Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia;  Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.

Enformation
is the
New Spirit

Post 44. 07/04/2018

Empirical vs Theoretical Science

    Enlightenment Science vs New Age Science

Sheldrake's Biological Fields and Mind Fields are compatible, in principle, with the accepted theory of quantum fields underlying our macro reality. If physical fields are responsible for the forces, such as space-warping gravity, that we detect with our instruments, then maybe there is also a bio-field, shaping emerging life-forms, that we have yet to discover with current technology. There's nothing anti-science about that hypothesis. But he jumps ahead of the empirical evidence to assert that a variety of intangible spiritual phenomena may be caused by natural enforming fields.  

For example, he has studied a phenomenon I had never heard of, “the sense of being stared at”, which sounds like a joke to me, but that he takes very seriously as a real scientific topic. Shermer presents more mundane explanations that take into account human psychological foibles, and don't require any mediating fields to convey information. Trivial notions like “dogs who know when their masters are coming home” may or may not be evidence of bio-fields. But I'd prefer more significant demonstrations of information flow on the ether before I'd accept it as a real thing.

My main problem with Sheldrake's kind of science is that extrapolations from the general theory, with almost no hard evidence, seem to support all kinds of spirituality & miracles & magic. In fact, he was converted from Atheist to Theist by his holistic worldview, and its implication of a God behind it all2. I have no problem with the god-concept, or with field meta-phors, but I do have a problem with intuition ruling reason. That was how humans understood the world prior to the advent of modern science. But the Renaissance of classical reason, and the Enlightenment's skeptical methods, opened up a whole new way of seeing the invisible forces around us. So, for most educated people in the 21st century, demons & elves & ghosts seem to be the stuff of fairy-tales and bedtime stories.

In their place though, Sheldrake and New Agers have found a scientific-sounding substitute : a force-field or mind-field that can be tapped into via intuition, allowing one mind to read the thoughts of another. But there's a catch : a skeptical attitude seems to disrupt the communication channels. So the doubting rational mind must be suppressed. Indeed blind trusting faith was the way of the world for centuries before the modern technological era took off like a rocket, due to methodical doubt eliminating erroneous hypotheses, and dissecting long- accepted dogmas from the past.  Yet the reasoned way has never appealed to the masses. And even some intellectuals like Sheldrake are able to reconcile their Faith with their Science. Which is also the mission of the BothAnd worldview.

However, the Enformationism theory proposes a reasonable alternative to both Spiritualism and Materialism. Spiritual Faith typically goes hand-in-hand with an Either/Or attitude though. So, while I appreciate Sheldrake's working out of a theory of enforming fields, I'll forego the faith in mysterious forms of communication until the fact of anomalous information trans-mission is confirmed3. Since the paradigm of Scientific Materialism has also become rather dogmatic in response to faith-based challenges by Theists, I”ll also view some of their outdated beliefs with a skeptical eye. 

End of Post 44

2. Conversion versus Conviction :
I too was converted, from Agnostic to Deist, by the evidence that everything in the world is made of mental Information, and that matter is merely our interpretation of patterns in quantum fields. But, I didn’t return to my former faith, because the evidence indicates that it was founded on fiction.

3. Psychic Phenomena :
Mind-reading and mind-over- matter powers are popular with the public, but are not accepted by mainstream scientists, due to the low quality of the evidence (mostly anecdotal).    Believers in such powers accuse the experts of dogmatism, but the article linked below indicates that the experts in the field want to keep an open mind, with-out lowering their standards of evidence.
   Since magicians and mentalists can duplicate most of the demonstrations of anomalous mental powers, the suspicion of either wishful cherry-picking or deliberate cheating taints most of the proposed proof. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/parapsychology

Fideism :
Literally, a belief system in which faith is prior to reason. I wonder if Sheldrake views them as equals in the sense of Non-overlapping Magisteria.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fideism/