Introducing Rupert Sheldrake (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, March 22, 2015, 13:11 (3326 days ago) @ BBella

DAVID: A wide-ranging interview with Sheldrake who is quite the free-thinker. His ideas deserve thought. He is fiercely anti-reductionist:-http://www.thebestschools.org/features/rupert-sheldrake-interview/-“I would like to see a plurality of sources for funding in science that enable different approaches to be explored. This is unlikely to happen through government funding agencies, which are dominated by the science establishment, but there are many private foundations that could fund alternative scientific and medical research and I hope that some of them will do so.
"I also hope that non-materialist scientists will feel able to meet up with other like-minded professionals and work together to change the sciences from within. And I hope that these open questions will become more widely known to students at schools through the educational system."-BBELLA: The more the above happens the more (for the good) changes will happen and happen quickly.-A very long but very interesting and refreshing interview. I'm afraid I skipped a lot of the specialist stuff, but here are just a couple of other snippets that attracted my attention:-For Tony especially:-“The software/hardware duality is indeed a very popular modern metaphor for the relation of mind and body. But it is of course inherently dualistic. The hardware is thought of as like the machinery of the body and the software as like the purposive intelligence of minds.”
“One of the attractions of old-style dualism was that the soul could survive the death of the body. And, interestingly, the founding father of modern computing theory, Alan Turing, was obsessed with this duality precisely because he wanted to have a model for understanding how the soul could survive bodily death. If the software could be taken from one computer and put into another, he had a good analogy for survival and reincarnation.” -Re psychic phenomena:
“In my various encounters with skeptics like Richard Dawkins, James Randi, Daniel Dennett, and Michael Shermer, I have found that they have no interest in looking at the evidence because they know in advance it must be false. In other words, their position is one of prejudice rather than open-minded scientific enquiry. In that sense, I think they are deeply anti-scientific.”-An interesting observation, which I have no doubt applies to other spheres of study too!