Calilasseia wrote:Sheldrake is merely another one of a long line of crackpots, who engage in venting of steam of this sort, because they can't persuade the editors of Nature to give their assorted brands of lunacy the oxygen of publicity. That line about matter being "dead" and "unable to produce life" really does show the level of palsied ignorance of real science emanating from these quarters.

Sheldrake did win a retraction from Nature on at least one occasion though as I recall? And actually they have not always been that critical of his work - for example they have published a lot of his mainstream work ---

Effect of pH and Surface Charge on Cell Uptake of Auxin; Nature New Biology (1973) 244, 285-288

Polar Auxin Transport in Leaves of Monocotyledons: Nature (1972), 238, 352-353

The Ageing, Growth and Death of Cells: Nature, Vol. 250, No. 5465, pp. 381-385, August 2nd 1974

However as I say, I'm not a fan of Sheldrake's ideas, and disagree with him on much. However in this book he is really discussing stuff very close to Paul Feyerabend's critiques, and I'm a big fan of that, and the need to defend society against science.

j x

Mr.Samsa wrote:

Ignoring the conflation of materialism with science, does Sheldrake's position really pose questions like these:

"Questions for Materialists", questions such as "Have you been programmed to believe in materialism?", "If there are no purposes in nature, how can you have purposes yourself?", "How do you explain the placebo response?" and so on.

and expect for there to be some difficulty in answering them? The philosophy behind materialism is quite interesting and there are a number of challenging questions that can be useful to present to materialists (either as an attempt to disprove their position, or to get them to solidify it by strengthening their understanding), but those questions presented aren't challenging or even particularly related to materialism...

Hey Mr Samsa

Probably. It's a few weeks since I was sent a review copy, and i read it in two days while ill. Essentially he is challenging unquestioned metaphysical assumptions in Science -- but they are of course questioned all the time in the Philosophy of Science. The bit you quote would be a small "summary" snippet at the end of a chapter, not his developed argument. What he does is pose ten "assumptions" of "science" and then poke at them in chapters of unequal weight. In the one chapter where I actually know something about the research, I would say he is every bit as partisan, one sided and biased - indeed more so perhaps - than Richard Wiseman with his equally flawed account in Paranormality - just in a polar opposite direction. I suspect they are both just tired of rehashing the arguments about psychic dogs. This infuriates me, because we actually can learn an awful lot about science not from whether Jaytee was psychic or not, but from the whole controversy, the spin, the rival camps a,d the contested results, just as many people have pointed out even if Bem's precog results are rubbish, they throw a huge amount of light on flaws common in huge amounts of social science research and much psychology. (Interestingly an early press release for Paranormality suggested it was to be on just these issues - how psychical research had thrown up a huge amount of what had become important advances in standard psychological research. Alas the final book had little of that - some, but that book is still to be written).

Now Sheldrake likes to pose actual experiments that could falsify his hypotheses, (and then argue negative results are flawed, occasionally with some justification, though I would wander off and create a tighter design, as he did in his work with Prof Chris French and telephone psi.). However his actual writing is clear, and interesting, and while it often pushed my boggle factor it does raise important questions for people who have not read Paul Feyerabend, Alfred Whitehead, Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos, or who tend to just accept that science provides an unproblematic description of reality that easily equates to a discovered universal truth. (I think it does part of that, but it is FAR from unproblematic - but I think there is an objective truth, and science approaches it by degrees.) To you or I, there is little new here: but I think many readers of the forum would find the book a hell of a slap, and possibly be incensed, hilariously amused, or outraged, or probably all three by it. Or just bored, as I was at times, but I have a low attention span.

I skipped a few bits on morphic fields and telepathy, because I have read his earlier book on morphic fields now, and have no interest in his ESP stuff really. I was really taken aback by his interest in people who claim to live on air etc, and at times i had to stop and recall just want an incredibly important figure in modern plant biology this guy is, and that he is not just in to this stuff in old age, but has been since the early 70's.

Also he has been badly treated recently by a ludicrous hatchet job by implication in New Scientist online implying misbehaviour where they was none at all ( discussed here -- http://www.dailygrail.com/Skepticism/20 ... -Sheldrake ) -- and in fact the "hardening of attitudes" they refer to is exactly what is wrong with Scientism, the thing he is attacking in, in that it is completely alien to the spirit of unprejudiced research that underlies good science.

Oh one thing that pleased me greatly, he rejects "Science" in favour of "Sciences", as I do. I think actually almost anyone who is not an English native speaker will prefer "the Sciences" to "science", and a little thought quickly reveals the Continental formulation is actually better in almost every way, removing many of the issues that arise in any attempt to describe a coherent methodology as common to all "Science". A lot of philosophical ink may have been spilled on nothing more than an idiosyncracy of the English language.

Anyway, enough. I may review it some time, if I can build up the enthusiasm, on the forum. We will see. Hopefully these few notes help!

j x

Spearthrower wrote:


How do you defend society against knowledge?

Willful Ignorance of course! Here is Feyrabend's essay -- don't take him too literally though, it was rather playful, but serious points -- http://www.galilean-library.org/manuscr ... stid=43842



j x

Does he think telekinesis is so clearly real he uses it so nonchalantly: "We have learned that there are phenomena such as telepathy and telekinesis which are obliterated by a scientific approach". Well, of course they are, but I don't think he means that the way I do. Are such ideas significant in his works?

Matt_B wrote:

VazScep wrote:

Jumbo wrote:

Whenever I hear the word 'paradigm', I reach for my revolver.

"Paradigm" is a universally horrible word. Does it all go back to Kuhn? Because it's now lingo for rants about mainstream science. It's lingo in the business world. And my first encounter with the term was in computing, where it remains a steadfast buzzword.

I think the word in computing is used as follows:

A) The stuff you're doing is kind of the same but kind of different to the stuff I'm doing.
B) Exactly, we're using different paradigms.
A) That clears up everything.

Maybe that's how it's used to talk about science too.

Yep, Kuhn has a lot to answer for. His use of paradigm is basically that people tend to treat new discoveries as exceptions to existing theories and you've got to wait for them to die of old age before new theories that offer a better and more integrated explanation can take hold, that being the new paradigm.

Personally, I'd think that it'll be Midgley and Sheldrake's supposed "paradigms" that will die with them, and not anyone else's.

I don't think it's fair to blame Kuhn. His ideas of paradigms were strictly related to the hard sciences and he was rather uneasy about it's widespread adoption in other areas of study, if I remember correctly. It's now taken on a new meaning and is used without the strict criteria Kuhn originally prescribed it.

Ian Tattum wrote:

logical bob wrote:

Mary Midgely wrote:We can't approach important mind-body topics such as consciousness or the origins of life while we still treat matter in 17th-century style as if it were dead, inert stuff, incapable of producing life.

Did she just accuse materialists of treating matter as being unable to produce life? Surely the whole point of materialism is that matter can and does produce life.

I think that Mary Midgely is one of our most important and useful philosophers, but I can't agree with her on that point at all.She seems to be picking an argument with contemporary 'materialists' by addressing ones who are long gone. Its like running away from a dragonfly because his ancestors were enormous.

"If there are no purposes in nature, how can you have purposes yourself?",

This is an important concept, I explained this many times in the past: the purpose we create ourselves is not real purpose its an illusion. And therefore people are not consistent when they claim their purpose is this thing or that thing..

I just finished reading the greatest show on earth by Dawkins, I think il buy Sheldrake's book now, thank for the article!

Mary Midgely is an incredibly obtuse person, full of opinions that are innocent of all facts, and such an expert at committing logical fallacies one half-wonders if she is a POE. Personally, I think even Michael behe is more intellectually honest, despite his "Science" being bitch-slapped by Ken Miller and other in KitzMiller vs Dover.
She is so stupid I wonder how she feeds herself. ?

crank wrote:Does he think telekinesis is so clearly real he uses it so nonchalantly: "We have learned that there are phenomena such as telepathy and telekinesis which are obliterated by a scientific approach". Well, of course they are, but I don't think he means that the way I do. Are such ideas significant in his works?

Hey Crank. You mean Feyrabend? He was speaking around 1975, when an awful lot of people in the scientific community thought ESP was pretty much proven. Robin Ince actually said something on Twitter about two weeks back on "a parapsychologists were misled by star psychics in the 1970's how do we know they are not now?" as I pointed out British and European parapsychologists appear from the journals of the time to have been VERY critical of spoonbending and the star subjects - it was brilliant physicists like Hasted, Taylor etc, etc, who actually led the investigations and were convinced. There is actually a passage in Fielding (1904) I think where he points out this problem - that great scientists are often laughably easy to convince, because they find it hard to believe they can be fooled. Mind you he also points out conjurers are even easier to trick. (And yes, as I always point out, magicians had been employed as investigators in psychical research for thirty years before James Randi was born - i can name at least three major SPR investigators who were accomplished stage magicians: but the myth that they are never employed is always used, and just as Houdini gets the credit for the parapsychologists expose of Margery (Mina Crandon) it is Randi who people associated with critiques of Geller now.

Now some people still think ESP is proven by any normal standard -- like the great Sceptic Richard Wiseman, who said

Richard Wiseman in the Daily Mail wrote:
“I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that remote viewing is proven, but begs the question: do we need higher standards of evidence when we study the paranormal? I think we do.

“If I said that there is a red car outside my house, you would probably believe me.

“But if I said that a UFO had just landed, you’d probably want a lot more evidence.

“Because remote viewing is such an outlandish claim that will revolutionise the world, we need overwhelming evidence before we draw any conclusions. Right now we don’t have that evidence.”

He later clarified this thus --

Richard Wiseman wrote:
“It is a slight misquote, because I was using the term in the more general sense of ESP — that is, I was not talking about remote viewing per se, but rather Ganzfeld, etc as well. I think that they do meet the usual standards for a normal claim, but are not convincing enough for an extraordinary claim.”

Now Sheldrake became as far as I can see interested back then in the 1970's, when ESP was fashionable among British scientists - one of the few major mainstream figures still doing work in it at Cambridge Uni is Nobel Prize for Physics Winner Brian Josephson, he of superconductor fame, though Prof Bernard Carr (who did his PhD under Stephen Hawking at CalTech ) is of course still heavily involved and is a former SPR president.

Now as it happens I don't know if ESP exists, and get pretty bored by the research articles.I have no interest in Morphic Resonance, or Sheldrakes scientific ideas in general. What I am interested in however is scientific culture.

What seems to have happened is that during the 1980s and 1990s there was a major hardening of the Scientific consensus against any kind of psi research -- despite increasingly positive findings in the Ganzfeld experiments for example. Now this is referenced in the New Scientist piece I linked above - which was actually absurdly prejudiced and comes close to bering disingenuous in claiming Sheldrakes use of words from the review they published in 1981 (I think) was unfair on a reissue of the book, and misrepresented the praise they gave at that time. The problem is there has been a sea change in attitudes, but whereas in the 1970's I think I would have been sounding warnings that psi research was far more problematic than popularly believed, now I have to shout the opposite - be fair, actually read the Journal papers before dismissing them. Still very few people are actually familiar with the research, even at my fairly general overview level, but most people feel able to hold an opinion, usually based on some other strongly held beliefs, which are generally considered by the holder as scientific, but which are actually usually axiomatic, metaphysical and philosophical constructs. So we are back to Sheldrake's point: scientific culture is often deeply opposed to actual critical thinking, free inquiry, and rational examination, and instead a cultural construct.

Bloody good point though Crank!
j x

Paul G wrote:

I don't think it's fair to blame Kuhn. His ideas of paradigms were strictly related to the hard sciences and he was rather uneasy about it's widespread adoption in other areas of study, if I remember correctly. It's now taken on a new meaning and is used without the strict criteria Kuhn originally prescribed it.

Absolutely!

Not sure how he defined hard science -- he believed paradigms applied to say psychology I think, but not philosophy or the humanities. I find Imre Lakatos idea of Research Programmes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imre_Lakat ... programmes quite useful in comparison, but ultimately agree with Feyrabend that Science is not one thing, but Sciences. Poor old Kuhn however has seen his ideas popularized, bastardized and reinterpreted as something quite different to the way he employed them -- "paradigm" is now a buzzword with no value: but then I piss people off who use "ultimate" in marketing by saying "so this is the last one?". (The phrase is correctly used in Lynx 2012 deodorant though, because of the eschatological implications - they jokingly claim its the last one cos the world will end in December!)

j x

logical bob wrote:

Mary Midgely wrote:We can't approach important mind-body topics such as consciousness or the origins of life while we still treat matter in 17th-century style as if it were dead, inert stuff, incapable of producing life.

Did she just accuse materialists of treating matter as being unable to produce life? Surely the whole point of materialism is that matter can and does produce life.

She did accuse people who treat matter in 17th century style as treating it as if it was incapable of producing life. And she´s right. Historically materialism developed as a metaphysical position opposed to dualism and idealism. It also grew out of a criticism of catholic theology and particularly the proofs of god in there.
Now generally the classical proofs of god work like this:
a) Show that reality must contain some entity with the property P
b) Argue that nature does not contain such an entity
c) Conclude that thus such an entity exists outside of nature and - as Augustinus put it - "that is what everybody calls god".
Materialist philosophers conceeded that c followed from a and b, but they disagreed with premise a. Traditiaonally materialist metaphysics has been about constructing a reality in which no entity has property P.

Now, Paley argued - and did so rather sucessfully - that life required something with the property P to work and of couse using b ended up with god. But then the game fundamentally changed: Darwin proposed a theory for the evolution of modern biodiversity that had entities with the property P in nature. For this to work, there had to be such entities and Boltzmann was the first to figure out the consequences for physics. As it turns out for Darwin to be right matter had to consist of particles and these particles had to have property P (and if they had it the entropy formulation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics followed). As we moved on we got quantum mechanics, which states that all particles have property P.

Basically: All of nature is made out of stuff with property P!

Now, this means a modern view has to accept premise a and reject b - the very opposite of what materialism did. Materialism in that form is less compatible with evolutionary biology than theism and more out of touch with science. Still it has a rather big influence on "new atheism", Dawkins trying to shoehorn evolution into a paradigm (ha!) that died with Darwin, E.O. Wilson singing the praise of Comte... I´ve certainly seen the blue butterfly do it as well. There´s a genuine need for an atheist position based on the rejection of premise b in the proofs of god - it´s one consistent with science. And so far that hasn´t really been developed. Instead we have Dawkins write a book that pretty much says "Evolution is wrong" (though it´s target is religion), because it is based on arguments drawn from classical materialism. There´s a cognitive dissonance there that at least borders on the wiseian...

A few notes on property P:
I´ve used this term instead of using the ones employed in the various types of literature. It´s hard to use a term that isn´t loaded in some way, but this describes the ability to "choose" between two or more alternatives - in the theological literature that is indicated by "will", the same holds for diverse philosophical writings. Darwin used the term "chance" and if I had to pick a term I´d probably (I´ve got options there: I´ve got property P after all) go with "stochasticity".

J Hubner wrote:

"If there are no purposes in nature, how can you have purposes yourself?",

This is an important concept, I explained this many times in the past: the purpose we create ourselves is not real purpose its an illusion. And therefore people are not consistent when they claim their purpose is this thing or that thing..

Purpose is subjective. This is profound or something?

susu.exp wrote:

logical bob wrote:

Mary Midgely wrote:We can't approach important mind-body topics such as consciousness or the origins of life while we still treat matter in 17th-century style as if it were dead, inert stuff, incapable of producing life.

Did she just accuse materialists of treating matter as being unable to produce life? Surely the whole point of materialism is that matter can and does produce life.

She did accuse people who treat matter in 17th century style as treating it as if it was incapable of producing life. And she´s right. Historically materialism developed as a metaphysical position opposed to dualism and idealism. It also grew out of a criticism of catholic theology and particularly the proofs of god in there.
Now generally the classical proofs of god work like this:
a) Show that reality must contain some entity with the property P
b) Argue that nature does not contain such an entity
c) Conclude that thus such an entity exists outside of nature and - as Augustinus put it - "that is what everybody calls god".
Materialist philosophers conceeded that c followed from a and b, but they disagreed with premise a. Traditiaonally materialist metaphysics has been about constructing a reality in which no entity has property P.

Now, Paley argued - and did so rather sucessfully - that life required something with the property P to work and of couse using b ended up with god. But then the game fundamentally changed: Darwin proposed a theory for the evolution of modern biodiversity that had entities with the property P in nature. For this to work, there had to be such entities and Boltzmann was the first to figure out the consequences for physics. As it turns out for Darwin to be right matter had to consist of particles and these particles had to have property P (and if they had it the entropy formulation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics followed). As we moved on we got quantum mechanics, which states that all particles have property P.

Basically: All of nature is made out of stuff with property P!

Now, this means a modern view has to accept premise a and reject b - the very opposite of what materialism did. Materialism in that form is less compatible with evolutionary biology than theism and more out of touch with science. Still it has a rather big influence on "new atheism", Dawkins trying to shoehorn evolution into a paradigm (ha!) that died with Darwin, E.O. Wilson singing the praise of Comte... I´ve certainly seen the blue butterfly do it as well. There´s a genuine need for an atheist position based on the rejection of premise b in the proofs of god - it´s one consistent with science. And so far that hasn´t really been developed. Instead we have Dawkins write a book that pretty much says "Evolution is wrong" (though it´s target is religion), because it is based on arguments drawn from classical materialism. There´s a cognitive dissonance there that at least borders on the wiseian...

A few notes on property P:
I´ve used this term instead of using the ones employed in the various types of literature. It´s hard to use a term that isn´t loaded in some way, but this describes the ability to "choose" between two or more alternatives - in the theological literature that is indicated by "will", the same holds for diverse philosophical writings. Darwin used the term "chance" and if I had to pick a term I´d probably (I´ve got options there: I´ve got property P after all) go with "stochasticity".

I'm sorry, but I honestly have no idea what you're saying here.

Am I the only one?

JoeB wrote:

Animavore wrote:Get in the fucking sack.

Dara Ó Briain!

Yes, this is what I was thinking too.

orpheus wrote:I'm sorry, but I honestly have no idea what you're saying here.

In short? Materialism entails a particular view of matter, that is simply wrong by modern scientific standards. Heisenberg stated it this way: "The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct ‘actuality’ of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation, however, is impossible . .. atoms are not things." Arguably - and that´s the argument I´ve made earlier this illusion died with Darwin: evolution is fundamentally at odds with the view of matter materialists have held. Some philosophers have argued that materialism doesn´t entail any particular view of matter (then it´s arguably vacuous: Unless I state what I mean by matter, the sentence "Everything there is is made of matter" is as meaningless as "everything there is is made of Oompha") while others argue that versions of scientific realism or physicalism work better.
I also note that there´s an attempt by some neo-materialists to stick with the original view of matter even if it is at odds with science. Something particularly odd when it´s done by scientists whose own discipline is at odds with this view.