miércoles, 10 de julio de 2013

Rupert Sheldrake - The Science Delusion BANNED TED TALK

Guess I'm old-fashioned re science; got most of my sci edu in the 50s & 60s.  The scientific "dogmas" he lists sound okay to me, at least as working hypotheses; the Newtonian world still works pretty well for most physics and engineering, etc.  It does seem, as the TED folks claim, his talk crosses into pseudoscience and was therefore banned.  But I don't have the expertise to make that call.

I can see Sheldrake is striving, for one, to rebutt Richard Dawkins of THE GOD DELUSION fame.......whom I've been rebutting ever since THE SELFISH GENE came out, but as an anthropologist, not a religious person.

So I'm not, as I think most anthropologists are not, a reductionist.  And in agreement with Sheldrake, I don't think mind=brain.

Beyond that, as a religious person who has taught on religion and the sociology & anthro of religion, I would prefer simply to explain it this way:  Science is very good at what it does, but it can only deal with the empirically known and knowable world, and that's its strength.  Science (like magic) is a belief system, not a value system, tho scientism would be a value system,  perhaps in danger of falling into dogmas, as Sheldrake senses. 

Religion, OTOH, is both a belief and value system, and it covers both the empirically known/knowable and the unknown/unknowable -- the seen and the unseen, as the Credo suggests.  It is sort of a totality or total all-encompassing approach to the material & spiritual world that goes well beyond science.

Now what is interesting is that religion is a human, sociocultural creation -- involving a world view and ethos, which as Geertz nicely points out reinforce one another. 

Social sciences qua sciences can only study the empirical world (incl cultural creations, like religion).  My own neo-Parsonian approach is non-deterministic and includes the impact of the all pervasive/interpenetrating environmental, biological, psychological, social, and cultural dimenisons, as analytical, not concrete distinctions.  Which is perhaps why I think mind cannot be reduced to the brain, or even anything psychologists might come up with within their narrow field.

However, as a religious person I also conceive of a mostly unknown/unknowable "spiritual" dimension, all-pervasive interpenetrating -- not to be confused with "religion" (which is a human creation, even if "inspired" by God and mystical experiences).  I think the spiritual has something to do with the totality Bellah speaks of; it has its own "divine economy" and makes its own sense, of which we might only get tiny glimpses, IFF we are totally open to it, tho it remains pretty much incomprehensible, as in the finite trying to grasp the infinite.  This spiritual dimension goes beyond the purview of sciences and social sciences and is not what we social scientists study, tho it is an elusive topic for theology.

I think my concept of the spiritual dimension goes well beyond what Sheldrake had in mind, bec there will never be any science that can encapsulate it, so my take on Sheldrake's banned TED talk is that he's beating around the God-flaming bush.  Almost as if he's trying to make science become religion.  And if so, then he has failed just as badly as Dawkins failed.

Lynn
 


Date: Sun, 7 Jul 2013 12:22:53 -0400
From: mckenna193@AOL.COM
Subject: Rupert Sheldrake - The Science Delusion BANNED TED TALK
To: EANTH-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU



Telepathy, the new physics and radical anthropology. . .
by a formally non-anthropologist (who quotes many top anthropologists like Daniel Moerman)
Rupert Sheldrake - The Science Delusion BANNED TED TALK
Comments welcome.

BMcK



FROM JOUTUBE:

Publicado el 15/03/2013
Re-uploaded as TED have decided to censor Rupert and remove this video from the TEDx youtube channel. Follow this link for TED's statement on the matter and Dr. Sheldrake's response: http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/14/open-f...

If anyone would like to prepare a transcript or caption file in any language so non-English speakers or the deaf and hard of hearing can enjoy this talk, please do so and I will be happy to upload it. Just PM me. Or the video is embedded on the Amara project website, so you can add subtitles there at: http://tinyurl.com/bwexn5q

RUPERT SHELDRAKE, Ph.D. (born 28 June 1942) is a biologist and author of more than 80 scientific papers and ten books. A former Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he studied natural sciences at Cambridge University, where he was a Scholar of Clare College, took a double first class honours degree and was awarded the University Botany Prize. He then studied philosophy and history of science at Harvard University, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow, before returning to Cambridge, where he took a Ph.D. in biochemistry. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, where he was Director of Studies in biochemistry and cell biology. As the Rosenheim Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he carried out research on the development of plants and the ageing of cells in the Department of Biochemistry at Cambridge University.

While at Cambridge, together with Philip Rubery, he discovered the mechanism of polar auxin transport, the process by which the plant hormone auxin is carried from the shoots towards the roots.

From 1968 to 1969, based in the Botany Department of the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, he studied rain forest plants. From 1974 to 1985 he was Principal Plant Physiologist and Consultant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad, India, where he helped develop new cropping systems now widely used by farmers. While in India, he also lived for a year and a half at the ashram of Fr Bede Griffiths in Tamil Nadu, where he wrote his first book, A New Science of Life.

From 2005-2010 he was the Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project funded from Trinity College,Cambridge. He is a Fellow of Schumacher College , in Dartington, Devon, a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences near San Francisco, and a Visiting Professor at the Graduate Institute in Connecticut.

He lives in London with his wife Jill Purce http://www.healingvoice.com and two sons.

He has appeared in many TV programs in Britain and overseas, and was one of the participants (along with Stephen Jay Gould, Daniel Dennett, Oliver Sacks, Freeman Dyson and Stephen Toulmin) in a TV series called A Glorious Accident, shown on PBS channels throughout the US. He has often taken part in BBC and other radio programmes. He has written for newspapers such as the Guardian, where he had a regular monthly column, The Times, Sunday Telegraph, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, Sunday Times, Times Educational Supplement, Times Higher Education Supplement and Times Literary Supplement, and has contributed to a variety of magazines, including New Scientist, Resurgence, the Ecologist and the Spectator.

Books by Rupert Sheldrake:
A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation (1981). New edition 2009 (in the US published as Morphic Resonance)
The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (1988)
The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God (1992)
Seven Experiments that Could Change the World: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Revolutionary Science (1994) (Winner of the Book of the Year Award from the British Institute for Social Inventions)
Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home, and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals (1999) (Winner of the Book of the Year Award from the British Scientific and Medical Network)
The Sense of Being Stared At, And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind (2003)

With Ralph Abraham and Terence McKenna:
Trialogues at the Edge of the West (1992), republished as Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic Consciousness (2001)
The Evolutionary Mind (1998)

With Matthew Fox:
Natural Grace: Dialogues on Science and Spirituality (1996)
The Physics of Angels: Exploring the Realm Where Science and Spirit Meet (1996)

http://www.sheldrake.org/

These videos are released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license, so they can be freely shared and reposted. (from http://www.ted.com/pages/about)

Mejores comentarios

  • ZorbaTheDutch
    Speaking of closed minds...
    · 5 en respuesta a Clay ton (Mostrar el comentario)
  • Harish Kumar
    The same behaviour was seen again during the Belgian UFO phenomenon, in which the UFOs were seen by thousands of people on the ground and was also tracked by Air Force Radar and F-16 pilots obtained a "lock" on the objects. The scientists and the skeptics denounced it as a classic case of mass delusion. As if only when the CSICOP scientists, Michael Shermer and James Randi, view it, it is an observation. Otherwise, it is a delusion ! Anybody should have the freedom to observe and experiment.
    · 4

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  • Elhardt
    He gave valid hypothesis' and then gave specific examples from experiments and also from the scientific community's own measurements. You're doing what is so typical in youtube commenters, and that's shooting the messenger and giving absolutely no specific examples as to what exactly he said that was wrong or repugnant. It's the equivalent of those people who just respond "You're an idiot", with nothing to back it up with.
  • Elhardt
    "Pictures are valid evidence, eye wittness accounts are not."
    Pictures (photos?) have only been available for the past 150 years, and so science didn't used to depend on them. It was based on observations (eye witness accounts). For eye witness accounts there's something called corroboration. If you have lots of independent witnesses whose observations match each other's, then you rule out lying and confusion. No photos of Dark Energy, Dark Matter, or the Big Bang exist. Must be false then.
  • jungcarlgustav
    You are guilty of personal attacks and appeals to authority here. What part of his argument do you actually disagree with?
  • Tory Wright
    I don't think so. It seems that what occurred was a claim of proof of a negative based upon the assumption that the principles are understood. That shouldn't be condoned. If "we need physical evidence" is what is meant, then that is what should be said. We are all only human after all.
  • pentremansion
    Karl Sagan, where are you ?
    ·
  • Simon Kimberley
    This guy... is repugnant. A man with qualifications such as these is unlikely to believe the nonsense he's saying, he's just preying on foolish people's inexperience of the actual scientific methodology and community, and preying on their miscomprehension.
    If you want to see real academic and intellectually honest criticisms of science this is not the man to look at. He adds nothing to the dialogue from what I see.
    ·
  • Simon Kimberley
    "Its almost as if only scientists can make observations, and if anybody else does it, he or she is delusional or hallucinating."
    Pictures vs. eye wittness account. Pictures are valid evidence, eye wittness accounts are not.
    Drawing this out as some kind of unreasonable bias is frankly quite stupid.
  • davveist
    What about socks? Or shoes?! ....
    ·
  • Marcela Figtree
    life-affirming!!!
    
    ·
  • Dain Q. Gore
    They are hypotheses and opinions, as easily dismissed as saying "I disagree."

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