RUPERT SHELDRAKE, unlike many of his critics, is a working scientist who does some of the most ingeniously inexpensive and simple experiments that rigorously fulfill the requirements of scientific methods and some of his experiments actually do get that rare replication that seems to have become a non-requirement in late stage science. He is regularly published going into his ninth decade, he continues to do groundwork in asking questions and gathering evidence from the public. Just last week he made such an appeal to the public for information in regard to the possibility of inherited traits in animals. He has been a fellow at Cambridge University, until 2010 he as a director of a project at Cambridge University, he was a research fellow of the Royal Society, He did groundbreaking research in biology and agricultural science in India and Malaya, some of his work there has probably been more important in the lives of more People than that done by just about any of his critics, some of his basic work in studying auxin and related topics is among the most important science of the 20th century. So there's no doubt about it, he has every right to be considered a scientist. That he is unafraid to do what I said the "skeptics" obviously don't, trust scientific methods to discern the truth even when they show things that are controversial is obvious.
Unlike most of his critics, as well, Rupert Sheldrake has done serious graduate work and continuing reading and study of philosophy. If there's one thing that is remarkable about those educated in science, it is how many of them are less than novices in that area of thought. That used to not be a rarity among scientists, especially those from Europe and Britain but it has been among scientists, especially in the English speaking People for quite some time, now. I think it's one of the reasons that he thinks and writes with a clarity and consistency that is unusual. He clearly does what even some of his critics renowned for their writing ability, such as Richard Dawkins, fails to do, he is a critic of his own ideas as well as theirs. Which is one of the reasons that I have every confidence that Dawkins' evolutionary psychology and its associated ideas will go onto that scrap-heap of discarded science where you can find Freudianism and Behaviorism, both credentialed science of their time and, Lord help us, still having rump communities that believe in them. Some of them allowed to keep shop as practitioners.
It's planting season and I don't have the time to write what I'd like to have so I'm going to type out some more from Rupert Sheldrake's book Science Set Free. Right before a section titled Minds that deny their own reality, he says:
The strongest argument in favor of materialism is the failure of dualism to explain how immaterial minds work and how they interact with brains. Te strongest argument in favor of dualism is the implausibility and self-contradictory nature of materialism.
The dualist-materialist dialect has lasted for centuries. The soul-body or mind-brain problem has refused to go away. But before we can move forward, we need to understand in more detail what materialists cliam, since their belief system dominates institutional science and medicine, and every one is influenced by it.
I have pointed out that an immaterial mind - one which is not composed matter of or the consequence of material causation, could be expected to have qualities and abilities that aren't covered by the properties of matter and material causation. An immaterial mind could not be subjected to scientific discovery because of that, science is structured only to discover things about things that exist within the properties of matter and material causation. It is irrational to think that science could do more than notice discrepancies between physical systems and such minds, they couldn't even go far in explaining much about those discrepancies. Materialists, rigidly holding with a rigidly monistic ideology that insists everything that exists must be restricted to the properties of material existence and the human made "laws of nature," insist that their promise that all will be explained even as they have failed to explain it for centuries, now. Someone who believes minds surpass the qualities and limits of such a conception of matter and existence should realize that science can't handle the idea of such a mind, though they have certainly been trying to answer the question of how minds influence or control brains or our bodies in the same way instead of admitting that their idea can never have a scientific explanation. They shouldn't feel bad about that because the materialists have never fulfilled that major promissory note they keep issuing, generation after generation, century after century, I'd argue for millennia, now, only they've structured things so their creditors are suckered into never calling for payment.
Going on to his discussion of the materialists' irrational and decadent declarations that minds are, to one extent or other, illusory, he says.
Most neuroscientists do not spend much time thinking about the logical problems that materialist beliefs entail. They just get on with the job of trying to understand how brains work, in the faith that more hard facts will eventually provide answers. They leave professional philosophers to defend the materialist or physicalist faith.
Physicalism means much the same as materialism, but rather tan asserting that all reality is material, it asserts that it is physical, explicable in terms of physics, and therefore including energy and fields as well as matter. In practice, this is what materialists believe too. In the following discussion I use the more familiar word "materialism" to mean "materialism or physicalism."
I'd add to that that recently some materialists have used the dodge of declaring themselves "naturalists" (which previously meant nudists, as I recall) which is just a ruse as it means pretty much the same thing as the other labels. I interpret that to mean that even some of the slightly more philosophically astute materialists feel if not realize that there are deep problems with their ideology but they don't want to admit that or give it up. Covering up their naked materialism, sort of.
Among materialist philosophers there are several schools of thought. The most extreme position is called "eliminative materialism." The philosopher Paul Curchland, for example, claims that there is nothing more to the mind than what occurs in the brain. Those who believe in the existence of thoughts, beliefs, desires, motives and other mental states are victims of "folk psychology," an unscientific attitude that will in due course be replaced by explanations in terms of the activities of nerves. Folk psychology is a kind of superstition, like belief in demons, and it will be left behind by the onward march of scientific understanding. Consciousness is just an "aspect" of the activity of the brain. Thoughts or sensations are just another way of talking about activity in particular regions of the cerebral cortex; they are the same things talked about in different ways.
Of course such eliminative materialists exempt their language about their own unevidence talk about these things from the rigid model they have created when, by their own claims, what they believe about all of it, from their academically snobbish and insulting labels for the ideas of those who disagree with him to their declared faith in the not yet reached triumph of science, to the very science they ask us to put our faith into, must all fall within the same countentless, purposeless chemical and material causation which cannot be anything but a huge crap shot at a hugely improbable picture of what is really true. Such academic scribbleage and babblage gives away its own disbelief in that by even making the attempt to convince other People that their favorite line of belief is what they should believe because such a materialist faith would hold that none of it is meaningful, including their desire to be believed. It cannot have more legitimacy than any other aspect of "folk psychology" only they insist that while most of humanity swims in that self-deceiving ignorance, they and their allies, alone, can, somehow, escape from it. Many of those who hold university professorships and chairs in departments of philosophy aren't especially rigorous in their own criticism of their own ideas, especially those who hanker after the repute and status that is given to scientists. That last thing is ubiquitous among those with college credentials in the humanities, in my experience. It reached absurd lengths even among some of the more astute composers of the 19th and 20th centuries who should have known better.
I think any university or college or school which hires and pays someone who denies the reality of or significance of consciousness, teaching students that what the university is in the business of providing them is, in effect, meaningless, is guilty of consumer fraud. They, despite their desire to appear properly sciency, are promoting the ultimate act of intellectual decadence. There's a lot of that in this late state of eutrophic modernism. That is what materialism can be counted on to produce because it is, ultimately, a self-refuting and undermining ideology.
Sheldrake continues:
Other materialists are "epiphenomenalists": they accept rather tahn deny the existence of consciousness, but see it as a functionless by-product of the activity of the brain, an "epipenomenon," like a shadow. T. H. Huxley was n early advocate of this point of view, and in 1874 he famously compared consciousness to "the steam whistle that accompanies the work of a locomotive engine. . . without influence upon its machinery." He concluded, "We are conscious automatons." People might just as well be zombies, with no subjective experience, because all their behavior is a result of brain activity alone. Conscious experience does nothing and makes no difference to the physical world.
Again, you have to wonder why someone who believes that would not only make an attempt to discern anything, never mind spend a lifetime in science, but to issue polemical statements, declarations, books, to convince other such minds of anything because, in the end, none of it makes any difference to anything and has an absurdly remote possibility of coming to an accurate description of reality. Everything they come up with and believe would have as much of a chance as any other of finding reality on the basis of chemicals and physical structures which were a product of random chance in their particular situation. You have to wonder how such a person accounts for the possibility that any two such organisms would contain the physical basis of that they could agree on anything. How any two brains could make precisely the same structure to give rise to the same epiphenomenon - how brains would know how to do that is a question I've been posing, off and on, to materialists for a number of years now and I have never had any response that wasn't an expression of atheist materialist faith lacking any real explanation of how it is supposed to work.
A recent form of materialism is "cognitive psychology," which dominated academic psychology in the English-speaking world in the late twentieth century. It treats the brain as a computer and mental activity as information processing. Subjective experiences, like seeing green, or feeling pain, or enjoying music, are computational processes inside the brain which are themselves unconscious.
I've discussed that before, how computers are a deliberate creation made to mimic BY ANALOGY modeling of human mind, of humans thought, they have a relationship to minds as an anatomical statue made of sculptures of human organs, bones and other structures have to human bodies. To claim that human bodies function like anatomical models is about as astute as claiming that computers can serve as a means of understanding human minds. Circular reasoning and inapt analogies flourish when science and philosophy are governed by materialists ideology.
Some philosphers, like John Searle, think that minds can emerge from matter by analogy with the way that physical properties can emerge at different levels of complexity, like the wetness of water emerging from the interactions of large numbers of water molecules. In nature, there are indeed many different levels of organization (Figure 1.1)*, each of which has new properties that are not present in their parts alone. Atoms have properties over and above nuclear particles and electrons. Molecules have properties over and above atoms; the molecules of water, H2O, are fundamentally different from uncombined hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Then the wetness of liquid water is not explained by water molecules in isolation, but through their organization together in liquid water. New physical properties "emerge" at every level. In the same way, consciousness is an emergent physical property of brains. It is different from other physical processes, but is is physical nonetheless. Many non-materialists would agree with Searle that consciousness is in some sense "emergent" but would argue that while mind and conscious agency originate in physical nature, they are qualitatively different from purely material or physical being.
Apart from the extremely fuzzy and, it seems to me, diffuse idea that so many different dissimilarities there are between larger physical entities and the properties of their component physical entities on lower levels of organization can be reified into the same kind of thing, this idea doesn't seem to explain much about minds. Does water have wetness except as a product of perception, an action of minds? And it would depend on what you define "wetness" as being, which is another action of minds. Often a scientific definition of some phenomenon is created to limit what aspects of it will be under scientific discussion but I'd be surprised if science can come up with a definition of something like "wetness" or the perception of a color that will really encompass everything that's meant by the word when we use it. I would question how anyone could really determine that all of the various such experiences which are called "physical properties" are connected except as they are experienced by living beings' minds. Given the recent biology of such scientists as James Shapiro and Denis Noble, I think it makes at least as much and more sense to think that bodies are epiphenomena of minds.
This last one was one of the things that those who tried to answer me with on those questions of how brains could make the physical structure(s) to give rise to an idea could be physically present in that brain, structures that would be entirely novel to that brain, structures that would need to be extremely precise and complex enough to give rise to a new idea in any particular brain, before the materialists' model of "brain only" minds would have any possibility of even knowing the brain needed to make a new structure - not to mention the problem of how it would know how to make that structure in that case. Only the answer "natural selection" was no answer at all.
Finally, some materialists hope that evolution can provide an answer. They propose that consciousness emerged as a result of natural selection through mindless processes from unconscious matter. Because minds evolved, they must have been favored by natural selection and hence they must actually do something; they must make a difference. Many non-materialists would agree. But materialists want to have ti both ways; emergent consciousness must do something if it has evolved as an evolutionary adaptation favored by natural selection; but it cannot do anything if it is just an epiphenomeon of brain activity, or another way of talking about brain mechanisms. In 2011, the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey tried to overcome this problem by suggesting that consciousness evolved because it helps humans survive and reproduce by making us fee "special and transcendent." But as a materialist Humphrey does not agree that our minds have any agency; that is to say, they cannot affect our actions. Instead our consciousness is illusory; he describes it as "a magical mystery show that we stage for ourselves inside our own heads." But to say that consciousness is an illusion does not explain consciousness; it presupposes it. Illusion is a mode of consciousness.
My guess would be that the psychologist Nichols Humphrey would take enormous offense of some skeptic of psychology and materialism such as myself would brush off his entire professional and academic work in the very terms that it must, itself, brush off every product of every conscious mind, only I'd do it on the basis of the central and basic logical disconnect that is baked into the entire field of academic dismissal of minds and consciousness in favor of atheist-materialist ideology, that it's clear that those academics pushing it don't really believe it when it comes to their own minds, their own consciousness and what they choose to believe and insist that others believe. A point Sheldrake made earlier in the chapter about the published declarations dismissing consciousness by the pudding-headed Daniel Dennett. I call him "pudding-headed," Rupert Sheldrake has much better manners than I do. It's entirely legitimate to critique the behavior of the eliminative materalists of academia because everything about their actions proves they don't really believe it when it comes to them and their own meaningless burps and noises coming from those random molecular actions in their brains. I'd bet if someone cribbed them for sale they'd assert in court that they were more than meaningless and not really attributable to their creativity.
If all of these theories sound unconvincing, that is because they are. They do not even convince other materialists, which is why there are so many rival theories. Searle has described the debate over the past fifty years as follows:
"A philosopher advances a materialist theory of the mind . . . He encounters difficulties . . . Criticisms of the materialist theory usually take a more or less technical form, but, in fact, underlying the technical objections is a much deeper objection; the theory in question has left out some essential features of the mind. . . and this leads to ever more frenzied attempts to stick with the materialist thesis.
The philosopher Galen Strawson, himself a materialist, is amazed by the willingness of so many of his fellow philosophers to deny the reality of their own experience;
"I think we should feel very sober, and a little afraid at the power of human credulity, the capacity of human minds to be gripped by theory, by faith. For this particular denial is the strangest thing that has happened in the whole history of human thought, not just the whole history of philosophy."
I am unaware of any materialist whose primary motivation is anything but their attachment to atheism, though some may have been led to atheism through a naive conception of materialism, the two seem to be linked pretty firmly in most minds that hold those ideologies. Though that would be those who consider the matter at any higher level of thought. Materialism can be held even by non-atheists on the basis of conformity to the ambient requisite thoughts of secular culture, as a default, respectable, reputable and profitable mode of going along with that to get along. I don't think most atheists or materialists really think about it very deeply at all, no more than those who maintain a naive, primitive, even quite mistaken notion of Darwinism, natural selection or, as many even college-credentialed folks abbreviate that "evolution." I don't think most materialists, atheists or true-believes in scientism hold those on a particularly deep or sound basis, I think most of it is a product of wanting to fit in with the kind of People taken to have higher status in a secular, materialist, atheist, scientistic milieu. I doubt most of the media figures, including some of those "public scientists" I ridiculed to such objection the other day are especially intellectually engaged with their own adopted ideology. As I mentioned, even those as fully engaged as the eliminative materialists don't engage with the logical consequences of their own claims for the intellectual legitimacy of those very claims. Materialism is one of the most philosophically inastute conceptions ever held and it is ubiquitous in our decadent stage of materialism as vulgar materialism has almost always ruled in those who gain power.
Francis Crick admitted that the "astonishing hypothesis" was not proved. he conceded that a dualist view might become more plausible. But he added.
"There is always a third possibility; that the facts support a new alternative way of looking at the mind-brain problem that is significantly different from the rather crude materialistic view that many neuroscientists hold today and also from the religious point of view. Only time and much further scientific work, will enable us to decide."
Yeah, there could be a third possibility or it could be that minds are non-material and, so, will never be able to be directly discerned by analogies to the properties of material causation. It may be just a hard fact that we, in our thinking which is so tied to the experience and analysis of material objects and experiences, will never be able to articulate more than a vague sense of minds and consciousness. It could be similar to the speculation by A. S. Eddington that there are laws of nature which our minds are not capable of discerning and will never know because of that. If other species on some other planet, somewhere, may be able to conceive of those, it would be interesting to think about how we'd deal with that. I'd imagine that materialist scientists on Earth would deny that those properties of matter which their minds could not comprehend could possibly exist. But that's just speculative imagining on my part. Maybe they'd learn the kind of humility and acceptance they figure non-sci-guys should practice in regard to their incomprehensible claims.
Before going on in the next section to discuss the latest fashion (or desperate resort) in panpsychism, the idea that matter has consciousness as an intrinsic property and our minds emerge out of that subatomic, atomic . . . consciousness, Rupert Sheldrake says, "There is indeed a third way."
How panpsychism isn't just another from of the very fuzzy and vague notion of emergentism, I'd need to have explained to me.
I would point out to the panpsychists that there is religious precedent for their materialistic last resort, in fact it's in Scripture. Jesus told the religious high and mighty of his day that God could raise up children of Abraham from rocks (Matthew 3:9} and, during his dramatic entry into Jerusalem that if the crowds didn't proclaim him the stones would do it (Luke 19:40). Not to mention the scriptures tell us we are made of Earth (Genesis 2:7). The dualism of matter and spirit in some of Christian philosophy and theology was an artifact of Greek pagan philosophy, not the Hebrew tradition, certainly not as that was extended so drastically through the Gospel of Jesus and the theological explanations of the Glorified Jesus after his death by Paul and the Catholic Epistles. The mind-body dilemma that has given rise to the ultimate decadence of brain sci-guys and their philosopher groupies in consciously denying the existence of significance of consciousness may well be attributable to pagan proto-science, perhaps as filtered through atheist materialism, of the classical period atomists (as popularized by a deeply flawed book by Stephen Greenblatt that was all the rage a while back) and was never much more than a product of that ideological assertion irrationally retained in the ideological basis of science.
I am extremely skeptical of panpsychism, for a start the idea that any molecular, atomic, subatomic, "consciousness" any consciousness of rocks or crystals or other non-living entities could ever be conceived of in a way that connected them to the consciousness that we experience is as fraught with problems as the other materialist's ways of dealing with consciousness. And it has the same problem as my rejection of ethology, the supposed science of animal behavior) as anything but lore passed off in the guise of science - and with a particularly nasty association with Darwinist eugenics. The hard fact is that we have no way to consult even animals who are living as to what their experience of consciousness is, what any explanation of their own behavior is, we can't even know if human reports of that are accurate or honest. How are we supposed to verify that for rocks and atoms? How are we to even define what that would be? I think it's just the latest or perhaps last straw of old-line materialism among those who have thought honestly enough about all of those other schemes of it to realize they are bunk but not being willing to admit that minds, consciousness, must well surpass the limits of material causation, to give that property to atoms does nothing to change that, to give it to subatomic particles does no more to remedy that problem.
I will say that there are ways to scientifically study some animal behavior as Rupert Sheldrake rather ingeniously does in his study of animal behavior to study such phenomena as animals who seem to know when their human companions are going to come home, but even that has its limits because no animal can tell us that's what they're doing and what motivates them to do it. Sheldrake is one of the great living shoe-string practitioners of basic science research. He said he learned a lot about how to do that kind of science among the scientists in India where there wasn't money to do fancier science. His books are some of my favorite science reading as his talks, lectures, dialogues and conversations are in online listening. His work is an example of the possibilities of using scientific method and intellectual searching when it's freed of ideological straight-jacketing and the requirements to conform to the dominant materialist-atheist-scientistic hegemony in decaying modernism.
* I don't have the book with me as I'm editing this, but I think it was an image that looked like this one I found online diagramming such a hierarchy.
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