http://michaelprescott.typepad.com/micha...

Michael Prescott rarely fails to have something interesting for his readers. His review of "The Goblin Universe" by Ted Holiday in particular chimes nicely with many of my own dearly held but essentially amateur hypotheses. Such as:

and...

and this ...

Great food for thought even if it is pure speculation.

Enjoy.

Another current thread here is asking (and answering) questions about the relationship between science and philosophy. This post was prompted by that discussion but as the latter has over 40 entries and still growing, I thought I'd ask this question separately.

What I really want is an insight into the thinking of the sceptic. I want to know whether scepticism is driven by philosophical bias or by the belief that no evidence exists for the things about which they are sceptical. I know there are sceptics, philosophical materialists and debunkers who read the stories and comments on this web site. I hope that some of you might respond in an open and informative manner.

Here's my problem in a nutshell: there is evidence out there in support of phenomena such as Out of Body Experiences, NDE's, telepathy, reincarnation ... the list goes on and on. Some of the evidence is admittedly weak. Some is not. Some evidence comes from studies by well qualified researchers. Sometimes this evidence is attacked using not-so-fair tactics by the debunkers while, on the other hand, there are bogus psychics and bandwagon gurus. Why is it then that all - rather than just some - of this evidence is ignored? What makes you so sure that people who take such evidence seriously are either deluded or liars and cheats? Honestly, I do want to understand.

Let's take NDE's, for example. People all over the world, from different cultures and with different religious and secular beliefs, have reported such experiences. If taken individually, probably not one of these reported cases represents the silver bullet: the paradigm breaker. But surely the sheer volume of anectdotal evidence must count for something? Can you just dismiss it all with an imperious wave of the hand?

Add in the other supporting evidence from telepathy studies and other anomalies and can you not admit that there is a rather compelling case that something is going on that just doesn't fit with the current orthodox materialist view?

I know why my philosophy - at least in part - is what it is. As a teenager I had, like all teenagers, a crisis of belief. I was brought up to go to Sunday school every week, I studied scriptures and I sat with the local vicar and talked about parables and miracles. At some point the vicar was unable or unwilling to answer my doubts. I questioned the orthodox views of the church and found them wanting. For a while, I switched sides completely and became an atheist (at the same time my politics lurched leftwards and I started calling myself a communist). It didn't take long for my mind to start asking questions of the scientific, materialist orthodoxy and I found that wanting too. My parents died within two years of each other during my mid-to-late teens. Where had they gone? I was convinced that I could still feel them around. My step mother came to me in dreams and showed me her new surroundings.

Now I was confused. I had developed a keen appreciation of some of the things going on at the boundaries of science. I was excited by relativity and quantum mechanics and cosmology. On the other hand, I was driven to find out whether there were such things as ghosts or a spirit world. Whether life ended in oblivion or transition.

Forty years on and I'm still trying to reconcile those two sides of my psyche. I have friends who are hard line materialists and others who are New Age adherents and I feel comfortable in the company of either. I respect both but I can't seem to grasp why their views are so irreconcilable.

Dave.

Michael Prescott's Blog is always very interesting and usually draws some equally interesting comments.

His latest is his 1000th posting and he marks the milestone with the big question about the nature of God.

http://michaelprescott.typepad.com/micha...

In this blog entry, I'm attempting to make a case for saying that the "quality" media, most scientists and the academic establishment have a bias in favour of physical realism - or materialism as it is more commonly termed. Stating the bleeding obvious, you might say, but many people tend to trust the above mentioned authorities without question. This materialistic bias is sustained by the fervent deisre of its proponents to expunge anything smacking of the spiritual or the supernatural from public debate. This is a concerted attempt to promote a philosophy that eliminates purpose and consciousness from any description of fundamental reality.

Highly credentialed materialists such as Daniel Dennett or the Churchlands (Paul and Pat) go so far as to deny the existence of consciousness altogether. There is actually a name for this kind of denial: they are called "Eliminatist Materialists". Thoughts belong in the realm of the subjective and there is no place in science for the subjective. There is a book entitled "The Taboo of Subjectivity" (see Amazon) by B. Alan Wallace who is the President of the Santa Barbara Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Consciousness. And where we really see the full fury of the campaign against idealism is when we speculate about the metaphysical: possible worlds beyond the world of the five senses. Worlds possibly inhabited by incorporeal beings: dead people and such like! How can you measure something that is not of this world? Impossible. Therefore, if it can't be measured, it just doesn't exist.

We don't have to try too hard to find examples of this bias. There are anomalies that science has a bit of a problem trying to explain. Consciousness is one (the New Scientist gracefully included consciousness as one of the 13 great mysteries that science has yet to explain). I would contend that many of these anomalies just wouldn't be a problem if we were to adopt an idealist worldview. Religious types like to explain these anomalies by saying that God did it (obviously). This, the sceptics accuse, is the God of the Gaps argument and that one day, all of these slight problems will be satisfactorily explained by physical science. What I see, on the other hand, is the over-use of coincidence and statistical probability as an explanatory device among materialists. When someone tells of a dream they had that grandpa had died and then they hear the next day that Grandpa did indeed die during the night ... coincidence. When people all over the world describe similar experiences: all coincidences (or they are all liars). To accept the idea of a mind-based reality is asking far too much but to believe that at every moment, with every decision made by anyone and everyone, a whole new universe is created is just hunky-dory. After all, it would be a new PHYSICAL universe, now wouldn't it?

This is precisely what was suggested in the 1950's by the physicist, Hugh Everett. For years it was regarded as the ramblings of an eccentric. Until, that is, these New Age hippy types started hijacking physics and putting consciousness back in the centre of things. Come back Hugh, all is forgiven ... what a genius you turned out to be! At a stroke we can be rid of that pesky consciouness thing and solve the problem with statistics. Schrödinger's cat can be dead in one world and alive in another. No conscious observer required. Just an endless supply of universes ... not much to ask in the defense of materialism. Actually, I don't have a problem with the idea of parallel universes and the splitting-off of new universes at decision points - in fact, for what it's worth, I think that is probably the way the world does work. But to use that purely to eliminate the need for consciousness seems a little desperate.

There is another example of this stats-of-the-gaps argument. We are told that the universe is so precisely fine-tuned as to appear to be designed that way. Prof. Paul Davies calculated the odds against life-supporting stars evolving from the Big Bang rather than an aggregate of black holes is "one followed by a thousand billion billion billion zeros (at least)". Any good atheist or materialist couldn't allow that word "design" into the equation. So again we see the old stand-by - probabilities (nobody but scientists and mathematicians understand that stuff anyway). Again, if we have enough universes (only this time we need all these universes at the outset, not just created at decision points) then we can explain why we happen to live in one that just so neatly fits the bill. No less than arch-materialist and high priest of British cosmology, Sir Martin Rees supports this explanation while agreeing with the impossible odds against chance for a single universe.

So we have examples of desperate number crunching going on in order to eliminate the need for mindful purpose. Mindful purpose suggests God. God represents all that superstitious nonsense we learned at church when we were children. We must not allow that back in at any cost. Isn't that the general tenet?

Here, therefore, is the bias: while idealism might provide just as good an explanation of the world as would materialism; and while idealism might actually provide a better explanation for the so-called supernatural phenomena that many of us observe or experience, why is it that the materialist explanation - no matter how contrived - is invariably accepted (or demanded)? At this point one might expect to hear a clamour of voices proclaiming "Occam's Razor!". I might suggest, however, that Ian Stevenson's reincarnation research would find a more parsimonious iterpretation within an idealist worldview while it would be seen as impossible according to the materialist view. Indeed, investigating the impossible is not science - it is fantasy. And who decides what is possible? Scientists.

I'll end this little discourse with a recent example of media bias. The BBC recently aired a documentary called "The Secret Life of Chaos". This was, as you might expect from the BBC, a well produced and well presented treatment of the theories of Chaos and Complexity. However, as we have also come to expect from the BBC, it presented a particular point of view as fact: that being the materialist/atheist point of view. In short, we were presented with the inescapable (and somewhat triumphant) conclusion that chaos theory showed that the universe has no purpose. That massively complex systems such as humans can be explained by a few simple equations involving feedback loops. Finally, Darwinian Natural Selection is embraced to complete the picture: no purpose, no mind, just self-organising dust which happens to produce very complex, self- replicating organisations of dust over billions of years. It seems that at some point along the billions of years timeline, the dust learned to think. No mention of how that happened but it is hinted at that thinking is nothing more than an emergent property of the organised clumps of dust.

Well, who'd have thought it?

Dave.

I was musing away in the shower this morning, thinking about OOBE's and NDE's and skeptics. I somehow have the impression that, while the evidence is quite good, some of the details of these reported experiences lead skeptics to say "Ha! Why didn't she notice that while out of body?".

Also, with research experiments using objects placed deliberately out of view of the physical person ... the subject of the experiment ... many might describe a vivid and convincing experience but fail to identify the target object.

Now I know that what I am about to suggest will make the skeptics cringe even more but, well, that might have more than a little to do with their materialist worldview.

In a nutshell, we consciously create the reality we experience and the only reason it seems consitent when we compare notes is because our "physical" world is the product of a consensus. It seems that this consensus is pretty solid in this world. Nevertheless, it might not be quite so solid in whatever dimensions we find ourselves in while in another state of consciousness (such as out of the body or during an NDE).

I wonder how much emotional belief might play a part in all this? If a researcher with a decidedly pro-paranormal outlook sets up an experiment and connects emotionally with his subjects, then perhaps a stronger consensus between them can be achieved and the experiment produces positive results. And, of course, the opposite might be the case if the researcher is a skeptic. I believe the term "Experimenter Effect" is widely used and we have seen it in action when skeptics have tried to reproduce some of the results achieved by Rupert Sheldrake, Gary Schwartz and others.

I am aware of the obvious objections to this "we create reality" idea. Evidence points to the fact that the physical universe pre-existed human-kind by billions of years. The equally obvious answer to this is to say that the universe itself (and every particle within it) is conscious. In effect, the idea of an atom must exist before the physical atom can exist. This is idealism. Many would say that the entire universe is recreated moment by moment. Others might say that there is no physical reality unless there is a conscious observer to observe it. Maybe it is a bit like those old computer games where the trees suddenly appeared as you mover towards them?

These are difficult concepts (well, they are for me). How much consciousness is required to define an "observer"? Does an observer from a "higher" dimension count as an observer in our 3 (or 4) dimensional universe?

Dave.

Hi everyone,

You might have noticed a previous Blog entry of mine in which I commented on the treatment of Rupert Sheldrake at the hands of sceptics, particularly his "friend", Chris French. I was encouraged to see subsequent articles on the same subject with links to the Skeptiko podcast, etc.

Other scientists in the field of consciousness research and paranormal investigations have receieved similar, if not worse, treatment from the scientific orthodoxy. I'm thinking particularly of the likes of Gary Schwartz and Dean Radin. Now we might be forgiven for thinking that the establishment reserves its scorn and ire for the gullible cranks out there on the fringe working on that silly parapsychology nonsense. But it seems that the great and wise of the orthodoxy cannot bear ANY dissent, even from cosmologists, physicists and astronomers.

Here is a link to an open letter, published in the New Scientist, in response to the treatment they received after daring to question the Big Bang theory. Does this look somewhat familiar?

http://www.cosmologystatement.org/

Dave.

I recently spoiled myself (and my bank balance) with a new iPod Touch and immediately went looking for interesting media to download. I have a 40 minute stop-start journey to work and occasionally have a longer trip of perhaps three or four hours driving. So I bought myself a cheap cassette adapter (stereo mini-plug wired to a cassette tape case which allows the iPod to play through the car tape player) and started playing podcasts to while away the time in the car.

I have found these audio clips so interesting that I'd like to share some of them with the readers here. Obviously, I'm hoping that others might be able to add to the list. I don't know about you but I find podcast searching quite difficult and very time consuming so I hope this will help cut some of that search time for you. Usually these sites will give you a choice between a podcast and a downloadable .mp3 file (in case you have a player other than an iPod).

In no particular order:

1. The always excellent Skeptiko:

http://www.skeptiko.com/

2. Nice half-hour interviews at Beyond Reason:

http://www.beyondreason.com/archived_shows

3. Hours and hours of material here:

http://binnallofamerica.com/boaaudio.html

4. News for the Soul on Blog Talk Radio:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/soulnews

5. Living Dialogues:

http://personallifemedia.com/podcasts/21...

6. Jim Harold is a must for TDG readers:

http://paranormalpodcast.com/

7. More Grail, Rennes-le-Chateau and other mysteries:

http://www.rennessence.com/index.php

8. Rupert Sheldrake has some great audio clips online:

http://www.sheldrake.org/realaudio/

9. As does Dean Radin:

http://www.deanradin.com/NewWeb/activiti...

10. While I'm not sure about "Life Coach Mary" herself, she does have some interesting guests on her show:

http://www.lifecoachmary.com/conversatio...

11. Voices of Wisdom - including the likes of Ken Wilber and Eckhart Tolle:

http://www.learnoutloud.com/Podcast-Dire...

12. I haven't sampled these yet but you might like to pick out a few from this impressive list of shows:

http://www.ghostlytalk.com/node/1798

Well, that's for starters. Please feel free to add your favourites. Who knows, maybe one day we will have a Daily Grail podcast? Or not.

Have fun.

Dave.

Recently, I noticed an announcement of a debate to be held in London, entitled "Cynicism - The British Disease" ( http://21st-centurynetwork.com/blog/?p=1282 ). This particular subject has become something of a thorn in my side ever since I returned home to England after spending some 15 years in South Africa during the 80's and 90's. Perhaps it was always thus but, after spending so long away, I had perhaps forgotten just how cynical the British could be.

Arriving home in 1997, I began to notice that the whole British cynicism thing was based upon a sneering variety of humour and that had witty TV and radio personalities as well as stand-up comics in the vanguard. They set the style of delivery to be copied by journalists, writers, academics and pundits everywhere. Foremost among these celebrity wags was Stephen Fry - already worshipped by the "quality" press for his seemingly boundless knowledge and mastery of the language - his ego inflated as he became ubiquitous in the media. He presents a long running TV series called QI (Quite Interesting) in which he dispenses pearls of wisdom with the fabled wit that brought him fame and fortune. In the show, he is surrounded others - usually comedians - who have helped hone the blade of British cynicism. Beware all ye who do not fit the British norm: thy public humiliation shall be merciless.

I watch the show and I laugh along with the rest: these guys are very funny. The same can be said of that other ego-inflated TV personality, Jeremy Clarkson. He's funny. I laugh. What's wrong with that? Well, what's wrong is that he has influence. Extreme he may be but so are many of those who follow his shows and read his books and tabloid articles. Fry is of a different order though. Ironically, for an avowed atheist, he's a High Priest in sceptical circles. On one episode of QI he crassly invited any of his viewers who happened to believe in astrology to switch off immediately (to huge applause, as I remember).

Like Clarkson, I enjoy watching Stephen Fry. But, like Clarkson, it is his influence that bothers me. Too many people believe what he says without question - and I suspect he likes it that way. Yet Fry's brand of cynicism is usually quite restrained and polite. Not so, those who attempt to imitate him. There is no reasoned debate in the British media. There are those - such as Fry himself - who conform to a certain "OK" philosophy and it is open season on the rest. That philosophy can be summed up with a few ism's: materialism, atheism, scientism, empiricism. In short, we are insignificant specs of dust in a pointless universe; our lives have no meaning and oblivion is inevitable.

I'm an idealist. I believe that the universe itself is conscious and that reality is multi-dimensional - with dimensions some would call spiritual. This view is generally dismissed in my country as being wooly, New Age, hippy clap-trap. The fact that I share a similarity in philosophy with the likes of Plato and Gandhi matters not a whit: according to the prevailing view, I'm a credulous idiot.

Rupert Sheldrake is, first and foremost, a scientist. He is a very meticulous scientist who sticks to the scientific method and publishes his experiments and statistics for all to check. His ideas don't go down too well with sceptics. When assessing his work, they quickly revert to their natural cynicism and sneer en masse. I spent a good part of this weekend listening to many of the audio clips he has posted on his website. Whether you agree with him or not, when you listen to him speak you cannot help but appreciate his quiet intelligence and dedication to his life's work. He seems like a lovely man so why is it that sceptics and cynics seem so threatened by his ideas that they feel the need to ... well, I'll let this link to the (appropriately British) UK Sceptics forum speak for itself:

http://www.ukskeptics.com/forum/showthre...

Anyhow, the reason I bring up Sheldrake is because I listened to a debate between him and Chris French - a well known British media sceptic and debunker. Now it is clear that Rupert has a lot of respect for French. He sees him as one of the more open-minded sceptics and describes him as a friend. Now, for anyone reading this blog, I'd invite you to listen to that debate and comment. Firstly the tone is somewhat unfortuantely set by the chairman, Prof. Simon Blackburn, when he describes (laughingly) those who raised their hands as being open to the possibility of telepathy as a "credulous lot". Then again he tried some Fry-like sarcasm by describing the subject of Sheldrake's investigations as "dark powers at work". But I'd really like you to listen to Chris French. Perhaps I'm being too critical but I 'm sure that I detect a level of condescension in his reply. He's obviously secure in the knowledge that he's one of the "OK" philosophy crowd. That nobody who matters will ever sneer at him. And because of that security, and despite the fact that he regards Rupert as a friend, he casts doubt on Sheldrake's integrity by implying (perhaps) sloppy science or even dishonesty. To make his point, he invokes historical cases of fraudulent research. Why? Everyone knows there is fraud in paranormal research. Rupert points out that there is fraud in orthodox research too ... lots of it.

Nevertheless, Sheldrake is right in saying that Chris French is unusually fair minded compared to the majority of sceptics. I still, however, lament the fact that Rupert Sheldrake should have to contend with poorly disguised cynicism, even in a friendly debate.

Sheldrake's Audio Clips: http://www.sheldrake.org/B&R/audiostream/

Look for:

Rupert at the Perrott-Warrick Public Debate, Trinity College Cambridge, November 29th 2006
Rupert debates with Professor Chris French, Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths College, University of London
Does Telepathy Happen?
Chaired by Professor Simon Blackburn