Wasn't getting heated, sorry if it comes off that way. Just thoroughly explaining my perspective

Regarding proof..as benz always says; technically science never 'proves' anything

Gibran old buddy!

Nice to see you. Been awhile since our paths crossed. I spent most of the winter offline, travelling and busy... as usual, you put the crux of the matter quite succinctly and evenhandedly.

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It is nice to see the debate here picked up again, actually. As Orion intimated, many people who disagree with Sheldrake find it beneath themselves to bother arguing these points. As Rupert has said many times over the years, people hold their beliefs so firmly that it never really occurs to them to question them.

I agree with what has been said here. Namely:

1) That science doesn't explain anything, but rather describes certain phenomena from certain perspectives... in very specific languages like mathematics.

&

2) Science (with a capital S) is clearly not a belief system, but scientists have belief systems like anyone else. Very few people can actually claim to have no beliefs or worldview. What Sheldrake is saying is that many (most) scientists and academics believe things that are not Science, and on some level, at least, believe that those things are scientific.

These should not be threatening concepts to anyone who applies critical thinking to them. And yet, many people are threatened by any broaching of these topics. There is certainly a knee-jerk reaction on the part of many otherwise intelligent and progressive people to stifle any criticism of science, and such people can resort to name calling and negative labels like woo, psuedoscience, malarky, bullshit, quackery etc. etc. I am afraid that such behavior is unbecoming of intellectual debate. Even if you think the other side of an argument is totally wrong, name calling simply shows you haven't the linguistic, logical or rhetorical skills to debate the issue calmly.

People seem to forget that "fringe" issues often become science eventually, and that all the greats were suppressed by the academics of their day. Newton was not only ridiculed at first, but he was an alchemist! Sheldrake, like it or not, IS a scientist... and one who is probably at least as well versed in the current notions of the scientific community as the vast majority of people who see fit to criticize him.

Well said..that pretty much covers my view of this as well.

Well i just picked it up again recently and read through the chapter on the question of psychic phenomena. The second half of the book i'm enjoying greatly since its more up my alley anyways. But this chapter is definitely my favorite one so far..I was aware of some of the studies mentioned, but the sheer amount of research that's actually been done on it and the results attained goes deeper than i thought

It was an excellent read.. More people need to actually look into this area before dismissing it. I can't tell you how many times I've encountered people who dismiss all of this "in the name of science and reason" and yet when further questioned its revealed they've never even bothered to look at any of the data, and often even refuse to upon request..Their stance has nothing to do with science or reason, its just ignorance and dogmatic denial a lot of the time IME. They just assume its BS and flawed since it couldn't possibly occur, and don't ever bother to look into it. As he says, no reasonable person would denounce research in physical chemistry or any area of science without knowing anything about the subject.. And yet this is exactly what many materialists do when it comes to research on psychic phenomenon. His encounter with Richard Dawkins wasn't surprising, but fairly amusing in how it characterized this overarching situation

The reason i brought this thread up though was not to rant but because as i was reading the very last paragraph of this chapter on telepathy a funny little sync happened. As i read a sentence on how people most often report premonitions occurring in connection with dreams (one kind of psychic thing which I've documented in my own life/dream journal dozens of times over the years) i was suddenly hit with a memory of one dream i'd forgotten from the night before. I'd written a page or two of dreams this morning but this one evaded me until then: I was some kind of animal taking handfuls and handfuls of honey and stuffing it into my mouth (ya... it was the bomb!)

Right then I looked up from the book and mentioned to the person on the couch next to me that i'd just remembered how i was pooh bear in a dream last night, and that i faintly remembered them being with me. They had a shocked look on their face and told me that a few days prior they too had a dream of being pooh bear, only they were running around looking for their honey instead of eating it.

Pretty silly dream sync and not too crazy compared to what i've observed before, but in the context of it all happening as i'm on the last page of this chapter on that very subject, with the dream even being sparked because of its mention of dreams and all, it was pretty funny

Yeah UC, that tends to be the case. People who have some basis in science seem to think their prejudices and unproven beliefs are backed up by science when they are often completely or in a great measure unsubstantiated.

Psychic research and paranormal stuff is taboo because it tended to be career damaging and stigmatizing... but the sheer volume of research and the money spent show that people in positions of power took it very seriously. Nobody would spend billions of dollars and go to such lengths if there wasn't something there.

For me it is far more simple... I have these experiences quite regularly and have learned over and over that I can trust them. Simple.

This kind of joint dreaming you described is something I have had scores of times. Factor in the fact that you only become aware of this if both people remember the dream AND talk about it... and you can realize that this is probably happening a lot.

Anyway, rock on buddy. All the best.
HF

I posted the following as a reply in another thread which probably won't be read very much, but it is directly applicable to the discussion here, so I figured I would re-post it in this thread. If you happen to have read it already, I apologize:

I think it is odd that people think that there is any such thing as "objective" evidence of anything. Objective evidence is technically impossible given that your reading about it, the manufacture of it, and everything in between are all clearly subjective.

In the fields of logic and epistemology, this is rather well known. Science, despite wanting to seem authoritative, even when it is genuine, is all quackery to some extent because it relies on induction... which can prove absolutely nothing. The only thing in science that can said to be a proof is in the field of mathematics... and then only if you do the proof yourself... and then only in that moment when you have done the proof. There is no evidence that the laws of nature even remain the same from day to day. We have had mounds of evidence that the constants people assume to be steady fluctuate like mad... including the speed of light and the gravitational constant. http://www.sheldrake.org/experiments/constants/

So, subjective evidence is all we have. Like it or not, we have no choice but to base our beliefs on our own subjective experiences.

As for the constant yammering here about clinical trials and objective evidence... it is basically wishful thinking. Clinical trials don't even claim to be objective. They are paid for by corporations and people with financial interest in the outcome. In case you missed it, thousands of pharmaceutical clinical trials were called into question back in 2010, and must be considered invalidated due to widespread abuse of the lax controls around the placebos being used. http://www.naturalnews.c...cebo_medical_fraud.html

Most of you know that a medicine must only be 5% more effective than a placebo to get FDA approval. Well, it turns out that 92% of "clinical" trials never mention what their placebo actually is... and there are no rules on it. They can use sugar pills as the placebo in a diabetic drug test... and do. They have used hydrogenated fats as a "placebo" in heart medicine trials. Naturally, water would 5% more effective than these placebos.

And let us not even bring up the moral implications of purposefully injuring and perhaps even killing your test subjects in the sole interest of pushing through a drug that probably doesn't work. (hence the need to stack the deck with fake placebos)

Please, my lovely scientifically oriented brethren, don't get so swept up in your enthusiasm for science that you forget to be critical. Whereas most of you seem to think that questioning psuedoscience is the totality of critical thinking... it is not. When you understand the economics of science and follow the money, you will realize that much of this glorious peer-reviewed research amounts to a hill of beans and is actually often evidence that you should not trust the people doing these often rather obviously lame studies.

"You see, if there are no regulations or rules regarding placebo, then none of the placebo-controlled clinical trials are scientifically valid.

It's amazing how medical scientists will get rough and tough when attacking homeopathy, touting how their own medicine is "based on the gold standard of scientific evidence!" and yet when it really comes down to it, their scientific evidence is just a jug of quackery mixed with a pinch of wishful thinking and a wisp of pseudoscientific gobbledygook, all framed in the language of scientism by members of the FDA who wouldn't recognize real science if they tripped and fell into a vat full of it.

Big Pharma and the FDA have based their entire system of scientific evidence on a placebo fraud! And if the placebo isn't a placebo, then the scientific evidence isn't scientific."

Rupert Sheldrake has completely misunderstood the relationship between the speed of light and the definition of the metre.

The speed of light (c) is defined as 299792458 m/s and the metre is defined as the distance that light travels in 1/299792458 of a second. However, these definitions don't prevent us from detecting changes in c. All it means is that if we do detect a change in c then we change the length of the metre instead of the value of c.

Here's an example with some arithmetic to make things clearer. Suppose someone develops a new technique to measure the speed of light and everyone agrees it's the most accurate method yet. Using this technique we measure the speed of light to be 300000000 m/s. Then the new length of the metre would be longer than before:

mnew = (300000000/299792458 ) x mold

mnew = 1.00069228559 x mold

But the speed of light would remain unchanged at 299792458 m/s.

I fail to see the complete misunderstanding you are referring to...




Excuse me if I'm missing something obvious, but aren't you making the same statement?

The misunderstanding is that he thinks the definitions of the units prevent us from detecting changes in c.



My example shows that's not true and there's nothing to stop us from detecting changes in c, the definitions of the units are not relevant.

If the definitions of the units are irrelevant, and yet it's precisely the definition of meter that will change as soon as a different measure of c is taken, what are the implications of any changes in c?

The way you express it, it does sound like any changes in the measure of the speed of light are totally irrelevant. Which sounds like Sheldrake's point the way I understand it, being "blind to them" the only potential point of conflict here.

Your point is we do detect changes in c, and Sheldrake's point is that it doesn't really matter if we do, since the c constant will remain the same so the change goes unnoticed in practice. We don't see it. Particularly if, as you say, the units are not relevant.

The units aren't relevant because they're arbitrary human conventions. For example, you could choose to use Planck Units where c=1 instead of the conventional SI units and it wouldn't make any difference. To give you a further idea of why your choice of units doesn't matter, you can choose to weigh something in lbs or kgs but that doesn't change the actual weight of the object you're measuring.

Changes in c would have many implications, For example, nuclear weapons. If the speed of light suddenly became very small (say close to zero), then an atomic weapon which previously destroyed a city would now make an explosion not much bigger than a fire cracker (because e = mc^2).

Yes, I know that the choice of units in physics is arbitrary, and I know that a drastic change in c would have many implications. That was not questioned. I was trying to question your comment on Sheldrake's statement, as he observed that science would not hesitate to re-define those units in order to preserve constants as such, for instance, instead of formally acknowledging the fact that they might not be constants, and translating that to reference books. It's a statement about how science works, not a challenge to how the value of c could affect our universe.

Following your example, and according to this convenient adjustment of measure units, an infinitesimally small c would make the meter infinitesimally small as well. But c would still be equal to 299792458 m/s and considered a constant in calculations. And I tend to agree with Sheldrake that radically transforming the definitions of our measures instead of challenging some principles in the current paradigm (such as the consideration of c as constant, particularly in regards to calculations) suggests a reluctance to move forward, just for convenience sake.

If c is known to vary, maybe it should not be involved in the definition of our distance units.

c varies and varies alot depending on the medium the light travels through; the quoted c values and unit definitions above presumed that the medium is vacuum.