Science Set Free

This TEDtalk was banned! I first heard about this in Reality Sandwich, an e-zine that I subscribed to but didn't read very much of because most articles are about traditional chemognosis. The dogmas listed are ideas that a large part of me still holds very much to, which leaves me conflicted because I keep a psionic development blog. I'm too lazy to transcribe it right now, but here's what I think are the highlights:

"There's a conflict in the heart of science between science as a method of inquiry (based on reason, evidence, hypothesis, and collective investigation) and science as a belief system or a worldview, and unfortunately the worldview aspect of science has come to inhibit and constrict the free inquiry which has been the very lifeblood of a scientific endeavor."

Ten Dogmas of Science:

1. Nature is mechanical.
2. Matter is unconscious.
3. The laws and constants of nature are fixed.
4. The total amount of matter and energy is always the same.
5. Nature is purposeless.
6. Biological heredity is material.
7. Memories are stored in the brain as material traces.
8. Your mind is inside your head. All consciousness is the activity of your brain, and nothing more.
9. Psychic phenomena are impossible. All apparent evidence for telepathy and other psychic phenomena is illusory. People believe these things happen because they don't know enough about statistics, they're deceived by coincidences, or it's wishful thinking.
10. Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.

The argument that Sheldrake offered again #3, is that laws are themselves anthropic. People have laws, and we have projected those onto nature as a metaphor and then we've forgotten that it's a metaphor. Besides, according to the Big Bang theory, the nature of our universe did change drastically in the first place. The regularities of nature are better called "habits" (which evolve) than "laws" (which are fixed) and this is the same thing as extra-material or non-material memory.

According to the records from physics textbooks from 1928 and 1945, the recorded speed of light changed as much as 20,000 kilometers. A talk that Sheldrake had with a metrologist suggested that, rather than an error in printing, people didn't know the speed of light and were just adjusting the speed depending on what they needed to make their formulas work... or else copying that error from anybody else. The speed of light was fixed in 1972, said the metrologist, who seemed very pleased that all constants that would depend on the speed of light would adjust to that recently-set standardized constant. The gravitational force, called "big G" is going through the same standardization process-- which Sheldrake dislikes because it doesn't leave room for the possibility that big G is not a constant at all but is itself a fluctuating force, taking into account dark matter.

Next, for #8, that in the simple act of perception, what we consider the "mind" is already extended beyond our brain. He reports that this is a force that can be sensed by other people.

In Sheldrake's unfortunately entitled book, The Science Delusion (published as Science Set Free in the United States) he addresses the entire list with his experience as a research scientist.