Excellent. I'm glad the Tyee is open minded enough (despite having a "fundamentalist materialist" like Rupp as one editor) to publish Sheldrake's rebuttal.
I agree with Sheldrake that self proclaimed "sceptics" are typically not just unconvinced "sceptics".They are true believers in their own belief system. Worse, they are insistent that others, especially scientific researchers and academic institutions toe thier line. They push for censorship, or worse, "excommunication" (firing) of those who dare to seriously investigate "verboten" subjects.

I'm afraid the sceptics movement may have more in common with certain religious fundamentalist groups than they'd care to admit! Especially those who wish to impose their own ideas of "religious law" on others. We could compare the organized sceptics to the Taliban, for instance! Both have a narrow system of belief which they actively attempt to impose on others, while attempting to eliminate those who get in their way!
Fortunately, the sceptics have thus far limited themselves to hounding, smear jobs, and lobbying for firings. They haven't started a campaign of murder just yet!

Robert Anton Wilson wrote a good book
quite a few years back, "The New Inquisition" exploring how sceptics groups have a history of launching vitriolic campaigns of persecution against paranormal researchers, actively trying to hound and discredit them and often attempting to get them fired from sponsoring institutions. We see by the campaign against Mr. Sheldrake, they are still at it today!

Unfortunately for the sceptics, there is a long and ever growing body of scientific studies (many sponored by universities) over many decades, investigating the paranormal, which show evidence of paranormal phenomena...But the sceptics groups refuse to accept any such data. They dismiss out of hand data that threatens their precious materialist view, with unfounded charges such as "fraud!", "shoddy research methods!",
"pseudoscience!"

The late Carl Sagan was a poster boy for the sceptics, as he was a vocal, active fundamentalist materialist himself.
Sagan had an "interesting" yardstick he devised to (pre)judge any and all paranormal research. He said "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof". In other words, he admitted he would never accept any evidence of paranormal phenomena, no matter how persuasive the proof. The proofs would never be "extraordinary" enough for him! This appears to be sheer bigotry.

A problem with Mr. Sagan's view, is that he categorizes evidence of or belief in the paranormal as "extraordinary claims". On the contrary, paranormal experiences
have been almost always been seen as being of fairly ordinary (at least not uncommon) occurrence through all of history (and prehistory), in virtually every culture in the world.
I believe there are polls that show a majority of people believe they themselves have experienced paranormal phenomena ("illusion!" ,"delusion", "liars!" - I can hear the sceptics screaming!)

It's the sceptics/materialismovement/belief system that has only been around in only very recent centuries, a mere and brief historical blip.

In this context, it's the sceptics who appear to be making the "extraordinary claims", not courageous scientists like Sheldrake!

sorry, several #%*%#@% typos...too early in the A.M. to be a good editor!

This is pure hucsterism, by a guy, who 100 years before, would have been a travelling medicine man.

There is always someone, who hides under the guise of science, eo sell their own brand of 'the cure'.

The honest hucksters are called magicians.

So Rupert, given the body of statistical research that you cite, supporting the claim that evidence of telepathy is not explicable by random chance, could you explain why your particular theory constitutes the best explanation of that data, and how the explanation is consistent with Occam's Razor?

I'm not being sarcastic here...the plain-language defense of your theories in this rebuttal is incomplete without it.

James Randi has a million dollar prize for proven psychic ablilty and Scientific American magazine has a 3 million dollar prize. You would think there would be a line up around the block.

Maybe Ruper Sheldrake will be in line to-day.

This might be a good forum to exchange "paranormal" experiences with no discernible materialistic, mechanistic, rational or logical explanations. Anyone have any to share?

Sorry, but stage magicians are pseudo-magicians! Therefore that use of the word magician is a misnomer.
Illusionist would be the honest description.

On the subject of magic: It's funny how magic in one form or another has been believed in, practised, and I would say experienced in virtually every culture since the dawn of mankind up to the present day. Sceptical fundamentalist materialism on the other hand is a very recent phenomenon. So, historically, this type of scepticism is an aberration.

In this historical context, cavalierly
dismissing as delusional or fraudulent a human experience so universal - without being willing to even investigate in an open minded, unprejudiced fashion - smacks of sheer narrow minded bigotry. Just because there happen to be some fraudulent practitioners of psychic arts, this hardly discredits the entire field!

There are frauds in every field of endeavor, including mainstream science.
A recent example is that Korean scientist
who faked his research data claiming huge strides in stem cell research...all fraudulent, I'm afraid.

The self appointed "guardians of the citadel of the science" - the sceptics groups - who hound and persecute paranormal researchers as "pseudoscientists", would be doing society a greater service by uncovering realpseudoscientists which are predominantly scientists associated with "acceptable" fields of study, but which fake and cook their research data so they can get published in journals and boost their careers illegitimately. There have been some articles in the past few years suggesting this is a larger problem than one might think. Yet the "science guardian sceptics" seem silent on this issue. I would say faked medical research
is potentially a much greater threat to mankind than any supposedly faked paranormal research.

I say, expose real pseudoscience fakery in mainstream fields, instead of persecuting brave legitimate
researchers of "controversial" subjects, such as Mr. Sheldrake! No one has succeeded in showing that Sheldrake has
faked any of his data. Amusingly, CSICOP's own attempts to disprove Sheldrakes's evidence of people knowing when they are being stared at, actually appeared to replicate Sheldrake's data!

CSICOP generally makes actual "investigation" (the "I" in "CSICOP" - such as attempted replication of paranormal studies) a very rare occurrence by them - Why?
Because by even conducting such research
they are stepping into the murky waters of practising "pseudoscience"!

There was another example years ago of
CSICOP coming up with "inconvenient" data on their own, which they tried to bury.
They were wanting to debunk an astrology study that seemed to show certain astrological birth signs seemed to predominate among sports athletes. So they amassed some birth data on pro athletes, and sure enough, their inital findings appeared to support the astrological correspondence! But instead of being honest by publishing these results in their journal, they tried to bury them instead! (Sounds like unethical research practise to me - burying inconvenient data!).

A founding CSICOP member, Marcello Truzzi, actually broke with CSICOP over this. He came to the organization an open minded sceptic. But he soon realized he was in with a group of mostly doctrinaire fanatical idealogues who were not the least bit inclined toward any neutral (ie. honest, non pre-judged) investigation of paranormal phenomena).

...Thanks to Mr. Sheldrake for posting a link to his excellent site. I see it includes panels/discussions with other interesting minds such as Dr. Andrew Weil, Terrence McKenna, and others, with lots of news on paranormal research.

Hey, Truman, Bob: I've mentally picked one of the names on the list of bloggers, at random. I want each of you to guess who I've chosen. You can post your responses, and I'll tell you whether you have telepathy, OK? hee hee

Sheldrake: "Most people claim to have had personal experiences of telepathy, especially in relation to telephone calls."

They do? I've never made such a claim. What you call 'telepathy', I call 'coincidence' - which has statistical merit in its own right.

Percy, maybe you should read up on Sheldrake's requirements for telepathy, among which you'll find
concern, friendship, empathy, common bonds, necessity--as experienced when a child or loved one is in danger, for instance.

Besides I wouldn't necessarily trust you to admit a correct response.

Mel:
The "less-than-amazing Randi" and his supposed reward offered for proof of paranormal phenomena is a joke. He has appointed himself the final arbiter as to what constitutes sufficient proof. Therefore he keeps a deck of aces up his (illusionist's) sleeve. He can't lose.Anyway, he's in the Sagan camp of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs". There is already decades of studies with statistically valid data of paranormal phenomena: proof. The fact that Randi refuses to even consider that any of them could be valid just proves the point that there will never be proof "extraordinary" enough to sway him (or cause him to part with his $)!

One of Randi's "tests" on offer for potential reward collectors is that he has a list of numbers stored in a safe which he challenges people to try to divine by psychic means...the problem is there are no checks on this "test". He apparently has refused to supply the numbers to a neutral 3rd party such as a law office. Again, he's running the show as judge and jury, with no checks to ensure fairness is built into the test.
You see, Randi's "reward" offer is itself a fraud!

Anyway, what's a supposedly "scientifically" minded group such as CSICOP doing putting Randi out there - a non-scientist, a stage "magician", to be one of their main spokesmen for their (ersatz) "scientific investigation of claims of the paranormal"?

I`ve read of a lot of research in the old Soviet Union into telepathy, telekinesis and other "paranormal" activity similar to Mr. Sheldrakes research.
I wonder if he is able to access any of that information?

Telepathy is a no-brainer...we used to call it "vibing"...its the control that is difficult....and can be dangerous.

Bobb999, Randi does not do the testing.

Bob the cat, Randi went to russia after the fall of the iron curtain to test some of these paranormal claims.

Not to get into detail but like psychics over here they rely on "cold reading" and not any kind of special powers.

Couldn't agree more. There is a rigidity and conventionality of thought in the sceptics movement that bases all things on an immoveable, nailed down approach to knowing.

Intuition is one of the finest kinds of intelligence...so is imagination..even Einstein said imagination trumped knowledge. Isn't it often the most radical, renegade line of thought or route of enquiry that makes the scientific breakthrough?

What a loss when sceptics assume that the strong bonds of emotion and human connection hold no valuble information for us...and ridicule them as a source of vital communication between human beings?

Telepathy and other paranormal faculties are usually most pronounced when a person is in a hyper-sensitive state. Unfortunately when conducting research most of the people involved are not in such a state. The mental wards are full of telepaths. John Brunners " The Whole Man" (also published as The Telepathist).
Years ago I knew a very bright young man
(his brother was a mathematical Savante who was also extremely pyschopathic and was institutionalized at an early age..he lost his mathematical powers at about puberty and remains inside probably to this day)
The bright young man I knew was a telepath and could only find relief through narcotics. He was always freaked out about relieving himself and transmitting the image to others. He hanged himself at 20 years old.

I knew another fellow very much into telepathy who went as a patient "undercover" into a mental ward ( much like cuckoos nest) to test his own theories and satisfy his curiosity about the sources of some mental illness.
Suffice it to say he encountered men and women in various states of hyper-sensitivity and very telepathic amongst exhibiting other para-normal abilities. They were desensitized with drugs and E.E.G. (Electro-Shock) therapy.

As Sheldrake, Truman, Lynn, and Bobthecat
point out, emotional links facilitate what we might call everday telepathic experiences.

The most common experience of telepathy can be simplified down to perceiving "good" and "bad" "vibes" (the other bob mentioned "vibing"). Phrases in common parlance, such as "the atmosphere was so thick you could cut it with a knife", or "black bilious rage emanated from him" , or "her love enveloped me" speak to this common experience of tuning into to others emotions apparently beyond the immediate 5 senses.

Talented psychics take it a step farther and can discern specfic thoughts amd information about people. There have been many scientific studies demonstrating that such talented people live among us.

Lynn: I liked your post:

I have read that there appears to possibly be a discernible personality profile among hard line sceptics. Namely:
They may be less open to others' feelings, less empathetic, emotionally colder than average...Emotionally stunted pygmies in other words,perhaps aberrant personalities, ! And they certainly appear to be intellectual fascists, persecuting those who dare to study subjects that don't fit their materialist belief system!

I'd like to see a definitive research study into the personality profiles of true believing sceptics, to either prove or disprove this theory about them!

I happen to agree with bobthecat that
some emotionally troubled people are hypersensitive to the vibrations around them in a debilating way. Some haven't developed the inner strength within themselves to be tuned in without being overwhelmed. I imagine that unfortunately,some of these people end up in the psych ward, and in some cases are mislabelled as delusional simply because they may be overwhelmed by real experiences of a psychic, not a psychotic, nature (or not just a psychotic nature). However, there is also a lot of delusional thinking due to unbalanced brain chemistry, among mental patients, having nothing to do with genuine psychic experiences.

The English occultist (modern day Wiccans, among others like her), Dion Fortune, who was also a psychologist of sorts, said "the psychic is often neurotic, and the neurotic often psychic". A healthy psychic has developed the inner strength
and personal protections sufficient to retain an equilibrium, and not be overwhelmed by the influences out there.

To be truthful,I myself in my younger years found myself somewhat
overly susceptible to others' in this way. It's good to be tuned into to others' emotions but there is also an undesirable unbalanced state of too much receptivity without also being at the same time healthily rooted within yourself, which is something pretty necessary for healthy relationships with others.

...I can even see the attraction of opiates for certain hypersenstive folks, as bobthecat makes note of with regard to that sad case he knew of, the fellow who committed suicide. I'm sure many junkies are not self indulgent so much as they are desperate folks self medicating for unhappy conditions of mind and being that otherwise are intolerable to them.

typo..sorry... "debilitating", not "debilating"!

Sheldrake sounds like a very sensitive guy... perhaps too sensitive? If critics want to give him a good shellacking he, and any institutions he's related to, should try not to take it personally.

One of the best examples and proofs of telepathy is when we think of somebody and the phone rings, or a letter arrives, or the person walks in the door. Animals have it in large doses. On a rainy, windy night a dog starts barking and there's a deer in the garden.

How many times do we say "I've just thought of you!", when somebody shown up?

I could write dozens of stories on unexplainable happenings, but here's one I could never figure out. About 25 years ago I was working on a small Briggs engine on the clean lino floor of my shop. As I was either tightening, or loosening a 1/2" bolt, the wrench flew out of my hands, looped over my right shoulder and fell on the floor with a clang.

I reached back to pick it up, tapped around with my hand, then turned around, but there was no wrench. I turned that area upside down, but no wrench, so I had to go out and buy a replacement.

Some, probably 10 years later I walked into my shop one morning and there was the wrench on the floor, where it fell. I called my wife to see it and there was no mistake. It was the same wrench, I still have, together with the replacement.

We're well educated, down to earth, practical people, sceptics, not mystics, not religious or ideologues, don't drink, or smoke, never tried any kind of drugs and don't even take any presription drugs.

In the years the wrench was missing, the shop was swept hundreds, or even thousands of times.

So, where was that bloody wrench for 10 years? Even when facing ridicule, both my wife and I are willing to sign sworn statement on this story.

Ed Deak, Big Lake.

Grumpy writes:

Dr. Bendo, perhaps?

Rupert Sheldrake writes:

Quelle surprise: a piece of investigative journalism is characterized as "polemic."

This is subjective opinion: in other words -- an unsubstantiated smear. Again -- quelle surprise!

Ah, innuendo at its best.

Habitual as opposed to accidental? How dispassionate!

These accusations are completely unsubstantiated -- but prepare the interrogation room just in case.

Unsubstantiated accusations -- like unsubstantiated theories spun as substantiated science -- might themselves be unethical. Just a thought. Read my mind.

Aside from an appeal to authority, what exactly does any of this have to do with the validity of these theories?

Are those the only airy possibilities? Seems rather dualistic to me. Think outside the box.

Widely replicated? Where, exactly? In which peer-reviewed scientific journals other than those publications that operate within the self-referential universe of so-called consciousness studies?

I would rather that scientists base their discoveries (rather than their opinions) on REPLICABLE empirical evidence rather than ANECDOTAL anomalies.

There was a debate and some people in the audience said something. Okay. That's nice. And how is this relevant?

Indeed. Through normative standards of scientific inquiry based on credible (testable, peer-reviewed, reliable, valid, and generally accepted) evidence published in mainstream scientific journals.

Will it be statistically verified?

Of course, if science and statistics are hopelessly compromised by hardcore skeptics, why bother making the appeal to them in the first place? Maybe it sounds more impressive to argue that one's theories reflect "true science" rather than just "silly twaddle."

Sheldrake's "response" to Rupp is full of sarcasm, innuendo, personal attacks on the integrity of a journalist, appeals to academic authority, unsubstantiated claims of replicability and falsifiability, and the churlish broadsides of some audience members at a debate. This is the best defense he can muster? I'm sure it will be a source of unbounded delight to his supporters, but the demands of sobriety are somewhat more stringent.

Fascinating story about your wrench, Ed!
I assume you eliminated, to your satisfaction, all obvious rational explanations, such as: could it have lodged in something or other in your shop and when that something or other was moved 10 years later, the wrench got dislodged-?

Studies of poltergeist and apparent haunting phenomena sometimes find similar
phenomena: objects mysteriously disappearing, only to equally mysteriously reappear later, sometimes in inexplicable spots.

Any other strange activities around your shop that might suggest haunting?

Bluenose: YOU appear to be the one making unsubstantiated criticisms of Sheldrake's rebuttal, rather than Sheldrake making unsubstantiated criticisms of Rupp's attack on his work, as you try (vainly) to suggest.

Very true 999..my undercover friend however did say the "lights really came on" for those her were confused about the sources of their anxieties..and when they realized much of it was external rather than internal they were able to begin to gain the inner strength which you have accurately described.

Another man I met who had spent a large part of his life residing in various institutions around the country was a complete empathist. He was living outpatient with a family I was visiting in Vancouver. He would stand and sense your totality of being and either it was ok or if not he would start to fret and groan very loudly. My companion had to leave but I was ok...he liked me, my "vibes" were
He said I could ask him questions if I wished. I couldn`t really think of anything at that moment as I was a little apprehensive of letting a "bad vibe" squeak out but thought I really should ask something so I said " UFO`s" he laughed and said "there there".

Now let’s not pooh-pooh Mr. Sheldrake’s intuitive powers too fast: he’s the first person, ever, to call me a zealot, and I’m chuffed!

Generally I’m criticized for being “too logical,” “too rational,” and “too critical.” I’m just not the true believer type. I have no religious affiliation, and no political leanings – I’ve yet to encounter political and social activists of any stripe who aren’t, ultimately, self-serving hypocrites who exploit the gullible. And it doesn’t matter how legitimate the cause may sound, or how earnest the players may seem.

That line about democracy requiring eternal vigilance? I take it seriously.

In short, I’m viewed as lacking passion. But Mr. Sheldrake respected my intellectuall zeal and gave it the New Age seal-of-approval by calling it emotional -- I appreciate that.

I’m too busy to check the facts in Mr. Sheldrakes piece, today. However, before I wrote my piece, I did check his claim to an “appointment” at Trinity College. He’s not listed as among the college’s fellows.

This morning I sent them an e-mail to see if this is some sort of oversight. Mr. Sheldrake was reported to have been given a grant from a fund administered by Trinity College, the Perrott-Warrick Fund. I gather the grants come from the legacy of a Trinity alumnus who stipulated that the funds be used for research into parapsychology. But I didn’t think getting a research grant was the same thing as being given an appointment. Perhaps I misunderstood the British system?

I'll let you know when I hear from the nice people at Cambridge.

Rupp’s smear goes on to suggest that I was the author of the gloating sentence (which, in reality, is a disparaging sentence), a suggestion she herself later contradicts by mentioning that a different author wrote it. Confused? Most readers of the article were, too.

The Globe and Mail came libellously close to labelling me a liar! Among other terms bandied about in the article, it is said, or inferred, that I am unreliable, vituperative, incorrect, irrelevant, insignificant, not credible, shameful, nonsensical, a fabulist, a vandal, a shyster, devious, and dangerous. The Republic of East Vancouver newspaper is dismissed as “full of inflammatory opinion pieces reminiscent of the ideological rants of 18th-century pamphleteers.” full:

http://republic-news.org/archive/139-repub/139_kevin_potvin_media.htm

From the Langara College brochure that arrived in my house yesterday, a course description: "Using special bio-energy breathing techniques, students learn how to generate energy in their body and to distribute it throughout their bones. Students have the opportunity to learn how to 'motivate' their bone structures to absorb more minerals and nutrients."

Ten years ago, my life was on the line. I had a rare malignant tumour in the middle of my head. I wanted to give myself every chance to survive, so I used my journalistic smarts to locate and read studies on a wide range of alternative therapies. I was astonished at the lack of scientific rigor in the alternative health community's own claims AND the lack of rigor in the mainstream science community's studies on the same subjects.

Overall, what was evident was the lack of evidence. That said, I encountered way too many true believers in the alternative health community. People told me not to have the tumour removed. Yeah, it's "natural." Even the most reputable alternative practitioners promoted absolute hokum.

Surgery saved my life. A very small set of semi-supportable alternative therapies may have played a small role in contributing to my current good health, but it's not the place I'd tell the truly sick to invest much money and, uh, faith.

This conversation is important, because people invest vast sums of money in alternative health care. Sometimes they bet their lives on it. I know people who have died because they rejected science to embrace the highly speculative.

I'll tell you this, though. Even though I've received phone calls and e-mails just when I've been thinking of that person, there is every reason to believe it's subconscious pattern recognition. Read my mind and tell me I'm lying.

Bobbb999.... the wrench had no place to hide on a lino floor, swept hundreds of times.

Now, another thing happened a few months ago. I use one of my digital cameras mostly now, but for certain shots I still prefer the film. One day I went to get my Nikon from the drawer it was kept in for years, but no camera. We turned the house upside down and still haven't found it.

I didn't use it and, living way out in the boondocks, our occasional visitors never go to the storeroom in my studio, so there's no way anybody'd known where it was kept and who wants to steal a 35 mm camera theswe days, when the digitals, including the camcorder, are there? .

This isn't quite the same story as the wrench, but still would like to know where is my Nikon?

But I have seen and experienced things totally unexplainable. Series of coincidences that worked out like carefully laid out plans by somebody, etc. etc. ending up with results that led into completely unexpected territories.

E.g. The accidental picking up of books, by unknown writers, without any plan, or thought, that opened up answers for long searched for questions.

One of the most interesting books I ever picked up out of the blue in a junkshop for $1. was Marilyn Ferguson's "Aquarian Conspiracy", that explained a lot of things for me. Never heard of her, or the book before.

Ed Deak.

"I know people who have died because they rejected science to embrace the highly speculative."

I know of people in terminally desperate straits.. who have squandered large sums on "alternative therapies" when science was unable to effect a cure and died anyway.

Ed Deak
Any chance your shop might be built over an old graveyard or something?
One of the ships I crewed on was haunted. All manner of strange things going on. One of the crew came bursting into the mess screaming that he had " The Biggest Egg in the whole world!!" He`d been frying an egg for a snack..when he cracked the egg it just kept on expanding in the pan...no drugs or alcohol involved..surprising how the haunting was able to affect peoples minds like that. Someone saw an apparition of an old "Tar"
seaman..in the striped shirt and black stiff hat outside the Captains door..looking very morose.

Anyway my favourite small crescent wrench with the nice blue rubber handle is missing. I hope I don`t have to wait ten years for it...matter of fact I`m goin` down to the basement to have another look. This has got me spooked.

Okay, Ed I've got one for you--a telephone telepathy thing, of sorts.

I do renovation work and about five years ago I was working for a former customer who had hired me to renovate the bathroom in an apartment which she rented to her sister.

I left the job and returned home for lunch, I think, and then for some reason which I can't remember, I wasn't able to get back to the job within the hour that I had promised.

I decided to phone the tenant and tell her that I'd be back in two hours, not one.

I realized that the tenant didn't have the same last name as her sister who owned the apartment, but I remembered that it was a Dutch name--Van something or other. I looked in the Delta phone book and came up with two Van somethings which reminded me of the name, which I had forgotten.

Then I was distracted by something else and didn't make the calls.

When I came back into the house my call display had one of the numbers I had looked up in the telephone book on it--and the name.

This blew me away--actually it was a bit frightening because I knew that it couldn't have actually happened--but it did.

cont'd. So anyway, I remember going over and over the events, and in a while I called the number and a man answered. I asked him if he had called me and he said no, and simultaneously called to his wife and asked her if she had called my number, which must have appeared on his call display. She answered, "Oh yeah, it was a wrong number."

Any explanations?

Okay, here's what I was dealing with regarding odds: Look at somebody's name in the telephone book, and what are the odds that that person--a complete stranger, is going to call you within a few minutes? Needless to say, this was not reproducible!

It's an intriguing coincidence that people here who passionately belive in the paranormal appear to have, shall we say, lots of spare time on their hands.

Truman:
A good example you cite there...Sheldrake might call it "morphic resonance", Carl Jung: "synchronicity, meaningful coincidence". Same with Ed's fortuitous books.
Whatever you call it, there appears to be an interconnectedness between the apparently unconnected, which shows up in sometimes amazing, even amusing ways at times! I used to keep a scrap book/diary of synchronicities, and
I used to get some striking ones from time to time. Also, it seems the more attention you pay to them the more they pay to you - I don't notice nearly as many synchronicities since I ceased recording them!

I'm sure the sceptics aren't too happy that the term "synchronicity", once quite obscure, is now part of common parlance...it does not reflect acceptance of their materialist dogma.

Ed: It's too bad your kleptomaniac "ghost" or whatever it is doesn't occasionally
give instead of take away, or "borrow" for 10 years!
If you ever had a spirit medium over to your place, they might have a perception about the goings on there. Even mediumship is gaining not just popularity, but also some scientific credibility. Dr Gary Schwartz, a University of Arizona prof.
conducted studies of a number of mediums.
His results suggest genuine abilities of those he studied, and Schwartz concludes
the evidence also seems to be most explainable by postulating the mediums ARE in contact with consciousnesses of deceased relations of the "sitters" (rather than just reading minds of the living) The Afterlife Experiments is his first book.
Online are probably the usual near apoplectic reactions from sceptics as well as Schartz's rebuttals to some of their typically shoddy criticisms.

bobthecat: that's a juicy story about the haunted boat.
I appreciated your posts about mental instability and psychism. Most interesting.

Too many of the paranormal are stories of "I know somebody...". There are so many psychics where is any proof or evidence of this existing? There should be libraries full of studies.

Someone sensing "vibes" is not paranormal, peoples expressions and posture reveal tons of information all of us pick up on. eg. go into a sports bar after the home team has lost, even though people may be sitting there quietly the room is dripping in atmosphere. So walking into this room you would pick up "bad vibes".

We have all misplaced something and looked "everywhere" and later found it in an obvious place.

The Rupert Sheldrakes of the world need to debunk a lot of the phonys then maybe, MAYBE at the end of the day there will be one person with proven ability.

Bob 999
I`ve really enjoyed and gained a lot from your posts....a lot more happened on the haunted ship but theres just too much to write down right now/
Novelist Malcolm Lowery was very much into synchronicity...between or maybe during delerium...so true after awhile it becomes commonplace...."I just knew I`d run into you here!" Yawn...yes how about that? Amazing isn`t it!
Enjoyed your posts Bob 3 9`s

OK, class, time for your medicaments.

(Wow, the things you miss on the day shift by having to go to work.)

No, no, class, it's not playtime because your think my lame humour is funny. It's REALLY time for your medicaments.

"Nurse Cratchit!!"

Great stories shared by Truman, Ed, Bob 3 9's, and bob the cat... Thanks and wow, thought provoking.

In order to tape into that "syncronicity" zone, I have found myself needing to be grounded, balanced, and connected, because then there is no stress to block the ease of "flow". Societys (especially those in cities) exist and live with stress in an unnatural way. This, I am thinking would promote a disconnect to all that is natural. I would be willing to bet that being alienated from ones deeper self due to these conditions, is why shallow and unimportant priorities, are so far ahead of the ones that really matter.

To live as a highly-tuned healthy and natural human being is to live as one who respects the rhythems of the earth. Having an understanding and a sense of responsibility to other living creatures of the earth, and the earth herself, is who we are. Our abilities, and awarenesses on many levels, are because we are animals...simple.

Peace

RTB

There certainly are no perfect people or social causes, all are quite humanly flawed...only I find your stance worse which is one of vanity and a dispassionate love for the safe, neutral ground.

I think the doubters are just people who haven't experienced these strange things. Neither did I, until I rented a haunted house on five acres in Langley back in the 70's, where every conceivable variation of the paranormal occurred.

I was there for three years, at first always discounting everything as somehow explainable, until I couldn't resist believing anymore--especially when my explanations started to seem almost as bizarre as the occurrences.

The old couple that lived next door didn't help much, though. After the first couple of weeks of strange events I went over and asked them if they'd heard anything about the house being haunted and they assured me that I was the first to mention it.

But on day I moved out, three years later, I went back and asked them again and they finally admitted that everyone who lived there said it was haunted but they didn't want to tell me because I was such a good neighbour and they were afraid they'd get noisy partiers or bikers in there.

Bobb999 wrote:

Vainly? Vainly? Why, Bobb is blessed with the ability to read souls! Can bilocation be far behind?

I suppose Shannon Rupp might take some consolation in the knowledge that her article has been upgraded from a mere "polemic" to a full-scale "attack." (It seems that the concept of critique is lost on Sheldrake's supporters.)

I find the theory of morphic resonance intriguing. On the other hand -- I would never wish to confuse philosophical speculation with scientific fact, let alone the revealed truth that most of its supporters seem to ascribe to it.

The sleep of reason produces the death of critical thinking. Send in the clowns. Oh wait, they're already here.

Incidentally, Jung defined synchronicity as "an acausal connecting principle." If there is a causal connecting principle behind what appears to be "meaningful coincidence," there is no element of synchronicity at play. Synchronicity as defined by Jung does not depend upon the existence of a morphic field (which by definition implies some level of physical causality). But what the hell -- since we can decide what's real and what isn't, why not just re-write Jung while we're at it?

In the truly, madly, deeply prophetic words of The Great Dali:

Oh, Dali! We've arrived! We've arrived! Isn't it bliss? Don't you approve?

Exactly, lynn, and I don't recall Sheldrake claiming to be a "political or social activist of any stripe" and I don't understand why she would bring up, "self-serving hypocrites who exploit the public," or use phrases like, "unlike most of his ilk."

Or : "...all of which may explain his prattle."

Or quote one of her sources regarding Sheldrake's being at UBC: "It's intellectually unethical" for UBC to invite him.

I've read tons of his stuff since it came out years ago. It's only enriched my life.

Truman Green wrote:

I've enjoyed apparently synchronous experiences my entire life and studied and practiced various symbolist systems for over twenty years. But I've never felt the need to accept any of these experiences or practices as anything other than "working hypotheses" that require a contingent suspension of disbelief and a sense of play. I've never felt the need to make a religion out of them or to insist that they represent empirical scientific fact. I would be delighted if the theory of morphic resonance were accepted into the scientific canon. But in the complete absence of evidence to support it I see no reason to pretend otherwise. Why would I wish to accept as fact something that clearly lies in the realm of speculation? That would truly be the height of delusion -- not to mention intellectual dishonesty. It seems that the desire to pull the wool over our own eyes has become the ultimate addiction.

Man Truman, that is soo interesting, and you left out many happenings in that 3 year period...

O.k... When I was a kid, I lived in a room downstairs in our home. Every few nights for several years, I would hear footsteps coming towards my bed in the middle of the night. No fear strangely...I got nervous easily normally. I still do not know what that was all about.

I am not sure this is applicable but, when I was 10, I slept under the stars with 2 friends, half way through the night, we all withnessed huge white spheres moving across the sky. It went on for hours. One was massive relative to stars. For a scale, say you baby finger nail is a star, these UFOish things were the size at least) of your hand. 3 years ago (I am 45) I met up with one of the chums, and we both were still unsure of what that was all about too... It is a fact that it happened though...

RTB

Bluenose I read all of Jung's stuff on synchronicity, too. So what if he referred to it as "acausal." (You got that right) That was his belief. Is it a necesssary condition of the world that synchronicity is acausal? Jung cited synchronistic events as "acausal," but believed that they were connected by their meaning--which, in fact, is just another kind of causality.

Jung also noticed that the "postulate of possibility also assumes the existence of improbability." (from Marie-Louis von Franz, "Number and Time").

You should read it.

Thanks bob the cat, that was my best chuckle of the day :-)

Excellent story, RTB. When you say you still don't know what it was all about...that's how I felt about that telephone call. I was walking around for days thinking: "I can actually get people to do things just by thinking about them."

But that was just a very silly fantasy. Now I just feel grateful that the universe shared its stuff with me.

The point Bluenose (and others)seem to be missing here is that Sheldrake, along with scores of other paranormal researchers over decades, has completed studies that validate paranormal phenomena, because they're statistically valid, as the positive results are so far above mere chance. Whether Sheldrake's proposed explanation, namely Morphic Fields, is the correct explanation or not, is rather secondary, in my view,to the fact that his results validate telepathic phenomena.

By the way Jung, recounted many personal experiences he himself had which he clearly viewed as paranormal, some of which he also categorized as "synchronicity".Thus, to Jung, many such meaningful coincidence phenomena also demonstrated telepathy and such (read his autobiography).
In "The Symbolic Life", one of the later volumes from Jung's collected works, Jung comes straight out and equates Synchronicity with the Tao of Eastern thought, with a quote something like (from faulty memory)"What I call synchronicity the oriental philosophers called the Tao".
Of course, the Tao is a unifying principle connecting all existence, and is also viewed as the source of all. Chinese Buddhists were known to use the term Tao interchangeably with the Buddhist "Void".
The anti-religionists may want to take Jung to task for going "all mystical" on us (nothing new there). As a unifying principle the Tao connects all, a "connecting principle", as Jung describes synchronicity. Sheldrake's morphic field is also a connecting principle, connecting the seemingly unconnected in mysterious ways. Can you see some connection now, Mr. Bluenose, between synchronicity and Sheldrake? Apparently, you could use some brushing up on your Jung studies.

Truman: I agree it would help that doubters had persuasive experiences of their own, yet I don't quite understand why some can't accept others' experiences, including those abilities demonstrated under scientific studies in published research, or perhaps the anecdotes of trusted relatives who've had particularly striking paranormal experiences.
I'd enjoy hearing more about your haunted house in Langley! Was it an old farmhouse? Do you know who'd lived there?
If you don't already know,there are some fascinating documentary TV shows about hauntings and spirit mediums weekly on the W network: The Rescue Mediums (A Canadian show), Most Haunted, and Derek Acorah's Ghost Towns. Entertaining!

I'm not so arrogant as to say that because my own psychic abilities are paltry compared to the apparent abilities of some others more gifted, that those others' abilities are not to be believed because I can't myself perform to their standard!

bobthecat: I didn't know that about Malcolm Lowry, although I'm not surprised. I do know he was friends with a somewhat bizarre occultist/Kabbalist, who lived in Deep Cove, who wrote books as "Frater Achad" but whose real name was Charles Stansfeld Jones. As far as I know, I've never dwelled in a haunted house or on a haunted boat, and I think I prefer hearing about others hauntings experiences! Although I think I'd be into visiting a supposedly haunted place, so long as the supposed spirits were known for their gentle disposition!

Glad to see another supporter in "our" camp: Right to Bear!

Thanks Bob 3 9's,

Its easy to support, as like my brother and sister posters, the evidence in my life is overwelming...

I like the idea of writing syncrinizing events down... It is very affirming.

Peace dudes...

RTB

Nothing wrong with scepticism, just don't make it your religion either.

What is wrong with keeping the doors of enquiry and observation open?

As an SF writer, I've been reading telepathy stories for close to 60 years. My first novel had a telepathic character...and she knew her telepathic little Stone Age tribe was going to die out, because everyone felt every death, every pain, every anxiety. Telepathy was evolutionarily counterproductive.

FIrst problem: The physical means of transmitting thought from one brain to another. We didn't understand the electromagnetic spectrum until about a century ago, so maybe some other physical aspect of the universe would permit neurons to generate a signal that neurons in another brain could pick up.

So far we haven't discovered that aspect, and no theory I'm aware of can predict such an aspect. While neural activity does generate some electrical waves, they're so long and weak as to be useless for communication purposes.

Second problem: Who says telepathy would be limited to conscious thought (which we don't begin to understand anyway)? What if all we could transmit and pick up was...lud-dup, lud-dup, lud-dup, the endless boring signal that keeps our heart beating?

Third problem: If we were telepathic, why would we have evolved spoken language? Telepathy would be far superior as a means of communication (if it weren't just lud-dup).

You could pick up the thoughts of the raiders over the hill, and they could pick up your decision to run like hell, and no one would get any benefit from sneaking up and killing anyone else.

But give just one person that ability, and a strong sex drive, and the mind-reading offspring would wipe everyone else off the planet.

Instead we find that everyone is born wired to acquire and use language, which in a telepathic species would be as useful as feathers on a polar bear.

Fourth problem: Anecdotal evidence, the only kind that really persuades any of us. We've all had psychic grandmas, or thought about someone (as Sheldrake points out) just before they phoned.

Fine, but I often think of people who nonetheless refuse to phone. (I suspect that even psychic grannies experience that phenomenon.) I call other people and they're astounded to hear from me.

We can think about a lot of things and a lot of people in any given couple of minutes, and most of the time nothing in the real world reflects our thoughts. When it does, the event is so astounding that we actually notice it: Omigod, I was worrying about going too fast, and now I'm being flagged down by the Mounties! Why didn't I trust my clairvoyant powers? And another scrap of anecdotal evidence is added to the compost heap we call an argument.

Communicating by writing and speech, William of Occam developed the principle we now call Occam's Razor: Do not multiply entities needlessly. Accept the simplest argument that fits the known facts.

Occam tells us that it's simpler to assume our own brain is duping us, than to assume the universe permits us to transmit and receive thoughts without the use of the senses.

“This might be a good forum to exchange "paranormal" experiences with no discernible materialistic, mechanistic, rational or logical explanations. Anyone have any to share?”

I do, although the story is not my own, but my brother’s. He was on his first big date with the woman who later became his wife and the mother of his children. He was, of course, eager for the evening to go without a hitch. Nevertheless, he suddenly got up from the table, before their dinner was served, and told his girlfriend urgently and without preamble, that he had to go home – quite a distance from the resturant he had taken her to.

When he came home, he found my mother, who was alone in the house and had no phone, experiencing a serious medical emergency, one that would have cost her her life wothout help.

I never have been able to find a ‘rational’ explanation for that occurrence. Consequently, I am the last one to laugh, when a new idea is presented, and I certainly don’t scoff at telepathy. My brother was and is the most practical, down-to-earth person and was not a little embarrassed about his dramatic exit and the implications the story carried.

Truman Green wrote:

You too funny dude!

Predictably (!) you presume too much from too little. I'll spare you the details because even if I were Jung himself it would make no difference:

Goody goody gumdrops! Read? Perhaps. Understood? Clearly not:

Do you think? Really? I mean, it was his theory. Or was it really yours? Or Rupert Sheldrake's? Or Count Chocula's?

Oh, wow. Heavy. Intense. No -- too intense. Freakishly intense. God -- let me catch my breath ... feel ... brain ... exploding ... Jesus -- if only Jung were here to learn from you. You could correct all his ideas for him. And just think -- he could have it all done here -- for free! -- on The Tyee! Will wonders never cease?

Dorothy, perhaps your mother was sick before before your brother left for his date, he was worried and went home?

How come no one has used their powers to pick lottery numbers? winning horse?

Following Dorothy (that's quite a story of your brother's)...I think some of my relatives have had more striking experiences than have I:

A cousin of mine, Edward, a contemporary of my father, and his best friend, had a particularly close relationship with his mother, at times a distinctly telepathic one.
On one occasion Ed had a skiing accident where the sharp metal tip of a ski pole pierced right through his cheek, putting him in great pain. Meanwhile his mother, at the same time, as it turned out, suddenly felt her own cheek
(same side) aching acutely, for no discernible reason other than the telepathic explanation.

Ed was a fighter pilot during WWII. He was shot down over Malta. His mother somehow knew he had been shot down and had died, long before she heard any actual word of the tragedy.
My Father believed both these incidents demonstrated telepathy between mother and son.

My father himself had some intuitive abilities. In a restaurant once he was speaking with a co-worker. In his mind's eye, her face suddenly turned into a brown husk for a moment, an experience he'd never had before with anyone. Just a few months later she was diagnosed with terminal cancer and died shortly thereafter. He later thought his "vision" was a foreshadowing of her death, although at the time he was unsure what it meant.

Right to Bear: Yes, there seems to be lots of evidence out there, personal experiences, credible friends' and relatives', as well as scientific studies, if people like Crawford would care to research the data). What might start out as open minded scepticism can become knowledge and belief in the face of ever mounting evidence!

Hey, Bob, I meant what I said: "I know people who have died because they rejected science to embrace the highly speculative." I didn't misspeak. It wasn't my acquaintance's desperation. It was a calculated, flaky decision by someone who was enormously important to me personally and to our society. And people really did advise me to take that metaphoric flying leap off a bridge. But why talk about the cost of new-age superstition to human life, and the cost of obsessing over unscrutinized nonsense to meaningful civic dialogue, when you can talk about missing crescent wrenches and haunted houses and pet telepathy? I've got some spare copies of the Weekly World News for all you folks.

Bluenose, it seems fairly likely that causality defined by meaning is not actually acausality. And I bet Jung would allow me that interpretation.

In Sheldrake's vision the history of similarities might be the causative factor for the precipitation of synchronistic events, and therefore causative, and because time and space is involved, there might be a field through which these events occur.

I think Jung's "acausal' in this regard is really quite simplistic, but not simplicity defined by Occam's Razor--more like "simple-mindedness."

Thus, I'd prefer Sheldrake to Jung.

That's one of the reasons that I referred to Sheldrake's "formative causation" as being instinctive, better yet, "intuitive," partly because it appears to employ Occam's Razor to cut out the greatest number of assumptions possible--just as recommended by Einstein,who cautioned against a too simple view of simplicity.

Take my weird phone call, for instance. Am I not allowed the assumption that there is a causal connection between the events of me finding a name in the phone book and the owner of the name telephoning me--"a posteriori." And doesn't Sheldrake's "formative causation" make the smallest number of assumptions regarding causation.

It's an excellent, intuitive and elegant theory.

Charles Campbell, it's fun and interesting to share strange experiences-- and maybe even educational.

Any weird experiences yourself?

Researchers like Sheldrake are trying to do exactly what you suggest: to scrutinize unsubstantiated claims.

And did you know that medical errors done by allopathic doctors are now the third greatest cause of death in the United States. There are numerous sites about this, but go to the Journal of The American Medical Association for an excellent study--a particularly good source because one might suspect that they'd be conservative in reporting these matters.

Did you know that a hospital is actually one of the most dangerous places in the world to be.

Do you know how much more likely it is for you to get a serious infection in a hospital than anywhere else.

And where are all the stats about people who are dying from what you call "New Age Superstition?"

Which by the way, is a bit of a Red Herring to this entire discussion anyway. Is someone hear denying that there are quacks out there?

Shannon Rupp wrote an article attacking Sheldrake and referring to him as a charlatan and a fake. Some of us think it might not be true.

I don't think there's anything controversial about your choice to trust a medical doctor for treatment. I think everyone here would agree that it's the most obvious choice to treat such a condition.

Who among us would recommend an alternative practitioner to take of you in such circumstances?

I've had some considerable experience with medical error. The specifics will make a good story some day, for an audience that won't misconstrue the implications. Suffice it to say that lack of education and lack of attention to detail were the causes of said medical errors.

Yeah, I've had some weird experiences, like waking up from surgery, turning on the TV, and finding an episode of The X-Files with Peter Boyle playing a psychic, dogged by nutjobs asking him "How am I going to die?"

Yeah, I read my horoscope every now and again, and the slips of paper in fortune cookies, so I've had some fun and interesting experiences.

But I've never marshalled the failures of mainstream medicine as an oblique argument in favour of superstition, as so many alternative health-care practitioners have.

I've never said I knew someone who died from folly and had two people quickly imply that I can't possibly be telling the truth.

And I've never been as stupid as Sheldrake, who marshalled in his defence a brief article about a public debate, from Nature, that actually gently mocks him, even while it noted that the audience supported him. What's the quote from the scientist? "The problem with an open mind is that everything falls out."

If that's how clueless Sheldrake is -- that he believes the Nature article actually defends him -- I have little interest in his "science."

I say this as someone who believes the alternative health field has some benefits to offer, but it can only offer its benefits effectively if it can free itself from the left's equivalent of born-agains and develop a little credibility.

Why when I read Tyee comments do I see so many lefties who remind me of George W. Bush?

Charles..if I offended you I do apologize..no offense intended..a very close friend recently passed away from sinus cancer...Chemo, surgery..nothing could be done for him...he spent a lot of money flying to Edmonton for some kind of private electromagnetic quackery which did nothing for him.
I didn`t mean to make light of your situation..and as Truman says.. trusting the medical doctors was the obvious choice.
Many years ago another friend passed away from an inoperable brain tumour but travelled to the Phillipines for "psychic surgery" first and tried many alternative
methods before succumbing.
Its good you didn`t take the bad advice.
bob

Charles Campbell, reading your comment again about: "I've got some spare copies of Weekly World News to give all you folks."

Recognizing the handles of the posters on this thread do you not think most, if not all of us are at quite knowledgable about current affairs and worldl events?

Do you think maybe that that was a very mean-spirited thing for you to say, especially as one of the Tyee editors?

Of all the thousands of threads, this one got off on a discussion of paranormal events--perfectly in line with the topic at hand and the article written by Shannon Rupp.

I don't ever recall you coming on before and mocking and trying to direct the content of the discussion, even if it did go astray.

And I think it's highly uncalled for.
Why now?

Charles maybe you need a holiday.

Charles, it seems that you diverted the discussion out of the blue about health care by relating a very personal esperience in YOUR life. Does that mean you don't aprove of the direction the discussion was taking?

We were all talking about paranormal events and the worthiness (or lack of same) of Sheldrakes's approach, and whether or not he should have been invited to UBC and what we thought of Shannon's article.

And where are Sheldrakes's claims regarding health care?

Because I fear that people who believe in the Rapture and people who believe in telepathy are cut from the same cloth, and because I believe that the solution to the troubling world events we're confronted with begins with intellectual rigor. As for mocking posts in the past, it's happened once or twice. As for trying to direct the nature of this discussion, forgive me for I have expressed my opinion, and we all know that on The Tyee posters suffer from restraint so overwhelming that it brings upon us all a deafening silence. Truman, I like most people, and I particularly like you. But I become a little ornery when people I like fall off the rails, especially on an issue involving human costs that I am all too familiar with.

If this guy is so good, why doesn't he win 649 jackpots all the time?

Way to go Truman...you invite everyone to tell their ghost stories..then an editor comes on and reams us for being new-age flakes.

Thanks for the kind words, Charles, and I'm going to say that since I met you and Dave on the street that day, and you worked with me on my story, I've had the greatest respect and admiration for you guys also, but I don't understand why you think we've fallen off the rails on this issue. In my opinion Sheldrake's not among the fakes (and there's plenty of them) whom Shannon should be trying to insult. I think she made a mistake.

I don't believe in the Rapture, as you probably might have picked up from other threads, and I positively hate religion, but I believe that there is some small discernible amount of mental telepathy in the world. I haven't found that it exists to a degree that it is useful or can be favourable manipulated, or used to win lottery tickets. I also believe I lived in a haunted house. I've no reason to invent it. Either I'm lying or I'm crazy or I was hallucinating for three years, or I believe it happened.

Many other people believe the same things happened to them in that house.

I think it's true. In fact I have no doubt whatsoever. Do you really think I'd go on Tyee and puposefully get a reputation as being a flake?

And I believe what the other commentors have related too.

As far as human costs of medicine, conventional or alternative, many of us have had life-threatening mistakes made by regular doctors. I certainly have, and if I didn't take it upon myself to research certain diagnoses, I'd be dead or seriously ill by now.

But, as I said this might be a diversion from about 95 percent of the discussion anyway.

And really Charles, you're just plain wrong to think that people who believe in the Rapture and people who believe in telepathy are cut from the same cloth, and I think my opinion, and that of all these other people, is at least as valuable as yours--wouldn't you think?

Hey, I love ghost stories. You think when Peter Boyle X-Files came on I didn't laugh and laugh and laugh through my stitches? But this converstation hasn't been entirely about ghost stories. And the health care/telepathy difference put forward by Truman entirely misses the point. This is also a thread about science and superstition, and it's been a serious conversation at times, with all sorts of allegations of malfeasance and dishonesty. But, hey, any good magician knows that a good ghost story will distract the audience while you shove that rabbit up the back of your jacket. Shannon's story, and this thread, are about illusion and delusion.

One person, one vote, Truman. And every now and again, I'm compelled to try to win the odd person over to my side, or at least let them know where I'm placing my X in the polling booth.

Charles says, "And the healthcare/telepathy difference put forward by Truman entirely misses the point."

Was the point that you and Shannon preferred the commentors to just dump on alternative theorists and warn eveybody how dangerous they are? Well some did just that, and others preferred not to, wishing instead to support that kind of work. Isn't that fair? Everybody's not going to agree on this stuff.

What point did I miss, Charles? And getting into ghost stories seemed a natural place to go for a few minutes, seeing as how this was a thread about the existence or non-existence of paranormal events, which is at the heart of Sheldrake's work.

You think some of us are delusional. We think you are delusional, at least regarding this subject.

Shannon Rupp said:

Well, he actually called it emotive, not emotional - the term "emotive speech" is used to describe speech that triggers emotion. It's often used in psychology and elsewhere.

And it certainly was emotive - it sent me for a loop.

Generally I’m criticized for being “too logical,” “too rational,” and “too critical.”

You don't seem dispassionate to me, based on your writing. Dispassionate people don't write social critiques for alternative new-media magazines... they become accountants, or middle-managers, or something...

I've had the same frustration, but:

we are all social and political activists. having "no political leaning" is just another stripe.

we are all hypocrites

we are all self-serving

we are all exploiters and we are all guillible

what gives me comfort is the belief that people can learn and grow, and overcome the personal barriers and limitations that keep them down, becoming more psychologically, physically and spiritually whole.

and although what you call "New Age" of course has flaws (just like any human endeavour, popular movement, etc), one very positive aspect that I find with "New Age" is the belief that personal growth is possible; and because of this belief people learn, create and share practical tools and methods to create this change in oneself.

there will always be con-artists - people that want to exploit you - it's happening to us all the time, on many different levels. the only defence we have is a gradual awakening to the ways in which we are exploited, and the ways in which we exploit others.

the social and political activists that i see creating the most positive change are often the ones that believe in and engage in personal growth, and in creating new ways of being instead of just opposing old ones. i think that openness to and pursuit of radically new possibilities, beyond any commonly accepted truth, is central to these new spiritual warriors. they don't have the loudest voices, but they do amazing, inspiring work.

Shannon Rupp said
(here: http://thetyee.ca/Entertainment/2006/05/09/TVisEvil/):

Couldn't agree more.

Anyway, enough of my New Age prattle.

Thanks all for the great discussion.

As a scientist (my PhD is in immunology, UBC), I hate to say (in response to Rupp) that it is more often than not the pseudoscience practiced by scientists working for big pharma (and that makes up a good portion of us) that take advantage of the vulnerable and gullible. People who venture out to investigate the "not easy to investigate" phenomena (such as the true influence of the human mind) that you have referred to as "new age" or unfounded superstition are already fighting an uphill battle in a society that has so distanced itself from acknowledging its own existance as something other than extraordinary (in every sense of the word) - that anything that is intangible is refuted as being "real". This is absurd in the extreme if you acknowledge that our sensory perception cuts out a significant portion of what is actually around us (our eyes see only certain wavelengths and our ears only a certain range of decibals). What struck my "intuitive" gene by Sheldrake's argument was his analogy of the human brain and mind to the earth's own mass (anlagous to the brain) and its gravitational pull (the mind) which influences objects at a distance. Playing the "guessing game" to prove or disprove Sheldrake's argument is an infantile course of action - rather than testing the theory of the mind with your own intutive sense of what rings true and false (also called the gut feeling). In the medical field - the placebo affect makes a pretty good supporting base for Sheldrake's take on the influence of the mind. I'd like to think, that as a human being, I am more than just a sum of my parts - which is what your non-pseudo-science practitioners (such as myself) would like you to believe.

Because universities can no longer offer (or no longer want to offer) "universality", there has to be some (quite arbitrary) way of sloughing off subject matter considered irrelevant and immaterial.

I really think that the nomenclature "university" should be considered some sort of fraud, in that it is misleading, and might well be intentionally done.........

Avicenna, pharma companies and scientists have put out dishonest results but these are the minority most drugs and scientific research is honest and have merit.

How many psychics and others in the paranormal business been proven true?

No one has yet won the James Randi million dollar prize or the 3 million dollar Scientific American prize for proof of paranormal ability.

“Because I fear that people who believe in the Rapture and people who believe in telepathy are cut from the same cloth, and because I believe that the solution to the troubling world events we're confronted with begins with intellectual rigor.”

‘rigor’, yet? Do you mean Wahabi-style? These people are certainly rigorous.

I think the key words in your post are ‘I fear’. Fear will make us lash out and try to pound into the ground what we believe threatens us. Witch-hunts were based in no more than fear, and so are all atrocoties. So, I greatly fear people like you, who try to police other people’s thoughts and beliefs; your scoffing borders on being vicious. Maybe you cannot see it, I am willing to entertain that possibility.

The whole point of this discussion is, that we together recognize, that there are occurrences and relationships between them, which we lack an explanation for, based on what we now know. If this gets too close to your comfort zone, maybe you’ve made that zone too wide.

It is always frightening to deal with the suddenly-recognized inadequacy of one’s paradigms in the face of undeniable reality. I think a good example is Ed’s ‘where was the bloody wrench for ten years?’. He would, I gather, be willing to accept any rational, or otherwise, explanation that made sense, so he is not a ‘believer’ in anything, just a querent. If you cannot deal with that, do not read this column. Open minds, open questions, are meeting with reality on a level. Only a child demands answers to everything.

Of course, we who follow the old ways know that this is all done by the landwights. Therefore, we are not plagued by these uncertainties. It is only ‘modern’ folks that insist everything has to be meted out in measurable terms, or else it isn’t there.

I made a point yesterday similar to Avicenna's: That the sceptics would be doing greater good for humankind in uncovering fraud (pseudoscience)in mainstream science, that fraud in medical research is much more of a threat than any supposed fraud in telepathy experiments could possibly be! Avicenna's citing of scientific fraud in the pharmaceutical sector is certainly the best example.

As to Mel's downplaying of Big Pharma frauds. The business news of recent years has reported a disturbing number of cases of cooked data,and burying of data showing dangerous side effects of certain drugs. It appears that many people have died from side effects of dangerous pharmaceuticals, side effects the drug companies in some cases knew about
but kept secret.

Another apparently common fraud by drug companies is to claim that new expensive, patent-intact
drugs are more effective than related earlier drugs which (inconveniently) have lapsed patents and are available as cheap generics - not helpful to Big Pharma profits! eg. A recent study comparing older(cheap) anti-psychotic drugs to newer (expensive) ones, found the new ones were no more effective despite the companies' ongoing marketing campaigns citing manipulated data to "prove" otherwise! And the "guardians of science" sceptics think Sheldrake is a threat? These "science defenders'" choices of just which types of "pseudoscience" they should go after, is rather questionable, to say the least.
Defending their precious materialist belief system (by persecuting others)is apparently more important to them than protecting human life.

Is Mel still hammering away about the "Less-than-amazing-Randi?" Look, there are dozens or scores of statistically valid scientific studies with positive results on telepathy and other paranormal phenomena, perhaps predating even Prof. Rhine's work in the '40s at Duke University, up to the present. Sheldrake is one in a long line of successful researchers in these areas.If Randi's "reward" wasn't a fraud,a red herring, he would be honest and pay off all these researchers. But unfortunately Randi's a fraud.

What seems clear is that there is a deep desire on the part of humans like Shedrake, Truman Greene and Bobb999 (and perhaps most humans) to construct elaborate schemes to explain conciousness in ways that defeat a materialist model. Why? Probably because, they don't like the idea that we're just animated meat that rots away when we croak.

Many commenters have expressed that the paranormal provides a kind of comforting or reassuring or intuitive explanation of their experiences. Ok sure, ideas can be a palliative. Religion still does provide that palliative for many, but a lot of people hate organized religion, so they look elsewhere. It's only natural that they develop their own ideas, and then seek to invest them with authority. Unfortunately, it's at least partly a process of clinging so tightly to their desires that they allow themselves to be deluded. Extreme manifestations of it that you see in fundamentalists of whatever stripe be they Christian, Communist, Muslim, Neo-Classical Capitalist, et al. can result in direct harm to others.

There is a danger in those kinds of fantasies.

The difference with science is simply that it is founded on observations about the material world made in a controlled environment that are not only replicable, but have in fact been repeatedly demonstrated to be accurate. What those observations tell us is the closest approximation to the truth we can come to. They aren't the whole truth, or any kind of absolute. And they will change as our understanding and ability to observe improves. But they are based firmly on material reality. Imagination is important in science, but flights of fancy ungrounded in material reality can obscure far more than it reveals.

Sheldrake, with his ruminations on morphic fields, is practicing philosophy, at best. Many would look at it as simple science fiction. As a means of provoking imagination he may be doing something useful, but he is not practicing science.

I agree with Truman that deaths due to mainstream healthcare errors/incompetence are much more significant and threatening than any deaths due to alternative treatments. I've seen estimates of hospital deaths due to medical errors somewhere in the thousands each yearin Canada.(Wrong drug or dosage, incorrect diagnosis, too long a wait for treatment,etc.)

Yes, there are some alternative treatments that need to be better regulated. A few herbal medicines appear to have some very dangerous potential side effects among a small number of users. Some people have likely died (but many more die from side effects of recognized, Health Canada approved pharmaceuticals). I think
there needs to be better scrutiny of all potentially dangerous medicines, be they herbal or pharmaceutical.

Rupp in her original piece came out against "energy" work treatments. This is typical of the sceptics community. As far as I know they are still denying the efficacy of acupuncture, something used routinely in medicine across China ( as a local anaesthetic and a for a host of other uses).

The Chinese government has sponsored many scientific studies of acupuncture which show that it in fact works, for a variety of medical uses. I imagine the sceptics reject acupuncture out of hand because the theory underlying it postulates so-called "subtle energies" coursing through the body...Saying "subtle energies" to a hard line sceptic is like waving a red cape at a bull!

With numerous positive Chinese scientific studies and routine use behind it in China, sceptics still apparently cavalierly dismiss acupuncture out of hand.
I have to wonder if there isn't more than just a little "Western superiority" attitude demonstrated by some sceptics.
("What do those f'ing Chinese know about medical science? Hah!")

They are often an ugly bunch, the hard line sceptics: An attitude of moral and intellectual superiority, a tendency to persecute others(including trying to get scientists fired) who dare investigate subjects that threaten their fundamentalist materialist belief system.
Instead of being open minded sceptics they are often fanatical doctrinaire idealogues. They ignore dangerous pseudoscience that kills people (pharmaceutical industry frauds), while going after people like Sheldrake who is no danger to anyone. He only "threatens" fanatics' belief systems, not human lives.

Back in the olden days, before Randi, the Scientific American prize was 1 million dollars for proof of paranormal ability. There was a woman they were going to give it to but subjected her to one more test. Her abiltiy was to move tables, they hired Houdini to be part of this test. He shaved his leg (sensitivity)and once sat down pulled up his pant leg. The table did move but Houdini could feel her foot on his leg instigating the movement. She was very good.

As to "hard line sceptics", there is nothing to be skeptical about until the believers come up with one example of ability. Now we have nothing but "stories" like "Red Riding Hood".

Thank you James Burns. And thank you Bob999 for making my point, by encouraging the view that troubles me most about new-agers: mainstream medicine bad, new-age superstition never hurt a flea. Let's start distinguishing good pharmeceuticals from bad ones, and good alternative health practices (yoga, acupuncture) from bad (any number of bogus cancer therapies). Let's not oversell the benefits of any health treatments; let's do rigorous, repeatable experiments to assess their effects, to ensure we direct our efforts to practices that produce good outcomes. And let's not encourage a kind of tribal belief in wild theories that becomes an impediment to rational inquiry.

James Burns demonstrates a curious trait typical of hard line sceptics. As Sheldrake said somewhere (I think in a CBC radio interview)"they are immune to data".
In his post,Burns completely ignores the fact that there are dozens or scores of statistically validscientific studies conducted over decades and published, which validate so-called paranormal phenomena.

He fancies himself as science minded yet
chooses to ignore scientific data which contradicts his fundamentalist materialist view of reality. By doing so, he is indulging in philosophy, not science. Perhaps a sceptics reaction is something like: "It can't possibly be true therefore I will choose to simply ignore all such data"!

He also avoids the fact that his precious materialist model is a historical aberration in the context of human history, a mere blip on a graph of history and its various belief systems.

It seems a bit of a stretch to take this latter day materialist "cult" or philosophy, a kind of minority belief system in the modern world, and try to claim that all non-materialist belief systems (which are by far the majority), current ones, as well as those throughout history and prehistory, are by definition wrong, illusional ("fantasy"), delusional, etc.

Belief in and experience of paranormal phenomena has been accepted as fact in virtually every culture throughout human history, including our own North American culture today. I believe polls show the materialist view is definitely a minority view in North America. So, contrary to (arch sceptic)Carl Sagan's assertion that
paranormal claims are "extraordinary", they appear rather to be fairly ordinary, being culturally and historically nearly universal.
In this context it is the aberrant materialist view that appears extraordinary.

Burns'(Rupp's and others")attitude strikes me as arrogant indeed.

James Burns, I don't think you're understanding Sheldrake's work. He's devised scientifically rigorous tests and trials to try to find out the probability of unexplained phenonmena actually occurring. Here's a simple example to test if telephone telepathy is happening or if it is only a matter of coincidence.

Gather five friends in the test. (who each claim telephone telepathy occurs) Have them sit at home, waiting by their telephones. Have each of them on video tape to scrutinize if there's any kind of cheating or signalling going on. Have each of the four friend to phone the subject at random times during the duration of the test.

Take the results and examine if the subject was correct in identifying the caller at a better than expected (chance) rate, which is 25%. Sheldrake report's he has gotten between 42 and 47%.

This is a scientific approach. Why do you insist that it is not?

Much of his work tries to apply the scientific method to an examination of unexplained events. For you to claim he's only doing philosophy can only be accounted for by your position that such phenomena do not actually exist.

Do you understand that Sheldrake's "morphic Reasonance" is, in fact, as good a theory as any to explain the attractive force of the stars and planets, known as gravity.

Do you know that beyond such hypotheses such as "particles" known as "gravitons" and theories that they operate dually like the particle-wave theory of light, that there is no remotely good idea of, not only why the planets in our solar system don't just fly off into space in a straight line instead of being held in orbit by something called gravity-- which has no discernible energy--but how this attraction works.

Do you know that, after Hubble discovered the "red shift,"--that stars are not only moving away from each other, but actually accelerating, physicists have been speculating on what force could be causing this acceleration, because by calculation, there's not enough energy around to account for it.

So they come up with "Dark Energy."

The medical scientists always like to use the prefix "idio" to front a diagnoses which for which they have no evidence, like "idiopathic CD4 lymphocytopenia," for people who have Aids, but not HIV--which doesn't fit into their disease hypothesis. So this energy could be thought of as either "idiopathic dark energy," or simply "woo woo."--unexplained phenomena.

But I kind of like "morphic reasonance."

They Tyee readership is always such a good resource so I was wondering if anyone who has been participating in this discussion might know something about "integralism."

I keep hearing about this philosophy and it sounds interesting. Can anyone recommend some reading, or maybe tell me about it?

If you want to talk to me directly e-mail me at

Many thanks!

Shannon Rupp

Charles: For some reason you choose to completely misrepresent my position:
To quote my prior post:

I would add the same goes for alternative cancer or any other treatments. I believe there is some forms of "alternative" quackery best avoided that people should be warned about.

I also believe (like you) that some alternative treatments can be beneficial.
I fear you're on shaky ground with the sceptics though when you cite acupuncture
as legitimate and beneficial. This is heresy to the hard line sceptics! This is because acupuncture postulates subtle energies (chi) which sceptics often pontificate "can't possibly exist!"
I'm glad to see you yourself are apparently more open minded.

The notion that many more people are needlessly killed each year by errors/incompetence in mainstream healthcare than are killed by alternative therapies, is based on statistics and estimates I've encountered (in the mainstream press rather than from alternative health advocacy sites).
I'm open to any new data that may emerge.

There are a host of medical problems I would choose to go to my family doctor about, rather than to some alternative treatments. I imagine you and I are, in fact,in (some amount of) agreement on these issues, afterall.

Rupp:

If by "integralism" you mean "integral medicine", I believe Dr. Andrew Weil coined the term and is involved in
the process of attempting to integrate traditional medical approaches with some
alternative ones, including herbs, supplements, diet,yogic exercises and meditation. He has done this in his own practise and is now advocating/educating other physicians to do so.

...I do hope we won't soon be served up an expose/ hatchet job on Dr. Weil from your poison pen!

I saw Sheldrake speak a while ago in Vancouver at the Norman Rothstein Centre. I went with a friend who is extraordinarliy intelligent and interestd in quantum pysics. What impressed me was Sheldrake's acknowledgement that Indigenous peoples have known since time immemorial that everything is connected-a cocept of morphic reasonance that western science has yet to catch up with.

Bobb999: Fair enough. And if you read my posts from the outset you'll find I wish for more skepticism all around. When we follow Sheldrake's links, though, we find papers by him. Peer reviewed by whom? Not his peers, I hope. The central issue here is whether Sheldrake's theories are supported by evidence we can trust. I think we too easily accept theories on faith, because of our underlying beliefs, rather than scrutinize methods and results. There are many aspects of the body's chemical and electrical behaviour that we don't fully understand. It's because we as humans like to explain things that we either create silly theories or simply ignore the issue. Many new-agers cast themselves as open-minded, when in fact they suffer from the same human foibles as a lot of skeptics -- they want a framework that allows them to comprehend the world and they are prepared to either discount or oversimplify what they don't understand (particularly when it doesn't accord with their own world view) so they can feel sure of themselves. It happens in politics, religion and science, it happens on the left and the right, it happens in personal relationships and social organization. When scientist, or a politician, or a colleague tells us something is true, we should always ask ourselves how the conclusion was reached. I see very little of that in this thread. I see too many generalities, a couple of which I'm responsible for. But, hey, I've never been compared to Wahabists before, on account of asking for a little intellectual rigor.

An excellent observation, Metis Girl...and I think it fits quite well with Avicenna's insightful comment below:

"People who venture out to investigate the "not easy to investigate" phenomena (such as the true influence of the human mind) that you have referred to as "new age" or unfounded superstition are already fighting an uphill battle in a society that has so distanced itself from acknowledging its own existance as something other than extraordinary (in every sense of the word) - that anything that is intangible is refuted as being "real". This is absurd in the extreme if you acknowledge that our sensory perception cuts out a significant portion of what is actually around us (our eyes see only certain wavelengths and our ears only a certain range of decibals). What struck my "intuitive" gene by Sheldrake's argument was his analogy of the human brain and mind to the earth's own mass (anlagous to the brain) and its gravitational pull (the mind) which influences objects at a distance."

Metisgirl:
Where do the sceptics get off completely dismissing, out of hand, tens of thousands of years of human culture (including North American indigenous), beliefs and experience which acceps a interconnected non-material principle underlying everything? The materialists, in fact, represent a historical aberration, a minority view, a modern "cult". To top it off, they are often mean spirited, persecutorial and fanatical.

That's a fine quote from Avicenna about Sheldrake's work that Lynn posted (thanks L.). I especially love the analogy of the earth's gravitational pull and the mind's "pull" on objects at a distance.

Funny ,(I'm kind of wandering here...) I don't follow popular music closely anymore, but I've become enamoured
of the "Yeah Yeah Yeahs" this week and their singer Karen O via Youtube video clip postings. One song I especially like and was puzzling over, "Gold Lion", has this line:
"Cold desire makes a moon without a tide".
I think I like the song even more after reading the quote about Sheldrake's analogy about tides and the mysterious brain!

Charles: I'm sure you're more sceptical than me. If you doubt Sheldrake's results,consider there have been many more paranormal researchers before Sheldrake from Prof. Rhine at Duke U. in the '40s to present. Can you just dismiss a whole body of research with statistically valid results?
I agree there are likely chemical and electrical properties of the body not well understood yet by modern science.

We know the body is surrounded by an electrical field. I wonder if this field
may act as a medium of communicating emotion (perhaps even thought) and may help explain the experience of "vibes" from others. This, of course, wouldn't explain apparent telepathy over distances though.
All of the above is heresy to the hard liners, even though they (presumably) accept the existence bio-electric fields, which I believe are accepted by the science mainstream.
Talk about narrow minded.

Some scientists have tried to test Sheldrake's theories, with less-than-convincing results:

http://www.csicop.org/si/2000-03/stare.html

Earleir this week a line from song that I hadn't thought of in 10 years ran through my mind. Today while eating lunch, the song played on the in-house music system. Morphic resonance? Paranormal? Mind reading or telepathy? Woo-woo?

You be the judge.......

Enjoying reading your comments, Bobb999.

I think there is great value in life in what Keats referred to as "negative capability"... that is "when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."

This is an important quality in the process of exploration and creativity..an openness to wonder that is not restricted by the rigidity and dominance of human will...nor the demand for the nailed down certainty of endless proof.

Shakespeare, an explorer (of the human condition) in his own right, would never have written such great masterpieces without it (negative capability). And I would think that this is just as true of all of the greatest artists through out history, as it is of the greatest scientists.

It is not to say that scepticism is not without value, it certainly is, highly valuable, in fact...but so is the ability to explore the unknown....problem is, the words "unexplained phenomena" have been given such a bad rap.

When the "unexplained phenomena" that Truman refers to becomes known or explained phenomena....we then step once more out into unknown territory...into the mystery. Isn't that how we learn? When one mystery is solved, more mysteries make themselves known.

I'm not sure why it is necessary to view these two very important parts of the process of discovery as having to be in opposition to.... or antagonistic towards each other.

To all the people who keep arguing magic must have merit because it’s ancient practice, whereas science and rational thought are recent developments and therefore suspect, the same thing could be said of bathing.

Are you opposed to regular bathing, too?

Don’t answer that. I’d rather not know. How about human rights legislation? Anti-slavery laws? Dentistry?

Are all modern innovations suspect because the pre-industrial tribal cultures you’ve romanticized didn’t have them?

Or is it only the modern things that make you feel powerless, because you don’t understand them, that disturb you?

After all, it’s a helluva lot easier to believe in the fuzzy, comforting notions of morphic resonance than to actually struggle to understand calculus, quantum mechanics, or neuroscience.

Hey, I feel your pain. The more valuable the information, the more difficult it seems to be to learn. That said, I can't respect the views of people who settle for the contents of drugstore paperbacks and pretend it's wisdom.

Then again, I suppose someone has to be suckered into buying useless things to keep the economy going.

for Bobb many nines

" Here we have Charles Hoy Fort, lover of the unusual, recorder of miracles, engaged in the formidable task of reflecting on reflection. What is he attacking in the mental structure of civilized man. He is completely out of sympathy with the two stroke motor which is the driving power of modern reasoning. Two strokes: Yes and No, Positive and Negative. Modern knowledge and modern intelligence are based on the binary system: right, wrong, open, closed; living, dead,liquid, solid, etc...Where Fort is opposed to Descartes is in his insistence that we should envisage the general from an angle which would allow the particular to be defined in its relation thereto, in such a way that every object or thing would be seen as intermediaries between other things. What he demands is a new mental structure, capable of recognizing as real the intermediate states between the yes and the no, the positive and the negative. In other words , a system of reasoning which is higher than binary and would be, as it were, a third eye for the intelligence.
To express what the third eye perceives, language (which is a binary product, an organized conspiracy and limitation) is not sufficient. Fort was therefore constrained to use double-faced adjectives, Janus-epithets such as " real-unreal," "immaterial-material," "soluble-insoluble," etc.

Charles Hoy Fort 1874-1932
The Book of the Damned

Excerpts taken from " The Morning of the Magicians"

Louis Pauwels Jacques Bergier

" In the topography of intellection," said Fort, "I should say that what we call knowledge is ignorance surrounded by
laughter

Expressed in a sentence, Fort's principle goes something like this: People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels."

I'm not sure I'd try to do a survey of military stuff on the web what with all the...ahem..uh...surveillance, but both the big Cold War intelligence systems have been testing it for years. (or at least were, at one time--distant viewing, anyone?)

Bob999 wrote:

If Sheldrake's experiments were conducted under a scientifically valid and rigorous model, then they say nothing about telepathy. At best, all they say is that people appear to be able to predict who is calling them at a level greater than chance under the particular conditions that Sheldrake devised.

What could be causing that? Most likely shoddy experimental design. Most subjects of psychological experiments are not told what they are really being tested for, because doing so introduces bias that will skew the results. For example, if you know you are being tested to determine the average level of aggressive behaviour among your particular social grouping you will adjust your level of aggression while being tested to what you consider socially desireable levels. That will skew the results of the experiment.

Given that it appears Sheldrake's subjects knew they were being tested for telepathy, and that the subjects also chose the pool of people who would contact them, there is a far greater chance that carelessness in the experimental design led to results he found. But again, even if Sheldrake's experiments are rock solid, there is no evidence of telepathy. What's more, to have even a modicum of validity the experiments would have to be repeated with near identical results by independent investigators, including skeptics, many many times.

The fact that Sheldrake's studies have been published mostly in the Journal of Parapsychology and the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research doesn't lead me to believe that they were properly peer reviewed.

As for the experience of "vibes" Bob999, that information comes to us through our senses. Or more specifically, we can see the body language, and particularly the facial expressions, that people emit. In addition how they dress, their level of health, their size, shape, colour, and ethncity are usually visible. There are also audible (voice volume, intonation, accent, etc.) and olfactory (B.O., perfume, and possibly pheremones) cues. While we don't normally touch or taste others, a limp clammy handshake can say volumes about a person. Most of the time people don't think consciously about all these "vibes", but the information they provide work in conjuction to form that feeling or impression of someone.

Again, people usually seem to believe in psychic phenomena because it reinforces a reassuring worldview that death of self and loved ones isn't simply the end, while at the same time avoiding the traps of organized religion.

As for "western science" not having an understanding of the unity of all things... well sorry but that's just new age garbage. If anything the knowledge that science has brought us demonstrates just how interconnected the natural world is.

How that knowledge gets exploited to tear resources out of the natural world is a different story, but that's not science either, that usually falls under the rubric of corporate business. People regularly confuse the antics of corporations with science. No surprise considering that everyone from communists to capitalists like to pervert science to justify their ideology. So it's little wonder science gets a bad name. That, and the fact that many people are colossally ignorate of even basic science. As just one example, most people think the theory of evolution is about the survival of the fittest. Nope.

I'm not a believer but I don't discount the value of faith. For example, those who escape alcohol/narcotic addiction through the 12-step program and belief in the Bible — it works for some people and good for them, I say. But it doesn't follow that therefore I believe in the Resurrection or God or whatever...

"Given that it appears Sheldrake's subjects knew they were being tested for telepathy, and that the subjects also chose the pool of people who would contact them, there is a far greater chance that carelessness in the experimental design led to results he found."

How so? please explain exactly why there is a 'far greater chance', and what kind of 'carelessness' could have skewed the results. It is not enough to express unfounded doubt, even a jury is only supposed to obey 'resonable doubt', which was explained by a judge I worked with as 'doubt for which you can give a reason'. I don't see you giving a reason for your doubt.

James Burns wrote:

There are in fact spiritual paths and practices that embrace this view: from the silent emptiness of the abyssal darkness we come ... and to the silent emptiness of the abyssal darkness we return. But this is not a generally popular option amongst practitioners of New Age spirituality. Not enough sugar.

Too much information! Too much information!

Precisely: not the absolute truth -- which in a relative world is probably an impossible prospect -- but the closest approximation we can come to. But there is something in human nature which wants to go beyond that -- even at the cost of truth itself.

.

It's the sleep of reason and the rise of fundamentalism: religious fundamentalism, political fundamentalism, scientific fundamentalism, progressive fundamentalism, conservative fundamentalism, woo-woo fundamentalism. Especially woo-woo fundamentalism. It's an absolute insistence on absolutism in absolutely everything. It's completely delusional and it's the chief characteristic of our age.

Shannon Rupp wrote:

This is as good (and comprehensive) a place to start as any:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_(philosophy)

For a different perspective on some of the individuals listed in that article see:

http://www.strippingthegurus.com/

I would also recommend a book called "Gathering the Light" by the Jungian analyst Walter Odajnyk: he offers a cogent critique of many of these ideas -- particularly those of Ken Wilbur.

Have fun!

Footnote: on the Integral Institute, see Geoffrey Falk's blog for this month:

http://www.geoffreyfalk.com/blog/July2006.asp

James Burns, okay you've done your first, (I think) possibly valid critique, and one I'd want to investigate too regarding the reliability of "statistically valid" results. Most of your comment still just flogs the "a prior" "nonsense" horse, though.

But, I've been looking at the famous "prosecutor's fallacy" and the "defence lawyer's" fallacy (regarding dna in criminal cases) recently and I suspect that there might be a need to examine "significantly positive" results in this kind of light.

So-called "statistically valid" results have landed people in prison wrongly, especially with regard to dna findings, and I wonder how rigorous the paranormal studies are too.

See: "prosecutor's fallacy--shaken baby syndrome" etc.

But I'm sure Sheldrake's totally competent in statistics and is aware of the work of the Royal Statistical Society.

I'm not too impressed by statistics of the reliability of paranormal events like telepathy anyway. I've often tried to do a thought game to look at what the world would be like if these phenomena were actually universally manifested, useful and provable, and I'm sure it would be anything like the one we're living in now.

Maybe in a few hundred or thousand years.

So one of my ideas is that paranormal events will never be provable beyond a certain necessary and unchangeable constant, analogous to Max Planc's principle regarding the emission of X-rays and light--that there's a limit and it's pretty well cast in stone. (Planc's Constant)

Human society and consciousness depends as much upon NOT knowing, as it does upon knowing, I think.

As far as I can tell--and I've given tons of thought to this (not that this necessarily means anything) extrasensory communication is real, but necessarily limited--kind of like Crawford suggests. (Although I'd recommend Crawford do a thorough study of how Occam wielded his razor while investigating the paranormal)

"...and I'm sure it would be anything..." should be "...and I'm NOT sure it would be anything..."

Sorry dorothy but science is not a court of law where an experiment is innocent until proven guilty. It is not incumbent upon me to show that telepathy doesn't exist, it is incumbent on Sheldrake to demonstrate that there is sufficient scientific evidence that telepathy exists.

I mentioned in my comment where carelessness can creep into experiments involving humans.

As for how Sheldrake could have been careless, that can occur in any number of ways. For example, he and his staff could have given unintentional non-verbal cues to participants that enabled them to better guess who was contacting them. But really I would have to see him setting up and conducting an experiment live in all its steps, preferably with the help of someone like Randi and an expert in psychological experimental design in order to detect where the problems might lay.

If you guys want to check out some scientifically rigourous research into human empathy, then take a look at the work of the social psychologist William Ickes
http://ickes.socialpsychology.org/
He has a book "Everyday Mind Reading: Understanding What Other People Think and Feel"
http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/103-2349887-5229458?search-alias=aps&keywords=william%20ickes

It has a good layman's discussion of real research into the area. But be forwarned, despite having "Mind Reading" in the title, Ickes isn't talking about telepathy or any other kind of extra-sensory perception.

Speaking of social psychology, another interesting person is Ernest Becker. A lot of recent research has also been done by social psychologists that seems to support Becker's philosophical postulations on the seemingly universal human tendency toward death denial (a tendency that leads to things like organized religion, occult beliefs, etc.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Becker

Ickes and Becker's stuff is vastly superior to the woo-woo from guys like Sheldrake.

Oh and Shannon, integralism is really just another name for fascism. It's just been prettied up. New Coke.

Anyone remember the Dr. Peter Venkmann character played by Bill Murray in "Ghostbusters"?
He was doing telepathy experiments with volunteer students at a university and when they got it wrong they were zapped with an electric shock.

I think it is great to be cynical at times (such as listening to dubious reports of WMD as a rationale to bomb the crap out of a nation's infrastructure - or that the straight and narrow path to peace is war - or that climate change is a figment of your non-powerful mind) - but when it comes to asking for "scientific proof" (not the type that can be twiddled with in the lab) for a phenomenon that we have yet to find a suitable tool to measure is kind of like asking the deaf person to judge the octave range of an opera singer. There is a fine line between objective and subjective data - and the latter is simply not trusted because it nye near difficult to reproduce. Sheldrake isn't talking about the validity of the likes of Ms. Cleo's pyschic hotline to give you tomorrow's weather readout - he is simply arguing that the mind exerts an influence at a distance. As a scientist, I have both seen and experienced this - I even know that the state of mind can influence how your body responds to disease, and I believe that it is more than a small coincidence that great concepts evolved at similar time points around the world by two unrelated sources. I also think this "influence" of the mind is something that not all of us know how to control or tap into - but it can be trained (meditation is one form of training) - but if you don't acknowledge it, it simply won't work for you. This is the basis of the self-fulfilling prophesy.
Bobb999 and Lynn - and others - aren't naive in their open-mindedness (pardon the pun) - but are people who have reached self-actualization at some point of their lives and are a bit more comfortable with concepts that makes others uncomfortable simply because it requires too much left unknown and in doubt. Yup, we hardly know any thing - and we've proven that fact over and over again.

Shannon, regarding integralism, for which you, I think, you requested guidance...

There's this new research tool out. It's called google. I tried it for integralism. I got 800 hits, eh.

James Burns, you're dangerously close to suggesting that work on the paranormal, if devised rigorously, could possibly, just possibly, of course, be worthwhile.

Hey, welcome to our side, James Burns.
You say, "It is incumbent on Shelddrake to demonstraste that there is sufficient evidence that telepathy works."

All we are sa----ying. Is give him a chance.

Avicenna wrote:

No one is arguing the mind can't do that. If I talk to someone, I'm using my mind to send audible information to them at a distance. Writing on this comment board is another way my mind exerts influence at a distance. Where people have a problem is in woo-woo descriptions of mental influence at a distance, particularly when there are far more reasonable explanations available.

As for the "influence" the "mind" can exert on the "body" you seem to be asserting a dichotomy that doesn't exist. Disease is a biochemical process, and mind is a biochemical process. Why wouldn't they be able to affect each other? How could they not when they exist in the same environment. Why does there need to be some non-material cause? As for self-actualization, how do you know when someone is or has been self actualized? Let me guess, an authority told you so.

Secular advocats of meditation for healing with a science background, like Jon Kabat-Zinn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Kabat-Zinn), do not make assertions of non-material causes for mind and meditation. Meditation doesn't require faith, it requires regular dedicated practice of awareness of the ever present moment. It's not about trying to get anywhere or trying to influence anything. What usually unnerves people about the concepts related to "self-actualization" which is really a ludicrous term because it includes "self" ("enlightenment" is better if more vague) is that it removes or enlarges upon the notion of "self". That's where people get scared, because it doesn't provide them with the sense of immortality or eternal reincarnation that they had "in mind". They have to accept the unacceptable and love the unlovable. Not easy things to do, and certainly not highly recommended if they take those ideas too literally.

TG wrote:

I don't see the utility of beginning with the premise that the moon is made of green cheese, when far simpler explanations would suffice as a starting point.

Jim, but the there's no massive anecdotal evidence that the moon is made of green cheese, so your attempted application of Occam's Razor is premature.

My personal estimate is that 99.7% (kidding) of scientific investigation begins with anecdotal reporting. Even those guys speculating about dark energy and dark matter, and trying to make the energy and matter in the universal equal--less or more to get their favourite kind of universe, flat, open or closed-- are responding to anecdotal reporting--that something's missing from the equivalency math.

And, if you get a chance maybe run to the store and pick up a bucket of faith please seeing as how it's totally material in nature.

James quotes Avicenna who says: "He simply (Sheldrake) is saying that the mind exerts influence at a distance."

James responds, "Noone is arguing the mind can't do that."

And then he gets into an explanation of how he's using his mind to send "audible information to them at a distance."

Uh, Jim, you're not only using your mind to send the audible information but a whole lot of inventions, not to mention people's hammers, anvils and eardrums.

Now turn off everything. I'll see if I still get your message.

And unbelievably this: "Where people have a problem is in woo-woo descriptions of mental influence at a distance, particularly when these are far more reasonable explanations available.

And so Jim, do you realise that you've just used some rarely uh, (okay, I'm finally saying it, Charles Campbell set the precedent) STUPID argumentation.

It's basically known as the "strawdog" effect wherin you set up a totally false example, (using the mind at a distance using the internet or telephone, whatever), then claim that there are some "far more reasonable explanations available."

I wouldn't have believed it unless I'd seen it with my own eyes.

Yeah, James, the far more reasonable explanations for what you set up are the telephone lines or radio waves or whatever electromagnetic radiation is being employed.

Unreal!

Lynn: I've enjoyed reading your posts too.
Would you say "receptivity" could be a synonym for Keats' "negative capability"?
...I enjoy my night time dreams (if they aren't nightmares) because they drop you into some of those mysteries and uncertainties, sometimes elaborately constructed, but how?
Since I haven't the ability of lucid dreaming - knowing you're dreaming and being able to consciously control it, as some claim to be able to do - I am pretty much just receptive to what ever situation my unconscious cares to toss me into! I don't usually look to analyze dreams (apologies to Dr. Jung), just enjoy them!

Artists, such as the writers you mention, have the gift of being able to open up to the creative mystery while awake and be open to what ever might come, along with having the talent to choose from,translate or shape it into a great poem or play.

bobthecat:
I like the Charles Fort quotes. I enjoyed reading "The Books of Charles Fort" some years back. He certainly enjoyed poking fun at "sacred cows" of science current at the time, while he collected "damned" data that didn't fit dogmas. I especially like the apt phrase "People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels. " It's evident from the vitriolic attacks on Sheldrake and others
just how needful some of these people are
to maintain, and worse, imposetheir materialist belief system.
...which brings me to Mr. Burns and his school of thought:
His recent post appears to validate Sheldrake's criticism about hard line sceptics, that is "they are immune to data". Burns is not so much considering the data,as he is prejudging the data, and so we get predictable sniping such as "most likely shoddy experimental design".
Why "most likely"? Perhaps because Burns already knows telepathy can't possibly be real?

An analogy: Just as the Bush administration insisted on making the intel. fit the preconceived notion they were going to sell to the American people - that Saddam had WMDs, was an ally of Al Qaida, etc -
the sceptics insist on making paranormal research fit their preconceived notion that it's all bunkem - unfortunately, they often do this by persecuting those scientists brave enough to investigate such areas, including trying to get them fired, and accusing researchers of poor methodology, fraud, trickery etc.

I like to come back to Carl Sagan's quote 'cause it clearly demonstrates where these people are really at: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs".

In other words, no
data will ever be good enough or extraordinary enough to satisfy such sceptics. So, it doesn't really matter how excellent or reliable Sheldrake or others' methodology is or becomes , it will never be extraordinary enough to satisfy the fundamentalist materialist. They already know
"the truth" about telepathy, so they make the data fit their "truth" - by knee-jerk denial.

Rupp: The fact that non-material belief systems historically are culturally nearly universal, while the materialist view is historically aberrant and a minority view, isn't necessarily reason enough to adopt a non-material model...
- but it IS a fact which challenges Sagan's claim that paranormal claims are "extraordinary".
- and the fact should
demand that phenomena so commonly believed and I'd say experienced
since the dawn of mankind, deserves a bit better treatment than to be automatically dismissed out of hand by
the aberrant modern "cult of materialism".
- It also suggests that scientists investigating something so common to human thought, deserve better than to be persecuted.

Science needs more genuinely open minded scientists in the vanguard, such as Avicenna. I'd urge all the hard liners here to read and reread his fine posts!

Bobb999, I'd second that motion regarding Avicenna's comments--and yours too, and lynn's and Dorothy's et al.

I think every comment of the sceptics is reducible to the fact that, while they are claiming to have some obvious and self-evident knowledge that extrasensory and other phenonena are impossible, what they are actually saying is: "We don't believe it happens, THEREFORE it shouldn't be studied and anyone who believes it happens, or who studies it is a fool, or worse."

Is disbelief really an acceptable cause for such bigotry?

"Sorry dorothy but science is not a court of law where an experiment is innocent until proven guilty. It is not incumbent upon me to show that telepathy doesn't exist, it is incumbent on Sheldrake to demonstrate that there is sufficient scientific evidence that telepathy exists."

I still think you're being condescending here without really having anything substantial to offer. Nonverbal clues would be relevant, if it was a 'yes' or 'no' situation, but not, as far as I can see, in the case of a specific choice out of four. What I really have a problem with is, that there is, based on what you and I know about these experiments, no more reason to dismiss them as invalid than there is to shout 'eureka!'. Therefore, you are being prejudiced, and that is what I tried to question, but maybe i was being too subtle. And what are you sorry about? Dont you know that 'sorry, but...' is one of the rudest things you can say to anyone?

Gee, thanks, Shannon for dismissing Indigenous people's beliefs as new age! I found your post offensive. Of course, what was I thinking-Indigenous people are "primitive" and "savage" and don't have coherent theories and world views. excuse while I go do a rain dance.

Avicenna wrote:

This is an inappropriate analogy: there is no likeness between [1] a phenomenon that is known to exist (the existence of which has been quantified), i.e., the octave range of an opera singer, and [2] a phenomenon the existence of which is either indeterminate or incapable of verification.

Upon what basis do you make this assertion? How are you able to determine that a lack of "self-actualization" in others makes them "uncomfortable" with Sheldrake's theory? Is this an example of the "inclusivism" of the New Age? It seems more like fascism with a patina of condescension to me.

All of the arguments in favour of Sheldrake's theory are inherently elitist and authoritarian: they reflect an Aristotelian orientation that leads inevitably to certain conclusions. It was Aristotelian philosophy that reigned during the Middle Ages, a mode of thinking that sought Truth through inference from pre-existing premises, rather than Facts from hypotheses based on observed phenomena, which is the approach of empirical science rather than subjective belief. Sheldrake's theory depends entirely on a pre-existing premise that is itself based on metaphysical speculation (i.e., "revelation"), not testable hypotheses based on independently verified phenomena. His theory, to which many cling tenaciously, has assumed the proportions of a religious doctrine, a revealed truth. This whole debate is about belief (religion), not science. Without belief in Sheldrake's theory, it collapses like an overcooked soufflé. Bon appétit!

Ms. Rupp is not only offensive she is inconsistent. She totally dismisses social activism in a previous post and yet what does she use as examples of the progressive wonders of the modern world?.... Human rights legislation and anti-slavery laws.

Gee, Ms. Rupp, how did those rights suddenly materialize? By magic? Or did at least a few good people, (yeah, definitely flawed like you and me, Ms. Rupp,).... but still relatively good people...stand up in often risky situations and fight courageously for change.

And it is you Ms. Rupp that is pitting the ancient against the modern...finding one worthy and one not, by persistently employing all or nothing thinking.

We do not have to make a choice between ancient or modern because we cannot go back to what we never left...which I think Metisgirl's comment aptly highlighted. Instead you just trudged all over the meaning of her words.

Try a little tender receptivity, next time...(a good word that you suggested, by the way, Bobb999).

In the words of Paul Shepard, Professor of Natural Philosophy and Human Ecology:

"Most people seem to agree that we cannot and do not want to go back to the past, but the reason given is often wrong. The truth is that we cannot go back to what we never left. Our home is the earth, our time the Pleistocene Ice Ages. The past is the formula for our being. . . . The attempt to revive our humanity and recover values and behavior does not mean giving up science, art, medicine, law, machines, music, or anything else."

And, Bluenose, without disbelief in Sheldrakes's theory your hypothesis collapses like an overcooked souffle, too. So what? Sheldrake's trying to find out if his ideas are correct. Sounds pretty normal to me.

This is how we accumulate knowledge,eh--by testing ideas.

Unexplained effect at a distance has already been experienced by every human being and every living thing that has ever existed.

I'm beginning to understand why so many people don't think effect over distance, with no apparent cause, is possible.

Scientists have forgotten to tell the general population that they have no idea how gravity works. Basically it's just a woo woo force. It you shoot a rocket into space away from the sun the weird, unexplained attractive force of any planet in its way will capture it into its own orbit and "fling" it away into its next trajectory by a completely unknown force.

And what we think of as this action of nature is as woo woo as anything any of us can conjure up.

It's called gravity--solid bodies attracting each other according to Newton's calculations regarding the amount of mass and the distance between the centres of the masses--for no other reason than that they exist.

This is the most amazing thing in the universe. And nobody has a clue what it is.

TG your response was a little incoherent, but I'll try to deal with it none the less.

I didn't set up a straw man (or dog if you prefer) of Sheldrake's assertions. Now you might wish to argue that Avicenna set up a rather vague definition of what Sheldrake is arguing, namely that the "mind exerts an influence at a distance". I simply pointed out that no one is arguing that the mind can't exert an influence at a distance. I also correctly pointed out some means a mind can use to exert an influence at a distance. That those means involve evolved biolgical mechanisms or technological ones is in no way a misrepresentation of how the mind can exert an influence at a distance. I was pointing out that what people commonly think of in almost unconcious and ubiquitous terms is in fact a meeting of minds that involve throughly familiar means. You don't need telepathy for your mind to exert influence at a distance, a telephone will work far better.

Bitching that I'm creating a straw dog, is itself a straw dog. It's a common tactic among proponents of woo-woo to start with accusations of percecution, and ad hominem attacks that equate critique and skepticism to totalitarian tactics. What a joke. As if excoriating argument is equivalent to being burned at the stake, when at worst your poor widdle feelings have been hurt.

dorothy wrote:

Actually based on what you and I know about the experiments there is a very good reason to dismiss them as invalid, because Sheldrake proposes mechanisms for his results for which there is absolutely no scientific evidence. Anecdote is not scientific evidence. All the scientific instrumentation we have for measuring the electromagnetic radiation given off by the brain has been unable to show anything that could be telepathy. People frequently then bring up the holy grail of quantum level phenomena. Well the problem with that is observation of quantum level phenomena is changed by the observations. So it is very difficult to gain scienfiic data about quantum level phenomena.

If there is no scientific evidence then you can't call it science. You can call it philosophy. You can call it religion. You can call it J. Jonah Johnson for all I care. But you can't call it science.

Could that change? Of course. As instrumentation improves, so does our understanding. There currently is a revolution going on in neuroscience because of improvements in brain imaging technologies. One thing is for sure thus far, however, no evidence of telepathy and no evidence of souls have been detected.

”This whole debate is about belief (religion), not science”

Actually, that is where we run off the rails, by insisting on a sharp divion line between the two.

Science is not nearly as ‘scientific’ as we like to believe, and much religion is simply covering what could have been science if there was any money in it.

The most important difference is that science occupies itself with those phenomena, which can and do repeat so many times in an experiemnt or a series of experiments, that statistics can be brought to bear on them. Religion or spitituality, on the other hand, occupies itself with what is often uniqe happenings, or at least much rarer happenings in our lives and typically cannot be reproduced on command, because they involve interaction with forces and phenomena, which we only understand in a very sketchy way or not at all.

Surely no scientist in his right mind would claim that we have understood everything about ourselves and our world there is to understand. A new idea or observations that do not tally with what we think we know, therefore should not elicit a repressive diatribe about he limits of intellectual propriety, but a quiet jubilation, that there may be yet more. The sense of wonder is what makes life worth living, and those that would dump on it are old fuddy-duddies, no matter their chronological age. I don’t ususally lapse into name-calling, but some of the people here have been ‘rigorous’ enough for me to get impatient with their demands of not having their cage rattled even by the mildest breeze.

I will end by quoting one of my favorite poets, as well as mathematician, Piet Hein (Danish), who wrote a poem, which in translation would say:

I sometimes glean,
with a sardonic smile,
but only at the edge of my comprehension,
that life is two locked caskets,
each one holding
the key to the other.

James Burns, Sheldrake is not studying information that goes over telephone lines. He's studying communication without any known devices. Shesh!--except two or more brains and their respective organisms.

Dorothy wasn't impressed by someone saying: "This whole debate is about religion not science."

Exactly, Dorothy. I haven't noticed anyone setting up experiments to test for--moral application--Abraham's taking his kid, Isaac, out to the boonies to kill him in order to show his loyalty to god, who, at first commanded it, but then just at the last moment said, "Just kidding."

I mean, how would someone set up such an experiment?

Therefore, as Dorothy says, this whole debate is NOT about religion.

James Burns, did you really say, "You don't need telepathy to exert influence over a distance, a telephone will work better?"

And is this some of your better debating?

You did? It is? And is that why I'm rolling on the floor right now laughing my guts out?

TG wrote:

Gravity isn't woo woo. Gravity is an observable phenomena with predictable effects confirmed by a near endless set of repeated, and easily replicable experiements. Newton formulated the laws of gravity ages ago. Just because scientists can't explain all the causes of gravity is no evidence that telepathy exits. That kind of retarded argument is a logical fallacy called a spurrious relationship.

A better tack to take would be arguing about the phenomena of conciousness. Now everyone experiences that, and it's not something science can properly explain. However, the evidence thus far seems to suggest it is a dynamic biochemical process. The miracle of something as simple as our perception of the colour blue is a fascinating immensely complex phenomena. But for some reason people seem to think that juicy guts, and spongy noggin goop are too boring an explanation for life. Again, I think that has more to do with their fears about mortality than it does with any concern for an accurate understanding of reality.

TG wrote:

Where did I say that he was? Are you being intentionally obtuse or are you just unable to understand what I wrote? I said the mind can exert influence over a distance using the telephone. I didn't say Sheldrake said that. Now I'll repeat that with the hope it will sink in. I said that the mind can exert influence over a distance using a telephone. It does that by using the means of communication clearly available to us through a combination of biological and technological means.

What I have a hard time understanding is why you insist on asserting I'm saying Sheldrake is saying that. Are you confusing the fact Sheldrake did experiments using the telephone, with what I'm saying about how the mind can exert influence over a distance? Are you just a careless reader, or are you being intentionally obtuse so you can misconstrue what I wrote?

dorothy wrote:

Actually as I mentioned earlier scientfic methodology has proven to work in its ability to provide accurate explanations of reality. Religion has not. That is an exceptionally good argument for separating science and religion.

dorothy wrote:

Actually I'd say the opposite is true. Religion is not nearly as 'religious' as many would like to believe, and much science is simply debunking a lot of what religion previously exploited for the purposes of wealth and power.

In their ignorance people unfamiliar with science seem to think they have a corner on the experience of wonder and awe for life and the processes of the natural world, as if having an accurate understanding of some small parts of it takes away all of life's mystery. Nothing could be further from the truth. Answering certain questions not only leads to more unanswered questions, but it also provide a glimpse of the wonderful complexity out there. The only people I see who don't like having their cages rattled are the fuddy-duddies who try to usurp the authority of science to promote their religion, be it morphic fields, intelligent design or what ever other junk they can come up with to avoid contemplation of their mortaliy.

Mon Dieu - quite the discussion Dr. Sheldrake has triggered from a distance. First off, thanks for the acknowledgement, Bobb999 - in reference to your quote (on my quote), I'd just like to change "his fine posts" to "her fine posts". I suppose I'm a non-sequitor, Bluenose and Burns, in my own field of life science since I'm the only one baffled that none of us fine white cloaked "experts" - (with degree in hand proving the fact to all those impressed by white coats and degrees) - can't even define the concept of life (you can take that as an example of a phenomenon for which we don't have a very good tool to measure and neatly categorize like we, as humans, feel compelled to do with everything that falls out of the box - (talk about an anal retentive species). In fact, it is only amongst ourselves that we will admit that we have actually (if anyone was keeping track of such nuances) caused more problems than we've solved - because we really don't have a clue about anything - but it hasn't stopped us from breaking it when it ain't broke. We'll give you a dose of lithium or SSRI's for your mental "disorder" without knowing either how the mind works or the mechanism of action of the drug - but because we are scientists - its okay - medicare will cover it. If you really believe your complex thoughts are a result of spontaneous biochemical processes that you have no control over, well I'm glad you're satisfied with that. My problem is that I never was satisfied with such an obviously unsatisfactory conclusion which is why I've spent my entire life (as short as it has been) in trying to figure me (or us) out. What forms your thoughts? Your experiences? What is an experience? Is it measurable? Is it relative (like everything else)? Are you defined by the combined exerted efforts of your body cells just passing time going through "biochemical processes" - until you fizzle? What a useless exercise if that be the case. If I took one of your many biochemical processes away - are you a lesser being?
I have no love of Aristotle - my loyalty lies firmly with Plato, if truth be known. And there is enough condesceding attitudes here to pass around for seconds for everyone. My subjective assessment of Lynn and Bobb999 as displaying characteristics of self-actualized individuals was based largely to their "measured responses" (my favourite phrase of the week) to various topics on the tyee - and they epitomize the non-formalized personality pretty much down to the letter. Adieu for now, and it would be great to have some - if not all - of you attend a philosophy cafe.

Just recognized your handle, Avi, and so I thought I'd remind you, Hiv still doesn't cause Aids, eh. Silliest thing I've ever heard in my life.

I can't figure out why some people are so threatened by telepathic research. God help them, they don't want to know what scientists in the Pentagon have researching since the end of the second world war: mind control and psychic phenomena. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, skeptics.

To the people who suggest you are a snake oil salesman, I'd say "wrong analogy" because Rupert isn't selling anything. And even if he were no one is forcing you to buy it. (These are the same idiots who fall for telephone lottery scams, probably, and are so angry about their own foolish gullibility they take it out on you.)

I've experienced the telepathy you write about as I'm sure many have, but there are others who haven't and these are the people who can't believe it's possible. I'm convinced about the resonance of which you speak, particularly in animals.

There is another behaviour I find repeats over and over again and I wonder if it's related. I live in a busy urban area and frequently when out walking I'm invariably surrounded by others doing the same. Whenever I'm walking behind someone and I'm gearing up to pass them, it always happens that the person will veer left or right until they are directly in front of me. It almost feels competitive, but I'm convinced they're not even aware of it. If I try and pass them they will veer again to block me. Usually I end up saying excuse me and that's when they move out of the way to let me pass. I've often wondered if I do the same thing with people who are behind me. I'm amused and puzzled by this and wonder why it happens.

Stuff happens.

Firstly, I think that putting Sheldrake’s field and qualifications in scare-quotes ('Rupert Sheldrake's web site describes him as "a biologist" and author of more than 75 scientific papers and 10 books') is pretty disingenuous and as such is consistent with much in the original article. Here's what his web site actually says:

'Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author of more than 75 scientific papers and ten books. A former Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he studied natural sciences at Cambridge University…He then studied philosophy at Harvard University, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow, before returning to Cambridge, where he took a Ph.D. in biochemistry. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge University… At Clare College he was also Director of Studies in biochemistry and cell biology. From 1968 to 1969, based in the Botany Department of the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, he studied rain forest plants. From 1974 to 1985 he worked at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad, India, where he was Principal Plant Physiologist. While in India, he also lived for a year and a half at the ashram of Fr Bede Griffiths in Tamil Nadu, where he wrote his first book, A New Science of Life. In September 2005, he was appointed to the Perrott-Warwick Scholarship , administered by Trinity College, Cambridge. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, near San Francisco, and an Academic Director and Visiting Professor at the Graduate Institute in Connecticut.'

I suspect that this CV probably entitles him to refer to himself as a "biologist" - certainly it provides more evidence for his career than Shannon Rupp's work does for hers ("journalist").

Secondly, I think that characterising this part of Sheldrake's work as 'telepathy' (as the both he and critics do, I assume, as a kind of shorthand) lends itself to misleading assumptions - not least of which is the commonly held fantasy of 'reading minds' - which, remarkably for so short a phrase, manages to misrepresent the nature of mind, the nature of reading and the nature of mental content – and all the nonsense that comes with that. Better terminology would probably be something like 'extended empathy', or 'connective empathy'. I should also point out that Sheldrake isn't primarily 'telepathy', at all - he's looking at such phenomena as one possible set of mechanisms for the intra-species communication of data, in service of his own attempts to understand morphology and learning.

Lastly, referring to Sheldrake as ‘Telepathy Advocate’ in the headline of this article is pretty close to sleazy. As I note above, his primary interest is not in telepathy as a phenomenon in its own right, but in the possibility of such phenomena is in service of speculative biology and morphology, and the objections I made earlier hold. More than that, though, calling him an ‘advocate’ implies that he is…well, advocating something. I wasn’t at the discussion that UBC organised, but I ‘m pretty sure that while Sheldrake might be doing many things, advocacy work isn’t among them. In fact, as an earlier commenter pointed out, the main advocates of the sinister ‘telepathification’ of the world are in the Pentagon, and if she’s of a mind to agitate against something, agitating against the Pentagon is usually time well spent.

Strangely, while Sheldrake, who is accused by Rupp of being an advocate isn’t one, Shannon Rupp is – she’s an advocate of a peculiar fear of data that seems to infect many acolytes of ‘scientism’, and which in both spirit and practice is the direct opposite of what ‘science’ is claimed to be. In this, Ms Rupp is the willing pawn of others (Dennet, Dawkins et al) in an ideological war. Given that Ms Rupp undertook to defend ‘science’ against…well, against scientists, really, I think Sheldrake’s description of her article as a polemic is both entirely accurate and far too kind.

daelm, thanks for that. - Admittedly, I just didn't have the strength to straighten the leaning tower of conception - thinking it futile. Your attempt is not only valiant, it is ovation worthy.

Truman - I see you're still fighting the good fight - don't let anyone say that tenacity is not a virtue.

"In their ignorance people unfamiliar with science seem to think they have a corner on the experience of wonder and awe for life and the processes of the natural world, as if having an accurate understanding of some small parts of it takes away all of life's mystery. Nothing could be further from the truth. Answering certain questions not only leads to more unanswered questions, but it also provide a glimpse of the wonderful complexity out there. The only people I see who don't like having their cages rattled are the fuddy-duddies who try to usurp the authority of science to promote their religion, be it morphic fields, intelligent design or what ever other junk they can come up with to avoid contemplation of their mortaliy."

Man you're raving. First you try to take down what I have said, piece by pice, not by sound argument, but by stuff like 'and I say it ain't so, but just the opposite, so there!'
Then you do a few twists and turns, making snide remarks about my 'ignorance' and 'unfamiliarity with science'. I don't know about ignorance, I certainly don't claim to know all, but unfamiliarity with science is a wrong assumption, and you are altogether throwing too many of these in your defense of 'ordnung muss sein'.
I also think you're kidding yourself with all these graphic descriptions of the goo we consist of. Have you actaully seen much of it for real? I have. There isn't much there, and that's not the point. I can testify, from personal experience, that dead people are still people, which may surprise many. But I think what you keep throwing out is bravado, and the fear of own mortality that you so persistently jab in other people's faces may be harbored in yourself more than most. Yes, we are mortal, what of it? Gerry Spence wrote in one of his books, that the most important thing we learn in this life is how to die. There is far more in that idea than just being gracious about it, when the chips are down. It is a recognition that sets our entire life in perspective and gives it more, not less, meaning, raises it from just run of the mill to something serious, never-to-be-done-again, every moment we have.

Then strangely, after your attempted demolition of my intellect and its foundations, you turn around and paraphrase what I have said, now as your own opinion. You come across as confused in many things, but dead-set on chasing everyone back in his corner. why the panic? You talk about people who "try to usurp the authority of science to promote their religion, be it morphic fields, intelligent design or what ever other junk they can come up with to avoid contemplation of their mortaliy." The key word is 'try'. We have free speech here, we cannot pound anyone into the ground for disagreeing with us. Each to his own. People can try to promote all they want, but if it cant stand, it'll fall, you aren't solely responsible for policing the village square, so cool it.

It is interesting to see this debate still raving on..... I'm not interested in the academic claptrap, had enough of it in my own days at Cambridge, only in the easily observed, and recordable facts

In my experience, anybody who denies the existence of telepathy, has serious problems. It has mostly been wiped out of humans, through centuries of brainwash, but we can see many examples unexplainable happenings in our daily lives: E.g. People whose presence disturbes, or ruins electronic equipment. I knew a young Asian woman, about 5' and 85 lbs., who stopped conversation when she entered an large, crowded room, where she could not be seen.

Is reincarnation a reality, or fable? How was Mozart able to compose music at 4. How can some people, who have never touched a piano sit down by one and play it?

How do we solve problems, totally outside of our own experience and educational background, subconsciously?

How can semi literate, uneducated people drive a racing car around bends at speeds in fractions of seconds, again subconsciously, that would take scores of physicists using computers to figure out?

What is "charisma" about ? How is it that certain untalented people become starts and idols? How did Hitler and other monsters of history, been able to command millions to follow them into self destruction?

In animals, how does a calf find her mother in a large herd? How do seabirds find their nests and mates among hundreds of thousands, on some nesting islands? These questions could go on and on.

How do empires start and and why do they always self destruct? Between 1945 and 85 I spent 40 years on looking for the definition of the "common denominator of history's tragedies", so the subject is dear to my heart.

Now look at the repetition of history in our present days. Easily recordable events of societal self destruction that have happened hundreds of times in the past, yet, we've never learned and keep makin the same mistakes, misled by the same fools. Why?

These are only a few small examples of things we do not and may never understand. Yet, according to the Mayan Calendar, the world will either self destruct in 2012, or the Age of Enlightenment will begin. How did they figure this out? In any case, it will be interesting to see which event will happen ?

I'm betting on Enlightenment!

Ed Deak, Big Lake.

For anyone seeking shelter from the woo-woo storm, check out scienceblogs.com for the rigorous thinking of some young, progressive, activist, scientist-types.

The Tyee article on Sheldrake is commented on at "The Island of Doubt":

http://snipurl.com/u0jo

Kwilson has a nice point above here;

In truth, you'd probably be nuts to believe in this stuff unless you've experienced it. Equally dopey to fail to believe once you have. It seems to be a matter of personal sensitivities to the things that happen in a human life.

That said, it's even more foolish to call everybody who has had these experiences names just because you yourself lack the capacity.

I personally seem to have some difficulty recognizing a particular shade of blue. Should I then disparage everyone who believes that blue exists? Imply they're lying or worse when they tell me they saw it? Should I insist that they call it green?

Should I offer a million dollars to anyone who can prove they see blue as blue, then refuse to pay unless they can make me see it too?

Then I could pay my million dollars to myself, couldn't I?

Just read your link, Booker. "The Island of Doubt." The author just does another intended put-down--and dismissal of Sheldrake's work--even quoting Rupp's original Tyee article, claiming that Sheldrake's work has been, "not so much controversial as discredited."

This is part of the quote from Rupp. Untrue on both counts. Sheldrake's work, obviously remains controversial--so that's not true; he's only been discredited by people who don't accept it. So that's not true. I think the number of people on this thread who have supported his work and especially the right for him to present it at places of education, such as UBC, confirms that many people support his work.

That said, the author of your linked article comes close to identifying a possible problem with the hypothesis of "morphic reasonance," when he suggests that it is not falsifiable.

This concept (falsifiability) refers to the idea that most scientists believe that it is necessary for someone who presents a hypothesis to be able to identify and define a circumstance or a set of conditions in which the hypothesis would NOT be true. For instance, (simply) if I claim that dogs bark, but you can find a dog that doesn't bark, you have falsified my hypothesis. Remember, however that this would only cause me to modify my hypothesis, not discount it entirely. (Most dogs bark)

As I said on this or the other thread, I once invented my own theory of evolution to account for the fact that it seems that speciation is precipitated at the terminus of the developement of variations within species. It seemed obvious to me that Darwin's theory was an incorrect observation, and that what natural selection was really causing was a kind of "stasis," not change.

Natural selection "selects" the "fittest" archetypical individual, not in order to change the species, but rather to maintain it. If I am correct about this the entire theory of evolution means absolutely nothing.

But! My theory, which I called "variant saturation," which I still believe describes what happens, is not "falsifiable." In other words I can not define a circumstance in which it is not true. One shouldn't be totally dissuaded, as I mentioned, by infalsibility. It may be that an hypothesis is not falsifiable merely because it is never false.

Sheldrake's ideas of "formative causation" and "morphic reasonance," are tentative proposals to explain what so many people have always reported: that there are effects over distance, for which we have no explanation. And he's dedicated his professional life to examining this.

Incidently the theory of evolution by natural selection, is the world's most famous NON-FALSIFIABLE THEORY.

Absolutely ANYTHING can be referred to as "natural," so the theory is "self-defined."

And the idea of "survival of the fittest" is a tautology, a needless redundancy and restatement, which adds no new information. More simply stated: Anything that arrives in the present from the past can said to be the fittest by virtue of having survived. So Herbert Spencer's famous support of Darwin's big idea is not so supportive as it might appear.

Ed: please don’t write a long list of all the things YOU don’t understand and announce that “we” don’t know anything about them. The “mystery” of Hitler’s charisma has been quite well explained by social scientists and historians.

Just cuz you’re ignorant, it doesn’t mean everyone else is. Despite what some of your fuzzy-minded gurus may said, you are not the centre of the universe.

As for your comment on how it’s a mystery that birds can find their mates in a crowd: Just because birds all look alike to you doesn’t mean they all look alike to each other.

I find that comment really offensive: it’s species-ist.

Yeah, Ed, as much as I usually appreciate your comments, Shannon might have a point. (finally) Your examples were a bit, uh... shall we say, inconclusive.

There are a few simple facts that a number of the commenters here seem determined to ignore, and then use rhetorical slanders in the form of ad hominem attacks to distract from the fact that they ignore those simple facts.

First the facts, which I've stated earlier. Science works. Science doesn't explain everything. In fact, science never can. Causes once explained always lead to more questions about earlier causes. However, the scientific method thus far has provided humans with the most accurate understanding of the natural world. Part of what makes the scientific method work is starting with a reasonable hypothesis based on the most accurate scientifically established data available. Why? Well for one you won't spend time reinventing the wheel. But the most important reason is that it maintains the consistency of the scientific method. If you play loosey goosey with the methodology you aren't doing science, and when you aren't doing science the accuracy that has made scientific endevour so useful disappears.

If you start with a hypothesis that the ancedotal experiences that people can tell when they are being stared at, or of being able to predict beyond chance who is trying to contact them, are due to phenomena for which there is no scientifically valid data, then you are not doing science. Sheldrake's data does not support his morphic field speculations. To assert that they do is a corruption of the scientific method. Skeptics and scientists don't object to this violation simply because, as so many here seem to argue, that it is scary or that they don't have open minds. They object because it is a stupid way to study phenomena. It introduces inaccuracy. It is a speculative dead end. If you bother to take the time to look at the history of science, and the revolutions of understanding that have created ever more accurate models about the natural world, you will see those revolutions are firmly based on reformulations of the causes for observed data. But they are reformulations based very firmly on established laws of science. They do not go off into flights of fancy about possible causes for which there is no supporting scientific data.

If you can't follow the scientific method, then don't call it science. If you don't like calling it woo-woo then call it something else, like religion or nonsense.

Sure in the "real world" science get perverted all the time, usually by those looking to make a buck. The Pentagon does it, pharmaceutical companies do it, even certain scientists do it. There are also those who mean well and who don't intend commit fraud, but who are so convinced of their intuitive beliefs that they are willing to ignore established scientific methodology because it stands in the way of their beliefs. They then attack skeptics who point out their errors as close minded instead of dealing with the errors that they have created.

Repeatedly I read people here objecting to the fact that scientific materialist explanations for life don't satisfy their experiences of what life is. They point out that the more science seems to discover the more is left unanswered. Well duh. When science answers a question, ten more crowd in to take its place.

Of course instead of dealing with all of this the most common argument I read here is that anyone expressing skepticism toward Sheldrake is just a close minded proponent of scientism. Forget dealing with verifiable data that can be independently and repeatedly tested; that's too inconvenient, it gets to the heart of why Sheldrake's "data" appears to be nonsense. No it is far easier to avoid that thorny issue and create long posts extolling on fabricated fantasies about totalitarian ideologies.

Apologies to Avicenna for my wrongly assuming she was a he...I assumed based on your handle,Avicenna, because the only person I had heard of previously with your name was a famous male Persian physician (and poet)from the 9th century! I'd read about him in a history of opium, with which he was closely associated. "His Canon of Medicine was a standard text for 5 centuries", which is impressive in itself.

I like this from this thread's Avicenna: "Are you defined by the combined exerted efforts of your body cells just passing time going through "biochemical processes" - until you fizzle? What a useless exercise if that be the case." Oh well, if the sceptics insist on "fizzling", let them fizzle!

A few days into this thread I noticed
that some of the sceptics were posting
the same arguments repeatedly (in some cases ad nauseum)...and I found myself repeating my own arguments over and over: a recipe for tedium. I want to avoid continuing this pattern!

Truman: Thanks. I've appreciated your posts too, and your "battles" with the naysayers. I wanted to return briefly to
synchronicity: I noticed 'nose in one of his particularly arrogant, bitchy posts took you to task for saying:

Perhaps 'nose got all excited 'cause to his mind your statement may have appeared awkward and contradictory. But I agree with your assessment.

I went back to Jung's "On Synchronicity" (a shorter piece than the one with "...An Acausal Connecting Principle" in the title - Joseph Campbell believed Jung was actually clearer in the shorter work). Jung cited
Prof. Rhine's successful experiments in ESP and psychokinesis (PK) as examples of synchronicity. The PK experiments involved subjects attempting to influence
the throw of dice, ie. cause certain throw results by PK.It's too bad 'nose appears ignorant of the fact that when Jung called such phenomena acausal, he meant they were not explainable by the same cause and effect as defined by classical physics, that's all. Jung: "[Synchronistic phenomena] prove that a content perceived by an observer can, at the same time , be represented by an outside event , without any causal connection. From this it follows either that the psyche cannot be localized in space , or that space is relative to the psyche"..."The experiment with dice proves that moving bodies,too, can be influenced psychically - a result that could have been predicted from the psychic relativity of time and space. PK (and some other paranormal phenomena) may be acausal from the point of view of physics, but not from the point of view of the psyche, which can reach over time (precognition) and space (PK, ESP), without need of the transmission of energy, yet can influence, as we see in PK. "The energy postulate shows itself to be inapplicable to the Rhine experiments, and thus rules out all ideas about the transmission of force". From memory, I recall Jung somewhere writing something like "we must give up the idea of the psyche being localized in the brain".

I like the quote from Sheldrake where he said something similar,which Rupp quoted in her piece:
"You have to understand where skeptics are coming from," he told The Straight. "They have a materialistic world-view that the mind is the brain. I'm saying that there's more to the mind than the brain. Some skeptics don't want to believe that...it's easier to question the evidence."

bobthecat: After we each wrote posts about Charles Fort yesterday (you were 1st), what should I find in my mailbox but a communication from "The Fortean Society", which contained "weird news" articles, etc.!
I think they send me something approx. monthly. By chance, did you happen to receive the same e-mail before you wrote about Fort, or is it just one of those coincidences?!

oops...correction:I see my prior post is missing important quotation marks that should be there to separate Dr. Jung's words from my own. Also, all the italics and bold letters in the post were put there by me.
[Jung]:
"The experiment with dice proves that moving bodies,too, can be influenced psychically - a result that could have been predicted from the psychic relativity of time and space."

PK (and some other paranormal phenomena) may be acausal from the point of view of physics, but not from the point of view of the psyche, which can reach over time (precognition) and space (PK, ESP)...

Bobb...just a coincidence of course..;--)
just a little woo woo

No I didn`t receive the e-mail..but would be interested in keeping abreast of Fortean News tho..I`ll look into it.
I thought you were probably aware of Fort before I posted...actually I find this forum and the communication here very..how can I say..my thought processes really are in sync at times with some of the posters...they take the words right out of my mouth..they often say ( and much better than I can) what I was about to..all the time..can be exhausting.

Just shortly after we all had finished chatting on the thread I received a very strong contact from I`m sure one of the posters..nothing definite..just that sensation of an egg being lightly broken or water lightly trickling over my head..I have a pretty good idea of who..
I`m rushed right now Bobb...I have a visitor who I need entertain...talk to you later...
bob

Bobb 999, that was an excellent appraisal of my comment on Jung's idea of acausality regarding PK and sychronicity. As you'll remember, I suggested that Jung would allow my asessment. Very astute of you to pick up on that!

And also, I believe that if a person uses his brain to its best advantage he/she can only conclude that it cannot entirely encompass or explain the mind.

To me this is a "no brainer."

There's a very interesting study done by some researchers in England which strongly suggests that some patients who were gravely ill, and who had been certified as "brain dead" reported memories from that time, after they were revived.

My current view, which I'm working on, is that the material is essentially an analogue or hologram of the mind, not only of the organism, but of the universe.

“Science works. Science doesn't explain everything. In fact, science never can. Causes once explained always lead to more questions about earlier causes. However, the scientific method thus far has provided humans with the most accurate understanding of the natural world.”

So we’re climbing this big tree, and every so often, there is a branching where we must choose our direction. Sometimes, we find a new pattern of branching that makes us realize we didn’t necessarily understand the nature of a choice we made earlier. Then we backtrack a little, and progress anew, with our now broader understanding. We don’t know where the top of the tree is, or even if it has one, or in whose garden it grows, or ???

Seems to me you are describing the pattern of scientific progress to be the same as that of almost any other human endeavor: creating a garden, building a house, or a road, bringing up children, making a living, etc., and that the ‘rigorous principles’ you are slapping everyone over the head with really boils down to just plain common sense. Actually, religious or spiritual path-seeking fits right in there with the rest of it. It has its own 'rigorous principles'.

So, your postulate that ‘science works’ will remain unproven for ever and ever, for we really cannot know that, until we have that final answer to everything which you claim will elude us into eternity. Nor can we know whether the understanding we gain is ‘the most accurate’, even ‘thus far’. If we don’t have an overall map, we won’t know we’re lost, will we? One answer not fitting the rest is enough to throw the whole thing, and we might be back to square one.

Really, what you are saying in this paragraph is, that science is completely on a par with any religion.

So...as much as I'd like to deny it, I suppose there is something going on called god, although I haven't the foggiest what its trying to do, or if it plays dice with the universe (as Einstein doubted), whether it has any sense of morality, or if it is just bored.

Further investigation is required.

Avicenna wrote:

Are you a clinician who is qualified to administer psychometric measurement techniques to determine the presence of non-formalized personality characteristics? Of course not. A clinician would never have written what you have written above because he or she would recognize the impossibility of such an assessment through purely subjective means. But this is symptomatic of the evaluation of woo-woo pseudo-science: anyone can say anything even if it is internally inconsistent or completely contradictory and God help those who dare to disagree. As I said above -- this is about religious belief systems, with constant appeals to "personal experience" and "subjective assessment."

Kwilson wrote:

Who is threatened by research? It is not telepathic research per se that is questioned -- it is the validity of the research, the design of the research, the replicability of the results, the falsifiability of the results, the inflated claims made on behalf of the results, the assertion that the results have been substantiated and verified when they have not -- it is, in short, about intellectual integrity. People who conflate any of the above with the argument that those who doubt Sheldrake's claims are just "skeptical" are attempting to obfuscate the issue in the interests of maintaining their own belief systems.

In 1890, the philosopher and psychologist William James, who had helped found the American Society for Psychical Research, stated in what was to become a famous lecture "that to upset the conclusion that all crows are black, there is no need to seek demonstration that no crows are black; it is sufficient to produce one white crow; a single one is sufficient." William James believed that Boston medium Mrs. Leonora Piper (1859-1950) was his white crow, an authentic medium capable of demonstrating evidence of survival through her clairvoyant ability.

In 1901, the New York Herald carried a story about her that was headlined "Mrs. Piper's Plain Statement". She wrote that she could not be sure that she was being controlled by spirits but that she thought perhaps her information came from extrasensory perception (ESP) instead. In a series of experiments conducted over the course of thirty years, Mrs. Piper agreed to all of the conditions imposed upon her by the skeptics who investigated her abilities and subjected her to extreme physical discomfort and deprivation. Her case is completely unique in the annals of research into claims of the paranormal.

Now contrast the case of Mrs. Piper with the attitude of most of the True Believers in woo-woo pseudo-science, for whom skepticism and the demands of rigorous investigation are evidence of heresy: it's like comparing the reflections of an Einstein with the bawling of a spoiled brat.

TG wrote:

And you're critiquing Ed? LOL!

It is a fundamental misunderstanding to assume evolution is simply about the "survival of the fittest". You are right to identify that mistake with Spenser, but it is a misunderstanding of Darwin, not a support of him. Spenser came up with that notion to support his classical "free" market ideology and lassie fair economics.

Evolution is based in part on successful reproduction of offspring which in turn successfully reproduce. Species that can do that can be said to survive (although individuals don't have to survive very long) and be said to be fit (although if they reproduce in sufficient quantities individuals don't have to be very fit) for their environment. But survival and fitness are useless if a species does not reproduce.

Bobb999 wrote (a Sheldrake quote):

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of skepticism. It's not about what skeptics do or don't want. It's about the evidence. Again, if you look at the history of scientific revolutions, models that fit the data best can overturn old ideas quite rapidly. One of the most recent examples is the unifying theory of plate tectonics which replaced a hodge podge of earlier geological postulations during the 1960s. Now I'm sure TG will follow this up with his notions of the hollow earth theory, along with an exposition on the gnomes and elves that really cause volcanic eruptions. But the scientifically accepted theory is based firmly on easily repeatable observation, not kooky woo-woo that has an intuitive appeal.

Dorothy wrote:

Then you seem wrong. You are imposing a definition that does not reflect what I wrote. Here you avoid the fact that science is based on evidence gained through repeatable verifiable observation. Yet you yourself acknowledge this fact in an earlier comment:

So which is it? Who is really confused here? You want to argue whichever end suits your rhetorical purposes at the moment. Specifically your tactic is primarily to engage in ad hominem attacks. You'll change your argument on a dime, switching back and forth to science being this, but no science being that to fit whatever direction your mental winds happen to be blowing you at the time. I don't accept your intentional misinterpretation of what I wrote.

No it doesn't. It boils down to a rigourous application of the principles of scientific methodology, which work. Upon reflection in seeing the success of the scientific method it may be common sense to follow those rigourous principles, but engaging in scientific investigation is not a process of simple common sense.

No I didn't, and in fact the quote of yours I pointed out above demonstrates you seemed to understand that. Moreover what I've been writing does not reflect your intentional misinterpretation. You mentioned earlier my apparent confusion. Well I'm sorry but it seems that you are the one who is confused. You fail to maintain a shred of coherence to your arguments, and instead lose the thread of logic in metaphorical concepts that only fit together because you put them in the same sentence.

I've pointed out repeatedly why science is not religion. I've pointed out repeatedly why speculation that is not supported by a shred of scientifically validated evidence should not be called science. Dorothy why don't you try to decide whether you believe science is different from religion. Sometimes you do, sometime you don't. Which is it?

Bluenose, do you realize that you have supplied the fact that William James, philosopher, was indeed persuaded to believe in the paranorma by his investigation of the Piper case--as some kind of critique of other believers in the paranormal.

Does this seem sensible to you?

Would you be able to expand on your rationale for presenting James' conversion as some kind of foil to counter the beliefs of "those for whom skepticism and the demands of rigorous investigation are evidence of heresy."

Hasn't it occurred to you yet that what we're advocating is that work such as Sheldrakes's be subject to the "rigorous investigation" to which you refer.

I see that you found it necessary to claim that the Piper case was "completely unique in the annals of research into the claims of the paranorma."

Does the term, "Freudian slip" resonate with you, at all?

Or, how about "Methinks the lady (bluenose) does protest too much."

Stranger yet, (reminiscent of woo woo), your confirmation that James' acknowledgement that one white crow could falsify denialism, does not seem to have enriched your comprehension of this issue.

By syllogistic necessity, your comment has nudged you into the camp of the believers.

Unless, Bluenose, you really think that William James actually believed that there was, in fact, only one white crow that is, only one true case of the paranormal in the world, and on the basis of that one "white crow," he became president of the Society for Psychical Research.

Wouldn't this have made him a bit of a charlatan, having already discovered, according to your interpretation, the only true case?

What would he have left then, to investigate?

"what I've been writing does not reflect your intentional misinterpretation."

That's not fair! No call to get angry and accuse me of dishonesty. I was trying to rephrase and query what you said, because it seemed to me to be contradictory to what you had said before. I don't have a problem with distinguishing between Science and Religion, although I am not sure there is as sharp a boundary as most people tend to claim, rather a loose boundary, some sort of grey no-man's land between the two. But it looked to me as if you were describing science and its capabitlites and aims in terms that could just as well fit, as I said, any other human endeavour, and so I queried it. You may not like me or my viewpoints, but that doen's mean you can question my sincerity or rant on about what a rotter I am in general, without some better reason. Please keep a civil tone. It seems to me you are the ad hominem warrior here. Please specify, how I have attacked you personally? I have said what I seemed to read out of your postulates, but you have actually not answered any of the questions I have put to you. Why is that? If you somehow have formed the conviction, that I am beneath your notice, then ignore me. I won't take offense. But of course I'll interpret it as I see fit.

An excellent piece of commentary by daelm:

Considering the present state of humanity, I can't think of a better area of research than the study of empathy, as it relates to communication and learning.

Well said, daelm.

Further investigation is required. (Truman Green.)

I agree completely and I think you said it brilliantly..."the further investigation" is definitely the fun part...so I don't know why so many people refuse to even go there.

...and this was a little gem on Sheldrake, that went unnoticed but it works for me:

And this quote by Avicenna says it all, in regards to closing down avenues of exploration before they have hardly even begun:

*Sigh*

Dorothy, I'm not angry. Attacking (or perhaps rebutting is a better term) flawed arguments about misunderstandings surrounding science is not, to me at least, something I do with any sense of anger. In fact, I find it amusing most of the time. People can be quite kooky, which I find funny. Sometimes I shake my head at some of the nonsense, and I worry that people are so susceptible to intuitive flights of fancy that they are willing to swallow fantastic notions, not because they have any grounding in reality, but because they appeal to their unconcious desires. At certain extremes, particularly those of fundamentalists, those desires can begin to get downright creepy.

If you want to see me angry...hmmm.. well lets talk about Lebanon and Shrub, our "great" and "powerful" PM. On second thought, no let's not, at least not on this thread.

Truman: We're in agreement on the idea that the mind encompasses more than brain...I've heard of similar cases to the ones you mention about patients in comas being able to recount activity and conversations that went on around them while they were comatose. And how about
the many cases of OBEs of people who've had severe medical emergencies and were unconscious? Again, being able to recount in detail what went on around them. Perhaps my favourites are the cases of hospital OBEs where the patient reported not only hovering above his or her bed, but of finding themselves floating down the hall into other
rooms, and accurately describing scenes and conversations occurring there!

I agree with you that WE want rigorous paranormal studies, as bullet proof as possible, as far as methodology. I'm sure Sheldrake doesn't want to risk his reputation by using shoddy methods. I don't want faked data that supposedly might make me "feel better" 'cause it might back up my beliefs. The sceptics like to claim Sheldrake's methodology must be faulty, but they provide accusations and speculation only, no evidence that Sheldrake's methods are unreliable. How about his sponsors? Institutions don't want to be pouring money into poor quality research designs.
I haven't heard Sheldrake's sponsors or colleagues complaining about him. Only the sceptics. Curious.

The sceptics scream for "evidence!".
Their dirty little secret though is that the only evidence they in fact want or will ever accept is negative evidence, disproving the paranormal!
This is why it is banging ones head against a wall to attempt to argue with them on the question of evidence - lack of, quality of, quantity of,honesty of - it doesn't matter. I just wish they'd cease being ingenous about it and simply admit that they are now, and forever will be, completely and utterly "evidence proof "!

Lynn: You do some fine recaps, choosing many juicy quotes, and write
some excellent ones of your own. I'm glad you recapped daelm, 'cause that is an
excellent post. I think this from it also deserves emphasis:

... I think that's bang on. The sceptics are adherents to "scientism" (a materialist belief system), not the scientific method
impartially applied.

As far as that question about the mystery of mysteries - the God question, I like to think the mystics throughout history
(those apparently adept at penetrating far beyond their personal ego, and experiencing something of what lies there and coming back to tell about it), may be best qualified to tackle such a question.
They, like artists, no doubt posess a form of the "negative capability" Lynn wrote about.

A common theme seems to be that beyond gods of form and image (Jos. Campbell called these "masks of God")lies a transcendent ground of being beyond form, image, space and time, yet at the same time immanent in all of creation (interconnecting everything). It's given names such as: Tao, Brahman, the Void or Buddha-Mind. (Truman's idea of the material world being a holographic projection of "mind" makes me think of the Buddhist idea of a kind of universal mind), Islamic Sufis have similar ideas. Even some Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart: ideas of the "God" beyond God, likely Shamanic cultures too, etcetera. Personally I practise some Taoist meditations, largely energy (Chi) related.
That's just my take.

typo in prior post...should read "ingenuous", not "ingenous".
***************************************
Bobthecat:
Okay, so the Charles Fort stuff wasone o'dem coincidences...if you're interested, here's a link for the Fortean Times/Society: http://www.forteantimes.com/ You can get on their e-mail list for free. I subscribed to their Times
for awhile long ago. Unfortunately, the mag itself isn't free online, but they have entertaining news articles, etc.
I'm not one to deny the influences possible between minds, however,personally, if it was me experiencing some physical effect as you described, my first attempt at an explanation would be to consider it's my own body responding because of an emotion I felt that was evoked by something I'd read that made me feel in some way positive or negative. I wouldn't be looking for "deeper" explanations than that right off the bat. Emotions can definitely trigger physical sensations of various descriptions.

Truman Green wrote:

This is a misrepresentation of what I wrote. If you had bothered to carefully read what I had actually written, you would have noted that I provided the reference to Mrs. Piper as an example of someone who "agreed to all of the conditions imposed upon her by the skeptics who investigated her abilities" -- something which no alleged medium or promoter of woo-woo pseudo-science has ever agreed to since.

Oh really? Sheldrake and his supporters appear to believe that his work has already been "widely replicated," despite its lack of substantiation. If his work has already been "widely replicated," as you and others seem to believe, why would you advocate that his work be subject to further investigation? Either his work has been widely replicated, or it has not. Clearly, it has not even been narrowly replicated, let alone widely replicated.

Sheldrake has yet to produce a crow of any colour, let alone a white one. Evidently your comprehension of that matter has yet to register with the rest of your rhetoric.

Do the terms "basic logic" and "critical thinking skills" resonate with you at all? I am neither a believer nor a skeptic: that is a dualism to which I do not subscribe (a subtlety which you appear to have overlooked). I am completely agnostic on the matter. I have simply stated that it is both scientifically unethical and

to claim validation for a theory that has yet to be substantiated. This has been stated time and time again in this forum by myself and others, but you and your co-religionists continually misrepresent or completely ignore this position. As I said, I am an agnostic, not a fanatic.

Not only do I wonder why you misrepresent my position (although I have a few theories of my own on that), I also wonder whether you are able to read what I have actually written. If you had, you would not have made the ridiculous assertion that James became president of the SPR on the basis of his work with Mrs. Piper. He was one of the founding members of that organization and his interest in paranormal research preceded his work with Mrs. Piper. He did not become "president" of the SPR on that basis alone.

I must say that I admire your tenacity: your ability to ignore, misrepresent, and obfuscate the arguments of others is something that only the most devout are capable of.

James, Darwin's theory is that because there is competition among members of the SAME species, characteristics of the most fit will be selected to emerge in future generations. The best example of his thought probably is what he calls "sexual selection."

When male individuals participate in competition for the favours of females, the strongest, (biggest, fastest, most visually appealing) will win such battles and therefore have a much greater chance of having their genetic material passed along.

Darwin repeats this idea many times in his "Origin of Species."

He has another story similar go this regarding wolves engaged in the race to kill deer. The fastest, biggest, baddest wolf wins, and gets to eat more meat, therefore grows stronger; therefore wins the battle for the attention of the females.

What I am maintaining is that the "fittest" explanation of this competition is that "nature" has devised it to ensure that the best genomic representation of the species will be maintained (the individual with the most "wolf-like" genome), and that change is, in fact, more likely to come through the success of the WEAKER members rather than the STRONGER, and that the competition occurs to prevent this from happening.

All of which would make the "survival of the fittest," not only tautological, but truly meaningless as an engine of speciation, not to mention evolution.

Speciation is one of the most brilliant things ever devised. Without it neither ants nor buffalo could live. Organisms would exist as individual representations of chaotic genetic progression.

Nature protects and allows it by ensuring that the best archetypical representative will be successful.

Thus "natural selection" works exactly in the reverse to the arrow of time which is proposed by Darwinian and neo-Darwinian theory.

I believe that my "variant saturation" is a much better discription of the causation of speciation than Darwin's, who I think got it all wrong, unless of course, one believes in the idea of "acquired characteristics," by which it was wrongly claimed that behaviour and activities which are done by an individual during its lifetime can somehow be represented in the genetic information passed along to future generations. (I learn to play golf, therefore my kids are good golfers)

This idea has been discredited, but Darwin believed it. If it was true, Darwin would have been correct, but speciation could not have occurred.

Sheldrake is simply not truthful about claims that his theories have been confirmed by scientists. If they had been, it would have been one of the most important discoveries in the history of science -- a new, hitherto unknown, force in nature. Nobel Prizes would already have been handed out and huge research programs would have been launched to study it further. Corporations would be looking for ways to cash in on it, and the Pentagon would be looking for ways to turn it into a weapon. Instead, we have silence from practicing scientists. All we get is whining about those mean skeptics who keep asking for reproducible evidence.

I like how Sheldrake drops the name of Martin Rees when describing his own loose affiliation with Cambridge. Hardly inspires confidence in the veracity of his work. But I have to admit, Sheldrake's a charming salesman, or preacher.

Just for fun, (and to take a break from the seeming futility of debating with fundamentalist materialists, which is becoming about as pointless as debating with Jehovah's Witnesses)...

...I've always kind of enjoyed reading some of William Burroughs takes on things, including his somewhat dark take on ESP:

WB: "What protection does anyone have against manipulation by someone else? We know that people are manipulated all the time...I think that what we call ESP is just a simple fact of life. I've seen two horse traders, you know, banging back and forth there and one knows just how high the other will go. They're engaged in very active ESP. Card players are engaged in very aggressive ESP manoevres, in masking, harassing, projecting...How do you think a Mafia boss gets to the top? he's using all kinds of malign ESP. He knows when someone's there...All this has
been happening for thousands of years. That your privacy is invaded.
[Interviewer]: You think privacy is an illusion?
WB: Oh, yes. And I don't see that it will bring up any problems that we don't have already, and might bring a lot of things out into the open where they'll be less dangerous, less worrisome."
******************************
In the late '50s, in the so called "Beat Hotel" in Paris (frequented by often semi -starving writers and artists), Burroughs, Brion Gysin and other friends conducted a series of psychic experiments and demonstrations.(Gysin had learned a fair amount about magic when he lived for decades among arabs in Morocco).

One thing they did was experiment with mirror gazing or "skrying", staring into a full length mirror to produce visions.
Just one example: " When Burroughs tried mirror gazing, he saw his hands in the mirror with the fingers amputated, looking completely inhuman, black pink and fibrous, with long white tendrils growing where the fingers should have been. As he was mirror gazing, a young resident of the Beat Hotel, named Jerry Gorsaline, came into the room and said, 'Jesus Christ, Bill, what's happened to your hands? They look all thick and pink!' Burroughs wasn't sure what was going on, but the paranormal phenomena were flying thick and fast..."

Not angry. Good, then you won’t mind if I ask you to elaborate on the claim that ‘science works’. Works to do what? Works for whom? Works how? In what way does it show that it works?

I believe that most things work, just like most tools, if they aren’t being attempted used for something they are not good for. That is partly why the discussion of religion/science is problematic to me. I do not believe they can be ‘used’ in the same aspects of life, therefore I do not see a competitive relationship between them.

I also believe there is more than one kind of ‘reality’. I believe it depends on what you need it for, and what instrument you use to observe it with. The now flogged-to-death example of the father and son who each won a Nobel Prize for proving the nature of the electron; one proved it is a wave, while the other proved it to be particle is ‘scientific’, I suppose. Never mind if we solved that since, which I actually don’t know. The thing then was, that you could not see other than what you were looking for, or some such thing.

I believe the same to be true in general. If we look for scientific knowledge, that’s what we find. If we look for other kinds of knowledge, we’ll get those. The trouble starts, I think when someone will claim scientific knowledge is the only valid kind, for there are many problems it cannot solve for us. Such as the one you brought up: how to come to terms with our own mortality. Technical understanding will not help, for the real question is not: am I going to die sometime, and what does that mean biochemically speaking, but rather, what do I do with all the years I do have, and even, how do I adjust to the fact that I do not know how many that is? Maybe what you understand as ‘being blunt’ works for you, but maybe you can also respect that it doesn’t work for everyone? And if you proclaim science to be superior, because ‘it works’ likewise what ‘works’ in some contexts for other people does not deserve your scorn or being dismissed as ‘kooky’. As everything else, this only goes as far as not doing damage to the same rights for others. But merely stating another perception cannot be said to be damaging. I believe I am asking you to go from being ‘rigorous’ to being pragmatic. It may come across as friendlier, if you care about that. Are you familiar with Robert Heinlein? I believe his ‘stranger in a strange land contains some of the most pragmatic thinking I have found in this area. Of course you must mine it out of the overlaid fairytale, as one must with everything he wrote.

Bobb999

Thanks for the link..and yes the good advice re: the physical response.
Speaking of Burroughs I lived next door to an older/beat/dadaist/shaman/artist/jazz musician/writer/ex heroin addict on the mudflats at Dollarton back in the 60`s..the paranormal phenomena were the "norm" down there for awhile.
On mirrors ..an occassional experience I had was being about to shave in the mirror when I suddenly realized it wasn`t me looking back out of the mirror. I couldn`t recognize the face.. it always had a strange smile.. lasted until I was thoroughly frightened Happened a few times..it was extremely unsettling..no I wasn`t hungover...it never occurred again after I had reached my 20`s. My shaman neighbours wife had the same experience and the same disturbed feelings. She`s the only other one who I know of experiencing this.
Loved the flying dreams...they seemed to stop at puberty...my bedroom as a kid was an attic room and I would float up through the roof . I would then run like hell and leap off the roof and soar! Trouble was..I didn`t know how to stay aloft and travelled in an arc covering about three acres before crashing down through the small trees and saplings to the ground with a Whump!..really hurt...winded ...but the night flying was so wonderful I`d run along the roof and do it again. This must have been what they call astral travelling.
Later in life one time in a bar in Kobe Japan I had the misfortune of being hit over the head with quite a heavy barstool..my antagonist then proceeded to strangle me as I lay unconcious on the floor..suddenly I was floating above the whole scene..looking down at him on top of me pounding my head on the floor and a kindly older gentlemen beside him imploring him to stop as he would kill me. From above it was hilarious..I looked so foolish lying there..and he so foolish pounding my head..I was laughing my head off (literally I guess) Fortunately someone had called the police and I was rescued...the Japanese police thought it all great fun and we shared many laughs on the way to the hoosegow.

My Goodness, bobthecat, that bar story sounds somewhat less than funny to me... but I guess if you're out of your body and feeling no pain, I suppose things may look different from a "bird's eye view"! But how come you were laughing after you were back?

I don't know that I've ever astral travelled myself. Some say everyone has OBEs during sleep though, and that dreaming is or can be an experience of being out on the astral plane.
Certainly I sometimes have some vivid , atmospheric dreams of journeying through strange large buildings with odd architecture or twisting passages or else landscapes. Let's say I'm open minded about the astral travelling during dreaming theory - I'm not necessarily convinced.

I'm afraid I probably had more falling dreams than flying dreams, as a kid! Not nearly as much fun. I don't I either fly or fall much now. Now come to think of it, as a child I had a repeating dream where I was able to fly/float from the top of a staircase in our house to the bottom without touching a step. It seemed like a real experience,not a dream when I was 4 or 5 (-?),such that I remember one day standing awake at the top and coming within a whisker of leaping and believing I'd float. I stopped myself however.
Your flying adventures were much more adventurous, and braver,leaping off house tops and crashing among the trees!

I have in fact heard of mirror gazing leading to seeing your face replaced by a stranger's face, as you experienced. I've seen mediums and others experience this on the Most Haunted TV show from the UK a few times, where they investigate haunted houses. A few times they tried mirror skrying. They used it as a way for spirits to supposedly reveal their image. Several of the non mediums had the experience, for instance, a young woman seeing her face transform into a strange old woman's face. In one case the woman was fairly freaked out by this. Oh, and another time , a non-medium male was mirror gazing and he saw, not his face transform, but the room he was in (it was in a house some hundreds of years old) transformed: the reflection in the mirror showed the room quite changed, the way it might have been a few hundred years previous, and he saw a group of people from another time apparently enjoying a banquet!

Another idea about skrying I've heard of is using it as a way to try to "see your spirit guide".
So what do you think? What could your unknown face have been? A spirit? A guide? No idea?
I tried a little bit of mirror gazing, like 25 years ago, I didn't see faces but, my own face would become very indistinct, hazy, and kind of fade out - in my mind's eye at least!
You lived at Dollarton? Just like Lowry?
I love that area. Well, Indian Arm. I canoe from Deep Cove pretty often, and like to camp on some of the islands or paddle to the top of the Arm, and continue up the Indian River. It's beautful and fairly wild (lots of wildlife), yet so close to Vancouver!

More of them fun coincidences: After I wrote about Burroughs, I checked out the article on "addiction genes" for the 1st time, and who should be mentioned in the article? You guessed it. And it's not as if Burroughs is mentioned on the Tyee every day.

Cheers, all.

I had a friend once who believed that everything that happened to her was sent by the universe to teach her something. While I believe we can and should learn from our experiences, and that much of what befalls us is due to subconscious fears and desires that can appear mysterious, I don't believe there is a greater pattern, a mystic force or design that determines our lives. Although she and I may have dealt with events in our lives in a similar fashion (figure out why it happened, try to do something different next time), this wider belief system divided us.

This being Vancouver, I know a lot of people who think like she does, and this thread has made me wonder exactly why it disturbs me. And I think it's because it seems ultimately so self centred. This friend, and others like her, tend to reject not only scientific and academic models, but even aesthetic standards (for example, you can't say art is good or bad, it's all creative expression). What's important to them is their personal experience, and they find external standards and judgements threatening and alienating.

It also frees them to not hold themselves to any internal standards. After all, if it's all just how we feel or what we like, and if the universe is ultimately inexplicable, and there's a whole bunch of things we don't understand, this doesn't much lend itself to intellectual rigour.

I admire the persistance of James and Shannon, but you can't argue rationally with people who fundamentally reject rationality.

And now they've started talking about their acid flashbacks and flying dreams. How can we discuss something that happened inside their heads? I don't think any of us, no matter how materialistic, deny the phenomenon of hallucinations.

Gotta go. I feel my cat staring at me.

I think she's hungry....

Yes..like Lowry...the spring he mentions was behind my place..the trail he mentions to the spring ran from my tugboat( Superstructure of an old Ocean going Tug, no hull..on a platform up on stilts) to what is now Cates Park. There had been a very large midden at Cates..we would still find small stone beads when sifting the sand at the point. The Park had a large number of psylocibin (sp?) mushrooms every fall. We had somehow come into a canoe carved by Dan George(His reserve was right next to us) that we would paddle about the Arm in...amazing little craft.
Robert Altman used the houseboat as a set in " That Cold Day in The Park" with Sandy Dennis..I think it was his first feature Film or at least the first he made in Canada. His crew replaced some of the stilts in exchange for letting them use it. If you can get hold of the film you can see the houseboat.
It was a magical place.
Your floating down the stairs "Dream" sounds much the same as my crashing about in the trees..probably more stupid than brave. I did later learn how to fly...I really enjoyed showing off...it was like swimming ...using frog like movements to propel oneself..you know the phosphorous in the water when you`re paddling ..the air would sparkle like that when flying ..tinkerbell pixie dust..I had a guide ..who initiated me into how to fly...he was a giant black man..with a great deep laugh very genie-like. The flying dreams were wonderful gifts.
Speculating on the face in the mirror...don`t know if it had a malevolance to it though the surprise and otherworldliness of it gave it somewhat of a sinister hint.
What you`ve mentioned does make me wonder about the house..it was very old..the street was named after the original builder/ inhabitants...the large Maple tree in the front yard had been planted by the Maginnis boys to honor a hanged man they had found in the woods and the Maple sapling was growing beside him.
I found a WW1 German Army Cap under the floorboards in the attic..you know the ones with the red band. My mother dug up a perfectly functional revolver well wrapped up... in the garden with a number of cartridges..she later gave the revolver to an uncle and absent mindedly tossed the cartridges into the woodstove. Luckily no one was hit.
There were "bad vibes" in one room in the house...yes it could very well have been haunted unbeknownst to us.
Probably boring the hell out of people..a little off topic here 999..
I`m going to turn in..Good night to you

Cheers, all.

Dorothy wrote:

Sorry to be a stickler, but you're confusing electrons with photons (which are both waves and particles at the same time). Neither did a father and son each win a Nobel for proving the wave properties and the particle properties.

I completely agree, and I don't think any of Sheldrake's critics would argue that. The problem I, and many of his critics, have of him is that he claims to have valid scientific evidence for his speculations. He does not.

Those are perfectly valid non-scientific questions. Aesthetics, ethics, in fact most human endevor is not conducted according to the rigour of the scientific method. That doesn't mean those things have no value or that they are in any sense inferior, but it does mean you can't call them science.

It does deserve scorn if it claims to be science when it isn't. Let me be a little more specific. Science works in the sense that when the scientific method is followed rigourously it provides the most accurate understanding of the natural world we have available.

People can and will have whatever beliefs they want despite what I say or believe. However, being rigourous when it comes to science is the essense of pragmatism. Why? Because if that rigour is ignored what makes science so useful, specifically its accuracy at reflecting the natural world, will disappear.

I have no problem with people expressing their beliefs in a non-scientific manner. But when people make claims of scientific validity for their beliefs they must be backed up by scientifically valid data.

most reasonably enlightened beings would notice at this point in the discussion that there are threads of agreement above, and that most of us monkeys drift through life on five channels, with the sensory input level knob turned up to 1, and the output volume at 7 . That's "reality".

Some small number of people might dial it up for a thrill, or try another channel out of sheer curiosity. Others are inflicted with an unwanted cascade of sensory input on too many channels, and it drives them bonkers.

To each this is reality. In our good moments we comfort each other in this baffling mystery of Life.

The channels and dials probably go to infinity, but for most of us that we call death.

Wrong again, James Burns. Electrons exhibit wave-particle duality too.

Are you serious?

If you've discovered how to negate the appearance of electrons outside of the nucleus of atoms as waves, you should be submitting an application for a nobel.

Speaking of nobels, have you studied the work of nobel prize winner Brian Josephson, James. He's from Cambridge, too, and his nobel is for physics. He believes the mind can have an effect on matter over distance.

Have you solved the question of whether the observation of physicists on sub-atomic particles effects the behaviour of the particles. If the thread's still open, I'd like to know what you think of Josephson's work.

”Sorry to be a stickler, but you're confusing electrons with photons (which are both waves and particles at the same time). Neither did a father and son each win a Nobel for proving the wave properties and the particle properties.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J.J._Thomson

bobthecat:
I enjoyed reading your stories of living at Cates Park.I've never seen that Altman film. It must be fun and nostalgic for you to see the film nowadays.
The Englishman who used to run Deep Cove Pizza 25 years ago told me he had once worked for North Van. District and he was part of the crew that tore down Lowry's
squat (maybe your place too?).
Did you ever find any native pictographs? I've only searched north of Deep Cove (I actually live in Vancouver)so far, and have found 4 pictograph sites, some with numerous images: No doubt records of dreams from vision quests.
I'm curious about what might lie south of Deep Cove...I wonder what natives would think about flying dreams? Gifts from guardian spirits associated with the eagle, or other bird maybe?

Although I've probably always been open minded about hauntings, it wasn't an area
I gave a whole lot of thought to till I started watching these apparently documentary shows on the W network investigating hauntings ("Fraud! Wishful thinking! Gullibility!", I can hear the sceptics roar!). Perhaps they're more common than I thought!

The mediums who claim to know about this area describe 2 basic types of hauntings:
1)a spirit present 2) residual energy
The residual energy theory says the past
of a house can kind of imprint on the site. A sensitive person supposedly can get images of the types of people who were there, and in a general sense what went on there typically, and perhaps pick up an happy or unhappy atmosphere.
Perhaps you were picking up either residual energy at your house, spirit phenomena, or both!

The spirits theory says there can be earthbound spirits who are stuck here.
But other spirits supposedly come "in visitation" back to where they once lived, to visit periodically. Otherwise, they are in the "upper levels" so to speak.
Dr. Gary Schwartz, a Arizona U. prof. has
published scientific studies (The Afterlife Experiments)suggesting strongly that certain mediums have the abilities they claim to have. As he did more and more studies, he made every effort to make his methodology more and more bullet proof, including double blind studies between mediums and "sitters" where they could not see or communicate with each other.

flying fish: Your handle suggests you have yearnings to fly too!
(Perhaps you're secretly envious of bobthe cat's superior attainments in this area!)

I actually agree with you with regard to people like your friend who feel that everything they're faced with or that they experience in life is "for a reason", part of some plan or other.
In my view there's a lot of apparent randomness, not to mention cruelty and obvious unfairness in life, that does not demonstrate a divine "plan".
Carl Jung coined the term "synchronicity" as an umbrella concept for a variety of paranormal and meaningful coincidence phenomena. Jung said his theory did not suggest that there is some kind of universal harmony, as such, as one can't help but be impressed by the amount of apparent disharmony in the world, as well as the occasional demonstrations of sometimes seemingly miraculous harmony.

Those who believe that everything "works out as it's supposed to", like you're friend, are being naive, IMO.

Hi folks,

I'm looking to talk to people involved in Integralism, and I thought there might be some enthusiasts following this thread.

If you want to talk about it, I'd appreciate your help. I'm trying to understand what it's about. You can reach me at

Many thanks!

S.

Note to Truman and Dorothy: Is it fun yet (arguing with Burns)?!

...I was kind of hoping sub-atomic and quantum physics might come into the thread. I don't feel qualified enough to comment on many specifics.

A general observation and comment:

From what I have read, many findings of modern physics - including quantum entanglement, indeterminacy, the observer effect on particles, etc., suggest that the processes underlying
physical reality seem to defy so-called "common sense". At the subatomic level, the Universe is rather spooky, you could say. Was it Neils Bohr, one of quantum physics' pioneers, who said something to the effect that anyone who's
view of reality isn't completely bowled over by the findings of quantum mechanics, hasn't yet understood it -?

Whether quantum physics provides a basis for and the beginnings of an explanation of paranormal activity is a point of debate. I'm glad Truman cited Dr. Josephson (someone I wasn't familiar with), a nobel physicist who takes seriously the paranormal and how physics might apply to the whole question of it. He's not unique. There appear to be many very qualified physicists who are working in the same directiuon as Josephson. It's true the other side is well represented too among physicists, the naysayers. But the pro-paranormal physicists are growing in number.

But the sceptics can NOT now claim that their materialist view is confirmed by scientific findings in physics as undersood by qualified scientists, even leaders (like Josephson) in the field!

The sceptics would prefer the world to look like this:

Leading scientists all making findings and theories consistent with the sceptics' materialist view, and scientists all explaining the universe and its processes in this strictly materialist fashion - while "regular folk" who are open to paranormal explanations are the uninformed, the gullible, the wishful thinkers of the world. It is thus the moral duty of those in the know - the scientists - to gently (or not so gently) lead the rest of us
poor ignorant, superstitious savages into the light of day!

Too bad for the sceptics, the world is NOT "unfolding as it should" for them!
On the contrary, it appears a non-materialist paradigm is gaining, not losing adherents
,perhaps most most importantly among serious, qualified, even leading scientists!

What do the sceptics make of this challenging development?

Bobb999, here's just one of the things that happened out at that Langley house.

Many times I'd hear a female voice humming. One time when my girlfriend was staying with me we had a little argument and she got up and said, "I'm sleeping in the other room." So she went in the other room and pretty soon called out for me to cut the stupid humming out. After many exchanges between us; her telling me to stop and me denying it, she came back to my room and of course, no humming. But when I was by myself the humming was fairly routine.

As I said, my explanations, before I finally accepted that something was going on, got as strange as the occurrences. Sometimes when I'd hear the humming I'd rush outside hoping to catch the neighbour who was playing tape recordings to freak me out.

That's about the only remotely humourous thing that happened. The rest of the occurrences were basically just upsetting and scary.

About the end of the third year, I was sitting on the front porch and this yellow truck comes along and parks on the road. The driver gets out with a bunch of kids, and I walk up the driveway and ask him what's up. He asked me if the place was still haunted and if I'd seen the ghost yet. He was from Alberta and was just passing through on his way to Vancouver and thought he'd stop and show his kids the haunted house he used to live in back in the sixties.

I think I was out of there maybe three days later, because I couldn't deny it any longer.

I'm not telling if I ever saw the ghost, because I've already permanently labelled myself as "flakey."

But hey, it happened. (And lots more, trust me.)

Honest, Charles C.

Could I just have the seven numbers for the next Lucky 7 draw? Should be a piece of cake, really...

Truman:

It may also interest to explore the M-theory and its connection to ancient cosmologies and philosophies.

One of the references on Brian Josephson is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_David_Josephson

and from there onto

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicate_order

which last one mentions Buddhism, which is derived from the Vedic tradition of Northern India and the Kushan empire. Other developments of that same tradition are still to be found among western branches of Indo-european paganism, such as Celtic tradition and, even more profoundly, Norse paganism. The cosmologies of these, as well as cabbalistic cosmology appears to incorporate some of the fundamental ideas of M-theory, even to the number of dimensions, which, although I cannot account for how, have been intuitively gleaned by the old religions. It is known, according to the above reference, that Albert Einstein was interested in Buddhism.

There is much more than meets the eye, and, more importantly, many things never will meet the eye, such as these tightly curled dimensions of M-theory, isn’t it indeed a wonderful world?

http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gr/public/qg_ss.html

The M-theory makes plenty of room for tools to disappear and reappear. Science or no science – in such cases, it is smarter and cheaper to call on a shaman, of which there are many, also ‘white ones’. They don’t hang out a shingle, for there is a tendency for monotheistic insitutions to want to burn them.

Thanks for providing a great link on Josephson, Dorothy.

And something else: If you recall serveral posts ago I said this:

"My current view, which I'm working on, is that the material (the brain) is essentially an analogue or hologram of the mind, not only of the organism, but of the universe."

So here I am, following your link regarding Josephson and I come across this, describing David Bohm's view of the mind-brain link: "In collaboration with Stanford neuroscientist Karl Pribram, Bohm helped establish the foundation for Pribram's theory that the brain operates in a manner similar to a hologram."

Bohm calls his theory the "Holonomic Model of the Brain."

I thought I had an original idea, but others seem to be heading in the same direction.

And to me, this is another kind of synchronicity, (perhaps a low-grade event) not acausal, as Jung suggested but causal, and connected by meaning, and ironically a manifestation of Bohm's idea of "holonic" representation. (Arthur Koestler's word--the Ghost in the Machine guy)

All of which, might be meaningful to you, Shannon Rupp, if you're still interested in integralism. See "holon-Ken Wilber-integralism.

Truman (Charles):
I appreciated your sharing part of your (true) ghost story. I sure couldn't live in a house like that. I doubt I'd have lasted as long as you did there.
As far as other phenomena you might have
encountered, might any of these sound familiar at all?...
- Light anomalies: small flickering lights flitting across a room in the dark?
- Other sounds: tapping,
footsteps, talking, laughing, mutterings?
- Physical sensations of being touched or even grabbed?
- Poltergeist phenomena: small objects tossed across a room? Larger objects like furniture lifting or shifting? Doors opening or closing on their own?
- Objects mysteriously disappearing and reappearing?
- Shadowy human-like shapes seen briefly?
- An emotional charge or atmosphere attached to specific rooms?
- Sensations of abrupt temperature changes: a pronounced feeling of cold?
These are all ones commonly occurring in episodes of that darned "Most Haunted" TV show!
Ever seen it? As far as I can tell it's above board. It's very popular in the UK, and has been on for some years. If phenomena were being faked, how could that be kept safely under wraps for many years, through the transitioning of many different crew members who have passed through the show, who conceivably could come out after leaving and accept cash to do a tabloid expose of the "truth" about the fakery of Most Haunted? Especially with the sceptics groups around just itching to "take them down". I've seen sniping and accusations online certainly,
but no true confessions of former employees or hard evidence of fakery.

Your ghostly hum experiences remind me a little of an experience I had hiking the Stein Valley (a sacred place to natives from all around that part of the interior).

I had found a cave near the river,quite a ways down from the trail winding above, the entrance of which I'd recognized from a book about the Stein pictographs, a cave long used for vision questing, with red iron oxide images on the wall, and some recent ones in charcoal.(I'd read that natives were still carrying on the tradition today). My partner and I debated as to who should get to sleep in the narrow cave! Since I'd found it and I was the one studying native lore, I won. Anyway she was off setting up her own camp some ways away. I was just hanging out outside the cave and I began to hear singing! It wasn't my partner singing. I could see where she was quite a ways off. This singing was very close by, such that if it had been an actual person, I couldn't help but be able to see them.It was the voice of a native woman singing. She sang the same rhythmic melody over and over for what seemed like the longest time! There seemed to be words to the song, words I couldn't understand. This wasn't like your ghost in the sense that there was nothing disturbing or frightening about it. Rather it was beautiful and soothing.

Someone might suggest that it may just have been the river sounds playing games with ears and mind. Many people have had the experience of "hearing" distant voices or music triggered by the sound of moving water or wind...hearing "music in the air". I too have had that experience. But this sounded like that type of thing multiplied by a factor of 20. And so clear.

I wish I'd tried to actually get the sound of the apparent words, down on paper, or preserve the tune in my head (not having a tape recorder or knowing music notation), just in case, by chance, it might possibly have been somehow recognizable to a native of the area! But, unfortunately,it wouldn't stay with me for very long, except for the tone and tempo which is still with me.

Sleeping in the cave itself yielded no remembered dreams. It did yield an "attack" by wood rats though, which had been a small plague to us during the 2 week hike. On this occasion I woke up to one scrambling across my leg or something. Worse,in the morning, I found my packsack straps had been chewed nearly through(The rats like the salt taste from sweat)!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J.J._Thomson

Well what do you know, I knew I should have checked electrons. I knew that Newton discovered the wave properties of light, and that Einstien demonstrated its particle propterties, and that that eventually led to the wave-particle duality theory of quantumn mechanics. But I was too tired last night to bother looking up electrons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave-particle_duality

James you said, "I knew that Newton discovered the wave properties of light."

Wrong again. Newton "speculated" that light was comprised of particles, not waves.

Wikipedia, by the way is done by people like you and me, and is continually under upgrading. They tend towards conventionality, but I think they're usually pretty accurate.

Incidentally, regarding gravity...Newton described what it does, but nobody yet knows how it does it. Basically, large objects attract each other just by virture of "being there." Nothing like magnetism does it. The effect is much too small because the equal positive and negative charges nearly cancel each other out. So until physicists figure out how to combine it with the weak, strong,(nuclear forces), and electromagnetic forces, it pretty much remains, "woo woo."

Bobb 999, great story about that singing entity! Regarding your list of occurrences...yeah, about 80% of them, but I'm wimping out about now regarding details, wishing to preserve a tiny trace of credibility, which might be useful in the future, however small.

The following quote is from:

http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~sai/hologram.html

look it up

“In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. … Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart. Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. …”

… Aspect's findings "indicate that we must be prepared to consider radically new views of reality.”

James Burns you must add Alain Aspect to the names of Newton and Einstein.

Dorothy,

Indeed quantum weirdness is amazing and has been debated for 80 years. So far they seem to think that Einstein's relativity still holds, but, unlike with religion, science is always provisional until better evidence comes along. It's almost a certainty that Einstein's work will be added to and altered as we find out more about nature.

The study of the quantum world is a great contrast to Mr. Sheldrake's work. Quantum theory is based on reproducible data and years of extraordinarily precise experimentation. It has a strong mathematical and theoretical basis, and it's predictive to incredible degrees of accuracy. In other words, it's strange, but it's real. Personally (and I know this is subjective) I don't feel I need "other realities". This world, the one that includes us, and quantum strangeness, is so magnificent, why invent others?

If Sheldrake is ever able to do the kind of work that has been done in physics, and show that what he is talking about is real, then great. More knowledge is what we are all after. So far, I think Sheldrake has fallen far short, and condidering the poor quality of his work so far, I wouldn't hold my breath for any great additions to our knowledge of nature from him.

I have heard other commentators here, and have also heard Sheldrake imply, that this is all a bit of a popularity contest, with an attitude that "if we get enough people to believe our view, then we win". That's fine in politics, but it's a lousy way of figuring out how nature works. To give one example; evolution is a fact. It doesn't matter if a single human "believes" in it, nature doesn't care what we think, and organisms will continue evolving as long as there is life on Earth. Again, just to give my personal view, for what it's worth, I think that believing in what has been called "woo woo", or "religion", is like looking at the world through a veil. Once the veil is lifted, the real beauty of the universe hits us right between the eyes.

Booker claims" "evolution is a fact."

Well, Book, a certain interpretation of your claim is true; If one means that from the earliest prokaryotes to the emergence of eukaryotes, to invertebrates, to vertebrates to primates, then homo sapiens with consciousness...If this is what you mean by "evolution," then yes, this seems to be irrefutable.

But! The real question is about HOW.

The conventional thought is still that it happens by natural selection; that is the environment selecting the best-adapted "variety" of a species.

There are many falsifications of this, in fact so many that theorists had to use the idea that "mutations" were the vehicle by which evolution occurred. Mutations, again, random nucleotide sequence arrangement errors. The problem with this is that mutations are never global enough to do much more than change the fractals on the wings of a butterfly, and the claim that they could precipitate speciation requires little more than "faith," as does that old "spotted moth" fairy tale about industrial melanism in Britain.

I'm not the first to suggest that "mutations" rescued the idea of "natural selection" from its well-earned demise.

Wherever I go in my complement of cerebral neurons, Sheldrakes's "formative causation" seems to fit. From my own "variant saturation" theory of evolution, to my suspicion of a hologramic connection between brain and mind; to David Bohm, Ken Wilber and Karl Pribram's "Holonic Model of the Brain; to Richard Feynman's "sum over histories," to Einstein's "special relativity," where the speed of light remains the same for all observers, whether riding on his train or watching it go by; to the quantum physics mystery of observer interference in viewing the subatomic; and even to the ghost in that Langley farmhouse.

All of it, as Sheldrake somehow figured out, is dependent upon and brilliantly described by the idea of "FORMATIVE CAUSATION," and occurs by virtue of morphic reasonance--in morphic fields, and intuitively, bolstered by his view that the "the presence of the past" is a necessary condition for the existence of the world.

It seems to me, with all due respect, Shannon, (because I have appreciated all of your other stuff on Tyee) that if you really understood what Sheldrake was talking about, you'd be emailing him requesting further enlightenment.

Truman:
80%?! It sounds like you experienced a classic haunting alright.
One other one I neglected to include in my list is phenomena involving electronics or appliances: turning on by themselves, for instance (supposedly not uncommon)

You yourself happen to know pretty much for certain that hauntings take place, that conventional explanations just cannot account for, especially considering the variety and number of phenomena you witnessed over several years!
If some of the sceptics were tossed into the same situation, they might find themselves broadening their view fairly quickly!

I should say that most people who believe in things like telepathy, do so, NOT out of "faith", wishful thinking, or wanting to believe. They believe because they personally have experienced
first hand perhaps striking examples of such phenomena. Also, over the course of my life I have met a handful of people who were obviously gifted in this area, such that, ESP ability for them was
a fact of their daily life, a habit. One of my best friends in high school, at around age 18 began to develop pronounced abilities of telepathy. Once the thought of a family friend came into his mind along with the idea of "heart" - so, he had the impression: "Mr. X - heart!, Mr. X - heart!", repeatedly. Only later it was learned Mr. X had indeed had a heart attack. Such accurate perceptions became a habit for my friend. This is just one small example.

A one time girlfriend of my brother had
similar abilities. One example: The two of them attended some public event, a boat show, I think, and at some exhibit she got into a conversation with a girl she'd never met.
She said to the girl: "You dance, don't you?" The girl was rather floored, admitting that yes, studying modern dance
was one of her main interests.
Again, this is only one small example.This woman demonstrated such abilities habitually.

I believe in ESP because of an insurmountable stack of evidence : from my own first hand experience, plus having known some really talented psychics,plus the many statistically valid results of Sheldrake and others. The sceptical view simply doesn't account for my data. My belief comes out of data, not
wishful thinking.

I continued to be open mindedly sceptical about survival of personal consciousness after death for much of my life. In recent years, I lean towards accepting there most likely is consciousness survival after death. The growing evidence from mediums (including a number of readings I personally received), including Dr. Schwartz's scientific studies of mediums, as well as evidence for hauntings, is pretty convincing to me.

I bet it's the same with most who are believers in the paranormal. They believe because of convincing data from their own experience, and perhaps from exposure to scientific data such as Sheldrake's confirming their own experiences.

I liked a quote I found by Nobel physicist Dr. Brian Josephson (thanks for directing my attention to him Truman!)in a google search. He noted that there is: much more evidence for ESP than there is for superstrings, for instance, and, unlike superstrings, ESP is replicable in the laboratory.

In other words, the sceptical physicist is prepared to accept the idea that there are many "extra" dimensions underlying reality (as superstring theory says), without replicable proof of such dimensions, yet are at the same time insistent on rejecting ESP, something many (perhaps most)people believe they personally have experienced, and which has been repeatedly demonstrated in the laboratory.

Accepting superstrings, and rejecting ESP
appears to be sheer prejudice or bigotry. Fanaticism, anyone?

I agree with Truman that there is likely more to the evolutionary process than the materialist view allows for.
The Universe appears to possess underlying intelligence. I don't claim to understand this intelligence. I certainly don't believe it's an "individual entity", a Big Dude in the sky. I'm kind of partial to the idea of a decentralized intelligence which Eastern philosophies allude to. That evolution is due entirely to blind accidental processes appears to me highly unlikely, considering the incredible sophistication, exquisiteness, and some amazingly precise, specialized adaptations to environments, that have the "wow" factor, in spades. "It's an accident" doesn't adequately explain, for me.

Booker: I'm all for the "popularity contest" you mention. The sceptical-materialist view appears to be losing ground among both the scientific community, as well as among the public at large. I welcome this wholeheartedly. For one thing, it allows for a more open debate. The persecutorial tendencies of the sceptics groups (their ugliest side, revealing a mean spirited fanaticism) will be less poisonous or successful. Note UBC's response to the sceptics complaining about their bringing in Sheldrake to speak: Basically UBC responded by saying Sheldrake's work appears credible enough, and they make no apologies for airing his interesting work [so f-off you narrow minded fanatics! - (my subtext!)]. 30 years ago, it might have a been different story - UBC might actually haved caved, or "compromised".

20 or 30 years ago I believe the sceptics had more clout, and actually got away more often with threatening and frightening institutions into censoring
researchers, or worse, firing them, for simply looking into phenomena generally accepted and apparentlyexperienced, across all cultures, across all of history, from the dawn of humankind to present...Can't we please just look into this area, common to mankind, if we want to? Who says they have the moral right to say NO?

If the non-materialist paradigm is gaining in the popularity contest, I'm very happy about it. We can have real open debate now, and less persecutory chill, censorship, hounding, and the damaging of careers of brave scientists in the vanguard, like Sheldrake.

Okay Bobb999 and Truman,

If were voting on reality, I vote for this

venganza.org

As you say, scientists are flocking to it.

Bobb999, so glad you posted that quote waaaay back there now from daelm. I think it lies at the center of this issue...in its questioning of the need to sort things into neatly packaged separate little boxes of "knowing".... so that the interconnections between things become viewed as threatening to the "sealed and labeled " contents of the box.... which was the point MetisGirl made so well in her comment, I think.

I would think genuine scepticism would involve a necessary open-mindedness towards enquiry...

"And going on, we come to things like evil, and beauty, and hope...
Which end is nearer to God; if I may use a religious metaphor. Beauty and hope, or the fundamental laws? I think that the right way, of course, is to say that what we have to look at is the whole structural interconnection of the thing; and that all the sciences, and not just the sciences but all the efforts of intellectual kinds, are an endeavor to see the connections of the hierarchies, to connect beauty to history, to connect history to man's psychology, man's psychology to the working of the brain, the brain to the neural impulse, the neural impulse to the chemistry, and so forth, and up an down, both ways. And today we cannot, and it is no use making believe that we can, draw carefully a line all the way from one end of this thing to the other, because we have only just begun to see that there is this relative hierarchy. And I do not think either end is nearer to God." -- Richard Feynman

You're right Lynn, skepticism is questioning. I couldn't agree more. Back in the day (at least in the West) when superstition and religion ruled, it was believed that humans were not interconnected with nature. We ruled the roost. When people started to practice science, those beliefs lessened, though they are still very strong in Christian circles. The interconnectedness was discovered by questioning superstition. The First Nations were found to be right.

Booker, I got my first inkling that something was amiss with the natural selection-mutation model of evolution, by watching David Suzuki (back in the early 70's on his Nature of Things tv show), constantly repeating his mantra that nature "knows" this and nature "knows" that and such stuff as nature "provides" this or whatever.

Which got me to thinking: "Well here we have this well-known evolutionist ranting constantly about what nature knows, but who still figures that speciation is done by random couplings between the environment and variations of species.

Something didn't appear to fit, because Suzuki seemed to be in a constant state of intellectual confusion--at least conlict--on this issue.

Either there is a teleological component to speciation or there is not.

When I started to examine the theory--and I didn't stop until well into the nineties--it seemed to me to be little more than a fantasy based on faith--and Suzuki was proclaiming that "nature" acted with regard to all of these anthropomorphic contingences for reasons based on world view ideology rather than intellectual rigour.

I'll just remind you of what Gene Myers, the computor scientist who designed the human genome map proclaimed, "The system is extremely complex. It's like it was designed. There's a huge intelligence here. I don't see that as being unscientific. Others might but not me."
(quoted from Elizabet Sahtouris, "A Message To Us From Our Genome")

It's unfortunate that the religionists have taken "intelligent design" for their own, because the theory, in fact, provides nothing which would bolster anyone's chauvinistic pretense to have special or inspired knowledge about the character of or intentions of god.

I don't know...perhaps popularity, in the end is a hindrance...it is such a lightweight flimsy thing..... maybe the fringe is the best place to be in the scientific community.

I think Sheldrake's theory that our cells have a memory far older than our bodies, a collective unconscious of biology that proves our interconncectedness is highly worthy of further exploration.

He has interesting things to say in regards to sleep as well, a really uncharted territory, where we all quite willingly go, indeed spend a great portion of our life, and return, not knowing much about where we have been...and yet we all quite willingly go there again night after night...so there is definitely a draw but what exactly is it?

Sheldrake is just not afraid to venture in the darkness...in the chaotic mystery of uncertainty...and he pays the price for it.

In one of the most beautiful poems ever, Rilke, writes of Sheldrake's chosen territory for exploration.... our divine interconnectedness:

You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything;
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them!—
powers and people—

and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.

I have tried several times to post on this topic, but for some reason, am repeatedly unsuccessful.

I live in a haunted house - very real, and experienced by more than myself.

There is an intelligence in nature - no doubt. A blood vessel will seal itself closed when severed. We have trillions of cells in our bodies - all communicating with each other, yet we are unconcious of this communication - although it is happening within the bodies that we inhabit. If we look at the idea of a holographic universe, each tiny part is a microcosm of the whole. The Earth - or Gaia - can be no more aware of us as individuals than we are aware of each individual cell in our own bodies, but it is all part of the greater whole.

Jung and Bohr communicated with each other a fair bit regarding non-local effect. Tesla did some pretty weird stuff too - including instantaneous transmissions between Earth and Mars. Einstein computed that "God" must exist.

No mention of the Pineal Gland in all of this. No one really knows the function of the Pineal - it is thought to be a vestigial organ (?) related to extra-sensory perception. My own sense of smell, hearing, touch, and vision are much more acute than most peoples, and my "sixth sense" also seems to be much more acute than most peoples. There are many people whose sensitivity is much greater than my own.

My dogs can smell and hear things that I cannot, and my cats can see and hear even more. We have senses that are capable discerning of a very limited range of light, sound and smell, but all of those higher and lower frequencies are still there.

A few years ago, a team of quantum physicists observed one photon in two places simultaneously, and postulated that there may be only one photon in our universe - everywhere simultaneously. Eleven dimensions have been identified, and it is thought that there are about 27 than can be observed. I personally believe that there are most likely infinite dimensions. Most accept that our universe, time and space are infinite, in which case, possibilities must also be infinite. Our biggest limitation as a species is hubris - in my humble opinion.

New species are constantly being discovered - last week 7 marine species were discovered off the Eastern coast of Canada. Volcanic vents support life around them at temperatures that would cook most terrestrial life forms.

The sum of human knowledge is miniscule compared to what we don't know, and labelling something "woo-woo" because we have not quantified it is kinda limiting.

Well, it worked! It's too bad my previous attempts failed, because they were much more concise, but I did not want to spend another hour re-iterating in vain.

It's funny how many billions of people believe in "God(s)" that they have never seen, and cannot be quantified, but have so much trouble believing in something that has been observed by so many.

Booker Wrote:

“Personally (and I know this is subjective) I don't feel I need "other realities". This world, the one that includes us, and quantum strangeness, is so magnificent, why invent others? “

I take it that you’re asking me a serious question here, not just observing that you’ve got one up on me, because, as you obviously believe, I’m in the business of ‘inventing other realities’, while you’re not subject to such follies.

I think what the ‘quantum strangeness’ brings home is, that we are all looking through a veil. Science as it stands today has been likened to little islands floating on the ocean of a mighty big planet, according to some of the previosuly mentioned references. Scientists have just decided, that this is all one planet, not, as was first suggested, different planets.

My own favorite metaphor is, that science is like the little network patches of bloodvessels growing out on the surface of an embryo. Eventually, they will come together to form an entire vascular ssystem, but all in good time.

Until we understand the entire picture, we cannot say that someone’s grasp on reality is more serious or sober or credible that anyone else’s. There is a tendency for people engrossed in science to somehow set up an intellectual hierarchy, just as you have done, where religious people, those with a ‘God-shaped hole in their head’, are the dumb suckers who think they can dream their way to everything and make shortcuts, while scientists are the adult, intelligent, serious workers, who are the only ones deserving of any credibility among equally adult, serious people. It irks that group mightily, that religious people appear to think that they can pick up things intuitively, which ‘real’ people work long and hard, and rigorously, to establish.

If indeed the universe is one big hologram, there is actually nothing strange in that. Why would we, who ourselves are holographic projections, but part of the big underlying ‘something’, why would we not come equipped with some of the deeper understading ‘for free’. It may not be translatable into ‘proper scientific terms’, but it may still be findable by way of deep focusing of our consciousness and what we term ‘vision questing’ for lack of a better term.

I don’t believe it is a question of ‘needing other realities’. I believe it is a recognition, that our grip on ‘reality’ is much more tenouous than we like to believe, this including scientists. I believe it is about having the guts to admit we are afloat on the open sea, that we don’t know from where we come, and to where we are going, and yet try to live a decent, productive life with what direction we ourselves can devise, in the form of our best pragmatic evaluation, guidance of ‘the Gods’, or whatever works. If we have a mad drive to know it all, I believe we are doomed to meet with disappointment, but it is fun to try, just don’t get nasty and condescending about the directions other people take in their quest. By what standard do you decide yours is superior, or start drawing boundaries and making snide definitions? It would seem to me, that by doing so, you are seeking to become the God you are busily denying to be needing for anything.

Glad somebody finally mentioned 'Gaia'. Been reading this for an hour or two wondering how I could bring Lovelock's ideas into the mix just to agitate things a bit. Thanks to solipsist.

"..wondering how I could bring Lovelock's ideas into the mix just to agitate things a bit."

So, when are you going to bring them in, West?

I tried to Google the man, but did not see anything that seemed to apply to Rupert Sheldrake's thoughts or the discussion of them. We must realize Mr. Sheldrake is in trouble with 'the establishment', and so efforts at supporting him should be well founded, since he isn now a hero of the people.

dorothy

is what solipsist wrote above.

Gaia is the name James Lovelock gave to his holistic conception of the multiple mechanisms that, working together, provide the tenuous balance which makes continued life here on earth possible.

You can find a good deal of information here:
http://www.ecolo.org/lovelock/
And plenty more if you're interested. Enjoy.

His latest book is entitled:
The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back - and How We Can Still Save Humanity

What all this has to do with the present subject should be clear when you've read what Lovelock said decades ago about where we were heading, at our peril, if we did not attend to the way we were injecting atmospheric carbon into a complex and not necessarily passively correcting system. The point being, it seems to me, that we need both an empathetic (qua Sheldrake and a deeper investigation of the powers of the mind) and a scientific approach to understand the complexity and interdependency of the multiple systems of which humankind is merely one aspect.

Truman,

Your theory of "unnatural selection" is certainly creative. Your characterizations of evolutionary biology are factually wrong. There have been one or two scientific papers published on the subject over the last 150 years -- try reading some of them. If you are relying on Sheldrake for your science then something will happen to your mind, but "enlightenment" is not the right word.

http://talkorigins.org/

Booker, I suppose you're referring to my claim that Darwin got it all wrong by proposing that sexual selection, and even his more generalized "natural selection" could be the vehicle of speciation because it claimed that the strongest or "fittest" individual was selected as precursor for speciation.

My idea is that the most archetypical genomic complement is contained in the "fittest," and by virtue of this individual being most likely to pass its genes on to the next generation, this is actually a device by which the species is maintained, NOT CHANGED.

And I think that any reasonably intelligent person will see the logic of my claim.

Think about it, Book. The neo-darwinians introduced the idea that evolution was a result of the environment "selecting" the most suitable mutation.

Let me ask you this: Is it not the most fit specimen which is LEAST likely to have mutations among its genes or alleles? If you have been following the progression of information about mutations you will realize that they are usually retrograde or degenerate.

(Don't be too easily persuaded that H5NI will suddenly upgrade to providing Pharmacorpia with billions of vaccine dollars).

Take a look at genetic diseases, for example, which are caused by mutations. Huntington's, sickle cell, are good examples, or the types of breast cancers that are caused my mutations in a certain line of sequences.

So, Book, the individuals without mutations are the best archetypes. They "preserve" the genotype, phenotype and genome, therefore the SPECIES.

And exactly how can "mutations" play such a pivotal role in speciation if the "most fit" organisms have the smallest number of them?

I do not propose this "archetype selection" as the cause of speciation, only as an alternate conclusion regarding's Darwin's "natural selection."

For Darwin to use the word for "natural" as a description of his theory regarding speciation, is somewhat meaningless. Similar to "the survival of the fittest," anything can be proposed as "natural," if one believes that it is true.

As you'll recall, I think my "variant saturation," is a better description of speciation than "natural selection," because it proposes that there is some kind of necessary limit to the kind and number of variations that can occur before a species becomes extinct. And a similar "saturation" appears to explain hybridization. This admittedly requires a teleologic, or at least algorithmic involvement, and it might be so generalized that it is actually not falsifiable, but it's my personal, original proposition.

And yes, I maintain that according to conventional evolutionary theory, it is just as likely for the weakest, least fit, to have its genes alter the next generation, because the genes of the strongest are primarily archetypical--and that all of that fighting those male mountain sheep and deer and wild horses are doing, is actually brilliantly, (but cruelly) devised by nature as a method of HOMEOSTASIS, not EVOLUTION.

See what I mean, Booker?

Name calling and innuendo are not usually recognized as debate, by the way, but rather the last refuge of a....oops.

Actually, I'm being a bit coy about Darwin's big idea. I really think that the second law of thermodynamics renders it not only implausible, but laughable.

What do you think, Book? And maybe drop the links for a bit. Got any thoughts of your own on this?

Lynn: Thanks for the Feynman quote, about the need to find interconnections, and for what you said about the unfortunate tendency to separate everything into "separate boxes of knowing" This is food for thought.
I fear this is a drawback of our current state of knowledge and academia:
The "curse of specialization"! It's likely largely due to the sheer volume of knowledge that has accumulated to this point, which demands that someone wanting to learn and master a field of study, must choose a rather narrow path or box. I read somewhere that the last mathematician (I forget his name)who was entirely knowledgable and up to date with mathematics in all its branches of the time, lived early in the 20th century . Mathematicians today can only hope to master and stay current with a particular branch of mathematics that they've decided on, leaving them "stuck in their box".

I agree with Feynman that many more interdisciplinary studies need to be encouraged in order to try to bridge some of these gaps that have been created by so much specialization where "never the twain (or more)shall meet"!

Thanks for the Rilke poem. For some reason it made me think of black cats!
And how black cats were not only deemed unlucky, but used to be persecuted and killed in Europe because they'd become associated with the "Devil's darkness"! I thought, well, as a cat lover who has had several lucky and lovable black cats, including 1 currently (my furniture might hold a differing opinion!)

I'm on about this 'cause I was pleased by an entertaining chain, and a synchronicity, that followed:
The black cats train of thought caused me to suddenly recall in detail,a dream from early this morning,the most vivid dream I've had in weeks, which had to do partly with a large number of semi-feral cats, many of which were black , which roamed an area where my car had become stranded.

The coincidence part is that moments after recalling my cat dream I came upon a Guardian article, entitled, "Claws Out Over Hemingway's Six-Toed Cats". It describes how Hemingway's former house has been preserved as a tourist destination, as have descendents of the writer's unusual 6 toed cats. It's believed 46 such cats roam the Hemingway property! (Some local politicians are now persecuting the cats via the property owners, by proposing to fine them $200 a day for illegally "exhibiting" the cats!)

On the value of being on the fringe.
Certainly scientists in the vanguard with challenging new ideas are often initially "fringers". Nothing wrong with that!
I just want to see "fringe [I]boosting" be popular enough among the scientific community to ensure that censorship and persecution/career damaging of those on the fringe, no longer occurs. Just give them room to explore "out there", unmolested, please.

Gee, in my prior post,I didn't intend all those darned italics!

Well said. Couldn't agree more.

I reaally enjoyed reading your comment. I was always a [I]"dog" person, until a starving black cat that could hardly walk turned up at our door. At first we made a little home for her in our woodshed... but you know how cats work themselves into your hearts...after awhile, somehow she ended up on a down-filled cushion on the most comfortable chair in the house. She was one of those wise old soul cats and I always thought I saved her life until I realized that she really saved mine...a long story ...won't go there.

So I think you're right on, Bobb999, about Rilke's mysterious "darkness that pulls everything in"...including serendipity and black cats ...oooo...I can hear the sceptics wincing ;-)....frankly, Scarlett....

To the person who wrote that...I doubt many people on this board are qualified to design a research study never mind critique the merits of one conducted by a reputable scientist. If you can describe in detail how Sheldrake's research is flawed, please do so. I take it you're skilled in this area?

Lynn: So black cats are "resonating' today, it seems. That's great you've had a lucky black cat too! It all fits together so...harmoniously. From the woodshed to queen of the living room...yes, I can understand how
this can easily happen.

I love to see non-cat type people get "converted". Same thing happened to my brother who went from "I just don't like them", for most of his life (I think it actually stemmed from a dangerous childhood asthma attack triggered by a cat's fur), to today being completely devoted to dumpster diving stray that won him over.

I have a couple of Rilke books around someplace I've never done more than just begin, then put aside. (I'm afraid I accumulate books faster than I read them). I must look those up again.

Hi, Truman:

I have meant to address this, but keep getting caught up with people who insist on invoking deities and spouting dogma instead of the intended scientific discussion. Suzuki and Lovelace may be elder-kin to some, but to me they're just old hat romantics. And I don't need to wax poetic about the old mother in order to figure that if we mess with her beyond her capacity, we do ourselves in. Pragmatic insight will do, thank you. Can temple bells and legal cannabis be far away? I pity Rupert Sheldrake, who no doubt is trying frantically to distance himself from these fast friends who may do nothing other than damage his credibility. The discussion as I understand it runs: should the so-called 'paranormal' be credited and taken into the field of science and studied, as possibly the only (so far) discernible manifestations of all 'the weird stuff' the quantum mechanics is unearthing (pun intended)?

Back to your postulate. You wrote:

"My idea is that the most archetypical genomic complement is contained in the "fittest," and by virtue of this individual being most likely to pass its genes on to the next generation, this is actually a device by which the species is maintained, NOT CHANGED."

Completely logical, but think about this for a moment: in a subtropical climate, a species of fox lives. There are various variants, some poor freaks with a thicker fur coat, leading marginal lives and never getting a date, sweltering in the heat every summer. Suddenly, due to a cosmic catastrophe, the climate is no longer subtropical, but subarctic. Can you imagine who now suddenly have the upper hand? You’re right, the former 'poor freaks'. I think this is where selection and change comes in. This is a drastic example to illustrate, but you get the drift. The other factor is the built-in entrepreneurship of life. It will fill the available niches eventually, when the right set of mutations adds up to being suited for the less attractive, less 'easy' habitats. A good example is the development of human blood types. Read up on them under these web sites:

http://anthro.palomar.edu/vary/vary_3.htm

http://www.dadamo.com/napharm/store3/template2/encyclopedia.html

This is a more subtle and less flogged-to-death example than Darwin’s remarkable group of finches on Galapagos, which had evolved from its shared origins to fill all the niches normally taken up by other species, which were not present on Galapagos.
I should add, that the views expressed are still somewhat controversial, but makes interesting reflections on the evolutionary parameters nevertheless. The most important reason, I believe, for their being controversial is their actual use of the 'R' word.

THE 23 ENIGMA AND SYNCHRONICITY

Are any synchronicity buffs out there familiar with the "great 23 enigma", the strange case of # 23?
Seeing this headline in today's Washington Post brought it all back to mind:
"At Least 23 Killed in Ambush Near Baghdad".
25 years ago I first encountered the novel idea that "23" appeared to occur with mysterious frequency in headlines and news accounts of deaths and tragedies.
As far as I know, William Burroughs was first to notice this odd pattern, and he began collecting scrapbooks of "23s". For a while, I too recorded such 23s I noticed. Within days of first reading Burroughs' stuff on 23 (in '82), I saw in The Province paper the headline "Indian Plane Hits Mountain, 23 Soldiers Die", ...which turned out to be just the beginning of a long chain of unhappy 23s in the news that has lasted till today. The morbidity of the whole thing, however, caused me to soon cease keeping track, although I couldn't help but notice when I (frequently) heard or saw one. My reaction has become something like:
"Not that damned death dealing number again!", attended by some irritation.

Someone might say, "ah, but you're simply noticing 23 more than other numbers
'cause you're conditioned to look for them". I would be open to such an explanation except that the frequency of 23s seems to argue strongly against it!
With so much murder and mayhem in the news in recent weeks, months, and years, there's been a veritable parade of deadly 23s in the news I've noticed.

Although I haven't done a statistical analysis, it would certainly make a good subject for research (if someone hasn't already done it): One could search a particular paper's archives over a given period (the longer the period, the better the sample). Each time a number ,say, any number in double digits or above, appeared in a headline or news story associated with death or disaster, tally it. You might consider including variations such as 2300, 230,223,etc. I think it extremely likely that 23 would appear at or near the top for yielding the most tally marks. The old standby, #13, wouldn't even be close in the running!
I'd bet some serious money on it.

WHY 23 should have this disconcerting association, I haven't the slightest clue.

Hi Dorothy. I think Darwin's finches represent one of the all time hoaxes of evolutionary contemplation.

If I can get this right...The definition of a species is a group of organisms, any member of which can successfully couple with another and produce live offspring--and I might add, even in vitro, if this should become necessary.

And I bet this applies to his land iquana--marine iquana dichotomy also. I doubt if either of these "clinical couplings" has been done by scientists, though, as I'm sure they wouldn't want to be responsible for ruining Darwin's sudden Galapogos revelation.

Consider breeds of dog. A little Shih-Tzu is quite unlike a Great Dane, or Newfoundlander. But are these animals members of the same, or different species? Answer, as I'm sure you know, is that they're members of the same species, and if they could overcome problems due to shyness and gravity they'd have no problems at all in this regard.

Darwin's finches, though having different beak shapes, are all finches--just different varieties.

So the different environments on Galapogos didn't add up to a hill of beans, certainly not speciation.

I'd better go, I'm anxious to read your blood type links.

I have an old black cat (16 years old). She is lovely.

Great post all, thanks.

P.

RTB

With Lynn and RTB now, I think we have the nucleus for the start of a new movement: A "Rehab the reps of black cats, and restore them to their rightful place in world" movement!

Kwilson wrote:

To the person who wrote that ... duh.

I am skilled in this area. I also know how to read. I can, for example, read and understand the significance of the words "pseudo-randomization artifact."

Evidently you believe that I ought to satisfy your request to provide a meta-analysis of Rupert Sheldrake's so-called research. I believe otherwise. Since I see no point in re-inventing the wheel, I will direct you to a couple of articles whose content I am in full agreement with -- not that you're likely to do anything but reject their conclusions anyway (this is about as pointless as debating with Jehovah's Witnesses) but here they are:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=13&articleID=00022BBF-C300-1353-830083414B7FFE9F

http://www.csicop.org/si/2000-09/staring.html

The Scientific American is a little publication Sheldrake doesn't have a hope in hell of having the results of his work published in. It's all an evil materialist conspiracy, of course. I'm surprised this thread has gone on this long. I'm surprised Rupert Sheldrake has never won the Nobel Prize. Oh well. Another conspiracy, no doubt. Adieu, adieu, to yieu and yieu and yieu.

Well, Bluenose, how would you design a research project? We're interested because you have skills in this area, apparently. But thanks for agreeing that it would be a worthwhile project.

We knew you'd come around eventually.

I should just speak for myself but I don't think Bobb999, RTB or myself meant our discussion of les chats noir to be a reflection on Sheldrakes's work...it was simply an interesting random feline foray...purely empathic research. ;-)

Though speaking of temple bells, ;-) in this piece of haiku by Matsuo Basho:

The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound

coming out of the flowers.

If you read it slow enough you will hear the temple bells in the vowel sounds. Assonance...the repetition of vowel sounds. So temple bells can be found in unexpected places and can ring and interconnect in more ways than one.

I mean, chance and randomness has played a big part in the history of science:

Just a few of the important discoveries of the past couple of centuries that were made entirely by chance.

"In 1791 Luigi Galvani was an anatomist at the University of Bologna. Galvani was investigating the nerves in frog legs, and had threaded some legs on copper wire hanging from a balcony in such a way that a puff of wind caused the legs to touch the iron railing. A spark snapped and the legs jerked violently (even today, we speak of being "galvanized" into action). In one unintended step, Galvani had observed a closed electrical circuit, and related electricity to nerve impulses.

In 1879, Louis Pasteur inoculated some chickens with cholera bacteria. It was supposed to kill them, but Pasteur or one of his assistants had accidentally used a culture from an old jar and the chickens merely got sick and recovered. Later, Pasteur inoculated them again with a fresh culture that he knew to be virulent, and the chickens didn't even get sick. Chance had led him to discover the principle of vaccination for disease prevention.

Wilhelm Roentgen was experimenting with electrical discharges one evening at the University of Wurzburg in 1895. There was a screen coated with a barium compound lying to one side, and Roentgen noticed that it would fluoresce when an electrical discharge would occur in the tube he was watching. On reaching for the screen, Roentgen got his hand between the discharge tube and the screen and saw the bones of his own hand through the shadow of his skin. In 1901, Roentgen received the Nobel prize for his accidental discovery of X-rays.

Alexander Fleming was a young bacteriologist at St. Mary's Hospital in London in 1928. One day in his cluttered laboratory, he noticed that a culture dish of bacteria had been invaded by a mold whose spore must have drifted in through an open window. Under the microscope, he saw that, all around the mold, the individual bacteria that he had been growing had burst. He saved the mold, and from it produced the first penicillin."

sign me up for the black cats..I too have a black cat...he was on my lap when I picked my "handle" for this blog..yes..his name is "bob"..very vocal...most talkative cat I`ve known.

Oh, hey, Lynn and company of the black ones!

I need a vacation, and I’m going to have one! I wasn’t aiming those slings and arrows at you, but at Lovelace and Suzuki, and their proponent, Booker, who had been ‘looking for a way’ to squeeze sideways into the discussion the whole romantic nonsense about Gaia etc. I don’t and didn’t see what it has to do there, and I have always resented the tiresome moralizing attitudes of that particular set. I was a girl scout back in the late 50’s and early 60’s, and at that time, it was simply considered declassé in the extreme to spread your junk around and not ‘reduce, reuse and recycle’.

But now I don’t regret the misunderstanding for what it brought. I am no ace in appreciating poetry, other than Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, and Ibsen’s ‘Terje Vigen’: (http://www.notam02.no/motherboard/landmark/landmark_doc/saga/saga_english.html) but I really enjoy your finds in that department, Lynn, and thank you for sharing them.

I do have a great love for serendipity and am a total non-believer in coincidence (as in: Once doesn’t count, twice is coincidence, third time you know it’s enemy action). No, seriously, I believe things happen for a reason, and not just where you can rationalize them post, but the great web. Has anyone here read the series The Last Rune by Mark Anthony? Great stuff! It is a hexology, so if youre not a speed reader…but if you ever should be laid up with a broken leg or something…It is fiction, of course, but as impressive as any saga.

I can tell whoever talked about the 23, by the way, that 13 was never ‘unlucky’, but only designated that way by the Roman Catholics in order to distance from the old ways, which they wanted to bury. !3 means ‘12 around one’, and denotes the king’s or leader’s council, the foundation of civilized governance in our Western tradition. The full formula reads 7-9-13 for good luck. 7 is for the main seven helpful deities and 9 is for the nine realms of the old Norse cosmology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norse_cosmology

http://www.blavatsky.net/blavatsky/arts/NumberSeven.htm

By the way, there was a zealous effort back in Europe at some point to eradicate the totally black cats, as they were seen as the familiars of magicians and witches, which were ‘evil’. You will not find many today, almost every black cat has some white marking somewhere. Human perversity is practically limitless.

dorothy says:

What nonsense?

Lovelace?

Ooops! You are right, G. West. I really need a vacation. It was you, who brought in the romantic nonsense, and I got the Lovelock confused with Lovelace (a Freudian slip, eh?)Sorry!

Yes dorothy,she has a white 2" lash coming out of her forehead and about 4 white hairs on her belly...

Very interesting.

RTB

Still no evidence about the 'romantic nonsense, I see, dorothy. How come?

"Still no evidence about the 'romantic nonsense..."

It cannot really be 'evidenced', since it is an opinion, which you can choose to agree or disagree with. I found a link according to G. West's post, where Lovelock presents this whole semi-religious thinking about how Earth (excuse me: Gaia, since somehow these people have decided that Greek is better than Old Norse, or, dare I say: more romantic?) should be revered, we shouldn't throw garbage, etc., etc. You get the general sense of somebody acting mighty superior, shaking a finger in your face, as if you never heard this stuff before.
I am not objecting to Greenpeace, Sierra and such people riding their hobby-horse, I'm sure they do some good. I just don't see what that whole rigmarole has to do in this discussion, which, if I understand it right, is about:
should the so-called 'paranormal' be credited and taken into the field of science and studied, as possibly the only (so far) discernible manifestations of all 'the weird stuff' the quantum mechanics is unearthing?

Hope this helps, even if it does fall short of 'evidence'. If not, please clarify further. As I said: I am in need of a vacation.

well my cat is totally 100% black..I`m his familiar..at least at times it does seem so. He is small and sleek and does resemble Egyptian portrayals of Bast..
What does Lovelock say about crop circles?
I read some Lovelock many years ago..(was it Harrowsmith)?..but haven`t read anything by him for awhile.
A doc on T.V... they were saying the circles were the earths speaking to us.

mea culpa, dorothy...maybe I need a vacation, too. ;-)

G West,

Last night on the CBC News they had a min-doc on the melting of the ice in the Arctic and its meaning to Canadian sovereignty. Michael Byers was on it, the UBC prof who often writes articles on the Tyee... (I think he wrote an article on Arctic sovereignty for The Tyee some time back). Anyway, it was very interesting, especially in regard, to their mention that the oceans of the world would be better off if they were not named...as really, they are all one...and flow into one another.

It fits in well with Lovelock's plea to recognize and revere the sacred interconnections between all things on Earth...that is if we want to survive until the next century.

And hi bob the cat...and bob the cat. ;-)

"..that the oceans of the world would be better off if they were not named...as really, they are all one...and flow into one another."

Se,, this is a good example of the stuff that once would have been innocent and peace-loving and all that, but now you have to watch it like a hawk, because it could be an evil illuminati-plot. Look: If there are no separate oceans, there is also no boundaries, no sense in national claims to anything, and so in reality, everything will ultimately belong to nobody, which means it will belong to those with the most cash and the biggest guns. See what I mean? it's just not that kind of World anymore, and the words no longer mean what they used to mean. That's why I say: Canada, you want peace, slam your gates shut and get armed to the teeth. The enemy is afoot, and his name is greenback (even that they've been messing with - going 'colorful', in the hope that we won't know the difference).
No need to feel guilty about anything, I like your selections of poetry as I said, that's enough, just realize there is dirt and gravel and grit there, it's not all sweetgrass and mallows.

I think you're quite right there, dorothy. Perhaps, the names should stay until us humans evolve to the point that we no longer need them. However, I don't think it negates Lovelock's assertion that time is no longer on our side...that we had better at least recognize that even though we name oceans...separate the earth into parts and name them...we are really part of one system...and that honouring that interdependency is crucial to our long-term survival.

Unfortunately, we have leaders who are into de-evolution...they are the worst of the bunch...completing lacking in foresight but full of arrogant self-interest.

Our survival, really, depends on an evolutionary leap forward....a new way of man relating to the Earth he lives on.

hi lynn!..very much enjoyed the Rilke...looking into reading more..also the Haiku..

The patter of new rain
on cherry tree leaves
lights the paper lantern

17 syllables..is that correct?

I definitely need a holiday..but I`m afraid.... to spend the money ;-)

I do agree with Dorothy and know that we are both wrong( bob and Dorothy). Yes you`re wrong.
my bob the black cat was mentored by the now deceased Dexter the little white dog..who was himself mentored by cats.
I swear bob tries to bark at times.
When I was carrying Dexter as a pup from his original home to our home..as I was leaving..a large cat firmly placed his paw on my shoulder...he was lying on a screen just above me and when I turned our faces were quite close. We held eye contact for awhile and he seemed to be wanting assurance that I would take good care of the little guy...I assured him of that and he removed his paw.
I do need a holiday.

And to think that all along there was already a lucky black cat lurking on this thread we didn't even know about till now - bob the cat! That makes 4 (so far).
Note how all 4 have humans who are on the open minded or believers side.Interesting. I'll admit the sceptics may simply be detached from the cat discussion or prefer to "stay in the closet" if they are black cat fanciers. Of course, if they did admit to
it, that would only add to our growing list of cats!

Yes, many mostly black cats have white boots, noses, splotches on chest etc. My first 2 had small spots on chest. My current one looks 100% black, until you look very close and find just a few tiny individual white hairs scattered, not sufficient to cause "markings", and which would've been insufficient to dissuade
cat pogromers of old Europe from murdering her.I'd guess it's more likely a jumbling of genes/mongrelism accounts for any variation from pure black in mostly black cats, than the explanation that Euro-pogromers successfully killed off all all black lines. In direct sunlight I see some orangey tones
shining out from within the dominating black.

...As for "the whole romantic nonsense about Gaia"...Well if Dorothy had paid attention to Metisgirl's earlier post:

Can temple bells and legal cannabis be far away? I pity Rupert Sheldrake, who no doubt is trying frantically to distance himself from these fast friends who may do nothing other than damage his credibility.

On the topic of drugs, I have read that
Sheldrake was good friends with the late Terrence McKenna, psychedelics explorer and theorist. Not just that, but in their discussions, Sheldrake was reportedly open minded and fascinated with McKenna's views, including that DMT, in particular, picks you up and plunks you in what seems a completely other world, populated by friendly
"elves" that move about like basketballs!
Sheldrake did not laugh off such ideas {as you no doubt would) - though I'm sure he laughed alright, (as McKenna did too), 'cause basketball-like elves are a fairly comical concept, I think all would admit!

On the "temple bells" sneer (I enjoyed the Basho haiku, Lynn. My take on it is different from yours, but perhaps that's part of the beauty of it): Sheldrake is also good friends with Matthew Fox, ex-Catholic priest, now an Anglican Priest, but an entirely non-traditional one whose eclectic religious approach ranges from Wicca, to Buddhism, to Meister Eckhart ( a Christian mystic who appears quasi-Buddhist). Fox is very much a booster of the Mother Earth concept, as well as of environmentalism. Sheldrake and Fox have written 2 books together, including one on angels....(Sheldrake, co-authoring a book on angels?!) Is this yet enough to shatter Dorothy's ill-conceived illusions about Sheldrake?
How come Truman, who says he's read everything by Sheldrake, didn't break some of this news to Dorothy, I wonder?

I wonder what Sheldrake would think of Dorothy, and her misreading of him, and her misreading of the kind of "friends" he appreciates?

How come my attempts to quote ended up so screwy?

Dorothy
Have you read Lovelock's books? Further, have you read the many scientific writers who have, since the 80s, come to agree wholeheartedly with him?

Further still, I think Sheldrake is looking into aspects of the nature of light and vision as well as, as it is so often dismissively put, 'telepathy'. Many of these things, and our attitude toward them, were established according to philosophical principles (notably Descartes') which have had no empirical basis whatsoever.

To dismiss Sheldrake and others, such as Lovelock (and, I think you also named Suzuki) as mere romantics is as absurd as suggesting that all science is, and always has been, rational. If you like, I can post a link to recent material that is reassessing the importance of alchemy as a serious contribution to the history of both science and the intellect.

I've had a rough day, so it is great to come home and read you both, Bobb999 and bob the cat. Loved your haiku, bob the cat. My cat's name? Ireland...Black Irish, of course. :-)

Bobb999, I think you're quite right about Sheldrake, I think there is very much a sense of wonder and awe in him that finds all of the diversity of life fascinating ...the direct contact of it...I can't see him ridiculing Lovelock's work, either. Seems to me he is challenging some basic scientific assumptions and that's pretty risky territory. It is so interesting what he has to say about our rather self-centered view of evolution:

"Any narrowly anthropocentric view of evolution, the kind of view of evolution that sees it all moving towards the evolution of humanity—the idea that the whole universe came into existence so that life could evolve on Earth, so that human beings could come into existence here, so that smart guys could be professors in major American universities—is very gratifying to our collective ego. But it doesn't explain why you needed millions of species of beetles and countless species of ants and termites in the tropical rainforests, existing for tens or hundreds of millions of years before human beings arrived on the scene. Why is all that necessary for the evolution of human intelligence?"

Just saw your post, G West...good to read you again, too.

G. West advises Dorothy that: "To dismiss Sheldrake and others, such as Lovelock (and I think you also named Suzuki) as mere romantics...is as absurd..."

This is quite preposterous because Dorothy has not dismissed Sheldrake. She's been defending and admiring him throughout the discussion, although she did register her disenchantment with Suzuki and Lovelock, who she dismissed as romantic.

I brought Suzuki into the discussion because, as I said, in his "Nature of Things" television show he constantly implied that nature indeed "knows" what it is doing and is, in fact, planning and preserving, choosing, selecting etc.--and that all of these qualities might have given him pause for their anthropomorphic insinuation--especially in light of the fact that this PLANNING is, afterall the hallmark of a teleologic, that is "intelligent" presence.

After the Harrisburg Pa, judge overturned the Dover School Board's dicision (2005) to include intelligent design in the biology curriculum, Suzuki wrote an article in "Common Ground Magazine," applauding the judge's decision. I saved the article somewhere in my mountains of papers, but, although I can find many other editions, that particular one remains lost--and it's not yet on the internet. So, unfortunatly, I can't quote from it. But this is why I view Suzuki's conflicted ideology as schizophrenic.

Hopefully--synchronistically--Suzuki's reading and will come on and debate this with me!

And Lovelock's "Gaia," a "mother earthian" type of presence, as Dorothy said, is about nothing if it is not about intelligence. Lovelock believed that the earth is a self-regulating organism--and the implication is that it is also self-aware, and that the vehicle of regulation is the biomass itself.

Like, Dorothy, I always found Lovelock's hypothesis to be totally unfalsifiable, if not irritating for two reasons: If the earth is self-regulating, certainly as a participating organism, humans must be regulated by the same force, and will therefore be prevented from continuing any ecologically terminal behaviour by virtue of our necessary containment.

And so it seems to me that the theory, while presenting massive grounds for contemplation, is necessarily self-defeating as a warning against environmental ruination.

Secondly, would a mother figure, allow such brutality and cruely as Khymer Rouge, all the big vicious wars and various holocausts, the subjugation and colonization of weaker peoples, slavery--even the current wars in Africa and Lebanon--not to mention "natural" disasters?

And would a "mother" devise a system by which carnivores had no choice except to kill and devour animals weaker than themselves?

I think only a romantic would "believe" and for this I tend to agree with Dorothy.

However, I like Lovelock's intuitive corollary of homeostasis, particularly in view of the fact that it converges with my own claim that "natural selection" is a mistaken idea, and that those effects which are seen by evolutionists to be precursors of nascent speciation are, in fact, actually manifestations of homeostasis.

Lovelock must have been brilliant, afterall.

Lynn:
A very good Sheldrake quote you posted.
Very valid. We are often a most anthropocentric species, believing we are the crown of creation.

I say the so called "anthropic principle" might just as validly be thought of as the "felinepic principle"!
************************************
Dorothy may have been defending Sheldrake, or so she thought.
Unfortunately, she was also defending a false image she held about where Sheldrake stands on subjects as diverse as religion and God, the Gaia principle,
and drugs.

Here are some Sheldrake quotes showing he is quite comfortable with the Gaia concept:

-" (Creativity) depends on chance, conflict, and necessity,...It is rooted in the ongoing processes of nature. But at the same time it occurs within the framework of higher systems of order. For example, new species arise within ecosystems; new ecosystems within Gaia; Gaia within the solar system; the solar system within the galaxy; the galaxy within the growing cosmos." --from The Rebirth of Nature

- "If Gaia is in some sense animate, then she must have something like a soul, an organizing principle with its own ends or purposes."--The Rebirth of Nature

-"...The conscious or unconscious purposes of Gaia include the development and maintenance of the biosphere, and they must in some sense include the evolution of humanity.."--The Rebirth of Nature

Sheldrake on God:

-"a view of nature without God must include a creative unitary principle that includes the entire cosmos and unites the polarities and dualities found throughout the natural realm. But this is not far removed from views of nature with God." -- The Rebirth of Nature,

-SHELDRAKE: "... But I think that when thinking about this, one has to think, what kind of God, or what kind of spiritual guiding principle is one thinking of? And the kind of God that for many people has become incredible, is the machine-making God of the seventeenth century, where God stands totally outside the universe, thinks up the mathematical laws of nature, and creates the universe like a great machine. I think that that kind of God is, or will be, as obsolete as the mechanistic world picture that went with it. Any new conception of God that we develop, or come towards, I think would at the same time be closer to much older conceptions of God -- not only in the Christian, but in other religious traditions -- as a living, creative source of a living, creative world."--(Interview with Jeffery Mishlove)

-MISHLOVE : You wrote A New Science of Life while you were living in an ashram in India [[I]I'M HEARING TEMPLE BELLS AGAIN!-B.] You obviously have deep spiritual interests as well as deep scientific interests, and I wonder, do you see these things converging?
SHELDRAKE: "Well, I do... The very word anima, the Latin word for soul, is the basis of our word animal. It means beings with souls. If we go back to the idea of nature as a living organism, the whole of nature as being alive, and ourselves as living beings within a living world -- a living world that has many levels of organization, from molecules, atoms, cells, the whole planet, the solar system, the galaxy, the whole universe -- at every level there's a kind of integrity or wholeness that's more than the sum of the parts -- then we can think about the relation between science and religion in a new light, a different way than has been possible for the last three hundred years."-- (Interview with Mishlove)

Re. Drugs:

From a review by Sheldrake of a book on the psychedelic, DMT (found in the Amazonian plant concoction, ayhuasca),
DMT: The Spirit Molecule: "Fascinating and provocative. A remarkable exploration of the boundaries of science and consciousness itself."

...And somehow I imagine Sheldrake, Suzuki, and Lovelock might get along together just fine.

Truman:

My friend, this, from Dorothy, was what I was responding to:

Obviously, I disagree with her attack on Lovelock and Suzuki and support her, and your, defence of Sheldrake and said so.
And obviously, I tend to be pretty much in agreement with what Bob manynines has written just above.
Clear enough my friend?

Now, if Dorothy wasn't actually being critical by calling Suzuki and Lovelock hopeless romantics and dismissing, thereby, their 'science' then I'm more than willing to apologize. But, that was how I read it and, in the absence of more conclusive evidence, I'm sticking to it.
CHeers.

Personally, in the circles I travel in it's not generally a compliment to call someone a romantic anymore!

Bobb999,

I especially liked that quote you included of Sheldrake's interview with Mishlove...this idea of the aliveness of nature in contrast to our current very man-centered, navel-gazing, mechanistic world view...that even attempts to sort theeeee whole universe into neat uniform little boxes...even though we know so little about it.

I mean, listen to the wisdom in the following words of Sheldrake's...this wonderful poet/scientist whose words evoke the thoughts of some of our greatest thinkers and writers.... and he is not afraid to risk saying it :

"I'm interested in the recovery of the sense of the life of nature. The thrust of all my work is to try to break out of the mechanistic view of nature as inanimate, dead and machinelike, which forces the whole of our understanding of nature into a machine metaphor. This is a very man-centered metaphor. Only people make machines. So looking at nature in this way projects one aspect of human activity onto the whole of nature. It's an extremely limiting view of nature, and an alienating one."

And here.... as he writes about his escape (yes, ring them temple bells ;-) ) from the narrow views of science at Cambridge:

"But I actually found myself most drawn to ordinary Hinduism: the pujas, the people's practice of making offerings to sacred plants in the mornings, the greeting of the sun in the morning, the pilgrimages to temples and sacred places, the holy trees, holy rats, holy cows, and holy snakes, and that kind of thing. I just liked the sacralization of nature and the earth which I found there. I'd gone there interested in the higher reaches of Hindu philosophy and meditation and actually found myself drawn to what most sophisticated Hindus despised—the folk practices of Hinduism. That drew me the most, and that I found most attractive because it involved a kind of sacralization of the earth and a different attitude toward nature and matter and life."

Isn't "a different attitude towards nature, matter and life", exactly what this world is so desperately in need of...so why is everyone so afraid to hear this brilliant man out?

Absolutely, Lynn. Well put, and Bob999 nicely summarized and concluded as well. To close one's eyes and stop one's ears to the music of the universe in favour of a slavish devotion to the scientific method is to rush headlong into a dark alley - an alley mankind spent a good deal of time threshing about in during the past 100 years. The are more things in this world to marvel over and try to understand than any philosphy or scientific theory will ever encompass.

G. West, you wrote: (To Dorothy) "To dismiss Sheldrake and others, such as Lovelock (and I think that you also named Suzuki, as mere romantics..."

My complaint against you is that you have lumped Sheldrake in with Lovelock and Suzuki, as though Dorothy dismissed all of them, (including Sheldrake) which she did not--only Suzuki and Lovelock.

Of course I am aware that she isn't too impressed with Suzuki or Lovelock. I spent a substantial amount of time on Lovelock's ideas when they came out, (at least after the New Scientist article) and as I said, they didn't hold my attention nearly as much as others, like Sheldrake--even Stephen J. Gould and Richard Dawkins--both regular evolutionists--Dawkins defining himself, even, as a "fulfilled evolutionist."

I don't think the idea is to necessarily agree with Sheldrake, as though he represents the "gold standard" in non-materialist thought, but rather to support and defend him from the conventionalizing hoards--who would rather that he was forever marginalized and ridiculed.

It is quite likely that he went through the Lovelock stuff too and probably saw much in it with which he could agree. In fact, I would be shocked if such is not the case.

I think Dorothy used the word "romantic" in reference to Lovelock because his program, as I said, at least for some, conjures up the "warm and fuzzy," and whatever else one might think about life on earth...with all the injustice and violence, it is seldom warm and fuzzy.

Regardless, for Dorothy, as for myself Lovelock's Gaia does not provide a compelling or engaging framework for contemplating the question of whether the materialist, mechanistic world view is more reliable than the one which claims that communication occurs without the facilitation of matter--and on that I think we five or six, including Dorothy agree.

However, I do concede that Dorothy's admonishment of "fast friends," who might "damage Sheldrake's reputation," might require a wee bit of reflection.

Truman
I was pretty skeptical of Lovelock when I read him initially in the 80s but, in the intervening years, he's grown on me and I think his model is as valid - and nearly as widely accepted today - as any other postulate or world view and certainly more positive from a long-term Earth survival point of view. You'd be surprised how many so-called hard scientists now agree with much, if not most, of what he's written. As for the rest of the Sheldrake business, I think bob many nines has expressed my thinking as well as I could, if not better - so I'll leave it at that.

Some are still a bit troubled by Lovelock’s recept adoption of nuclear power as the only viable alternative to carbon; for myself, I think I'm coming round to accept his verdict on that score too. Certainly, none of the piecemeal approaches (ethanol, hydrogen, synthetic oil etc) is going to work, in my view. In addition, I sure don't support Hawking's space travel cop-out either.

Anyway, I'll await Dorothy's own response on the other matter - as to whether or not she meant 'romantic' in a derogatory way!

And, I’d like to know what she has against Suzuki too.

Any bets?

I found the Suzuki article. It's under, "Science Matters" by David Suzuki
January 20, 2006 "The Ups and Downs of Evolution."

Have a read, then perhaps we can discuss if his comments compare to this by Shannon Rupp: "The 1990's saw the growth of the Christian right, and attempts to re-introduce creationism into the schools under the moniker of "Intelligent Design."

Exactly what do you suppose Suzuki is referring to as "religion?"--and do you think his applause of the federal judge who outlawed the teaching of Intelligent Design, echoes Shannon Rupp's warnings?

Suzuki writes: "Evolutionary research is thus vital to understanding our world. That's why scientists across the U.S. were thrilled in December when a federal judge prevented the teaching of Intelligent Design.

And do you imagine that Sheldrake was similarly "thrilled?"

I might suggest tentatively that, even though all you guys have made wonderful comments, you might be missing the real conflict. It's between the alternate theorists like Sheldrake, Sahtouris, Ken Wilber and Brian Josephson and the defenders of the faith like Suzuki and the American judges who have kept Intelligent Design out of the biology classes, to Suzuki's applause.

You're joking, Truman. The problem is not with intelligent design per se but with its backers - those same religious freaks you spend half your time here bashing into nothingness.

You never did tell me whether or not you'd gone to high school in Surrey....BC. Or not.

G.West. Do you have any idea who the "backers" of intelligent design are?

Intelligent design is the idea there are teleologic forces operating in the world--a kind of consciousness beyond that of huma beings, even animals.

The creationists and Christians have taken it up to support the idea of a rewarding (to believers) and revengeful god, but many of the scientist who support a version of the concept, reject this kind of Diety. Sheldrake appears to have retained at his a respect for religion, but many others totally reject it.

Honest, G, this entire subject is way over your head.

Oops, bad sentence: "retained at his a respect." What's this?

And G,if you're really concerned where I live, look up my address on telus, but don't phone, eh.

Okay, here's a slight explanation of the difference between creationism and intelligent design: Creationists--as Christians and Muslims and many Jews-- figured that God created the creatures and critters around here all in one fell swoop, just as they are today, like it says in the Bible, eh.

Darwinians and neo-darwinians, like D. Suzuki figure its a mechanistic deal like "natural selection," accidental mutations being "selected," by virtue of being most suitable to adapt to a change in the environment. For instance, say a dog is born with a mutation for having a really thick coat of hair, and the weather starts to get colder over a period of time. That particular trait will emerge as a "variation" and that variation will be selected as the norm because thick coats are the best adaptation.

Well, Suzuki might buy this silliness but not any of the really top notch thinkers, as far as I can tell.

Hawkings and Einstein understand that when you run out of virtual singularities you kind of bump into the requirement for some kind of consciousness beyond our own, eh.

That's why Hawkings talking about the "Mind of God," in his "A Brief History of Time," and "Einstein wonderered if "God plays dice with the universe," while contemplating what he thought was the biggest mistake of his career--his requirement for a cosmological constant--which, by the way, turns out probably not to have been a mistake at all--as the best physicists are thinking "Dark Energy," to explain the lack of matter-energy equivalency in the universe.

Most Intelligent Designists believe in a generalized "evolution"--and even Sheldrake and Lovelock would agree, but they tend to reject the conventional vehicles--natural selection and mutations, in favour of some kind of, at least "conscious' direction.

When Suzuki refers to Intelligent Design as "religion," he's stereotyping believers in teleology as religionists, which is far from the truth, and, I might suggest, he's far too intelligent for this assessment.

Intelligent Designists are mostly convinced by the idea that the fantastic complexity of the world cannot be "reduced" to a naturalized, materialistic, mechanistic operation.

Thus the idea of "Irreducible Complexity," to which, I think, all Intelligent Designists adhere.

Darwin noticed this problem in his reference to "Organs of Extreme Specialization."

It refers to organs such as the human eyeball which is composed of ten or twelve things such as the cornea, retina , lens etc--in the absence of ANY SINGLE one, nothing would happe

And so...the eyeball couldn't have evolved over millions of years. It must have been designed--somehow.

So get studying, G. You've got a lot to learn, eh.

And G, you're probably doing a pretty good job of convincing yourself that you understand any of this stuff, but you can't fool me.

But just in case I've underestimated your knowledge in this field, G, what's your take on the famous "peppered moth" story, and maybe: how does Lamarkianism fit into the picture?

What does Dawkins mean when he talks about the gene as being "selfish?" or what's with the "memes" he invented?
And what about S.J. Gould's "punctuated equilibrium," and what's the relevance of "transitional" species?

What do you think about ireducible complexity?

No googling, now!

I don't care where you live Truman. I asked, weeks ago, if you'd gone to high school in Surrey, that's all. I had a friend who is probably about the same vintage as you are whom I thought you might have known then, is all. I'm not from BC, therefore I asked. Let’s just leave it at that – I certainly wasn’t looking for your phone number.

Why do you think I said the problem I had with Intelligent Design theory was with the religious nuts who've tried to turn it to their advantage? People who know the square root of nothing about science and think that Yahweh created the world about 6 - 10,000 years ago according to Bishop Usher's calculations. I know more than enough about irreducible complexity and the arguments of those who reject the theory; the dispute about the peppered moth and the current problems with indemonstrable speciation so don't waste your time.

All and more of those books have pride of place on my shelves too and I think Dawkins is a conceited prick if you must know. And, along with my general disdain and skepticism for wikipedia, I find Google is pretty unreliable unless one is trying to impress the peanut gallery on very short notice with a hurry up cut and paste job.

Cheers.

Glad to hear you're up on this stuff, G.

So whadyyou think of the peppered moth story, and do you think those land iquana and marine iquana are just different variations of the same species--and how would this be provable? And what does it mean for the "natural selection" theory, if all those Galapagos finches were just variations and not different species?

What do you think of "acquired characteristics?"

What about my claim that selection of the archetypical individual within a species is actually an homeostatic device, instead of a precursor to nascent speciation, as Suzuki and Darwin and Dawkins would claim.

Do you think mutations would be sufficient for speciation? If not why not?

What does the fact that there humans have been creating breeds of dogs for five thousand years or so, and not even once has a variation proved to be the precursor of speciation.

What does this so-called "artificial selection" have to do with the evolutions theory of "natural selection?"

Was Lovelock correct when he claimed that the homeostasis provided by the biomass was able to maintain the temperature of the earth? What does it mean that the temperature has risen by l.1 degrees over the last 20 years--if it indeed has?

Do you think, then--if you accept evolution--that some kind of "planning"--that is teleology, went into the creation of the human eyeball?

Looks like the "peppered moth" was just invented by a bunch of overzealous evolutionists--with, believe it or not, moths being glued to trees.

Too bad, this was supposed to be a case of "evolution" in action because the soot from the smokestacks was supposed to have turned the trees black so the birds only ate the white moths and the black moths thrived, showing how natural selection could select a variation.

Google it, G, it's not evolution in action, but fraud in action.

Google's wonderful--for raw data, so is Wikipedia--as long as you go to various sites for counter and varying opinions and definitions, and have a pretty good understanding of your topic before you go there.

TG
I certainly think that mutation accounts for the wide variety of differentiation with species - domestic dog breeds for instance. But, I think there is probably something else going on that accounts for this kind of thing too. Perhaps when we started to domesticate dogs we purposely selected the ones which had a genetic predisposition for domestication and, along with that came a genetic propensity for mutation and differentiation. I believe there's a study currently going on with two particular kinds of fruit wasps. These wasps seem to prefer either one or another kind of fruit which have different times of maturity. My recollection is that this differentiation (I won't call it speciation) began when apple tress were introduced in North America _ before that the wasps had fed on a domestic fruit which matures earlier (or later) than the apple.

Anyway, my recollection is that the two groups are now fertile with each other less than 20% of the time. Could this be an example of speciation? Anyway, interesting stuff. And you know, given Suzuki’s background in fruit fly studies (and the number of generations one can telescope into a longitudinal study) it is not surprising he’d be a strong supporter of traditional evolution models.

Gotta get back to work dude.

20% fertility...yup that's pretty good, which means you've got exactly 0% speciation going on here, G. (It wouldn't exactly be chimeric if human's could maintain 20% fertility, eh)

What you've got is infertility problems or a couple of variations, like lions and tigers or pears and apples.

Nope, mutations don't account for variations of dog breeds. Wrong!

Wrong, we didn't select the ones with a genetic predisposition towards domestication, only the characteristics "we" wanted for a certain kind of work--or lapdogia--whatever we desired.

The wasp stuff is interesting, though--which only goes to show that those who have tried to identify such small-cale preferences as nascent speciation, are basically whistling in the dark. In vitro genetic manipulation would be more conclusive.

Suzuki's working within the conventional natural selection-mutation model. His discovery that certain melanogaster drosophila reproduce at 29 degrees has little bearing on whether he believes in intelligent design or mechanistic, naturalistic evolution. Either would fit, ideologically speaking. This won't, unfortunately, prevent him from claiming to believe those memorable words of Theodosius Dobzhansky that, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." (for "evolution" read "natural selection-mutation" neo-darwinian, that is)

So you get a failing grade, I'm afraid, G. But, you tried, so good on you.

Now here's a bonus question. If you get it right you don't have to write the final, and you definitely pass.

If you tell an evolutionist that the second law of thermodynamics pretty well precludes natural selection-mutation as vehicle for speciation, what is most likely to be his/her rebuttal?

Googling allowed. This question's worth 86% of your total grade, eh.

DIsagree my friend. I think there is evidence that the same genetic predispotion to domestication in dogs goes along with an enhanced tendency to mutate into the wild variety of doggy characteristics. In other words, the doggies who hung around the campfire in paleolithic times were the ones most likely to exhibit mutation when bred to each other. In the wild it would never have happened.

As for the wasps, can't remember all the details but I think the level of cross fertility is trending downward from the currently observed 20%.

I don't think I failed, bud and I really am too damn busy for any more fun right now.

You're gonna have to do summer school, G.

You can seem like a wiz in class, though, by just looking up this word: "species." And this: "mutation."

But I'm giving you a C- for having the jam to come up with that first paragraph, which means absolutely nothing.

What was that again..? "the dogs that hung around the camp fire were the ones most likely to exhibit mutation when bred to each other."

So domestication causes throwbacks to the wild variety, eh.

You've haphazardly gotten into some improbable inverse ration presentation of Lamarkianism--acquired characteristics--totally discredited, by the way, even by diehard Darwinists. But throwing domestication in as a facilitator of mutation, is your own ad hoc angle.

Nervy.
But goofy!

I'm really not very scientific, quelle surprise, quite obvious I'm sure.... but I've very much enjoyed this thread...it has been a wonderful conversation with all. I think science very much intersects with some of the thoughts of our greatest thinkers, poets and writers...which Bobb999 often made clear in his diversely woven posts.

What I find most compelling about Sheldrake is expressed in his quotation from my comment above:

"I'm interested in the recovery of the sense of the life of nature. The thrust of all my work is to try to break out of the mechanistic view of nature as inanimate, dead and machinelike, which forces the whole of our understanding of nature into a machine metaphor. This is a very man-centered metaphor. Only people make machines. So looking at nature in this way projects one aspect of human activity onto the whole of nature. It's an extremely limiting view of nature, and an alienating one."

Because in many ways he is saying the same thing about God as he is about Nature...that we have defined them both in human terms...and thus limited them. Doing so limits and alienates nature and it also limits and alienates God. So man perverts nature...and so man perverts "intelligent design"...it makes it man-centered and man-made...exactly as it did to all religions...and by doing we have created dangerous perversions of the thing itself.

Sheldrake it seems is asking about the possibility of an intelligence behind this all. But he is also saying it does not have to be defined in human terms. A diety, a purpose...these are ideas all of our own making..and perhaps they are mere trivialities in the grand scheme of things..if there is a grand (or not-so-grand) scheme of things...or perhaps they are not. Problem is we are posing all the questions in human terms, but the answers may not lie within that terminology. There is, after all, a whole universe out there. Sheldrake's morphic resonance seems to be an attempt to move beyond our man-centered metaphors about life...beyond
man's own self-imposed limitations.

My last word on this.

Truman, couldn't you at least make your exam multiple choice? ;-)

Lynn: Thanks for those Sheldrake quotes you found. The more I learn about him, the more I want to find out!The quote about the effect of India on his thinking made me want to find Natural Grace, a book of conversations between Sheldrake and Matthew Fox who I've always liked. I got it from the library today, 'cause I'm interested in Sheldrake's religious or spiritual views and how they might harmonize with his scientific theories.

Wow. This guy is not just an avante garde scientist, with a poetic sensibility!
He's also a mystic:

"Grace is difficult to define, but it seems to me to have to do with a sense of connection, openness, blessedness. open-ness and connection with what's around us. One evening recently, as I was in an orchard sitting under an apple tree in the sun, I realized I was there and then in a state of grace. I started reflecting on the different occasions on which I had felt this sense of blessedness. Some occasions had to do with music; others were in beautiful places when I had a sense of connection with Nature; others came through being in love and being with people with whom I felt blessed and at ease; others were through experiences of church services and rituals. For me some Christian services really are a means of grace. I've also felt this in Hindu temples and in sacred places of other traditions. Others came through psychoactive drugs; I have on occasion tried psychedelics such as LSD and magic mushrooms, and through them experienced an amazing sense of beauty. Others have come through prayer and meditation."

"When I was a graduate student... I came across a group called the Epiphany Philosophers, who were connected with an Anglican monastery...This group of philosophers, physicists and mystics explored the connections among mystical experience, philosophy and science - and still do. This was exactly what I was interested in ..."

I was a bit surprised that since his mid 30s he came back to Christian practise, attending a parish church regularly, and even saying The Lord's Prayer daily, often meditating on specific phrases:

" For example,I may spend half an hour on 'deliver us from evil'... "

He also found some Christian prayers "that place the heart at the center of our deepest thoughts", that for him could equate for Sufi heart meditations, and Hindu teachings about the heart chakra he'd learned in India.

He views ritual as very important (as the quote about India you posted makes clear), including for himself, and that they relate to his morphic fields theory:

" From the point of view of morphic resonance, rituals make perfect sense. By consciously performing ritual acts in as similar a way as possible to the way they have been done before, the participants enter into morphic resonance with those who have carried out the ritual in the past. There is a collapse of time. There is an invisible presence of all those who have done the ritual before, a transtemporal religious community."

Isn't "a different attitude towards nature, matter and life", exactly what this world is so desperately in need of...? So asked Lynn.
Yes, I think so!

Spot on Bob many nines and you too lynn. Without some real changes in attitude, as I wrote on another thread this afternoon, we're in for a very hard time of it.

Truman, I don't think you understood what I was trying to say - either that or I haven't explained it well enough.

Here goes. The first wolves (wild dogs, foxes) to be domesticated were the ones who were:
(a) Unnaturally curious about what these strange 2 - legged creatures were up to, and
(b) recognized that there were scraps available around the fire in the back of the cave that made hunting a little less necessary, and
(c) started hanging around the crazy humans.

Only animals with a genetic propensity for friendliness took this tack and they reproduced with other such animals who also had this propensity. Somehow, by chance or otherwise, the propensity to hang around humans existed in tandem with a propensity for these such animals to produce offspring with various mutations. Thing like, for a start, longer ears, shorter legs, tails, different head shapes, colours, coat length etc. Over time and through successive generations of breeding and interbreeding we ended up with the wild variety of canine breeds that we're all familiar with - a huge variety of types which is not at all typical of the relatively few types of wild dogs (wolf, fox, dingo, African wild dog etc.) which still exist today.

And, I'd suggest, this all took place in say, the last 10,000 years. It may not be, strictly speaking, evolutionary but it sure is amazing, when you look at it that way

Humans of course, intuitively sensed what was going on and entered into this breeding exercise themselves - witness the relatively new breeds like Doberman Pinschers 'created' in the 19th century.

I'd have thought such an explanation would appeal to you Truman given your ideas about mutation and evolution. Hey, it’s just a thought.

Lynn : I just read your last post. I think we must have posted almost simultaneously... you won by a nose!

I too have enjoyed this thread immensely. It's probably been my all time fave Tyee thread.
I'm kind of a news junkie and enjoy the political debates here, but I notice that dwelling on current world chaos can leave me with a sour, helpless feeling, while many of the ideas discussed on this one have been positive and hopeful (...despite the sceptics - who appear to have flown the coop!), with a sprinkling of "magic" thrown in, to make it fun!

That view of the universe as a machine, with its many ugly ramifications, as Sheldrake points out, reminds me of something I read from John Lilly.
Like Sheldrake, his early training layered this materialist view onto him.
An early Lilliy LSD trip started out as
a hellish experience, a vision of being trapped in such a machine like universe, which was all blind, meaningless activity
continuing forever, "signifying nothing"
(to borrow from Willy the Shake!).

Then suddenly the machine universe vision
disappeared, and Lilly found himself in new Universe, the polar opposite, a Universe full of light and meaning, that connected everything in a living way, and he felt completely at peace in this Universe.

Later he realized the nature of the first
ugly vision. It was sparked entirely by the false education he'd experienced as a science student, and the resulting materialist paradigm. It had warped his mind so to speak, and the LSD had shown him that when you get right down to it,
that view of life is one hell of a bad trip! Needless to say,like Sheldrake, he opted for the new Universe, once it was presented to him.

Now that I've realized how traditional Sheldrake is in many of his spirtual approaches, it suggests he sees a lot of value in our old metaphors, prayers, and rituals.
But I agree, Lynn, he wants to get far beyond entirely man centered views.

Something I did not know before is, according to Sheldrake, prior to the 17th century, in Christian Europeall beings were thought to have a soul of some kind, including animals and plants!
I'm not sure how Biblical this is, but he claims that was the common belief.
(so when did those dreaded cat killers live I wonder?). He also said something about any new emerging religions we might
see, are likely to resemble oldreligious traditions... reclaiming of something lost.
Maybe his morphic fields theories are helping to explain and validate some older traditions, before the damned (not so)grand machine took over!

G. West:
I've thought about that too, how animals were first domesticated. I wondered though, if instead of animals coming to us, if we, rather, as hunters, killed adult animals and then "adopted" their infants, wolf pups, say, and raised them. They would grow up thinking humans were their parents.
Just a theory! Yours is possible enough too.Or it could have been a combination.

By the way GW, I particularly liked this quote from you:

Excellent. Agreed. Obviously Sheldrake does too. He's not just a scientist. He evidently believes a well balanced person has spiritual disciplines or pursuits that speak to a deeper part of him or her than the overrated intellect! Obviously the intellect is very important, but to make it ones main focus, if you are meanwhile ignoring the spirit, is living a hobbled life, you might say, IMO.

...When I'm lying on my death bed, staring straight into the great beyond, what am I going to be glad I pursued during my lifetime, that might best prepare me for the next step?

-Would I say, "Phew. I'm sure glad I kept up with the daily world news all those years!"-? No!

-Would I say "I'm so fortunate now that I have a solid understanding of scientific findings and theories on a range of interesting, important topics!"-? I don't think so.

I believe that on my dying day, what I will most value from my life experience as a preparation for death (as well as a guiding force during life)will be: those moments of grace Sheldrake speaks of.
And I shall be grateful that I'd developed a habit of yogic/meditation practise, and I'll be thankful that I learned to open my heart compassionately during my lifetime.

Which makes me think of Truman...

Truman: You're obviously a well read gent
in scientific fields that have caught your interest,including avante garde ones, and are evidently an intelligent fellow. (BTW, what's with the
"I'm teacher, you're pupil schtick?"
Are you a teacher?)
But I'm curious as to what kind of spiritual practise you have, if any.
Or is your only (or predominant) chosen path to knowledge/gnosis via books and study (unlike Sheldrake)?

-You, more than any of us here, are likely all too aware of what can befall an ill prepared soul on his or her deathbed:
They can turn into unhappy, confused earthbound spirits, with nothing better to do than hang around where they no longer belong, haunting innocent folk - like yourself!

What are you doing to ensure you are not going to become such a sad earthbound soul? I believe one should try to prepare for death in order to avoid such a fate. Your haunting story, if anything, just makes me more determined on this point!

...BTW , you might have a point about Suzuki. I confess I skimmed your post about him earlier, and misunderstood you.
You're saying he is , unfortunately, in the status quo materialist camp as far as scientific explanations of evolution go(unlike Sheldrake), which is why he's against intelligent design being taught in schools. Alright, Sheldrake might be unimpressed with this aspect of Dave.
But I'm sure they'd still get along pretty well, because Sheldrake would applaud Dave's championing of environmentalism, and would forgive him for being so behind the times on evolution theory, IMO!

Thx Bob999, I'm off to watch the Daily Show - my nightly bit of TV escapism.

Cheers.

Hi Bobb999, lynn, Dorothy, G. West and all. I was sorry to see Dorothy stop participating because she had great intuition about just who's who--and who's sincere, and who's just trying to immortalize themselves by making a big splash while they're comprised of their beloved "matter." And I agreed with her take on David Suzuki and Lovelock.

As I said it was Suzuki's Lovelockian anthropomorphism that got me wondering why a materialist, Darwinian evolutionist would rave on about Nature's intentions the way he used to on his show. (As though Nature is indeed SMART--which is basically what WE'RE saying, isn't it)

And in his January 20, 2006 article on his David Suzuki website he applauds the
American judges who are keeping what he calls "religion" out of the high schools.

In truth, the judge's decision was not about "religion," (and Suzuki knows it) but about Intelligent Design, which is really what all the materialist scientists--and broadcasters-like Suzuki are railing against. And while he would never be so crass as Shannon Rupp, (referring to Sheldrdake as, "his ilk, for instance), his "Ups and Downs of Evolution," puts him squarely in her camp. (I think Shannon Rupp is a lady, but I realized I don't actually know).

Because, if Sheldrake represents anything at all it is his own special awareness that there is "intelligence" in the world, beyond the neurons of the human brain, however much the Churchlands of the world resist.

And I explained why Lovelock's stuff didn't "resonate" with me.

So Dorothy and I are seeing pretty much eye to eye on this.

But I agree, Bobb 999, I think this has been the best thread so far on Tyee, though I bet many would beg to differ.

I think, if physicists ever figure out how gravity fits into the knowledge of the strong and weak nuclear forces, and electromagnetism--and they get a unified theory, MOST science will look like the stuff Sheldrake and Josephson and Ken Wilber, and now, so many others are doing--perhaps in a few hundred years.

The conventionalists are ridiculing and mocking and twisting and turning, but there really is no serious question that conventional evolution with its natural selection and random mutations, and peppered moths, is little more than a silly idea--and Sheldrake with his obviously accurate "formative causation" is just taking a lot of crap and abuse for nothing, as original thinkers often do.

Of course, as he says, the presence is manufactured by a remembrance of the past, and this is why our dna is merely a kind of transforming device, well demonstrated by the ribosome, which is in FACT, the "work horse" of the cell. How can there be a ribosome without it having knowledge of how to perform when the dna passes through it?

And of course every cell and protein "knows" what it is supposed to do. It has knowledge and information and, magically, is "aware" of its role.

There's intelligence and remembrance and knowledge everywhere.

And that's why computer scientist, Gene Myers said, "There seems to be a huge intelligence here. It looks as though it was designed. Some might see this as unscientific, but not me." (About the Human Genome)

That should have been the "Eureka" mantra of the present scientific era, but the skeptics just keep on "woo-wooing" regardless.

So anyway, Bobb999 and lynn and Dorothy, Right to Bear, Avicenna, G. West and everybody, Bob the Cat--bloody good show! Our own sedentary version of Quest For Fire, eh.

Truman,G West, Lynn if you're still here! (...You said something about having posted your "last word"... Have a pleasant vacation, if that's what you're doing! It's been a great pleasure sharing thoughts with you, [and everyone]!).

One problem I see with teaching intelligent design is: who gets to design the curriculum? Who will have the authority to decide what theorists get included? Will Sheldrake make the cut? Etc. The evangelicals will be itching to further their own agenda, and will be lobbying hard to put Sunday school into secular school. It could get messy. Yet it's a poor situation now as the "neo-Darwinians have taken over the creation of life story", as Sheldrake says, warping minds and indoctrinating
them into the materialist cult.
Yes,I'd like to see non-material models taught as a counterweight, so long as the evangelicals can be held at bay!

Truman-I take it from your silence on my question, that you are pretty much a book and study man. Fair enough, but I'm with Sheldrake in thinking spiritual practise of some kind, can yield personal experience of the living interconnections of his morphic fields. Spontaneous synchronicities don't seem quite enough somehow!

...which leads me to today's "Demolition #23" (as Burroughs called it) headline:

Yahoo! News

AFP
Insurgents kill at least 23 Iraqis in new day of attacks

Fri Aug 4, 7:29 AM ET

BAGHDAD (AFP) - Insurgent fighters have killed at least 23 Iraqis, most of them police officers, in a wave of bombings across the country, after US generals warned the country could slip into civil war....

Hi Bobb. I was sure you would have noticed this: There's no interesting way to live a life, other than as a spiritual pratice.

The endless synchronicities I have experienced were a special gift--part of my education--as was that farmhouse, which by the way, I went out to visit yesterday.

What do you think of this? Yesterday I figured I might phone the house of my old neighbour (this discussion got me into it) who lived across the street from me in the mid 70s when I lived
at that farmhouse--just to enquire about what was up with the property. (Also, though, to see if they'd heard any ghost stories about it recently.)

I couldn't remember the family's name, and thought they'd probably be gone by now anyway. I flipped on the tv and within seconds there was Rae Dawn Chong (Tommy's kid) saying, "Deglan," who's her partner on that show where they examine mysterious incidents. Do you know the show? Well, I figured the name started with a D, but that's all that came to mind.

So, anyway, within maybe ten seconds of me trying to remember the name of that family the answer seemed to be provided by Rae Dawn, who, by the way absolutely enchanted me with her performance in Quest for Fire.

I went to internet telus and entered Deglan and sure enough there's still a Deglan on that same property--across the street from the haunted house. I didn't phone, though, but that's what inspired me to go have a visit.

Would you have just passed this off as run of the mill coincidence or would it have made you thoughtful about whether it might have been just a bit more?

It's the timing that's got me intrigued--and the fact that the "coincidence" seemed to instantly answer a question I had in my mind. I know this kind of stuff happens to everybody, and most people think nothing of it.

I've never come across the "23" occurrence, and haven't been able to find anything on it. I know that when I used to have an aluminum gutter business, I was always examining houses for the condition of their old gutters. This is the regular view of coiincidences like this--that we find what we look for, but I'm gonna look out for 23s from now on.

And Bobb, I just have skimmed this because it didn't seem to register as much as it might have. Sheldrake wrote: "Neo-darwinists have taken over the creation of life story"--and as you add, "warping minds and indoctrinatting them into the materialist cult."--or were those also Sheldrake's words? Not Sure. Regardless, that's basically what I've been trying to say about regular evolutionary theory, and why I went on about it ad nauseum with G. West, etc.

It is just a cult. The theory is actually just plain stupid. All of its intellectual icons have crashed. "Natural selection" would never have built anything at all, whether the "fittest organisms" were chosen--or not.

Intelligent design will be taught some day, as another branch of science--surely biology and physics. There will be formulae and equations, and algorithms.

They will be built upon the idea of default. If we ever get a Grand Unified Theory, for instance, with gravity included, this is going to provide a lot of time for physicists to try to identify that stuff that's always leaking out.

Most reasonably intelligent people know that there is really only one philosophical question and that is: why does the universe exist? And no human being will ever be able to figure it out without input from factor X.

Intelligent design is not necessarily religion, but religion is necessarily intelligent design. So what? Who cares that Pat Robertson tried to invite the wrath of god down on the heads of the Dover School Board for replacing eight members who wanted Intelligent Design on the curriculum?

The truth is never in a box--not even Schrodinger's. It comes in bits and pieces, from wise and good and evil--sometimes stupid--men and women.

Truman:
Re. That quote from Sheldrake. The quotation marks are correct (this time). The continuation about warping and indoctrinating, I wrote. The quote's from that Natural Grace book, from a chapter called "Revitalizing Education", where he offers a few novel ideas for improving on the materialist model in teaching children especially,
by introducing a mythic or spiritual dimension, including ritual. He wants kids to experience a personal connection to what is being studied, where possible. He admits this will be a hard sell, because it requires such a complete rethinking of curriculums.

I agree with you that just because the Pat Robertson's of the world are also pushing for teaching intelligent design,
that should hardly discredit the idea.
Movements and issues sometimes bring disparate, seemingly incompatible people together under the same umbrella.

Agreed. This makes me think of mythologist,Joseph Campbell whose friend
(Zen writer, etc.)Alan Watts once asked him "what kind of yoga do you do?" Joe said: "I underline sentences"! Campbell also noted that ordinary human interraction he would approach as a spiritual practise, recognizing divinity within others and himself. He said T.S. Elliot's "The Cocktail Party" addresses this idea.
...I myself though am with Sheldrake in
benefitting from a more defined discipline, which carries over into the rest of my day to day living.

That Deglan coincidence is a striking one indeed...so you returned to your "old haunts" (awful pun) this week?
I wonder how the current (corporeal) inhabitants are getting along?
I wonder if that house would be helped by a visit from a good medium. They not only
can (apparently) perceive and communicate with, but can often help an earthbound spirit cross over, and thus end any haunting. Of course, it's out of your hands now...

The 23 puzzle I first read about in Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger. He heard about if from William Burroughs.
Burroughs intro to it was this:
He was living in Tangier. One day he
was talking to the captain of a ferry that ran out of Tangier, a Capt. Clarke. The capt. told Burroughs "I've been running the ferry for 23 years without a single accident". Later that very day the ferry sank, killing everyone aboard.
Upon hearing the news, as Burroughs was contemplating this, he heard a radio report that a plane had crashed (somewhere), killing all on board. The
report happened to give the flight# as #23, and mentioned the capt. of the plane was another Capt. Clark!
(The phrase:" Captain Clark welcomes you aboard", would later reappear (as would 23s) repeatedly in Burroughs' novels, always with sinister overtones).Then he began to notice more and more 23s in newspaper headlines, etc. associated with death and disasters, and began collecting them, as something beyond blind chance seemed to be afoot.

Wilson on the other hand, found 23 to be quite personally significant in his own life, but in a positive fashion. Chains of 23 synchronicities accompanied his own spiritual journey.

(I thought I might add this darkly entertaining riff Burroughs wrote on #23).

William Burroughs wrote the following, in 1966, for the introduction to a book called With Revolvers Aimed...Finger Bowls, by Claude Pelieu:

some notes on demolition 23 revolvers aimed by claude pelieu...eureka calif.: deaths now total 23...common law wife he slew by stabbing her 23 times...23 die in montreal apartment blast...23 skidoo to the empty playground...23 die as bomb shatters embassy...bloody footprints back to your own people demolition 23..23..23...the more often your number comes up the more likely it is to come up again by simple association 23 die and millions read about it and associate it with death in their decorticated nervous sytems and walk around muttering 23 die 23 die 23 die with all that pressure on 23 do die bus in ecuador stadium collapsed at a public hanging in Malawai or was it basutoland now you will notice maybe later it turns out there were 24 died mostly children when a bus turned over and caught fire pick a place put the banner headline was 23 die in holiday bus horror that is the set up men will favour 23 by association maybe they collect 23s like I do and keep them in a scrap book so the number sort of lights up for me off the page you know and I feel good when I see 23 familiar as your own death which was always with you remember Johnny 23 so lets start a 23 club and pool all our little 23s into one big demolition 23 you mean to say you can make things happen kill decent folk by just juggling numbers on a page? well that's about the size of it just like uncle Albert we call him juggled a few signs around the blackboard made us all disappear 23 skidoo but we may get the drop on him cancel the bomb one hole was all it took...demolition 23...and in case you fellow members of the 23 club my fat french char calls me le cadavre semi vivant now isn't that cute? yes sir boys that's what marks a real 23 it's the smell of death bulldozing through it day after day and still it piles up all those millions of people was walking around rotten but had embalmed themselves in old film and when D.23 cut the film the stink would have knocked you to Uranus they was dead and rotten in there fell apart when the film drained off them it happened slow then get up to shave and dress hurts see?..

Bobb999
Your Burroughs sent me scuttling to the bookshelf for my copy of Ulysses for a few lines from Joyce's celebration of the magic of the ordinary, the usual and the everyday - the marvellous wonder of everyday life and the ordinary Bloomian folks we all are in our skivvies.

"...I love the smell of a rich big shop at 7 1/2d a lb or the other ones with the cherries in them and the pinky sugar 11d a couple of lbs of course a nice plant for the middle of the table Id get that cheaper in wait wheres this I saw them not long ago I love flowers Id love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing the beautiful country with fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violets nature it is as for them saying theres no God I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why dont they go and create something I often asked him atheists or whatever they call themselves go and wash the cobbles off themselves first then they they go howling for the priest and they dying and why why because theyre afraid of hell on account of their bad conscience ah yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes...."

I hope I got that mostly right -- transcribing Joyce is not the easiest thing in the world....

Thanks, G West! I enjoyed that Ulysses exerpt very much.
It also makes me feel I'm about due for another canoe or hiking trip soon...some of those "wild mountains then the sea then the waves rushing" are just what the doctor ordered (Dr. Joyce, in this case)!
...I see it touches on those damned septic,sceptic atheists too, such as we had on this very thread not long ago.(Personally, I'm not unhappy they've flown the coop by now)!

It's too bad Lynn's not here. She's very literary minded, and I'm sure she'd love your Joyce post too, and would offer some fine comments in response!

Enjoy yr. weekend!

Hi Bobb. Sat down this morning at 7:30 to do a bit of an expansion here on religion, evolution and intelligent design, and flipping on the tv for background noise, here comes Ron Rhodes, Christian theologian, on that show, "It's A New Day," going over, almost verbatim, my lecture on the contraindications for natural selection-mutation theory. In fact, he brought up all the same stuff I did--irreducible complexity, nucleotide engineering of proteins, second law of thermodynamics,

And then he said, (exactly) "That's one of the evidences for Christianity."

Which, of course, it isn't!!!

I won't harp on the synchronicity of it all, but really....!

Taken together with David Suzuki's declaration that Intelligent Design is just "religion," there's a massive lesson here in how people will use information to further their own ideological agenda.

I went hunting for 23 on the web and came across several interesting sites, including stuff on Burroughs. I've have always been intriqued that humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes--22 autosomes, one x and one y (males) and 2 x's females. Strangely, if this diploid arrangement is diverted to aneuploidy, birth defects and cancers result.

So...no 23, and no people!

(Yes, aneuploidy (diverson from 23) is more causatively epiphenomenal with cancer than are low grade mutations. {See oncogene-tumour-suppressor gene theory of cancer.} Solid tumours consistently show aneuploidy. Regular science just hasn't picked up on it yet. Too many billions in mutagens.

That was my litle advert on cancer,in case some Cancer Empire people are reading. You know...that disease which has quadrupelled in incidence in the last twenty-five years, but for which the Cancerists still claim brilliant breakthroughs every once in awhile.

The haunted house has been demolished. The school board has owned the property since I was there in l975; (so far, no new school) The horse corrals which used to surround the house are all blackberry bushes and trees.

Reverse evolution, I guess, like whales, which apparently started off as mammals--carnivorous herbivores, I think.

Truman: I'd read that interesting factoid you mention that we all start out from 23 chromosoome pairs. I see R.A. Wilson also mentions that "within the DNA coil of genetic metaprogramming instructions there are unexplained bonding irregularities every 23rd angstrom".

Aneuploidy and cancer. Interesting.
Presumably, carcinogens may cause aneuploidy and therefore cancer?

Which reminds me...certainly, the cancer empire or cancer industry is one of my pet peeves too.

How is it our affluent society more or less just accepts the presence of innumerable known or suspected carcinogens in our artificial environment? Chlorine in water, pesticides and trans fats in food, fire retardants in carpets, furniture, and computers (including the keyboard I'm typing on), plastic food containers (heat causes the chemicals to leach out), and on and on.

Why isn't the cancer society doing more with regard to prevention? Sure, they're
onto smoking and diet, but I hear little
about reducing environmental carcinogens.
An organization dedicated to eradicating
the disease should be on the front lines in educating the public and lobbying decision makers,(or so you'd hope).

As they are not doing this, focussing instead on medical treatments, I tend to view the Cancer Society as part of the problem, part of the Cancer "industry". With cancer touching virtually every family (who hasn't had relatives who have had cancer?), why isn't this a major political issue?
Why aren't we hearing screaming from rooftops?

As far as I can gather, demolishing a haunted house doesn't necessarily end a haunting...students and staff in any new school built on the site may well be in for surprises! Who knows, the ghost may be in an angry mood over the wrecking of his or her house, and may want to express displeasure in ghostly ways...

That theologian made a leap (of faith), I'd say. Interesting he repeated
the kind of evidence that you too point to but without your saying it also points to Jesus, however!

Bobb..One Business wag when asked about Cancer prevention said.." There are no products associated with prevention.
Nothing much to sell. However there are lots of products, sales and business in treatment.
Wendy Mesley the C.B.C. journalist was dealing with her own cancer and had said much as you have. Why nothing on prevention? That was the answer she got..no products..no sales..

bobthecat:

You've got me thinking about marketing.
Organic food products have taken off in recent years. They're in the biz of "selling health"...so why couldn't other manufacturers do likewise? How about a return to all natural carpets, for one small example, with an advertising blitz pointing out how unhealthy synthetic carpets are..."Did you know, dear consumer, that your chemical filled synthetic carpets may eventually kill you or your family?"

I think there is actually a lucrative and growing potential market out there for poison free consumer products.

The gardening products industry is being forced to come out with natural products, as more and more municipalities are banning chemical pesticides/herbicides for cosmetic use. Trans fats are on their way out.That's good news.
There are a few hopeful developments, but it's still moving way too slow.

Gov'ts should consider that reducing carcinogens means a reduction in illness, yielding a big money savings for public
health systems. That's one reason they should be on top of this.

I didn't see that Wendy Mesley program. I heard about it. Hopefully it will help push the issue a bit.

I wonder, do you think Dow, 3M, and other big powerful poisons makers are donating large sums to Cancer Societies to keep them "chemicals friendly", and have similarly cultivated friendships with top decision makers?

Black Cat Watch Chronicles:

I spoke with my Mom in Toronto today. She just happened to mention that the next door neighbors had acquired a new cat that comes to visit my Mom, (you guessed it!)an all black one.

...This afternoon my black cat, Coby (or Coco, etc. She has a lot of nicknames), was outside my door. A fellow
nearby said to his friend "that cat reminds me of my cat 'T.J.'" [Must be another black one].

Demolition #23 Strikes Again:

globeandmail.com

POSTED AT 12:39 PM EDT ON 07/08/06

Lebanese PM recants charge of 40 deaths

SAM F. GHATTAS

Associated Press

BEIRUT — Israeli warplanes intensified air strikes and launched a new commando raid in south Lebanon on Monday, killing at least 23 people in one of the heaviest tolls in days...
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060807.wmideast0807/BNStory/Front/home

Just gotta write one more thing before heading out on the not so-high seas up the coast...there is this kind of elitist view that often insists the discussion of science be isolated from all other realms...as if it is somehow superior to art, philosophy and literature. I would think that Sheldrake himself would very much disagree with this take.

In would seem that these diverse realms of exploration need not be seen in opposition to science but very much as important elements in the ether surrounding scientific discovery...and that often these other realms are actually, yup... even ahead of the self-appointed gods of science.

I have been reading an interesting book of late that points out that waaaay back in 1846 Edgar Allan Poe wrote in a metaphysical essay that "Space and Duration are One"... this essay also included the idea of an expanding universe...sixty years before Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

Dostoyevky, Joyce, Proust, Virginia Woolf, Lawrence, (and numbers of others) all helped to explode the concepts of time and consciouness...as did Monet and Cezanne. HG Wells and Feynman, though from different centuries, were fascinated by similar aspects of time...and would have enjoyed shooting the breezes of time over many cups of coffee I'm sure.

So Sheldrakes's concept of morphic resonance, this creative ether of collective learning...could suggest that patterns of artistic behavior may equally contribute to scientific discovery...and that art, in fact, may often be prescient in its behavior, as it was in helping to illuminate what would eventually become Einstein's shattering discoveries about time and space.

So it would seem just darn silly to close and disregard avenues of exploration, deemed not pristine enough for science...as the sceptics seem too quick to do...when those avenues don't at first appear to be solely scientific ones...and yet may be full of amazing information waiting to be discovered.

...it has been a great thread ...my pleasure talking to ya, too, Bobb999... and may all your pieshells be full, bob the cat and bob the cat ;-)...Truman, G West, Avicenna, RTB and all...have a great summer....though I can't quite believe it... there are already falling, yellowing leaves twirling and dancing about in the wind here today...

Lynn:

Those darn science chauvinists, prone to taking all the credit, and pontificating on all sorts of matters, as if they are the ones in the forefront of all knowledge, and the recognized judges of what's real and what's not!

Why shouldn't morphic resonance work just the way you suggest, with artists and writers, and philosophers informing science, even if scientists might be completely unaware of it, even predating the scientific discoveries themselves?
Yes, I believe Sheldrake would acknowledge this possibility - even if 99.9% of other scientists would not!
Hey, they gotta protect "their turf".

That's fascinating about Poe's (and others')intuitions Einstein would later confirm.
I'm guessing the Poe essay you mention is perhaps Eureka -? I've been curious about it since reading about it some years back, and always kept an eye out for it in visits to used bookstores. Never found it.

The take I read on it was it was supposedly a failed attempt by Poe to offer a kind of cosmology. I didn't necessarily believe that, as the author citing it seemed so off base to me in other of her pronouncements on Poe and other authors. From what you write, it sounds like rather than a failure, it was way ahead of its time, in part at least.

I'd love to see the Tyee offer further articles capable of sparking the kinds of discussion we've had on this one - But I won't hold my breath...I have a feeling Rupp isn't the only editor or honcho here that has a prejudice against topics
remotely "new age" (how I hate that term!)in concept.

Hints of Fall already? Best enjoy the summer while it's still around. (Not that I dislike Fall, mind you. It's just that the rainy season starts in earnest around here).I hope you have a good one (sailing?) too, Lynn!

Lynn,
You've sent me rushing to my bookshelf again. To find this sonnet of Poe's I'd completely forgotten.

Somehow its message seems apt. Have a wonderful sail/cruise/paddle - whatever.

Sonnet - To Science

Science! True daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Abeit he soared with an undaunted wing?

Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

Enjoy your dreams.

First word of last line in stanza one is Albeit - damn! I was concentrating on Naiad and Hamadryad and I let 'Albeit' slip beneath my radar - sorry!

G West:
Another excellent pick to post (the Poe sonnet). The "machine universe" Sheldrake
abhors was already well established by Poe's time. Poe apparently abhored it too, judging by his sonnet.

...I'm just reminded, Poe wrote a famous tale titled The Black Cat!

(Don't worry, I should be over this black cat fixation soon enough. I've just been finding it very entertaining!)

lynn, back at you my friend.

Have a great trip. I too just got back from the Central Coast... What a beautiful world we live in...!! Enjoy.

Peace lynn

RTB

I see some Christian evangelicals apparently are hoping the current war in Lebanon is a prelude to possible nuclear
war, Armageddon and the Rapture, and are
working feverishly to help boost Israel to this dire end.
...They've even (deservedly)joined the D-23 club:

MIDDLE EAST CRISIS
For some evangelicals, Mideast war stirs hope
Believing the Mideast conflict is a sign that Christ will return soon, some evangelical groups have cheered Israel's military actions.
BY ALEXANDRA ALTER

The Rapture Index -- a popular evangelical Christian Web posting that calculates a global rise in natural disasters, war and inflation -- bills itself as ``a Dow Jones industrial average of end-time activity.''

An index below 85 signifies a week of ''slow prophetic activity.'' Anything above 145 signals the apocalypse is near.

The Rapture Index this week: 158. The spike reflects many U.S. evangelicals' view that growing conflict in the Middle East signals the start of a global struggle leading to Christ's return.

''We believe 100 percent what the Scripture has to say about this,'' said Jack Heintz, a South Florida businessman and president of the Christian group Peace for Israel, who recruited 23 evangelical Christians to join a July telephone fundraising event for Israel. ``There's going to be a total battle, the battle of Armageddon, and I believe that's very close to happening.''

Some have ratcheted up support for Israel in its current battle in Lebanon with Hezbollah out of belief that a raging war -- perhaps even a nuclear confrontation -- marks a prelude to the apocalypse. Christian groups are sending millions of dollars to Israeli communities and shelters, hosting pro-Israel rallies and urging U.S. politicians to back Israeli military... action.http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/15221578.htm

I found this 23 taken from a Haaretz newspaper article and posted today by another Tyee poster on the Lebanon/Angus Reid thread:

IAF strikes funeral procession in south Lebanon, killing 14
By Amiram Barkat, Haaretz Correspondent and News Agencies

Israel Air Force air strikes hit near a funeral procession in south Lebanon on Tuesday, sending some of the 1,500 mourners running in panic and killing at least 14 people witnesses and the town's mayor said....

Mourners were burying 15 relatives killed Monday in another IAF attack.

Missiles slammed into a building in Ghaziyeh, a Shiite town southeast of the port city of Sidon, about five minutes after the procession passed. One person was killed and five wounded in that attack, rescuers and witnesses said.

Thirty minutes later, Israel warplanes staged four more bombing runs, destroying two buildings, said Ghaziyeh Mayor Mohammed Ghaddar. Five bodies were pulled out of the rubble, but between 10 and 15 more were believed trapped under the wreckage, he said.

Fifteen people died in Ghaziyeh on Monday, when Israeli airstrikes flattened three buildings there.

The town has been targeted several times, but Monday's and Tuesday's attacks were the heaviest. The town was overflowing with displaced people, who have swelled its population to 23,000.

...Seems to me there's something beyond randomness and chance to this weird Demolition 23 phenomena. They just keep coming.

Bob 999...Yeah, 23 seems quite significant... I am always open to explore... Thanks bro.

I thought I would pass on this tune, as it has been in my head all day... Edwin Starr wrote as a protest song in the 70's... I know you will appreciate it...

“War,” Edwin Starr wrote: "War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing….” ...

Peace

RTB

Right you are RTB. Too many 23s, too much war...I think I had more faith in human nature in my younger years, as far as the
possibilities for world peace go. Maybe in another 10,000 years or so? You may be more optimistic than me.

Bobb999, Firstly sorry about misspelling your name my friend on the last post. Secondly, I would like to thank you Bobb for your imput on this thread. It's a keeper for sure...!!

Thanks to all the other posters who contributed to such an informative and expanding read... Thanks Truman again, G West as always insightful, lynn, bob the cat and bob the cat, dorothy interesting, and all the black cats who take such good care of their human friends...;-)

Peace my friends,

RTB (Bear)

Anthrax spreads to 123 Sask. farms

Jeremy Warren, The StarPhoenix
Published: Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Donald Connell knows farming is fraught with ups and downs, but he never thought he'd lose his top breeding bulls in one summer, especially during breeding season.

More surprising is the way he lost them.

"It's been unbelievable. Nobody thought anthrax would ever be a problem (on the farm)," Connell said.

"Everybody was scared. You hear about this stuff coming in envelopes, but of course, that's totally ridiculous."

Connell's ranch was quarantined after anthrax-infected animals were found on his land. He has lost 27 head of bison, including his top breeding bulls.

His is one of three area farms quarantined near the RM of Ponass Lake, about 120 kilometres southeast of Melfort, where cases of anthrax first surfaced this year.

As of Tuesday, 10 more Saskatchewan farms had been placed under quarantine, bringing the total to 123, while 615 animals -- primarily cattle and bison -- have died suspiciously.... http://www.canada.com/saskatoonstarphoenix/news/story.html?id=cbe7a411-bacc-4a91-8be1-0a8f53ef71bb&k=57993http://www.canada.com/saskatoonstarphoenix/news/story.html?id=cbe7a411-bacc-4a91-8be1-0a8f53ef71bb&k=57993
*************************************************** RTB: Yes, it's been great fun. Thanks for your participation too and also for being a member in good standing in the black cat club!
A fascinating, worthwhile thread, that Mr. (or Dr.) Sheldrake sparked...Amazing tales, thought provoking, and insightful info. and opinion.

Thanks to all these valued contributors (in alphabetical order)!:
Avicenna, bob the cat, daehl, dorothy, G West, Lynn, RTB, Truman. (I probably left
somebody out from early on). It's funny, dorothy kind of got my (and some other people's) hackles up with some ill-informed pronouncements she made, yet those just drove me to do more research, which brought to light some wonderful quotes from Sheldrake I might otherwise have missed, and drove others to post some excellent stuff in rebuttal (thanks dorothy...sorry if we came down a bit hard on you).

...And to all the obdurate sceptics: May some paradigm challenging paranormal or mystical phenomena someday smack you hard across the side of your heads, and finally shake you awake you from your materialist dream!

...This thread is soon to disappear from The Tyee's front page, but will continue to be easily available in the "Views" section for a while, and after that will be available in Tyee Archives.

-So, maybe we can even keep the conversation going a little while longer!

23 skidoo, bobb999
Cheers.

GW: -One more on black cats (and E.A. Poe), for our black cat club. It seems Poe's a black cat club member in good standing too.

I discovered Poe wrote a short essay, Instinct vs. Reason - A Black Cat
where he notes the amazing apparent reasoning abilty of supposedly instinct-ruled creatures.
He says: "..The writer of this article is the owner of one of the most remarkable black cats in the world...of a demure and sanctified demeanor...."

He then describes in detail how his cat is regularly able to open a locked kitchen door by leaping up on to the thumb latch, carefully using her right paw to press down on the thumb latch, then leaping down with all her strength, pushing against the door so it will be sure to open!

Aug. 11/06

This article's been off the Tyee front page
for a few days now. It's been such an enjoyable thread though, I vote we keep it going! At least as an occasional repository for...anything related: info., links, opinion, more of those amazing tales...there's a lot of juicy stuff that just doesn't fit easily on other Tyee threads, but deserves a place to be posted.
This could be the place!