Review of Sheldrake's 'The Science Delusion'

The Science Delusion is Rupert Sheldrake’s latest book. I found this book to be an excellent and very readable presentation of some of the problems facing frontier science. All in all it is a great read. It’s a definite five stars in my book.

Let me begin with the only major criticism I have with the book: the title. The name “The Science Delusion” is obviously a response to Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion. I think it is the title more than anything which has offended many in mainstream science, or those members of the public who have a strong atheistic or skeptical mindset – i.e. those who like to read Dawkins’ books. 

 

 Rupert Sheldrake

An article about Sheldrake’s book in The Guardian online attracted some savage criticism, bordering on hatred. It was clear from many of the comments that many of the critics have never read The Science Delusion or any of Sheldrake’s other books, simply because their criticisms were so far off the mark. One poster simply wrote “What the fuck is this shit, and what is it doing in The Guardian?” Another comment lambasted Sheldrake for being a non-scientist writing about science, and having never conducted experiments. In fact Sheldrake has a PhD in biology from Cambridge, and has designed and conducted some of the most ingenious experiments imaginable. His telephone telepathy experiments are simply ingenious in their simplicity.

My point here is that the title appears to have set up Sheldrake and The Science Delusion as being anti-science. In fact, as Sheldrake himself argues, he is neither. The book simply addresses key issues in the philosophy of science. Its key target is the philosophy of materialism, and the rigid scientism which so often emerges from it. There is nothing that says that science has to conduct itself within a worldview where materialism is a founding ideology, and where the machine universe is its founding presupposition.

So there are better titles that could have been chosen.

Instead of being anti-science The Science Delusion pries open ten founding presuppositions of scientific materialism – each with a chapter of its own - and identifies key problems within all of them.

1. Is Nature Mechanical? 2. Is the Total Amount of Matter and Energy Always the Same? 3. Are the Laws of Nature Fixed? 4. Is Matter Unconscious? 5. Is Nature Purposeless? 6. Is All Biological Inheritance Material? 7. Are Memories Stored as Material Traces? 8. Are Minds Confined to Brains? 9. Are Psychic Phenomena Illusory? 10.  Is Mechanistic Medicine the Only Kind that Really Works?

At the end of each chapter Sheldrake asks several open questions to materialists. Each question is designed to gnaw away at the delusion that these founding principles of scientism are part of an immovable bedrock; instead Sheldrake attempts to loosen their iron grip on unthinking practitioners and advocates of science by implying that each of them is more uncertain than is often taken for granted.

Rupert Sheldrake makes reference to his hypothesis of morphic resonance periodically throughout the book. This hypothesis states that nature/life operates within fields of intention which operate ‘above’ the simplistic reductionism/genetic fixation which dominates so much of mainstream and popular science. Whether morphic resonance will pass the test of time remains to be seen. But the success of the book does not rest on the validity of the idea of morphic fields. This is not a book seeking certainty. Instead it seeks to acknowledge the ambiguity which lies behind business-as-usual science and education.

I agree with Sheldrake that morphic resonance fits the evidence better in certain fields of enquiry, especially in terms of the nature of consciousness. There is simply too much data and evidence that is currently dismissed or explained away as “paranormal” in mainstream cognitive science (it doesn’t fit our worldview, so we can ignore it). The extended mind – mind which is not merely contained in localized skulls, but is entangled with others minds and the environment – simply must be accounted for. It is too important a part of life, nature and the human condition to be dismissed any longer.

I find The Science Delusion to be very thought-provoking and entertaining. It is, I believe, a book that should be read by all science students – and in fact anybody with a high school education. Readers may not agree with all of it, but the questions it asks are too important to be ignored.

Marcus

Sheldrake, Rupert (2012-01-05). The Science Delusion . Hachette Littlehampton.

Do You Really Have Free Will?

Do human beings have free will? Can people actually make decisions of their own accord, or are they just robots mindlessly responding to the brain and the world around them? Most people assume they can make independent choices, but you might be surprised to learn that the dominant position in modern cognitive science is that there is no free will.

There are so many philosophical issues with the idea of free will that one could spend many hours going through them all. I will just note a few in this post. I will refer to two fascinating experiments which are important to the discussion.

The Libet experiment

The most famous experiment regarding human free will was conducted by neuroscientist Benjamin Libet. Libet and his team measured changes in the brain and the timing of ‘choices’.

Libet investigated what happened when people made ‘conscious’ choices. He measured the electrical activity of subjects’ brains by via electroencephalograph (EEG), with small electrodes placed on the surface of the head. The subjects were asked to flex one of their fingers or push a button whenever they felt like doing so. They also had to state when they ‘decided’ to do so. The surprising finding was that the conscious decision occurred about 200 milliseconds before the finger movement. But most crucially, electrical changes began in the brain about 300 milliseconds before any conscious decision was made. Many scientists use this experiment - or similar ones - to conclude that there is no free will because the brain changes first and then conscious awareness comes about a third of a second later. Therefore, it is concluded, the brain causes the ‘decision’, not free will.

A little philosophy

Of course the conclusion that there is no free will leads to a whole heap of paradoxes and problems.

Even scientists who believe they have no free continue to act as if they do. Sheldrake makes this point, too. For example, they continue to hold meetings to decide how to attract funding for their desired research projects. If they truly believed that everyone’s brains are making all these choices, and that those handing out the funding have no free will, why bother having the meetings in the first place?

The same scientists will continue to write papers, book, blog posts, magazine articles with the implicit assumption that they are choosing to do this – and that they can influence the opinions of others. ‘They’ – or at least their brains - will sometimes even get annoyed with the brains of people who have the audacity to claim that they have free will. But why have the debate in the first place, or get annoyed about it if nobody has any choice in proceedings, and their opinions have been decided by their brains?

There is also the obvious paradox that we are supposed to believe that we have no power to change our thinking or actions, yet our entire society spends millions of dollars attempting to manipulate perception and the choices that follow from it. Advertisers, government policy makers, educational administrators, CEOs and even torturers are all trying to change the way people think or feel. As a long time school teacher who has taught students of all ages from pre-school to university, I know that even small children can be masters of manipulating adults, using charm to ‘put it over’ them.

So we are expected to believe that we can readily influence other people’s choices, but not our own? How does a creature with no free will come to the ‘decision’ to try to change the way someone else thinks?

We all make regular choices with the implicit objective of influencing our own behaviour and feelings. Why would you bother to decorate your house in aesthetically pleasing colours if you cannot influence the way that your environment affects you? You might as well just slump in the corner and vegetate. But even that would require a decision.

We can also influence our mental structures, and even autonomic processes like heart rate. Yogis can even slow down their respiratory systems to minimal activity. A prime function of meditation is for the student to gain better control of mental processes, and develop the right relationship with the body and the mind. This is clear evidence that conscious choice can influence the body and brain. This should not be possible if there is no free will. One could argue that it is the brain that is telling itself to relax and breathe deeply. But again, we get into semantics. It seems that the idea of ‘brain’ has simply replaced ‘mind, with the same implicit meaning.

Finally, no matter how many correlations one finds between action and mental activity, in the end the science is merely descriptive.

There isn’t any way around it. We make choices all the time, even if we don’t believe that we are.

Sheldrake and time

In his wonderful book The Science Delusion, biologist Rupert Sheldrake discusses this issue of free will and comes to the same conclusion that I do - namely that even though the choices we make are subject to a whole range of factors that are wholly or partly out of immediate awareness, we are perfectly capable of making conscious choices. There is no contradiction.

Interestingly, even Benjamin Libet believed that there is a place for free will, stating that in the 200 milliseconds between conscious awareness of a ‘choice’ and the action taken, the individual can actually change the decision. Sheldrake writes:

This conscious decision depended on what Libet called a ‘conscious mental field’ (CMF), which emerged from brain activities but was not itself physically determined by them. The CMF acted on the activities of the brain, perhaps by influencing otherwise random or indeterminate events in the nerve cells. This field also helped integrate the activities of different parts of the brain and had the property of ‘referring back’ subjective experiences, and thus worked backwards in time. The CMF would unify the experience generated by the many neural units. It would also be able to affect certain neural activities and form a basis for conscious will. The CMF would be a new ‘natural’ field. It would be a non-physical field, in the sense that it could not be directly observed or measured by any external physical means. That attribute is, of course, the well-known feature of conscious subjective experience, which is only accessible to the individual having that experience.

The most interesting thing for me about Sheldrake’s take on these experiments is that he makes the same point I often have, and that is that consciousness is not localised, and that time is not linear. Logic is only as sound as the solidity of the premises which underpin it. Science is only as good as the presuppositions which scientists take with them as they go about their work.

Time can work backwards as well as forwards. While this may seem even more incredible than the idea that no free will exists, it is perfectly consistent with my own mental experience, as well as reports of human experience going back as far as human beings have recorded history.

The idea that the brain records stimuli before they happen has evidential support from scientific experiments. In these experiments subjects are tested for physical and neurological responses, after being exposed to randomly presented stimuli.

One such experiment was carried out in the 1990s by parapsychologist Dean Radin and his colleagues. Photographs were randomly shown to people. Some of the photos were of a peaceful or neutral nature, while others had deliberately shocking or arousing content such as corpses being autopsied or sexual content. Radin’s team measured changes in the skin resistance of the subjects with electrodes attached to fingers. People’s emotional state are reflected in the electrodermal activity of the sweat glands. Significantly, in Radin’s experiments, changes were detected three or four seconds before the emotional images were shown.

Sheldrake argues that mental causation, unlike physical causation, works from the future towards the past, and points out that ”the materialist interpretation of Libet’s finding assumes that causation works in only one direction, from the past towards the future.” He notes that if mental causation works in the opposite direction, then “the conscious choice could trigger the readiness potential.”

It is clear to me that human beings have free will. It is one of the defining characteristics of our species at this time in human consciousness development. Human intention is like a attractor in physics, pulling information into it from pasts and futures. For those who wish to live a mindful life, the key is to bring awareness to the moment of the decision, and to then choose wisely and joyfully.

Marcus

Reference

Sheldrake, Rupert (2012-01-05). The Science Delusion. Hachette Littlehampton. Kindle Edition.

Re-mapping the Cosmos

 The universe is bigger than we can think. This galaxy and its 100 billion stars is, in turn, just one of a humdred billion galaxies in the cosmos

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few”, said Buddhist scholar Shunryu Suzuki. Perhaps this explains why in the year 1900 Lord Kelvin stated that:

 "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement."

In just a few years physics was upturned by relativity theory, then completely reframed by quantum physics. And now we know that visible matter is but five per cent of the cosmos, with dark matter (25%) and dark energy (70%) making up the rest. And let's not even mention m-theory and the idea of multiple universes.

The limits of our vision are not the limits of the cosmos. The limits of our cognitive science are not the limits of our minds.

We might chuckle at Lord Kelvin’s short-sightedness now, barely a century since he spoke these words, but we should recall that he was one of the brightest men of his day. How long will it be before others are chuckling at the way we see the universe today? Again, history reveals that it will not be very long. Science – or at least the culture of science – is conservative. Yet futurists like me are not quite so restricted. It’s our job to critique, predict and speculate. We are expected to take risks. And that is exactly what I enjoy doing in my writing and talks! 

There is a tendency for experts and layfolk from every era to believe that history is a linear journey from superstitious past to the inevitable triumph of present wisdom; and that what we now understand as truth is the way it will always be. Each age deludes itself that it has reached the pinnacle of knowledge and that all that remains is to add the finishing touches. And each age gets it hopelessly wrong. Certain futurists like to talk about how the future will bring us flying cars and virtual reality interfaces in every room and how cool that will be. But I predict that the future will not be a mere rehashing of the current consumer age.

I like to challenge people to contemplate the changes that are taking place in science, and especially the sciences of consciousness and cosmology, and how absolutely important they are for all our futures. It is with these understandings that I predict vastly different futures than many techno-futurists. Futures which focus upon "money and machines" are what Sohail Inayatullah calls "used futures". I think we can do better than that.

For for me it is not so important to be proven correct by the passing of time, but to challenge the habits of thought that tend to make us believe that our outmoded maps of reality are actually the territory.

Marcus

How Much do we Really Know about the Universe?

How much do we really know about the universe? The answer is that we know an awful lot... but not much at all. I answer this question in today's video blog.

Marcus

 

Martin Rees and the Frontiers of Knowledge

The cosmos: it's bigger than your worldview

For those with a fascination with frontier science, you might like to listen to this Martin Rees lecture entitled, “What we’ll never know”.

The audio can be found on the BBC website.

The talk has also kindly transcribed online and can be downloaded here. 

It’s part of a series of lectures called the Reeth Lectures. Rees is the President of the Royal Society, or at least was at the time of the lecture, with his retirement imminent. I find Martin Rees to be a refreshingly open-minded scientist, with a strong ability to accommodate those with differing scientific and cultural views. He is certainly no Richard Dawkins, and expresses his strong belief that science and religion must learn to must co-exist.

In this lecture Rees discusses some of the cutting edge domains of science, and addresses the limits of human understanding. Topics he covers include the discovery of life elsewhere on the universe, space programmes, time travel, the big bang and much more.

As I have often opined on my blogs and in my writing in general, there are limits to the human intellect in its typical current state of development; but this development does not represent the limits of human perception in its current potentials. One thing Rees does not address is whether there are other ways of knowing which can deliver understanding of some of these frontier domains of inquiry. My experience with meditative and visionary states, and the development of Integrated Intelligence, have allowed me to see that such other ways of knowing exist and are available to all of us. 

 Martin Rees grasping the point. But are the big questions like water: the harder one grasps, the less the mind can hold the answers?

It costs billions to fund scientific endeavors like space programmes to attempt to answer the fundamental questions that martin Rees addresses, yet there are at least partial answers to them available via a strong commitment to expanding the intuitive capacities of the mind as they exist today. Integrated Intelligence won’t deliver mathematical answers or empirical proofs, but it does enable a deepening into relationship with the world and cosmos; and in that empathic state, there are profound knowings that are available.

Martin Rees represents the affable limits of open-minded rational inquiry, or what I like to call critical rationalism. There is certainly much more that we can and will know using critical/rational inquiry, so I not suggesting we desist in its deployment.

The one statement Rees makes which epitomises the limits of scientific inquiry as they currently exist, is as follows.

Some have speculated that other universes could exist 'alongside' ours.  Imagine ants crawling around on a large sheet of paper (their two-dimensional 'universe'). They would be unaware of a similar sheet that's parallel to it. Likewise, there could be another entire universe (with 3-dimensional space, like ours) less than a millimetre away, but we would be oblivious to it if that millimetre were measured in a fourth spatial dimension, while we are imprisoned in just three.

Because of the way his cognitive development has been delimited by modern science and education, Martin Rees, somewhat ironically, cannot see just how true that statement is, that the there are indeed other universes sitting right before us, and that intelligent life is already interacting with us from other realms of existence.

I certainly don’t pretend to understand more than a tiny piece of the scope of those other dimensions, but I think it is reasonable to assume that one day science will come to explore and understand them at a much greater level, and with that exploration, we will allow ourselves to relax and permit other ways of knowing to inform our understanding of the cosmos. Intelligence is not confined to the brain, and mental influence is not confined to local space and time. I have seen this to be true beyond any doubt.

It is perfectly reasonable to assume that other intelligent life forms from other worlds and other universes and dimensions know this at a level far beyond what any human can perceive, and that they currently utilise this non-localised space/time and integrated intelligence to connect with other life in the cosmos – and us. This would certainly help to explain many of the things that I have seen and experienced in my own lifetime (UFOs, spiritual entities, ESP, out of body experiences etc), and those experienced by mystics, alternative researchers and teachers such as Whitley Strieber, Esther Hicks, John Mack, Rupert Sheldrake and so on.

Undoubtedly we (I’ll include myself and the reader as lesser known explorers in the same waters) are making mistakes in our thinking and perception. Yet unless we step offshore to explore the oceans of the cosmic mind, not only will we never make mistakes, we will never learn from those mistakes.

Still, I suggest you take the time to listen to Martin Rees lecture and to the teachings of other learned scientists and thinkers who may not necessarily hold a spiritual perspective on life and cosmos. We have much to learn from each other. The truths that I write about here will make themselves known in greater scale sooner or later, and in the meantime we should relax and listen to each other in the spirit of open-minded and humble exploration.

Marcus