The Science Delusion by Rupert Sheldrake Book PReview - Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry

The biggest scientific delusion of all is that science already knows the answers. The details still need working out but, in principle, the fundamental questions are settled. 64,000 is the median number of words per book. Average person reads about 200 words per minute. Simple math will tell us, that is, one book in 320 minutes. To accomplish this in 7 days, numbers say you would have to read for 45 minutes a day. Don't forget to subscribe, hit that notification button, like comment and share. E

njoy! Welcome to the Book of the Week series. Every week as I read another amazing title, I share it with the world. My name is Igor, SF Walker. Today we look at: The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry by Rupert Sheldrake So how about you slow down and relax. Reduce all that noise, for just a bit. Make that choice and decide to listen. In this video we look at one of the world's most innovative scientists, who shows us that science is being constricted by assumptions that have harde

ned into dogmas. In the skeptical, questioning and explorative spirit of true science, this journey will radically change your view of what is possible and give you new hope for the world. Stick around till the end, I will share with you some tools I have and use that will help you tremendously in this game of life. Discover a way to find out what actually motives you, what innate human need is driving all of your decisions and your behavior. I will share some tools to improve your self-awarenes

s, social awareness, self-management and relationship management. It is not anti-scientific to question established beliefs, but central to science itself. At the creative heart of science is a spirit of open-minded enquiry. Ideally, science is a process, not a position or a belief system. Innovative science happens when scientists feel free to ask new questions and build new theories. Dogmatic ideology, fear-based conformity and institutional inertia are inhibiting scientific creativity. Contem

porary 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. 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. Most scientists share a model of reality and a way of asking questions that is called a paradigm. The ruling paradigm defines what kinds of questions scientists can ask and how they can be answered. “Normal” science takes place within this framework and scientists usually explain away anything that does not fit. Anomalous facts accumulate until a crisis point is reached. Revolutionary changes happen when

researchers adopt more inclusive frameworks of thought and practice, and are able to incorporate facts that were previously dismissed as anomalies. Different worldviews can be summarised as follows: Worldview God Nature Traditional Christian Early mechanistic Enlightenment deism Romantic deism Romantic atheism Materialism Interactive Interactive Creator only Creator only No God No God Living organism Machine Machine Living organism Living organism Machine Our private relationship with nature

presupposes that nature is alive. For a mechanistic scientist, or technocrat, or economist, or developer, nature is neuter and inanimate. It needs developing as part of human progress. But often the very same people have different attitudes in private. This division between public rationalism and private romanticism has been part of the Western way of life for generations, but is becoming increasingly unsustainable. No machine starts from small beginnings, grows, forms new structures within itse

lf and then reproduces itself. Yet plants and animals do this all the time. They can also regenerate after damage. To see them as machines propelled only by ordinary physics and chemistry is an act of faith; to insist that they are machines despite all appearances is dogmatic. Attempts to explain organisms in terms of their chemical constituents are rather like trying to understand a computer by grinding it up and analysing its component elements, such as copper, germanium and silicon. Certainly

, it is possible to learn something about the computer in this way, namely what it is made of. But in this process of reduction, the structure and the programmed activity of the computer vanishes, and chemical analysis will never reveal the circuit diagrams; no amount of mathematical modelling of interactions between its atomic constituents will reveal the computer’s programs or the purposes they fulfilled. The mechanistic theory of life has degenerated into misleading metaphors and rhetoric. Or

ganised systems are all nested hierarchies. At each level, the whole includes the parts; they are literally within it. And at each level the whole is more than the sum of the parts, with properties that cannot be predicted from the study of parts in isolation. For example, the structure and meaning of a sentence could not be worked out by a chemical analysis of the paper and the ink, or deduced from the quantities of letters that make it up. (Twelve as, two bs, six cs, six ds, etc.). Knowing the

numbers of constituent parts is not enough: the structure of the whole depends on the way they are combined together in words, and on the relationships between the words. The machine metaphor has long outlived its usefulness, and holds back scientific thinking in physics, biology and medicine. Our growing, evolving universe is much more like an organism, and so is the earth, and so are oak trees, and so are dogs, and so are you. Can you really think of yourself as a genetically programmed machi

ne in a mechanical universe? Probably not. Instead of dismissing our own observations and insights to conform to mechanistic dogma, we can pay attention to them and try to learn from them. As Terence McKenna expressed it, ‘What orthodoxy teaches about time is that the universe sprang from utter nothingness in a single moment . . . It’s almost as if science said, “Give me one free miracle, and from there the entire thing will proceed with a seamless, causal explanation.” The one free miracle was

the sudden appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe, with all the laws that govern it. Scientific dogmas create taboos, with the result that entire areas of research and enquiry are excluded from mainstream science and from regular sources of funding. The result is ‘fringe’ science, kept beyond the pale of orthodoxy by automatic scepticism. Scientists, like most other people, accept evidence that agrees with their beliefs much more readily than evidence that contradicts them. This

is one reason why established orthodoxies in science remain established. Although most people do not realise it, there is a shocking possibility that living organisms draw upon forms of energy over and above those recognised by standard physics and chemistry. 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 ever happened in the whole history o

f human thought, not just the whole history of philosophy. 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. The conventional materialist assumption is that memories are stored as physical traces within the

brain. Repeated failures to find memory traces fit well with the idea of memory as a resonant phenomenon, where similar patterns of activity in the past affect present activities in minds and brains. Individual and collective memory may both depend on resonance, but self-resonance from an individual’s own past is more specific and hence more effective. Animal and human learning may be transmitted by morphic resonance across space and time. The resonance theory helps account for the ability of m

emories to survive serious damage to brains, and is consistent with all five basic kinds of kinds of remembering. Minds extend beyond brains in time as well as space. We are connected to the past by memory and habit, and to the future by desires, plans and intentions. Are these memories and virtual futures contained materially within brains in the present, or are minds connected to the past and future by non-material links? The conventional answer is that our memories and intentions must be insi

de brains in the present. Where else could they be? The computer metaphor reinforces this way of thinking. Dogmatic skeptics reject all the evidence for psychic phenomena because it conflicts with the materialist worldview. Even so, most people claim to have had telepathic experiences. Numerous statistical experiments have shown that information can be transmitted from person to person in a way that cannot be explained in terms of the normal senses. Telepathy typically happens between people who

are closely bonded, like mothers and children, spouses and close friends. Other psychic abilities include premonitions and precognitions, as shown by animals’ anticipation of earthquakes, tsunamis and other disasters. Human premonitions usually occur in dreams or through intuitions. In experimental research on human presentiments, future emotional events seem able to work ‘backwards’ in time to produce detectable physiological effects. If the state-sponsored monopoly of materialism is loosened,

scientific and clinical research could look at the role of beliefs, faiths, hopes, fears and social influences in health and healing. Systems of therapy could be compared on the basis of their effectiveness, and people could choose those that are likely to work best for them, with the help of informed advisors. Diet, exercise and preventive medicine programmes would also be compared on the basis of their effectiveness. The nature of placebo responses and the power of the mind could become valid

fields of research, as would the effects of prayer, meditation and other spiritual practices. An integrative medical system could empower people to lead healthier lives. Doctors and patients could become more aware of the innate capacity of the body to heal and could recognise the importance of hope and faith. Comparative effectiveness research provides a way of finding out what works best. An inclusive, integrative medical system is likely to be cheaper and more effective than an exclusively m

echanistic system. For those who idealise science, scientists are the epitome of objectivity, rising above the sectarian divisions and illusions that afflict the rest of humanity. Scientific minds are freed from the normal limitations of bodies, emotions and social obligations, and can travel beyond the earth-bound realm of the senses to see all nature as if from outside, stripped of subjective qualities. Scientists constitute a priesthood superior to the priesthoods of religions, which maintain

their prestige and power by playing on human ignorance and fear. Most scientists are unconscious of the myths, allegories and assumptions that shape their social roles and political power. These beliefs are implicit rather than explicit. But they are powerful because they are habitual. They are unconscious and are therefore rarely challenged. In the academic world, promotions, grants, career prospects, the status of university departments, and even of entire universities, depends on scientific

publications in peer-reviewed journals. The more publications the better, and the higher the status of the journal the better. One effect of this system is to encourage and reward the selective publication of positive data. Another effect is to discourage original, risk-taking research. Most of the many thousands of scientific journals are now owned by a small number of highly profitable publishing conglomerates. Scientists are often imagined to achieve a superhuman level of objectivity. This be

lief is sustained by the ideal of disembodied knowledge, unaffected by ambitions, hopes, fears and other emotions. Scientists are, of course, people, and subject to the limitations of personality, politics, peer-group pressures, fashion and the need for funding. Within medicine, psychology and parapsychology, most researchers recognise that their expectations can bias their results, which is why they often use blind or double-blind methodologies. In the socalled hard sciences, most researchers a

ssume that blind methods are unnecessary. Many journals are now owned by international corporations, whose primary motive is profit. Fraud and deceit in science are rarely detected by the peer-review system and usually come to light as a result of whistleblowing. The separation of facts and values is usually impossible in practice, and many scientists exaggerate the value of their research in order to get it funded. Although the objectivity of science is a noble ideal, there is more hope of achi

eving it by recognising the humanity of scientists and their limitations than by pretending that science has a unique access to truth. The sciences are entering a new phase. The materialist ideology that has ruled them since the nineteenth century is out of date. All ten of its essential doctrines have been superseded. The authoritarian structure of the sciences, the illusions of objectivity and the fantasies of omniscience have all outlived their usefulness. The delusion that science has alread

y answered the fundamental questions chokes off the spirit of enquiry. The illusion that scientists are superior to the rest of humanity means that they have little to learn from anyone else. They need other people’s financial support, but they do not need to listen to anyone less scientifically educated than themselves. In return for their privileged position, scientists will deliver knowledge and power over nature, transforming humanity and the earth. The materialist agenda was once liberating

but is now depressing. The realisation that the sciences do not know the fundamental answers leads to humility rather than arrogance, and openness rather than dogmatism. Much remains to be discovered and rediscovered, including wisdom. And there you have it: The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry! Please do help out, its easy, simply like this video so more people can enjoy it. Share it too and spread the word. Leave a comment and share your thoughts. Subscribe to my channel and st

ay up to date. Link to this book is in the description below. Buy it. Read. Never stop learning. Especially learning about yourself and nature. So gift yourself by taking the free human needs test on my website and find out what actually motives you, what innate human need is driving all of your decisions and your behavior. If you feel you are ready to improve your self-awareness, social awareness, self-management and relationship management even further, do check out my Master of Life Awareness

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