Here’s a look at what Sheldrake had to say, and my opinion as to why TED was right to not endorse his talk.
Sheldrake’s Talk.
http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/19/the-deba ... akes-talk/
:01
There is an important distinction to make here. We have to make guesses about reality. Then we have to test these guesses against reality to see whether the guess we made was wrong. If our experiments say that the guess was off, then it was off and we have to try to fix the guess so that the consequences that can be figured out from the guess conform with reality. These guesses, if they prove to be accurate and agree with experiment are then pushed past the realm of what has been confirmed to what has not yet been confirmed.Science delusion is the idea that science already understands the nature of reality in principal, leaving only the details to be filled in.
We extend them past what has been proven into what we are not yet sure about. Why? To see if the guess applies! Then we do more experiments and see if the guess holds up. We work out the consequences to see what it would imply if our guess does hold in realms where it hasn’t been physically tested.
An example here is gravity. We can work out all the consequences of what should happen to an apple dropped from the hand, and one rolled down a ramp from the same height. We can work out how the planets should behave if our guess about gravity were right, and compare it to our observations. These calculated consequences agreed so thoroughly with observation that people gained great confidence in our theory of how gravity works. So much so that when problems cropped up we could use our confidence in our gravity guess to figure out new phenomena.
A great example of this is when we were figuring out how the moons of Jupiter ought to orbit the planet. It looked pretty consistent, but then a problem kept cropping up. Sometimes the planets were ahead of the predicted schedule, and sometimes behind. There was an 8 minute variation from prediction based on the guess and the observation.
But we had such confidence in our guess, due to the tremendous range of other phenomena that it agreed with with such accuracy, that we could infer the speed of light! The problem with the prediction was that it didn’t account for there being any lag between the light coming from the moon reaching observers here on earth. When the moons were 8 minutes ahead, Jupiter was closest to the earth. When they were behind, Jupiter was furthest from earth as both planets orbited the sun.
Figuring in the travel time of light, the prediction of the gravity theory worked out perfectly. Having nailed down one theory with confidence enabled us to detect something else about the universe. Light doesn’t travel instantaneously! It travels with a finite speed!
This confidence in gravity is also how we first detected Neptune. Not only did our theory let us predict how the sun interacts with the planets, but also how the planets interact with one another. And it looked to some theorists that the outer planets were being pulled on by another planet. But nobody had observed another planet. They did the calculations, determined what the observed variations in the orbits of the outer planets implied about where another planet would have to be to cause those variations, and told observers to look at such and such coordinates to find another planet. And they were right!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune_planet
When you get a good guess about how the world works, you push it until it absolutely breaks. Once a guess has been sufficiently demonstrated to be accurate you assume the guess applies until it is proven to be off. We haven’t been to proxima century, but it is reasonable to think that what keeps our feet to the ground, our moon in the sky, and our planets around our star is the same thing producing the same behavior in other stars. And through the whole galaxy. And in other galaxies, and between galaxies.
We can’t prove conclusively that it’s the case, but no observation has shown it to be wrong. There are some issues that crop up. Dark matter is a proposal to deal with a discrepancy in our predictions and our observations. There’s got to be something about gravity we don’t understand. Or about what produces gravity, or if there’s something out there that has an effect like gravity, but isn’t gravity. Whatever the issue is, “we can’t throw out something that works for nothing that doesn’t”. The theory of gravity accounts for nearly all the effects we’ve seen, and we can’t replace it with anything until that new thing also explains what gravity does, and then some of the things that gravity doesn’t explain.
Just pointing out that something is wrong can’t advance our success at guessing what will happen. The key is replacing something that you think is wrong with something else that works even better.
So does science make the claim that we fundamentally already know everything, and we’re just filling in the details? Not unless you consider “the details” to be 96% of the active forces observed in our universe. Because between them, Dark matter and Dark Energy take up the lion’s share of what has an influence in the long term stability of the galaxies. What we can say with high confidence, though, is that it isn’t like the 4 % we understand. And that’s a starting point. That’s the part we can leverage to discover other things. That’s the confidence in the theory of gravity that lets us determine that light has to travel.
The Dogmas that Rupert outlines.:
1:Nature is mechanical or machine-like.
Many of these dogmas fall into what I discussed above. You make a guess. Test it against reality. If the guess is accurately describing what you observe, you extend, or generalize the guess to other phenomena until the guess is broken by disagreeing with observations.
Observations have never shown us anything that is fundamentally in principal, unexplainable by a machine-like universe. That includes the four fundamental forces, and all their effects. Their effects, incidentally including you and I.
2:Matter is unconscious
At about 2:50 in the video.
He’s got this mixed up a bit, and that seems like an attempt to seed disdain in the listener’s mind for his opponent’s position. In a machine-like universe consciousness is not a property of any basic unit. No atom is conscious.No consciousness in stars planets galaxies animals and plants and there ought not be any in us either…The philosophy of mind has been to prove that we are not really conscious at all.
Consciousness, like many of the things we deal with, is an emergent phenomena, arising through the simple interaction of simple objects in vast quantities, and vast time scales. These Simple things interacting by simple rules produce a wide variety of events and phenomena that seem very far removed from the most basic level of interactions. It may seem weird that consciousness is not a fundamental property of reality, but how much weirder is it to think that the concept of “solid” is an emergent property? Or invisible, and visible. Or weight. Or hot and cold? All of these are emergent properties that arise from the interaction of billions, and billions of tiny objects which do not fundamentally have any of these properties.
That isn’t to say that “solid” doesn’t exist. Or that there’s no such thing as “fuzzy”. Or that nothing is conscious. These things are all real, and I doubt there is any scientist who is claiming that because atoms don’t keep dream diaries humans cannot be conscious.
3:The laws and constants of nature are fixed.
Discussed in more detail in the next post.
4:The total amount of matter and energy is always the same.
I’m discussing these to the degree which I think he’s misrepresenting them. His point on this is more or less accepted scientific consensus to my knowledge, but that isn’t to say the matter is closed. It just means you’ll have to have something specific and predictive to add in order to change thinking on the matter.
So simply saying “I DON’t think the total amount of matter and energy is always the same.” Won’t get you into any peer review journals, nor a place in the annals of science. You’ve got to replace what works, and has predictive power (and few laws are as useful as the conservation laws) with something that explains why what we’ve been using for so long has been so damned accurate in predicting things for so long, but also explains something new that the old guess had wrong. And that’s hard to do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein
5:Nature is purposeless
Purpose is a word that can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. I think most scientists would agree that there’s no intellectual PLAN being enacted by some cosmic consciousness called “nature”. But you might hear scientists discussing natural phenomena in terms of “the purpose of carnassal teeth is to sheer meat from bone” because that is what carnassal teeth have been evolved to do. Not by a consciousness with a plan, but by the effectiveness of that kind of tooth on the kind of prey an animal has been eating all through it’s evolution. To the extent that that tooth helps wolves eat deer, it’s purpose is to help wolves eat deer. But nobody, and nothing decided that was it’s purpose. The problem here is discussing evolution as though there were a motive to it.
6:Bilological heredity is material
Nothing has ever indicated otherwise. There are no mysteries which suggest that, fundamentally, it is impossible for any particular aspect biological evolution to take place if genes were responsible for the entire process. There are lots of things we don’t know about the evolution of creatures, and even the cellular machinery of some of these processes. But it’s a case of having so damned much to work on, rather than the problems are characteristically unsolvable based on a material inheritance.
7:Memories are stored inside your brain.
Correct.
8:Your mind is inside your head
It is.
9:Psychic phenomena are impossible
Not fundamentally. But people can’t do it.
Who, or what could? Think of it this way. The processes in your mind are chemical, and that means that ultimately they are electromagnetic. Disturbances in the electromagnetic field do travel great distance and at great speed. Nothing prevents the signals generated in your brain from being received at a distance from your skull. But on the other end you need a physical receiver to intercept, decode, and reconstruct those real electromagnetic signals emitted from your head back into a thought. No such organ exists in the human body, or any life form on earth. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Just that it doesn’t exist here.
And if there were aliens somewhere with telepathic powers they would have the morphology to prove it. Some vibrating part of the brain which amplified and transmitted the signals of the brain and another which was very sensitive to just such signals. But they still wouldn’t be able to read your mind because your signal would be weak, and they wouldn’t have evolved to decode it anyway.
10:Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works
Because our bodies are mechanistic. Our brains have a wide range of influence over our bodies and things like the placebo effect have great healing powers, but the placebo effect is also, ultimately, mechanical. Those alternate forms of medicine which work do so, also, through real interaction between the real components of the treatment, and the real components of the malady.