Discussions

Here is a a fact for you: 1 in 5 American adults believe that the Sun revolves around the Earth, which is somewhat shocking—but the same proportion holds for Germany and Great Britain.

WHY DO SOME PEOPLE RESIST SCIENCE? This was a topic taken up by the respected Harvard professor of psychology, Paul Bloom, along with one of his graduate students, Deena Skolnick Weisberg. They explain that it starts in childhood, "As Susan Carey once put it, the problem with teaching science to children is "not what the student lacks, but what the student has, namely alternative conceptual frameworks for understanding the phenomena covered by the theories we are trying to teach."

And add, "These clash with intuitive beliefs about the immaterial nature of the soul and the purposeful design of humans and other animals — and, in the United States, these intuitive beliefs are particularly likely to be endorsed and transmitted by trusted religious and political authorities. Hence these are among the domains where Americans' resistance to science is the strongest."

I'll add a quote from Carlo Rovelli, a leading contributor to quantum gravity, who explains, "We teach our students: we say that we have some theories about science. Science is about hypothetico-deductive methods, we have observations, we have data, data require to be organized in theories. So then we have theories. These theories are suggested or produced from the data somehow, then checked in terms of the data. Then time passes, we have more data, theories evolve, we throw away a theory, and we find another theory which is better, a better understanding of the data, and so on and so forth."

This is a standard idea of how science works.

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Wow. How truly disrespectful you are towards McTaggart~~about whom you clearly know nothing. Well, that's typical behavior for you.

McTaggart? hahahahaha

Wikipedia????? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

What gets funded and what doesn't has little to do with the question here. There is a great deal of research being done in the fields of consciousness for example, which is mentioned in the question, by very well known and respected scientists. Yet this research is ignored here.

Re: Lynn McTaggart Is she more than a spokesperson and author? Her bio is slim: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynne_McTaggart

Look at how much money is out there for grants and where the largest cut is going. It isn't to IONS-type research.

For folks to get money for this kind of research is difficult. Check out what Lynne McTaggart had to say about it.

Anyone one who can Google would find information such as this:
1) the Stargate Project, a $20 million research program sponsored by the U.S. Federal Government to determine any potential military application of psychic phenomena.
2) the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab conducted several hundred trials.
3) early researchers included Michael Faraday, Alfred Russel Wallace, Rufus Osgood Mason and William Crookes.
4) In the early 1970s, Harold E. Puthoff and Russell Targ joined the Electronics and Bioengineering Laboratory at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) In addition to their mainstream scientific research work on quantum mechanics and laser physics, they initiated several studies of the paranormal.

Want more?

re: "...astrophysics is dispelling some of these frameworks."

Is it sufficient to make blanket statements of this type and not provide details? What is changing?
Enlighten us!

Charliet,
One other thing that should be mentioned is that science grants for research will not be administered to investigations that are outside the frameworks commonly accepted in various disciplines. This is a huge reason for the dearth of serious exploration of psi and the paranormal. Researchers applying for such grants cannot get funded. That is part of why we see mainstream people, such as the plumbers, on the TAPS team, investigating hauntings when they are not at their day jobs!

It is fair to criticize the scientific, especially the academic community, for its circular investigation into its "known" aspects. Maybe these, too, will evolve, outward, in a slow spiral, to incorporate what is considered "fringe" in the present context. Sometimes, it seems that the scientific communities want to stick to old models because they are "safe" and mechanistic. The field of astrophysics is dispelling some of these frameworks, but it will take a long time before newer theories and models reach common discourse within disciplines.

"Smiley face"

:-)

edit

"May I also suggest we dispense with the castigations, since they add little to the real discuss."

Your sentences make no sense, so why bother waste time trying to comprehend them?

Dear Slow....

I am pleased that you are so moved to react and to reply to anything I type here.
And it appears you read it as well. Had you heard of Stuart Kauffman before?
Do like me know where this was cut and pasted from if that is the charge,
My I also suggest we dispense with the castigations, since they add little to the real discuss.
Surely you are capable of thoughts of a higher order of awareness.

Sincerely,

dustproduction

For starters, then does not equal than. As usual, poor writing skills and incoherent copy/pasting is a pretty lame way of trying to be the poster child of scientists.

"With Descartes, Galileo, Newton and and Laplace reductionism began and continued its 350 year reign. Over the ensuing centuries, science and the Enlightenment have given birth to the secular society. Reductionistic physics has emerged for many as the gold standard for learning about the world. In turn science has driven a wedge between faith and reason. It was not so much Galileo's geocentric theory (derived from Copernicus) that underlay his clash with the church but his claim that only science, not revelation, is the path to knowledge."
Stuart Kauffman

Clearly, the question here is more interesting then "Slowgetnthar" purports.

If we adhere to the idea that "mainstream scientists have been sort-of "bashed" unfairly," we might consider the world without modern science. The rhetorical question is: Was the world better left to the rule of the church? I suggest that those who do bash "science" (the sciences) unfairly, do so because of a lack of knowledge about the sciences,(science bashers are welcome to present an intelligent argument to this point) and I write this knowing that there are those here at IONS that conduct scientific research into the metaphysical. This thread allows for the discussion of the understanding that science has regarding consciousness in that Sungon9 refers to it in his question: " Mainstream scientists should not be lumped into the group of "those who do not believe in consciousness." What is meant by this? I will refer to the questioner to further informs us, " I believe many scientists do NOT look down upon (or belittle) the study of consciousness."
This is correct, science does not, and it is not content to believe in consciousness either. The study of neuroscience seeks to study the brain and uncover answers about emergence of consciousness. See the writings of Antonio Damasio or this talk.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/antonio_damasio_the_quest_to_understand_consciousness.html

The quote used here is from the book "Reinventing the Sacred" by Stuart Kauffman. I recommend it as an example of a perspective of science beyond a reductionist viewpoint, so as not to become bogged down in that argument. "Real" has a particular meaning: while life agency, value, and doing presumably have physical explanations in any specific organism, " the evolutionary emergence of these cannot be derived from or reduced to physics alone."

THE QUESTION ON THIS THREAD: Are mainstream scientists taking unfair criticism?

The question remains: "Does consciousness exist outside of the realm of the material world of time and space, and "quanta?" If so, how?

There it is! That response is the perfect example of the typical arrogance of folks who claim to be bonafide scientists! Thanks for the great example!

Of course the sciences get bashed by those that misunderstand the scientific method, or have not continued to follow a scientific field in an academic way. It is fair to say that most people only get a watered-down version of applied science, including medical advances, from the media. And this problem will only get worse since we are in and anti science era in this country. We constantly hearing that high school scores in science and mathematics continue to decline in America. So, it is common to mistrust what we do not understand.
We must also remember that science is very new to the study of consciousness It was, up until twenty or so years ago, a subject that was left to philosophers, but the neurosciences are now a rapidly growing field.

re: "Yet this type of science cannot be explored through the "material world" so to speak because it involves phenomena that take place out of space=time, namely in the realm of consciousness."

Does consciousness exist outside of the realm of the material world of time and space, and "quanta?" What we know is that we are here in a now that is connected to a measurable material world. Our physical brains produce mind and consciousness, which produces our sense of self and our experiences, whether that is illusion, delusion, or a perception of reality.
What else is there but philosophy and belief that science can probe beyond wave and particles, and that a brain can comprehend?
This is why we need the sciences to understand and explain the physical aspects of our existence. It is after all our ability to understand the theory of quantum mechanics that governs the behavior of integrated circuits which are an essential component of the device you are reading this on.
Thank science for the fact that one need not understand how computers function to use one.

Hey Charliet,
I think that, in some cases, criticism of some scientists is justified, but I don't believe we can lump all scientists together, either.

What is offensive to me is that folks with credentials in the sciences often use those as the justification for their defining for the rest of us what is "real" or the "truth" when, in fact, sciences are about hypotheses of how things work and the structures of our realities.

In scientific communities, I see stalwart denial of evidence if it threatents to challenge standardized assumptions in various fields. There is hubristic denial of the existence of things, such as UFO's, telepathy, clairvoyance, NDE's, OOBE's, because scientific disciplines have not arrived at methodologies for replicating, verifying, measuring, and validating these things. For these reasons, criticism of scientists is righteous. Most don't go out on a limb to try to develop approaches for investigating these sorts of phenomena, but we are seeing some brave few who will and do, and this is hopeful.

For too many centuries, society has blindly followed scientists very much in the same way that people followed church edicts about realities. If there is a paradigm shift occurring, it is because people are challenging the assumptions about our reality. In essence, this cannot be done without challenging the scientists who claim to be the pillars of truth in reality. Reality is a lot more fluid and mysterious than previously suspected or described via simplistic mechanistic models, so many "old school" thinkers, across disciplilnes, not just the sciences, need to reconfigure and recalibrate as new information surfaces. If they don't, let them defend their own stagnation in the face of change.

I believe that the scientists are being lumped in with the skeptics and so they should. Consciousness, spirit, life beyond life cannot be measured or examined by conventional methods and in lies the problem.

Scientists are not new to the fact that not all things conform to conventional ways and devise new methods to study their subject. When it comes to things that are beyond matter etc such as spirit, they pull back, they cannot control it, it appears to have its own mind if you will, so it is shut down and shuffled off.

Some scientists have opened their minds, delved into the subject and experienced the phenomena, they see the patterns, knowledge and unbelievable wisdom that comes with accepting that it is real, it all exists and we are part of it.

Scientists and skeptics have to come to the realization that just because "you can't put it in a jar, it doesn't exist", it does exist. There are way to many people of all walks of life, including the skeptics, who have those "unexplainable" moments, when something that cannot happen, happens, intuition, coincidence, label it as you will, it is real and exists.