Two deluded books
Channel: rozeboosje
Date: 2012-07-23

http://www.amazon.com/dp/014104957X
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1444727931

In addition to the unease I express re. Rupert Sheldrake's book: While I would consider myself a "naturalist", I'm not reductionistic in my outlook on reality.

I don't subscribe to the myth of "objectivity" as - and I'm in full agreement with Mr. Sheldrake here - you cannot separate the "observer" from the "observed".

Having said that, I do NOT think that the act of "observation" by "human consciousness" is qualitatively different to, for example, the act of "observation" inherent in one particle interacting with another. Such interaction between particles can be described almost completely in purely mathematical / mechanistic ways

While I think that in ONE important sense this interaction is no different to that between a conscious human observer and whatever they are observing, it DOES differ in various levels of "substrate independence". The "human consciousness" that observes reality is substrate independent from the "wetware" on which it runs, and its workings, in turn, are "substrate independent" in many ways from the elementary behaviour of the molecules and particles that make up "the brain".

While I agree with Mr. Sheldrake that a reductionistic, materialistic, outlook is unworkable, I vehemently disagree with his facile depiction of ALL science as "reductionistic" and "materialistic" just because its practitioners are not as eager as him to embrace ill defined ideas such as "Morphic Resonance" and they are much more reluctant than he is to take "psychic" phenomena seriously. 

I do NOT consider it "dogmatic" to assert that any explanation we provide for any phenomenon in reality MUST remain compatible with what is known about the behaviour of elementary particles. "Compatible with" is not the same as "explicable through". I can assert that it must be compatible with this behaviour even though I accept that it cannot be explained by simply extrapolating what is known about them. Scientists reject notions such as the "supernatural", "psychokinesis", "clairvoyance" and the likes not because of a dogmatical insistence that only a "reductionist" and "material" explanation is acceptable, but because many of the suggested ideas of how it "works" simply fly in the face of what we know about how things work in reality. In order for us to take such things seriously it will take MUCH more than just a "look at this, you can't explain it" assertion. In some cases it must be shown that our current understanding of how things work in reality is fundamentally wrong. And that is highly unlikely at this stage.

In some parts of the book, Mr. Sheldrake simply seems confused, for example at one point he correctly points out that all the "laws of nature" we have invented are (so far, at least) time symmetrical, but then he proceeds to propose an almost "mystical" idea in which "potential futures" exert a "pull" on a system's current state in order to "guide" a developing entity (e.g. a growing organism) toward a future state.

If we look at the time-symmetry of "natural laws" he should realise that this is equivalent to rephrasing it in a way that is compatible with a more ordinary understanding in which the current state of reality informs how it will develop in the future. Causality is not really inherent in any of our "laws of physics" anyway; it is merely a convenient way of expressing a relationship between a system's earlier and later states at a higher level of understanding (see also Daniel Dennett's ideas about different levels of "stance") and any "future to past causality" like what Mr. Sheldrake is proposing can simply be re-phrased differently as a more intuitive but logically equivalent "past to future" causality.