Showing posts with label Formative Causation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Formative Causation. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Rupert Sheldrake





AN EVENING WITH RUPERT SHELDRAKE

We are in an extraordinarily unusual time in relation to science and spiritual practices it’s particularly unusual because we are in the stage at which the pursuit of organized religion has declined to a remarkable degree. Only about 5% of the population of Britain regularly attend church services, for example. Yet at the same time there is a tremendous growth in the interest in spiritual practices. And we now have access to spiritual practices from all the world's traditions. Millions of people practice Yoga and Meditation, for example. When I was a child most people had never heard of Yoga and Meditation, outside India, or outside Theosophists, and possibly…

But now it is very common. Every small town has Yoga studios. At the same time these practices are being investigated scientifically which had not happened before. And in 2001 a huge handbook was published called The handbook of Religion and Health, and a second edition was published in 2012, reviewing more than 2,500 papers in peer reviewed journals, studying the effects of spiritual and scientific practices.

The overwhelming consensus was that these practices have very beneficial affects make people healthier, happier and live longer. Presumably the opposite must be true. People who don’t have these practices are unhappier, unhealthier, and live shorter. Which is why I think militant atheism should come with a health warning. Because when people are persuaded to give up religious practices it leaves them with a kind of void. And because of thet a new generation of atheists are advocating spiritual practices.

We now have the strange situation in which we have Sam Harris, one of the new atheists, is now giving online meditation courses. And Alain de Batton, one of our leading aethist philosophers in Beitan, recently wrote a book called, Religion for Atheists, in which he points out that when people loose their traditional religious practices and faith, then they loose out on a whole range of things, which are helpful for religious people: gathering together regularly, being supported by that community in times of adversity, having a sense of community, praying, singing together, celebrating festivals, having rites of passage, praying.

If people give up traditional practices, they usually give up all these things as well. And Alain de Batton recognizes that these are very important for human health, well being, and flourishing. Which he is trying to re-invent atheists versions of these practices.


The above is a paraphrased excerpt from a transcription of the YouTube presentation


Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, one of the world's most innovative scientists, who, while having a perfectly good PhD in biochemistry, prefers to spend much of his time on parapsychology with some truly amaising results.  In his quest to explore phenomena that science finds hard to explain, he has been condemned "in exactly the language that the pope used to condemn Galileo, and for the same reason.

Dr. Sheldrake shows the ways in which science is being constricted by assumptions that have, over the years, hardened into dogmas. Such dogmas are not only limiting, but dangerous for the future of humanity. According to these principles, all of reality is material or physical; the world is a machine, made up of inanimate matter; nature is purposeless; consciousness is nothing but the physical activity of the brain; free will is an illusion; God exists only as an idea in human minds, imprisoned within our skulls while societies around the world are paying the price.

In the skeptical spirit of true science, Sheldrake turns the ten fundamental dogmas of materialism into exciting questions, and shows how all of them open up startling new possibilities for discovery. Science Set Free will radically change your view of what is real and what is possible.

"I think what we’re heading for is a post-materialist worldview which is what my book (Morphic Resonance)  is trying to point the way towards. We could have a holistic way of looking at things, a scientific investigation into things, which leaves these bigger questions open. For example, in one chapter of the book where I’m dealing with the dogma that memories are stored as material traces inside the brain that becomes the question, are memories stored as material traces in the brain?

I’m not confident memories are stored in brains. I think that brains are more like tuning devices, more like TV receivers than like video recorders. Now that’s really a scientific question, how is memory stored? We can do experiments to try and find out how memory works.

So for materialists it’s a simple two-step argument. Memories are stored in brains; the brain decays at death, therefore, memories are wiped out at death. Whereas, if memories are not stored in brains then the memories themselves are not wiped out at death. They’re potentially accessible. That doesn’t prove they are accessed, that there is personal survival. It just means that’s a possibility whereas with materialism it’s an impossibility. So one position leaves the question closed and the other leaves it open."                                             - Interview with Alex Tsakiris

Why do many phenomena defy the explanations of conventional biology and physics? For instance, when laboratory rats in one place have learned how to navigate a new maze, why do rats elsewhere seem to learn it more easily? Rupert Sheldrake describes this process as morphic resonance: the past forms and behaviors of organisms, he argues, influence organisms in the present through direct connections across time and space. Calling into question many of our fundamental concepts about life and consciousness, Sheldrake reinterprets the regularities of nature as being more like habits than immutable laws.

The first edition of A New Science of Life created a furor when it appeared, provoking the outrage of the old-guard scientific community and the approbation of the new. The British journal Nature called it "the best candidate for burning there has been for many years." A lively debate ensued, as researchers devised experiments testing Sheldrake's hypothesis, including some involving millions of people through the medium of television. These developments are recorded in this revised and expanded edition of New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance

Sheldrake explains how past forms and behaviors of organisms determine those of similar organisms in the present through morphic resonance. The Hypothesis of Formative Causation proposes that the forms of self-organizing systems are arranged and fashioned by "Morphic fields." He proposes that the process of morphic resonance leads to stable morphic fields, which are significantly easier to tune into. He suggests that this is the means by which simpler organic forms synergetically self-organize into more complex ones, and that this model allows a different explanation for the process of evolution itself, as an addition to Darwin's evolutionary processes of selection and variation.

There is a fine line between moderation and censorship. At TED.COM (Technology, Entertainment and Design) on January 13, 2013, Rupert Sheldrake gave a talk in which he suggests that the modern scientific worldview has become associated with ten dogmas, and makes the case that none of them hold up to scrutiny. According to him, these dogmas — including, for example, that nature is mechanical and purposeless, that the laws and constants of nature are fixed, and that psychic phenomena like telepathy are impossible — are holding back the pursuit of knowledge.

TED’s scientific advisers have questioned whether his list is a fair description of scientific assumptions, and TED administrators have publicaly aligned themselves with the old paradigm of materialism, which has dominated science since the late nineteenth century. TED have decided to censor Rupert Sheldrake and remove this video from the TEDx YouTube channel. This has caused some controversy and should make Sheldrake all the more interesting.