Introducing Rupert Sheldrake (Introduction)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Monday, March 23, 2015, 03:13 (3325 days ago) @ dhw

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."-> 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.” 
> -
I agree, though I am not looking for a way for the "soul to survive bodily death". I think it is more of a case as it is the only analogy that really makes sense because a 'computer' is the only technology we have in which information, processing, and mechanics are intertwined in a manner similar to what happens in the human body.

--
What is the purpose of living? How about, 'to reduce needless suffering. It seems to me to be a worthy purpose.