conversation above, I score Chopra 0, Cox 1.

UPDATE: (h/t to reader Alex): This is like a soap opera. After having insulted Cox, Chopra goes into Groveling Mode and begs Cox to come to his “Sages and Scientists” meeting—the same one I refused to attend. Notice his prominent mention of “honorarium”!