Secular science and human rights

Sheldrake: In theory science does portray humans as just machines, computers, “lumbering robots” in Richard Dawkins’s phrase, with no free will. From this point of view our minds are merely the activities of our brains. On the other hand, most scientists subscribe to secular humanism, which says we should do everything we can to improve human welfare, stop suffering, and so on. So there’s a conflict there. If you consider humans machines, then you should treat them the same way science treats animals, which is what the Nazi doctors did in the death camps; the same experiments long carried out on animals were applied to humans there. There’s nothing in science that tells us humans are special and shouldn’t be treated this way. That idea comes from secular humanism, which is a kind of quasi-religious faith.

https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/446/wrong-turn

Richard Dawkins comes to call

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQeK05CtqNk

Unconscious souls

There are a lot of problems with substance dualism, but for me one of the most compelling is also one that has received less attention than it deserves. It is an objection that confronted the poster-boy for substance dualism, the French philosopher Rene Descartes. It can be summed up in a question: If dualism is true, then how is unconsciousness possible? 

...there is still something odd about about the soul carrying out unconscious processes, especially where these processes are presumably at least largely independent of what is going on in the brain. And it is still the supposed independence of the soul from the brain that creates problems for the dualist, since it looks very much like the properties that the soul is being invoked to explain are determined by the state of the brain. 

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/secularoutpost/2016/11/28/consciousness-and-souls/

This strikes me as a pretty unintelligent critique of dualism:

i) Although the notion of unconscious thought might seem to be self-contradictory, we know for a fact that reasoning can operate at a subliminal level. Consider scientists and mathematicians who struggle to solve a problem, fail, sleep on the problem, and awaken with a solution. 

Likewise, consider the creative process. When a novelist writes a story, where are these ideas coming from? Although writing is a conscious activity, the ideas well up from the subconscious.

ii) To my knowledge, we generally forget what we dream about unless we wake up during or right after the dream. There may be a lot of mental activity going on when we sleep, but we just don't remember it.

iii) In substance dualism, the soul is independent of the brain in the sense that it can survive apart from the brain. The soul is ontologically independent of the brain. But when a soul is coupled with a brain, mental awareness may be dependent on the brain. 

iv) To take another comparison: words and sentences are concrete. They can be visible or audible. Yet meaning is abstract. Meaning is not reducible to sound waves or the chemical composition of paper and ink. That symbolizes meaning. That encodes meaning in physical carriers. If you destroy the carrier, there's loss of information. The listener or reader can no longer access the information. But it's the conduit that's destroyed–not what it conveys. 

v) Take the position of Rupert Sheldrake, which he develops from Henri Bergson:

“Where?” is the wrong question. Memory is a relationship in time, not in space. The idea that a memory has to be somewhere when it’s not being remembered is a theoretical inference, not an observation of reality. When I met you this morning, I recognized you from yesterday. There’s no photographic representation of you in my brain. I just recognize you. What I suggest is that memory depends on a direct relationship across time between past experiences and present ones. The brain is more like a television receiver. The television doesn’t store all the images and programs you watch on it; it tunes in to them invisibly. 

http://thesunmagazine.org/issues/446/wrong_turn

I don't necessarily agree with that. But it represents a paradigm-shift, and it's worth exploring from that perspective. 

Selfish genes

http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/non-darwinian-biologist-rupert-sheldrake-takes-on-darwinian-atheist-daniel-dennett/

Distant starlight

Rupert Sheldrake 

In my talk I said that the published values of the speed of light dropped by about 20 km/sec between 1928 and 1945. Carroll’s “careful rebuttal” consisted of a table copied from Wikipedia showing the speed of light at different dates, with a gap between 1926 and 1950, omitting the very period I referred to. His other reference (http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/lightandcolor/speedoflight.html) does indeed give two values for the speed of light in this period, in 1928 and 1932-35, and sure enough, they were 20 and 24km/sec lower than the previous value, and 14 and 18 km/sec lower than the value from 1947 onwards. 

1926: 299,7981928: 299,7781932-5: 299,7741947: 299,792 

In my talk I suggest how a re-examination of existing data could resolve whether large continuing variations in the Universal Gravitational Constant, G, are merely errors, as usually assumed, or whether they show correlations between different labs that might have important scientific implications hitherto ignored. 

http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/14/open-for-discussion-graham-hancock-and-rupert-sheldrake/

A stock objection to young-earth creationism is the so-called problem of distant starlight. This presumes that the speed of light is constant. But Sheldrake draws attention to discrepancies in the observational data. Does this mean our measurements are inaccurate, or does it mean the speed of light is, in fact, variable? If the latter, then that complicates the appeal to distant starlight. 

Guerrilla atheism

Although this article concentrates on Rupert Sheldrake and paranormal researchers, it documents a broader strategy on the part of militant atheists to infiltrate and manipulate Wikipedia. Make no mistake: this is an ideological war. Like Ho Chi Minh, militant atheists are fanatically determined opponents who take no prisoners:

http://realitysandwich.com/179887/wikipedia_battle_rupert_sheldrakes_biography/

Science Set Free

http://www.skeptiko.com/184-dr-rupert-sheldrake-sets-science-free-from-dogma/

Richard Dawkins comes to call

Rupert Sheldrake shares a few words about his brief meeting with Richard Dawkins, concluding: "Should science be a vehicle of prejudice, a kind of fundamentalist belief-system? Or should it be a method of enquiry into the unknown?"

Speaking of Dawkins, some peeps might be interested in a debate he had with John Lennox, too.