Re: Making your mind up

Martin Harran <martinharran@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, 27 Apr 2024 16:32:48 -0700, Mark Isaak
<specimenNOSPAM@curioustaxon.omy.net> wrote:
 

On 4/27/24 1:09 AM, Martin Harran wrote:

 
[big snip for focus]
 

 
No, my issue is not with science favouring the study of one of them
because it is relatively easy to study it using well-established
practices that have produced good results in other areas; my issue is
science *ruling out* one of them out in principle. To some extent,
that is understandable because of it being so much less amenable to
study using those well-established practices but in the same way as we
figured out gravity, I think we should be able to figure out ways of
studying the effects and symptoms that would come from dualism.

 
As I understand it, lots of people *have* figured out ways to study
effects that would come from dualism, and those effects are not there.

 
If there were *lots* of them then it shouldn't be hard for you to give
an example or two.
 

Thus we reject dualism not because it is hard to study, but because it
has been studied and found wanting.
 

I get the impression, however, that it goes deeper than just being
difficult to study, there seems to be near-paranoia about opening a
door that might let God in. Take, for example, the early work done by
Rupert Sheldrake. He came up with the idea of 'morphic resonance',
that there is something like a cloud of collective memory that
everything adds to and draws from. He did some research using chickens
and published it in book form. Sir John Maddox viciously attacked the
book in an editorial in Nature, in a statement that caused
considerable jaw-dropping in the scientific ommunity, described it as
"the best candidate for burning there has been for many years."

 
Sheldrake's proposal is quackery. Anyone with more than a passing
familiarity with the many and various forms of quackery does not need to
read past the two words "morphic resonance" to by 99% sure that it is hokum.

 
Thank you for providing that perfect example of what I was talking
about.
 
The irony in all this is that Sheldrake is a self-declared atheist who
started his work with the aim of finding scientific answers that would
dispel supernatural ideas.
 

So I guess you’ve abandoned Teilhard for Sheldrake now. Who next? Deepak
Chopra?

The most annoying thing about Sheldrake is how he caused so many people to
associate his musing on formative causation and morpic fields with the far
more serious concept of morphogenetic fields that developmental biologists
had explored over the years. Silly stuff put forward by Sheldrake is never
considered for good reason:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9579920/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/immunology-and-microbiology/morphogen

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3413735/

More serious work has been done by people like Brian Goodwin, Lewis Wolpert
and numerous others. All Sheldrake has done is sow confusion about the
morphogenetic field concept where most laypeople and many biologists
outside that field think he’s responsible for the concept.

>

 

I don't have an opinion either way on Sheldrakes' ideas and I'm
certainly not seeking to defend them, but what disturbed me was that
Maddox made no scientific attempt to critique his ideas and research,
baldly claiming in a BBC interview that "Sheldrake is putting forward
magic instead of science, and that can be condemned in exactly the
language that the Pope used to condemn Galileo, and for the same
reason. It is heresy."

 
How does one give a scientific critique of magic?

 
Who asked for a scientific critique of magic? Certainly not me.
 
An explanation of why you think Sheldrake's work was magic and not
science would be useful.
 

An explanation of why you think Sheldrake’s work was of scientific
importance and not magic would be useful instead. I’m invoking Hitchens’
razor here. Otherwise this turns into a pointless game of whack-a-mole. The
onus is on you alone.

 

If anything can
happen, how do you test for "anything"?
 

'Heresy' is a word that should not have any place in science.

 
Why not? Surely metaphors have a place in science, and "heresy" is
useful as a metaphor.

 
Maybe it's something to do with my understanding of science where the
driving force is the effort to find answers to new questions and new
answers to old questions without being hidebound by existing
orthodoxy. Thankfully, there have been some exceptionally successful
scientists who shared that understanding.
 

Yeah Sheldrake has done groundbreaking work on psychic pets.

By the way you have left my assertions that Gould’s arguments on drunkard
walks, bacterial predominance, and contingency put a monkey wrench in
Teilhard’s Christward pointing orthogenesis completely unaddressed.