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[Rich Murray-2]

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Video Blog

August 27 2013

Rupert Sheldrake

Ph.D

Category:  Guest Bloggers

Biography

The Scientific Creed and the Credibility Crunch for Materialism

by Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D; biologist and author of Science Set Free

The “scientific worldview” is immensely influential because the sciences have been so successful. No one can fail to be awed by their achievements, which touch all our lives through technologies and through modern medicine.

Our intellectual world has been transformed through an immense expansion of our knowledge, down into the most microscopic particles of matter and out into the vastness of space, with hundreds of billions of galaxies in an ever-expanding universe.

Yet in the second decade of the twenty-first century, when science and technology seem to be at the peak of the power, when their influence has spread all over the world and when their triumph seems indisputable, unexpected problems are disrupting the sciences from within. Most scientists take it for granted that these problems will eventually be solved by more research along established lines, but some, including myself, think that they are symptoms of a deeper malaise. Science is being held back by centuries-old assumptions that have hardened into dogmas. The sciences would be better off without them: freer, more interesting, and more fun.

The biggest scientific delusion of all is that science already knows the answers. The details still need working out, but the fundamental questions are settled, in principle.
Contemporary science is based on the claim that all reality is material or physical. There is no reality but material reality. Consciousness is a by-product of the physical activity of the brain. Matter is unconscious. Evolution is purposeless. God exists only as an idea in human minds, and hence in human heads.

These beliefs are powerful not because most scientists think about them critically, but because they don’t. The facts of science are real enough, and so are the techniques that scientists use, and so are the technologies based on them. But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith, grounded in a nineteenth century ideology.


The scientific creed

Here are the ten core beliefs that most scientists take for granted.

1. Everything is essentially mechanical. Dogs, for example, are complex mechanisms, rather than living organisms with goals of their own. Even people are machines, “lumbering robots”, in Richard Dawkins’ vivid phrase, with brains that are like genetically programmed computers.

2. All matter is unconscious. It has no inner life or subjectivity or point of view. Even human consciousness is an illusion produced by the material activities of brains.

3. The total amount of matter and energy is always the same (with the exception of the Big Bang, when all the matter and energy of the universe suddenly appeared).

4. The laws of nature are fixed. They are the same today as they were at the beginning, and they will stay the same forever.

5. Nature is purposeless, and evolution has no goal or direction.

6. All biological inheritance is material, carried in the genetic material, DNA, and in other material structures.

7. Minds are inside heads and are nothing but the activities of brains. When you look at a tree, the image of the tree you are seeing is not “out there”, where it seems to be, but inside your brain.

8. Memories are stored as material traces in brains and are wiped out at death.

9. Unexplained phenomena like telepathy are illusory.

10. Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.


Together, these beliefs make up the philosophy or ideology of materialism, whose central assumption is that everything is essentially material or physical, even minds. This belief-system became dominant within science in the late nineteenth century, and is now taken for granted. Many scientists are unaware that materialism is an assumption; they simply think of it as science, or the scientific view of reality, or the scientific worldview. They are not actually taught about it, or given a chance to discuss it. They absorb it by a kind of intellectual osmosis.

In everyday usage, materialism refers to a way of life devoted entirely to material interests, a preoccupation with wealth, possessions and luxury. These attitudes are no doubt encouraged by the materialist philosophy, which denies the existence of any spiritual realities or non-material goals, but in this article I am concerned with materialism’s scientific claims, rather than its effects on lifestyles.

In the spirit of radical scepticism, each of these ten doctrines can be turned into a question, as I show in my book Science Set Free (called The Science Delusion in the UK). Entirely new vistas open up when a widely accepted assumption is taken as the beginning of an enquiry, rather than as an unquestionable truth. For example, the assumption that nature is machine-like or mechanical becomes a question: “Is nature mechanical?” The assumption that matter is unconscious becomes “Is matter unconscious?” And so on.

The credibility crunch for the “scientific worldview”

For more than 200 years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Science will prove that living organisms are complex machines, minds are nothing but brain activity and nature is purposeless. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs. The philosopher of science Karl Popper called this stance "promissory materialism" because it depends on issuing promissory notes for discoveries not yet made. Despite all the achievements of science and technology, materialism is now facing a credibility crunch that was unimaginable in the twentieth century.

In 1963, when I was studying biochemistry at Cambridge University, I was invited to a series of private meetings with Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner in Brenner's rooms in King's College, along with a few of my classmates. Crick and Brenner had recently helped to “crack” the genetic code. Both were ardent materialists and Crick was also a militant atheist. They explained there were two major unsolved problems in biology: development and consciousness. They had not been solved because the people who worked on them were not molecular biologists—nor very bright. Crick and Brenner were going to find the answers within 10 years, or maybe 20. Brenner would take developmental biology, and Crick consciousness. They invited us to join them.

Both tried their best. Brenner was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002 for his work on the development of a tiny worm, Caenorhabdytis elegans. Crick corrected the manuscript of his final paper on the brain the day before he died in 2004. At his funeral, his son Michael said that what made him tick was not the desire to be famous, wealthy or popular, but "to knock the final nail into the coffin of vitalism." (Vitalism is the theory that living organisms are truly alive, and not explicable in terms of physics and chemistry alone.)
Crick and Brenner failed. The problems of development and consciousness remain unsolved. Many details have been discovered, dozens of genomes have been sequenced, and brain scans are ever more precise. But there is still no proof that life and minds can be explained by physics and chemistry alone.

The fundamental proposition of materialism is that matter is the only reality. Therefore consciousness is nothing but brain activity. It is either like a shadow, an “epiphenomenon”, that does nothing, or it is just another way of talking about brain activity. However, among contemporary researchers in neuroscience and consciousness studies there is no consensus about the nature of minds. Leading journals such as Behavioural and Brain Sciences and the Journal of Consciousness Studies publish many articles that reveal deep problems with the materialist doctrine. The philosopher David Chalmers has called the very existence of subjective experience the "hard problem”. It is hard because it defies explanation in terms of mechanisms. Even if we understand how eyes and brains respond to red light, the experience of redness is not accounted for.

In biology and psychology the credibility rating of materialism is falling. Can physics ride to the rescue? Some materialists prefer to call themselves physicalists, to emphasize that their hopes depend on modern physics, not nineteenth-century theories of matter. But physicalism's own credibility rating has been reduced by physics itself, for four reasons:
First, some physicists insist that quantum mechanics cannot be formulated without taking into account the minds of observers. They argue that minds cannot be reduced to physics because physics presupposes the minds of physicists.

Second, the most ambitious unified theories of physical reality, string and M-theories, with ten and eleven dimensions respectively, take science into completely new territory. Strangely, as Stephen Hawking tells us in his book The Grand Design (2010), “No one seems to know what the ‘M’ stands for, but it may be ‘master’, ‘miracle’ or ‘mystery’”. According to what Hawking calls “model-dependent realism”, different theories may have to be applied in different situations. “Each theory may have its own version of reality, but according to model-dependent realism, that is acceptable so long as the theories agree in their predictions whenever they overlap, that is, whenever they can both be applied”.

String theories and M-theories are currently untestable, so “model-dependent realism” can only be judged by reference to other models, rather than by experiment. It also applies to countless other universes, none of which has ever been observed.
Some physicists are deeply sceptical about this entire approach, as the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin shows in his book The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next (2008). String theories, M-theories and “model-dependent realism” are a shaky foundation for materialism or physicalism or any other belief system.

Third, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, it has become apparent that the known kinds of matter and energy make up only about 4 percent of the universe. The rest consists of “dark matter” and “dark energy”. The nature of 96 percent of physical reality is literally obscure.

Fourth, the Cosmological Anthropic Principle asserts that if the laws and constants of nature had been slightly different at the moment of the Big Bang, biological life could never have emerged, and hence we would not be here to think about it. So did a divine mind fine-tune the laws and constants in the beginning? To avoid a creator God emerging in a new guise, most leading cosmologists prefer to believe that our universe is one of a vast, and perhaps infinite, number of parallel universes, all with different laws and constants, as M-theory also suggests. We just happen to exist in the one that has the right conditions for us.

This multiverse theory is the ultimate violation of Ockham's Razor, the philosophical principle that “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity”, or in other words that we should make as few assumptions as possible. It also has the major disadvantage of being untestable. And it does not even succeed in getting rid of God. An infinite God could be the God of an infinite number of universes.

Materialism provided a seemingly simple, straightforward worldview in the late nineteenth century, but twenty-first century science has left it far behind. Its promises have not been fulfilled, and its promissory notes have been devalued by hyperinflation.
I am convinced that the sciences are being held back by assumptions that have hardened into dogmas, maintained by powerful taboos. These beliefs protect the citadel of established science, but act as barriers against open-minded thinking.


This article is based on Rupert Sheldrake’s book Science Set Free, published in paperback on September 3. Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author of more than 80 scientific papers and 10 books. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, a Research Fellow of the Royal Society, Principal Plant Physiologist at ICRISAT (the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics) in Hyderabad, India, and from 2005-2010 the Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project, funded from Trinity College, Cambridge University. His web site is www.sheldrake.org.

https://www.deepakchopra.com/blog/view/1267/_the_scientific_creed_and_the_credibility_crunch_for_materialism

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[Roger Critchlow-2]

David Gelernter's attack on materialist chutzpah:

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-closing-of-the-scientific-mind/

-- rec --

On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 10:03 PM, Rich Murray <[hidden email]> wrote:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mark M (Giese) <[hidden email]>
Date: Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 6:02 PM
Subject: [sethmessageboard] ten core beliefs that most scientists take for granted [1 attachment]
To: "[hidden email]" <[hidden email]>, "[hidden email]" <[hidden email]>, [hidden email], [hidden email]

<form action="https://www.deepakchopra.com/blog/text/" method="post" target="_blank" onsubmit="return window.confirm(&quot;You are submitting information to an external page.\nAre you sure?&quot;);">

Ask Deepak

Video Blog

August 27 2013

Rupert Sheldrake

Ph.D

Category:  Guest Bloggers

Biography

The Scientific Creed and the Credibility Crunch for Materialism

by Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D; biologist and author of Science Set Free

The “scientific worldview” is immensely influential because the sciences have been so successful. No one can fail to be awed by their achievements, which touch all our lives through technologies and through modern medicine.

Our intellectual world has been transformed through an immense expansion of our knowledge, down into the most microscopic particles of matter and out into the vastness of space, with hundreds of billions of galaxies in an ever-expanding universe.

Yet in the second decade of the twenty-first century, when science and technology seem to be at the peak of the power, when their influence has spread all over the world and when their triumph seems indisputable, unexpected problems are disrupting the sciences from within. Most scientists take it for granted that these problems will eventually be solved by more research along established lines, but some, including myself, think that they are symptoms of a deeper malaise. Science is being held back by centuries-old assumptions that have hardened into dogmas. The sciences would be better off without them: freer, more interesting, and more fun.

The biggest scientific delusion of all is that science already knows the answers. The details still need working out, but the fundamental questions are settled, in principle.
Contemporary science is based on the claim that all reality is material or physical. There is no reality but material reality. Consciousness is a by-product of the physical activity of the brain. Matter is unconscious. Evolution is purposeless. God exists only as an idea in human minds, and hence in human heads.

These beliefs are powerful not because most scientists think about them critically, but because they don’t. The facts of science are real enough, and so are the techniques that scientists use, and so are the technologies based on them. But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith, grounded in a nineteenth century ideology.


The scientific creed

Here are the ten core beliefs that most scientists take for granted.

1. Everything is essentially mechanical. Dogs, for example, are complex mechanisms, rather than living organisms with goals of their own. Even people are machines, “lumbering robots”, in Richard Dawkins’ vivid phrase, with brains that are like genetically programmed computers.

2. All matter is unconscious. It has no inner life or subjectivity or point of view. Even human consciousness is an illusion produced by the material activities of brains.

3. The total amount of matter and energy is always the same (with the exception of the Big Bang, when all the matter and energy of the universe suddenly appeared).

4. The laws of nature are fixed. They are the same today as they were at the beginning, and they will stay the same forever.

5. Nature is purposeless, and evolution has no goal or direction.

6. All biological inheritance is material, carried in the genetic material, DNA, and in other material structures.

7. Minds are inside heads and are nothing but the activities of brains. When you look at a tree, the image of the tree you are seeing is not “out there”, where it seems to be, but inside your brain.

8. Memories are stored as material traces in brains and are wiped out at death.

9. Unexplained phenomena like telepathy are illusory.

10. Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.


Together, these beliefs make up the philosophy or ideology of materialism, whose central assumption is that everything is essentially material or physical, even minds. This belief-system became dominant within science in the late nineteenth century, and is now taken for granted. Many scientists are unaware that materialism is an assumption; they simply think of it as science, or the scientific view of reality, or the scientific worldview. They are not actually taught about it, or given a chance to discuss it. They absorb it by a kind of intellectual osmosis.

In everyday usage, materialism refers to a way of life devoted entirely to material interests, a preoccupation with wealth, possessions and luxury. These attitudes are no doubt encouraged by the materialist philosophy, which denies the existence of any spiritual realities or non-material goals, but in this article I am concerned with materialism’s scientific claims, rather than its effects on lifestyles.

In the spirit of radical scepticism, each of these ten doctrines can be turned into a question, as I show in my book Science Set Free (called The Science Delusion in the UK). Entirely new vistas open up when a widely accepted assumption is taken as the beginning of an enquiry, rather than as an unquestionable truth. For example, the assumption that nature is machine-like or mechanical becomes a question: “Is nature mechanical?” The assumption that matter is unconscious becomes “Is matter unconscious?” And so on.

The credibility crunch for the “scientific worldview”

For more than 200 years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Science will prove that living organisms are complex machines, minds are nothing but brain activity and nature is purposeless. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs. The philosopher of science Karl Popper called this stance "promissory materialism" because it depends on issuing promissory notes for discoveries not yet made. Despite all the achievements of science and technology, materialism is now facing a credibility crunch that was unimaginable in the twentieth century.

In 1963, when I was studying biochemistry at Cambridge University, I was invited to a series of private meetings with Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner in Brenner's rooms in King's College, along with a few of my classmates. Crick and Brenner had recently helped to “crack” the genetic code. Both were ardent materialists and Crick was also a militant atheist. They explained there were two major unsolved problems in biology: development and consciousness. They had not been solved because the people who worked on them were not molecular biologists—nor very bright. Crick and Brenner were going to find the answers within 10 years, or maybe 20. Brenner would take developmental biology, and Crick consciousness. They invited us to join them.

Both tried their best. Brenner was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002 for his work on the development of a tiny worm, Caenorhabdytis elegans. Crick corrected the manuscript of his final paper on the brain the day before he died in 2004. At his funeral, his son Michael said that what made him tick was not the desire to be famous, wealthy or popular, but "to knock the final nail into the coffin of vitalism." (Vitalism is the theory that living organisms are truly alive, and not explicable in terms of physics and chemistry alone.)
Crick and Brenner failed. The problems of development and consciousness remain unsolved. Many details have been discovered, dozens of genomes have been sequenced, and brain scans are ever more precise. But there is still no proof that life and minds can be explained by physics and chemistry alone.

The fundamental proposition of materialism is that matter is the only reality. Therefore consciousness is nothing but brain activity. It is either like a shadow, an “epiphenomenon”, that does nothing, or it is just another way of talking about brain activity. However, among contemporary researchers in neuroscience and consciousness studies there is no consensus about the nature of minds. Leading journals such as Behavioural and Brain Sciences and the Journal of Consciousness Studies publish many articles that reveal deep problems with the materialist doctrine. The philosopher David Chalmers has called the very existence of subjective experience the "hard problem”. It is hard because it defies explanation in terms of mechanisms. Even if we understand how eyes and brains respond to red light, the experience of redness is not accounted for.

In biology and psychology the credibility rating of materialism is falling. Can physics ride to the rescue? Some materialists prefer to call themselves physicalists, to emphasize that their hopes depend on modern physics, not nineteenth-century theories of matter. But physicalism's own credibility rating has been reduced by physics itself, for four reasons:
First, some physicists insist that quantum mechanics cannot be formulated without taking into account the minds of observers. They argue that minds cannot be reduced to physics because physics presupposes the minds of physicists.

Second, the most ambitious unified theories of physical reality, string and M-theories, with ten and eleven dimensions respectively, take science into completely new territory. Strangely, as Stephen Hawking tells us in his book The Grand Design (2010), “No one seems to know what the ‘M’ stands for, but it may be ‘master’, ‘miracle’ or ‘mystery’”. According to what Hawking calls “model-dependent realism”, different theories may have to be applied in different situations. “Each theory may have its own version of reality, but according to model-dependent realism, that is acceptable so long as the theories agree in their predictions whenever they overlap, that is, whenever they can both be applied”.

String theories and M-theories are currently untestable, so “model-dependent realism” can only be judged by reference to other models, rather than by experiment. It also applies to countless other universes, none of which has ever been observed.
Some physicists are deeply sceptical about this entire approach, as the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin shows in his book The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next (2008). String theories, M-theories and “model-dependent realism” are a shaky foundation for materialism or physicalism or any other belief system.

Third, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, it has become apparent that the known kinds of matter and energy make up only about 4 percent of the universe. The rest consists of “dark matter” and “dark energy”. The nature of 96 percent of physical reality is literally obscure.

Fourth, the Cosmological Anthropic Principle asserts that if the laws and constants of nature had been slightly different at the moment of the Big Bang, biological life could never have emerged, and hence we would not be here to think about it. So did a divine mind fine-tune the laws and constants in the beginning? To avoid a creator God emerging in a new guise, most leading cosmologists prefer to believe that our universe is one of a vast, and perhaps infinite, number of parallel universes, all with different laws and constants, as M-theory also suggests. We just happen to exist in the one that has the right conditions for us.

This multiverse theory is the ultimate violation of Ockham's Razor, the philosophical principle that “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity”, or in other words that we should make as few assumptions as possible. It also has the major disadvantage of being untestable. And it does not even succeed in getting rid of God. An infinite God could be the God of an infinite number of universes.

Materialism provided a seemingly simple, straightforward worldview in the late nineteenth century, but twenty-first century science has left it far behind. Its promises have not been fulfilled, and its promissory notes have been devalued by hyperinflation.
I am convinced that the sciences are being held back by assumptions that have hardened into dogmas, maintained by powerful taboos. These beliefs protect the citadel of established science, but act as barriers against open-minded thinking.


This article is based on Rupert Sheldrake’s book Science Set Free, published in paperback on September 3. Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author of more than 80 scientific papers and 10 books. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, a Research Fellow of the Royal Society, Principal Plant Physiologist at ICRISAT (the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics) in Hyderabad, India, and from 2005-2010 the Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project, funded from Trinity College, Cambridge University. His web site is www.sheldrake.org.

https://www.deepakchopra.com/blog/view/1267/_the_scientific_creed_and_the_credibility_crunch_for_materialism

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

[Nick Thompson]

Roger,

 

I scanned this essay quickly, so I may not be qualified to talk about it.  I am puzzled by it.

 

(1)    What is this “inside” people keep talking about?   If it’s not “the brain in the skull”, then where is this “inside space”? 

(2)    I think material science can handle “point of view” quite nicely.  It is literally a “point of view”.  The place from which the world is seen.  Every point of view is unique.  The Sangres look different from every different street corner in Santa Fe. 

(3)    How could my own point of view be constructed except through knowledge of others, their foibles, their blindnesses.

(4)     The following passage:

 

Your subjective, conscious experience is just as real as the tree outside your window or the photons striking your retina—even though you alone feel it. Many philosophers and scientists today tend to dismiss the subjective and focus wholly on an objective, third-person reality—a reality that would be just the same if men had no minds. They treat subjective reality as a footnote, or they ignore it, or they announce that, actually, it doesn’t even exist.

 

assumes apriori knowledge of a distinction between the subjective and the objective.  I am happy enough, for the moment, to say that experience is all there is: that is the radical empiricist position.  But if you start there, then both the subjective and the objective are constructions, as is their innerness and outerness.

 

5.  I wonder how Nagel comes down on the mental life of animals.  There is no doubt in my mind that every animal has a point of view.  (In fact, I guess I think every system has a point of view.)  But I suspect, in order to achieve the dignity and specialness of the human individual, he is going to deny mind to animals (except, perhaps, to special creations, such as his own cat) and this move I cannot tolerate.  If “mind” is “in” humans, it’s pretty much in any living creature.   

 

Thanks, Roger, for provoking  me.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Wednesday, January 08, 2014 8:22 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: [sethmessageboard] ten core beliefs that most scientists take for granted [1 Attachment]

 

David Gelernter's attack on materialist chutzpah:

 

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-closing-of-the-scientific-mind/

 

-- rec --

 

On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 10:03 PM, Rich Murray <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mark M (Giese) <[hidden email]>
Date: Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 6:02 PM
Subject: [sethmessageboard] ten core beliefs that most scientists take for granted [1 attachment]
To: "[hidden email]" <[hidden email]>, "[hidden email]" <[hidden email]>, [hidden email], [hidden email]

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Ask Deepak

Video Blog

August 27 2013

Rupert Sheldrake

Ph.D

Category:  Guest Bloggers

Biography

The Scientific Creed and the Credibility Crunch for Materialism

by Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D; biologist and author of Science Set Free

The “scientific worldview” is immensely influential because the sciences have been so successful. No one can fail to be awed by their achievements, which touch all our lives through technologies and through modern medicine.

Our intellectual world has been transformed through an immense expansion of our knowledge, down into the most microscopic particles of matter and out into the vastness of space, with hundreds of billions of galaxies in an ever-expanding universe.

Yet in the second decade of the twenty-first century, when science and technology seem to be at the peak of the power, when their influence has spread all over the world and when their triumph seems indisputable, unexpected problems are disrupting the sciences from within. Most scientists take it for granted that these problems will eventually be solved by more research along established lines, but some, including myself, think that they are symptoms of a deeper malaise. Science is being held back by centuries-old assumptions that have hardened into dogmas. The sciences would be better off without them: freer, more interesting, and more fun.

The biggest scientific delusion of all is that science already knows the answers. The details still need working out, but the fundamental questions are settled, in principle.
Contemporary science is based on the claim that all reality is material or physical. There is no reality but material reality. Consciousness is a by-product of the physical activity of the brain. Matter is unconscious. Evolution is purposeless. God exists only as an idea in human minds, and hence in human heads.

These beliefs are powerful not because most scientists think about them critically, but because they don’t. The facts of science are real enough, and so are the techniques that scientists use, and so are the technologies based on them. But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith, grounded in a nineteenth century ideology.


The scientific creed

Here are the ten core beliefs that most scientists take for granted.

1. Everything is essentially mechanical. Dogs, for example, are complex mechanisms, rather than living organisms with goals of their own. Even people are machines, “lumbering robots”, in Richard Dawkins’ vivid phrase, with brains that are like genetically programmed computers.

2. All matter is unconscious. It has no inner life or subjectivity or point of view. Even human consciousness is an illusion produced by the material activities of brains.

3. The total amount of matter and energy is always the same (with the exception of the Big Bang, when all the matter and energy of the universe suddenly appeared).

4. The laws of nature are fixed. They are the same today as they were at the beginning, and they will stay the same forever.

5. Nature is purposeless, and evolution has no goal or direction.

6. All biological inheritance is material, carried in the genetic material, DNA, and in other material structures.

7. Minds are inside heads and are nothing but the activities of brains. When you look at a tree, the image of the tree you are seeing is not “out there”, where it seems to be, but inside your brain.

8. Memories are stored as material traces in brains and are wiped out at death.

9. Unexplained phenomena like telepathy are illusory.

10. Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.


Together, these beliefs make up the philosophy or ideology of materialism, whose central assumption is that everything is essentially material or physical, even minds. This belief-system became dominant within science in the late nineteenth century, and is now taken for granted. Many scientists are unaware that materialism is an assumption; they simply think of it as science, or the scientific view of reality, or the scientific worldview. They are not actually taught about it, or given a chance to discuss it. They absorb it by a kind of intellectual osmosis.

In everyday usage, materialism refers to a way of life devoted entirely to material interests, a preoccupation with wealth, possessions and luxury. These attitudes are no doubt encouraged by the materialist philosophy, which denies the existence of any spiritual realities or non-material goals, but in this article I am concerned with materialism’s scientific claims, rather than its effects on lifestyles.

In the spirit of radical scepticism, each of these ten doctrines can be turned into a question, as I show in my book Science Set Free (called The Science Delusion in the UK). Entirely new vistas open up when a widely accepted assumption is taken as the beginning of an enquiry, rather than as an unquestionable truth. For example, the assumption that nature is machine-like or mechanical becomes a question: “Is nature mechanical?” The assumption that matter is unconscious becomes “Is matter unconscious?” And so on.

The credibility crunch for the “scientific worldview”

For more than 200 years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Science will prove that living organisms are complex machines, minds are nothing but brain activity and nature is purposeless. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs. The philosopher of science Karl Popper called this stance "promissory materialism" because it depends on issuing promissory notes for discoveries not yet made. Despite all the achievements of science and technology, materialism is now facing a credibility crunch that was unimaginable in the twentieth century.

In 1963, when I was studying biochemistry at Cambridge University, I was invited to a series of private meetings with Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner in Brenner's rooms in King's College, along with a few of my classmates. Crick and Brenner had recently helped to “crack” the genetic code. Both were ardent materialists and Crick was also a militant atheist. They explained there were two major unsolved problems in biology: development and consciousness. They had not been solved because the people who worked on them were not molecular biologists—nor very bright. Crick and Brenner were going to find the answers within 10 years, or maybe 20. Brenner would take developmental biology, and Crick consciousness. They invited us to join them.

Both tried their best. Brenner was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002 for his work on the development of a tiny worm, Caenorhabdytis elegans. Crick corrected the manuscript of his final paper on the brain the day before he died in 2004. At his funeral, his son Michael said that what made him tick was not the desire to be famous, wealthy or popular, but "to knock the final nail into the coffin of vitalism." (Vitalism is the theory that living organisms are truly alive, and not explicable in terms of physics and chemistry alone.)
Crick and Brenner failed. The problems of development and consciousness remain unsolved. Many details have been discovered, dozens of genomes have been sequenced, and brain scans are ever more precise. But there is still no proof that life and minds can be explained by physics and chemistry alone.

The fundamental proposition of materialism is that matter is the only reality. Therefore consciousness is nothing but brain activity. It is either like a shadow, an “epiphenomenon”, that does nothing, or it is just another way of talking about brain activity. However, among contemporary researchers in neuroscience and consciousness studies there is no consensus about the nature of minds. Leading journals such as Behavioural and Brain Sciences and the Journal of Consciousness Studies publish many articles that reveal deep problems with the materialist doctrine. The philosopher David Chalmers has called the very existence of subjective experience the "hard problem”. It is hard because it defies explanation in terms of mechanisms. Even if we understand how eyes and brains respond to red light, the experience of redness is not accounted for.

In biology and psychology the credibility rating of materialism is falling. Can physics ride to the rescue? Some materialists prefer to call themselves physicalists, to emphasize that their hopes depend on modern physics, not nineteenth-century theories of matter. But physicalism's own credibility rating has been reduced by physics itself, for four reasons:
First, some physicists insist that quantum mechanics cannot be formulated without taking into account the minds of observers. They argue that minds cannot be reduced to physics because physics presupposes the minds of physicists.

Second, the most ambitious unified theories of physical reality, string and M-theories, with ten and eleven dimensions respectively, take science into completely new territory. Strangely, as Stephen Hawking tells us in his book The Grand Design (2010), “No one seems to know what the ‘M’ stands for, but it may be ‘master’, ‘miracle’ or ‘mystery’”. According to what Hawking calls “model-dependent realism”, different theories may have to be applied in different situations. “Each theory may have its own version of reality, but according to model-dependent realism, that is acceptable so long as the theories agree in their predictions whenever they overlap, that is, whenever they can both be applied”.

String theories and M-theories are currently untestable, so “model-dependent realism” can only be judged by reference to other models, rather than by experiment. It also applies to countless other universes, none of which has ever been observed.
Some physicists are deeply sceptical about this entire approach, as the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin shows in his book The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next (2008). String theories, M-theories and “model-dependent realism” are a shaky foundation for materialism or physicalism or any other belief system.

Third, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, it has become apparent that the known kinds of matter and energy make up only about 4 percent of the universe. The rest consists of “dark matter” and “dark energy”. The nature of 96 percent of physical reality is literally obscure.

Fourth, the Cosmological Anthropic Principle asserts that if the laws and constants of nature had been slightly different at the moment of the Big Bang, biological life could never have emerged, and hence we would not be here to think about it. So did a divine mind fine-tune the laws and constants in the beginning? To avoid a creator God emerging in a new guise, most leading cosmologists prefer to believe that our universe is one of a vast, and perhaps infinite, number of parallel universes, all with different laws and constants, as M-theory also suggests. We just happen to exist in the one that has the right conditions for us.

This multiverse theory is the ultimate violation of Ockham's Razor, the philosophical principle that “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity”, or in other words that we should make as few assumptions as possible. It also has the major disadvantage of being untestable. And it does not even succeed in getting rid of God. An infinite God could be the God of an infinite number of universes.

Materialism provided a seemingly simple, straightforward worldview in the late nineteenth century, but twenty-first century science has left it far behind. Its promises have not been fulfilled, and its promissory notes have been devalued by hyperinflation.
I am convinced that the sciences are being held back by assumptions that have hardened into dogmas, maintained by powerful taboos. These beliefs protect the citadel of established science, but act as barriers against open-minded thinking.


This article is based on Rupert Sheldrake’s book Science Set Free, published in paperback on September 3. Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author of more than 80 scientific papers and 10 books. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, a Research Fellow of the Royal Society, Principal Plant Physiologist at ICRISAT (the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics) in Hyderabad, India, and from 2005-2010 the Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project, funded from Trinity College, Cambridge University. His web site is www.sheldrake.org.

https://www.deepakchopra.com/blog/view/1267/_the_scientific_creed_and_the_credibility_crunch_for_materialism

 

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[Russell Standish-2]

On Wed, Jan 08, 2014 at 11:07:29AM -0700, Nick Thompson wrote:

>  
>
> 5.  I wonder how Nagel comes down on the mental life of animals.  There is
> no doubt in my mind that every animal has a point of view.  (In fact, I
> guess I think every system has a point of view.)  But I suspect, in order to
> achieve the dignity and specialness of the human individual, he is going to
> deny mind to animals (except, perhaps, to special creations, such as his own
> cat) and this move I cannot tolerate.  If "mind" is "in" humans, it's pretty
> much in any living creature.  
>

I don't see how it can be. See my paper "Ants are not conscious" for
an anthropic/bayesian argument against the proposition that all
animals are conscious, let alone plants, fungi and bacteria even. If
you think that is wrong, I welcome your criticisms.

To be clear I do not deny nonhuman consciousness - the fact that we
can have conversations with a gorilla call Koko in sign language or with
an African Grey Parrot called Alex indicates to me that those animals
do possess a mind, but it is still a long stretch to extrapolate from
that to saying all animals are conscious.

--

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[Russell Standish-2]

On Tue, Jan 07, 2014 at 09:03:28PM -0800, Rich Murray wrote:

...

>
> *The scientific creed *
>
> Here are the ten core beliefs that most scientists take for granted.
>
> 1. Everything is essentially mechanical. Dogs, for example, are complex
> mechanisms, rather than living organisms with goals of their own. Even
> people are machines, “lumbering robots”, in Richard Dawkins’ vivid phrase,
> with brains that are like genetically programmed computers.
>

Well, yes - there is no evidence whatsoever of physical phenomena that
does not supervene on a mechanical process.

> 2. All matter is unconscious. It has no inner life or subjectivity or point
> of view. Even human consciousness is an illusion produced by the material
> activities of brains.

This is wrong - human beings are clearly conscious. (Even if it is an
illusion, which I would dispute anyway!).

>
> 3. The total amount of matter and energy is always the same (with the
> exception of the Big Bang, when all the matter and energy of the universe
> suddenly appeared).

Conservation of mass-energy is currently a well supported law, that is
based on time and space translation symmetry (ie 4, below). What
happens is that if it were found to be vioated, a new source of
mass-energy would need to be introduced to make the books balance. See
the story of the neutrino for an example.

>
> 4. The laws of nature are fixed. They are the same today as they were at
> the beginning, and they will stay the same forever.

That is the definition of a law. If a "law" was found to vary, it
would be replaced by a new law taking the variation into account.

>
> 5. Nature is purposeless, and evolution has no goal or direction.
>

This is partly a point of view thing. Some explanations are easier if
purpose is taken into account, such as why there is a copper atom
located at the tip of Nelson's nose at Trafalgar square (to quote an
example by David Deutsch), but in principle, it can be explained
without reference to purpose (otherwise supervenience - no.1 above,
would be violated).

> 6. All biological inheritance is material, carried in the genetic material,
> DNA, and in other material structures.
>

Yes - what other form of inheritence could there be?

> 7. Minds are inside heads and are nothing but the activities of brains.
> When you look at a tree, the image of the tree you are seeing is not “out
> there”, where it seems to be, but inside your brain.
>

This may be a little premature, as embodiment appears to be an
important aspect of consciousness, but I don't see anyone seriously
expecting a nonmaterial home for consciousness (or that the
supervenience principle is violated).

> 8. Memories are stored as material traces in brains and are wiped out at
> death.
>

What about the memories stored in books? This one is a bit fishy...

> 9. Unexplained phenomena like telepathy are illusory.

This is being close minded. In fact, there is plenty of unexplained
phenomena that is nevertheless taken quite seriously by the scientific
community, high temperature superconductivity being one. The problem
with telepathy (your example above) is the lack of good empirical
evidence for it.

>
> 10. Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.
>

Rubbish. The placebo effect is well recognised in medicine.


--

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[Owen Densmore]

Great post!

On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 8:22 AM, Roger Critchlow <[hidden email]> wrote:

David Gelernter's attack on materialist chutzpah:

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-closing-of-the-scientific-mind/

-- rec --

On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 10:03 PM, Rich Murray <[hidden email]> wrote:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mark M (Giese) <[hidden email]>
Date: Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 6:02 PM
Subject: [sethmessageboard] ten core beliefs that most scientists take for granted [1 attachment]
To: "[hidden email]" <[hidden email]>, "[hidden email]" <[hidden email]>, [hidden email], [hidden email]

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Ask Deepak

Video Blog

August 27 2013

Rupert Sheldrake

Ph.D

Category:  Guest Bloggers

Biography

The Scientific Creed and the Credibility Crunch for Materialism

by Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D; biologist and author of Science Set Free

The “scientific worldview” is immensely influential because the sciences have been so successful. No one can fail to be awed by their achievements, which touch all our lives through technologies and through modern medicine.

Our intellectual world has been transformed through an immense expansion of our knowledge, down into the most microscopic particles of matter and out into the vastness of space, with hundreds of billions of galaxies in an ever-expanding universe.

Yet in the second decade of the twenty-first century, when science and technology seem to be at the peak of the power, when their influence has spread all over the world and when their triumph seems indisputable, unexpected problems are disrupting the sciences from within. Most scientists take it for granted that these problems will eventually be solved by more research along established lines, but some, including myself, think that they are symptoms of a deeper malaise. Science is being held back by centuries-old assumptions that have hardened into dogmas. The sciences would be better off without them: freer, more interesting, and more fun.

The biggest scientific delusion of all is that science already knows the answers. The details still need working out, but the fundamental questions are settled, in principle.
Contemporary science is based on the claim that all reality is material or physical. There is no reality but material reality. Consciousness is a by-product of the physical activity of the brain. Matter is unconscious. Evolution is purposeless. God exists only as an idea in human minds, and hence in human heads.

These beliefs are powerful not because most scientists think about them critically, but because they don’t. The facts of science are real enough, and so are the techniques that scientists use, and so are the technologies based on them. But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith, grounded in a nineteenth century ideology.


The scientific creed

Here are the ten core beliefs that most scientists take for granted.

1. Everything is essentially mechanical. Dogs, for example, are complex mechanisms, rather than living organisms with goals of their own. Even people are machines, “lumbering robots”, in Richard Dawkins’ vivid phrase, with brains that are like genetically programmed computers.

2. All matter is unconscious. It has no inner life or subjectivity or point of view. Even human consciousness is an illusion produced by the material activities of brains.

3. The total amount of matter and energy is always the same (with the exception of the Big Bang, when all the matter and energy of the universe suddenly appeared).

4. The laws of nature are fixed. They are the same today as they were at the beginning, and they will stay the same forever.

5. Nature is purposeless, and evolution has no goal or direction.

6. All biological inheritance is material, carried in the genetic material, DNA, and in other material structures.

7. Minds are inside heads and are nothing but the activities of brains. When you look at a tree, the image of the tree you are seeing is not “out there”, where it seems to be, but inside your brain.

8. Memories are stored as material traces in brains and are wiped out at death.

9. Unexplained phenomena like telepathy are illusory.

10. Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.


Together, these beliefs make up the philosophy or ideology of materialism, whose central assumption is that everything is essentially material or physical, even minds. This belief-system became dominant within science in the late nineteenth century, and is now taken for granted. Many scientists are unaware that materialism is an assumption; they simply think of it as science, or the scientific view of reality, or the scientific worldview. They are not actually taught about it, or given a chance to discuss it. They absorb it by a kind of intellectual osmosis.

In everyday usage, materialism refers to a way of life devoted entirely to material interests, a preoccupation with wealth, possessions and luxury. These attitudes are no doubt encouraged by the materialist philosophy, which denies the existence of any spiritual realities or non-material goals, but in this article I am concerned with materialism’s scientific claims, rather than its effects on lifestyles.

In the spirit of radical scepticism, each of these ten doctrines can be turned into a question, as I show in my book Science Set Free (called The Science Delusion in the UK). Entirely new vistas open up when a widely accepted assumption is taken as the beginning of an enquiry, rather than as an unquestionable truth. For example, the assumption that nature is machine-like or mechanical becomes a question: “Is nature mechanical?” The assumption that matter is unconscious becomes “Is matter unconscious?” And so on.

The credibility crunch for the “scientific worldview”

For more than 200 years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Science will prove that living organisms are complex machines, minds are nothing but brain activity and nature is purposeless. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs. The philosopher of science Karl Popper called this stance "promissory materialism" because it depends on issuing promissory notes for discoveries not yet made. Despite all the achievements of science and technology, materialism is now facing a credibility crunch that was unimaginable in the twentieth century.

In 1963, when I was studying biochemistry at Cambridge University, I was invited to a series of private meetings with Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner in Brenner's rooms in King's College, along with a few of my classmates. Crick and Brenner had recently helped to “crack” the genetic code. Both were ardent materialists and Crick was also a militant atheist. They explained there were two major unsolved problems in biology: development and consciousness. They had not been solved because the people who worked on them were not molecular biologists—nor very bright. Crick and Brenner were going to find the answers within 10 years, or maybe 20. Brenner would take developmental biology, and Crick consciousness. They invited us to join them.

Both tried their best. Brenner was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002 for his work on the development of a tiny worm, Caenorhabdytis elegans. Crick corrected the manuscript of his final paper on the brain the day before he died in 2004. At his funeral, his son Michael said that what made him tick was not the desire to be famous, wealthy or popular, but "to knock the final nail into the coffin of vitalism." (Vitalism is the theory that living organisms are truly alive, and not explicable in terms of physics and chemistry alone.)
Crick and Brenner failed. The problems of development and consciousness remain unsolved. Many details have been discovered, dozens of genomes have been sequenced, and brain scans are ever more precise. But there is still no proof that life and minds can be explained by physics and chemistry alone.

The fundamental proposition of materialism is that matter is the only reality. Therefore consciousness is nothing but brain activity. It is either like a shadow, an “epiphenomenon”, that does nothing, or it is just another way of talking about brain activity. However, among contemporary researchers in neuroscience and consciousness studies there is no consensus about the nature of minds. Leading journals such as Behavioural and Brain Sciences and the Journal of Consciousness Studies publish many articles that reveal deep problems with the materialist doctrine. The philosopher David Chalmers has called the very existence of subjective experience the "hard problem”. It is hard because it defies explanation in terms of mechanisms. Even if we understand how eyes and brains respond to red light, the experience of redness is not accounted for.

In biology and psychology the credibility rating of materialism is falling. Can physics ride to the rescue? Some materialists prefer to call themselves physicalists, to emphasize that their hopes depend on modern physics, not nineteenth-century theories of matter. But physicalism's own credibility rating has been reduced by physics itself, for four reasons:
First, some physicists insist that quantum mechanics cannot be formulated without taking into account the minds of observers. They argue that minds cannot be reduced to physics because physics presupposes the minds of physicists.

Second, the most ambitious unified theories of physical reality, string and M-theories, with ten and eleven dimensions respectively, take science into completely new territory. Strangely, as Stephen Hawking tells us in his book The Grand Design (2010), “No one seems to know what the ‘M’ stands for, but it may be ‘master’, ‘miracle’ or ‘mystery’”. According to what Hawking calls “model-dependent realism”, different theories may have to be applied in different situations. “Each theory may have its own version of reality, but according to model-dependent realism, that is acceptable so long as the theories agree in their predictions whenever they overlap, that is, whenever they can both be applied”.

String theories and M-theories are currently untestable, so “model-dependent realism” can only be judged by reference to other models, rather than by experiment. It also applies to countless other universes, none of which has ever been observed.
Some physicists are deeply sceptical about this entire approach, as the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin shows in his book The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next (2008). String theories, M-theories and “model-dependent realism” are a shaky foundation for materialism or physicalism or any other belief system.

Third, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, it has become apparent that the known kinds of matter and energy make up only about 4 percent of the universe. The rest consists of “dark matter” and “dark energy”. The nature of 96 percent of physical reality is literally obscure.

Fourth, the Cosmological Anthropic Principle asserts that if the laws and constants of nature had been slightly different at the moment of the Big Bang, biological life could never have emerged, and hence we would not be here to think about it. So did a divine mind fine-tune the laws and constants in the beginning? To avoid a creator God emerging in a new guise, most leading cosmologists prefer to believe that our universe is one of a vast, and perhaps infinite, number of parallel universes, all with different laws and constants, as M-theory also suggests. We just happen to exist in the one that has the right conditions for us.

This multiverse theory is the ultimate violation of Ockham's Razor, the philosophical principle that “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity”, or in other words that we should make as few assumptions as possible. It also has the major disadvantage of being untestable. And it does not even succeed in getting rid of God. An infinite God could be the God of an infinite number of universes.

Materialism provided a seemingly simple, straightforward worldview in the late nineteenth century, but twenty-first century science has left it far behind. Its promises have not been fulfilled, and its promissory notes have been devalued by hyperinflation.
I am convinced that the sciences are being held back by assumptions that have hardened into dogmas, maintained by powerful taboos. These beliefs protect the citadel of established science, but act as barriers against open-minded thinking.


This article is based on Rupert Sheldrake’s book Science Set Free, published in paperback on September 3. Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author of more than 80 scientific papers and 10 books. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, a Research Fellow of the Royal Society, Principal Plant Physiologist at ICRISAT (the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics) in Hyderabad, India, and from 2005-2010 the Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project, funded from Trinity College, Cambridge University. His web site is www.sheldrake.org.

https://www.deepakchopra.com/blog/view/1267/_the_scientific_creed_and_the_credibility_crunch_for_materialism

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[Arlo Barnes]

But even the placebo effect is a mechanistic medicine - one is still delivering the 'package' into the body in order to introduce a chemical change, the difference being that the mode of transport is an idea (wrapped around a ball of sugar) rather than a pill. The (somewhat tentative) explanation for why placebos work requires no supernatural effects to take place, although I suppose it does not exclude them.

-Arlo James Barnes

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

"But feelings are not information! Feelings are states of being. A feeling (mild wistfulness, say, on a warm summer morning) has, ordinarily, no information content at all. Wistful is simply a way to be.''

If there was no such state of being estimated in a transpersonal way then there would not be word for it. 

American Heritage Dictionary:

wistful: 
   1.  Full of wishful yearning
   2.  Pensively sad; melancholy

Does anyone seriously deny personality?   That there exists relatively unique neural connectivity that makes Me different from anyone else?    It hard makes me a `roboticist' to observe that the these unique aspects, after subtracting off all that is known about personality, and what I infer to be similar in other people (e.g. based on stimulus/response experiments and modeling in everyday life), says to me that I'm not excessively unique.  I'm again and again struck by how easy it is to find examples of people (say, in the media) that seem eerily like me and even seem to me `ahead' of me on acting on their feeling.  If anything, this recognition of my humiliating smallness motivates me to get up off my ass and find something about my life trajectory that adds unique value.

One thing that gives meaning to human life is to have each add a little bit to pool of written history and technology -- to make the subjective, objective.  

Marcus



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[glen ropella]

Extremely well said!

Also, referring to the sentence just prior: "Computers are information
machines. They transform one batch of information into another.
Computationalists often describe the mind as an 'information processor.'
But feelings are not information! Feelings are states of being."

Our previous conversation about the duality of state/process comes to
mind.  Coming from a professor of computer science, you'd think
Galernter would understand that a state of being is just as validly
considered a process of being.  The information being processed while
feeling (e.g. wistful) is the enteroceptive machine transforming one
batch of information into another.


On 01/09/2014 09:32 AM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:

> "But feelings are /not/ information! Feelings are states of being. A
> feeling (mild wistfulness, say, on a warm summer morning) has,
> ordinarily, no information content at all. /Wistful/ is simply a way to
> /be/.''
>
> If there was no such state of being estimated in a transpersonal way
> then there would not be word for it.
>
> American Heritage Dictionary:
>
> wistful:
>    1.  Full of wishful yearning
>    2.  Pensively sad; melancholy
>
> Does anyone seriously deny personality?   That there exists relatively
> unique neural connectivity that makes Me different from anyone else?  
> It hard makes me a `roboticist' to observe that the these unique
> aspects, after subtracting off all that is known about personality, and
> what I infer to be similar in other people (e.g. based on
> stimulus/response experiments and modeling in everyday life), says to me
> that I'm not excessively unique.  I'm again and again struck by how easy
> it is to find examples of people (say, in the media) that seem eerily
> like me and even seem to me `ahead' of me on acting on their feeling.
> If anything, this recognition of my humiliating smallness motivates me
> to get up off my ass and find something about my life trajectory that
> adds unique value.
>
> One thing that gives meaning to human life is to have each add a little
> bit to pool of written history and technology -- to make the subjective,
> objective.

--
⇒⇐ glen

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[Pamela McCorduck]

I haven't yet read Gelernter's piece, though a friend sent it earlier, and I glanced at it. I'm sorry he feels "bullied" by scientists, but science ain't beanbag.

I'd also point out that Marvin Minsky's last book argues that feelings are very much a part of intelligence. It's called "The Emotion Machine," and it's very persuasive.

P.



On Jan 9, 2014, at 4:27 PM, glen <[hidden email]> wrote:

>
> Extremely well said!
>
> Also, referring to the sentence just prior: "Computers are information
> machines. They transform one batch of information into another.
> Computationalists often describe the mind as an 'information processor.'
> But feelings are not information! Feelings are states of being."
>
> Our previous conversation about the duality of state/process comes to
> mind.  Coming from a professor of computer science, you'd think
> Galernter would understand that a state of being is just as validly
> considered a process of being.  The information being processed while
> feeling (e.g. wistful) is the enteroceptive machine transforming one
> batch of information into another.
>
>
> On 01/09/2014 09:32 AM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
>> "But feelings are /not/ information! Feelings are states of being. A
>> feeling (mild wistfulness, say, on a warm summer morning) has,
>> ordinarily, no information content at all. /Wistful/ is simply a way to
>> /be/.''
>>
>> If there was no such state of being estimated in a transpersonal way
>> then there would not be word for it.
>>
>> American Heritage Dictionary:
>>
>> wistful:
>>   1.  Full of wishful yearning
>>   2.  Pensively sad; melancholy
>>
>> Does anyone seriously deny personality?   That there exists relatively
>> unique neural connectivity that makes Me different from anyone else?  
>> It hard makes me a `roboticist' to observe that the these unique
>> aspects, after subtracting off all that is known about personality, and
>> what I infer to be similar in other people (e.g. based on
>> stimulus/response experiments and modeling in everyday life), says to me
>> that I'm not excessively unique.  I'm again and again struck by how easy
>> it is to find examples of people (say, in the media) that seem eerily
>> like me and even seem to me `ahead' of me on acting on their feeling.
>> If anything, this recognition of my humiliating smallness motivates me
>> to get up off my ass and find something about my life trajectory that
>> adds unique value.
>>
>> One thing that gives meaning to human life is to have each add a little
>> bit to pool of written history and technology -- to make the subjective,
>> objective.
>
>
> --
> ⇒⇐ glen
>
> ============================================================
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============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com