Answering Rupert Sheldrake's Questions for Materialists

I respond to the questions asked in each chapter of Rupert Sheldrake's book, the Science Delusion.

[derekhudson]

'My long-legged, attractive blond assistant seductively swirled together the sulphuric acid and the calcium carbonate as she glanced flirtatiously at me above the phallic test-tubes, which she rubbed suggestively'. There, is that better, Rupert? Better than boring old passive impartiality?

[humbertojimmy]

Rupert's life must be filled with exquisit questions, lol. When he's playing cards with his friends - and any card game has rules - i'm sure he looks beneath the table for the rules of the game. Where could they be? Damn rules love to hide from people!

[esbenandersen]

Regarding passive/active voice: I get your point, but I also think it's important to recognise that you're coming from a particular field where the prevalent ontology is that it really shouldn't matter who mixed two chemicals. As soon as you move over to the social sciences and humanities, you'll find a lot of people who do not recognise (social) reality as independent of human thought, agency, interaction and/or human science. One of my International Relations friends is an analyticist (In the terminology of P.T. Jacksons Conduct of Inquiry - an exceptional read that I would suggest to anyone) who made two arguments regarding this: First, that an active voice confronts the scientist with their own agency and impact upon a socially constructed world; and second, that an active voice makes the reader aware that science is a human conduct, not an external entity handing down truth from on high.
For a relationalist (Within a broad swathe of social sciences, at least), observer bias is present by definition, and any attempt of getting rid of that bias will also get rid of the observer. The only way for a relationalist to still do science is to clearly state their (known) biases and factors that (unconsciously) could impact their study up front. A passive voice, for a relationalist, would make this honest effort meaningless.
I am aware that mind-world dualism is more prevalent in the natural sciences than it is in the social sciences (Where it in my anecdotal experience is already a majority) so I get your perspective on this, I'd just like to note that if we go with possible ontological positions rather than people, there are as many positions that are mind-world monist as are mind-world dualist.

[StefanTravis]

Sheldrake tried to claim in his book that, because measurements of the speed of light have a margin of error, the speed of light varies.

I really don't understand how someone that confused about science can be so highly qualified in a scientific field.

[GEdwardsPhilosophy]

Sheldrakes 'questions' are attempts to tell ( or at least suggest) rather than to ask.  I'm only qualified to judge the philosophy of mind / philosophy of science 'questions'; and they're little more than partial appeals to potentially misleading intuitions. All in all, Sheldrake reads like he's trying to placate his own doubt... the desperation of the subsequent Gish gallop is almost palpable. :/

[TheGentlemanPhysicis]

Interesting discussion, though I strongly disagree with your statement that selective publishing won't introduce a bias (around 31:00 minutes).  I'm pretty sure that a current issue in pharmaceutical research is companies only publishing the experiments that show positive results for the drugs trials, and ignoring the null trials. This practice strongly skews the statistical significance, making drugs seem more effective than they are.

[AlcyonEldara]

Last year, I started to explain to scientific method to my students. I wanted to tell them the merits and the limits of the method (and told them : you have the right to ask "how do we know this"). After pressenting it, I asked them "can you give me some examples of question who cannot be answered by the scientific method" and one of them came with "the scientific method".

To be honest, I was delighted with this answer.

[DjVortex-w]

The apologetic and pseudoscientific notion that the "laws of nature" are some kind of entities that exist independently of everything, and must thus have some kind of origin, something that created them, is a rather strange notion.
My favorite analogy to deal with the question is to compare them to the concept of "roundness". It's a description. We describe something as being "round" when it has certain characteristics. The concept of "round" didn't need to "exist" prior to the object (we describe as "round") so that the object could become like that. It's not like if nothing had created the concept of "round", then no round objects could exist.
"Round" is a _description_ we use for something. It's not some kind of entity that exists somewhere out there, nor is its "existence" some kind of prerequisite for round objects to be possible. And round objects don't need to "remember" what "round" means. That's just nonsensical.

[AsDeadAsDillinger]

This Sheldrake guy wrote a hilarious book about 'Psychic Pets'.

'Psychic' in the sense that they 'psychically sense' that their owners are due to arrive home (due to purely physical cues that the observer is evidently unaware of.)

No other scientist has yet been able to replicate any of Sheldrakes 'results' (even when using exactly the same tests and subjects) due to the fact they they are evidently not as batshit insane as Sheldrake is.

[theworldiknow]

Martymer, these are extremely well thought out replies. I enjoy the format of this video. Drank my coffee and nodded along as you explained the arguments you presented well.

Thanks as always.

[ActionEcology]

You know, as someone who has spoken with Rupert on a couple of occasions I suggest you email him your questions/points and he will most likely address them. He is fair, reasonable and ultimately in favour of health scientific debate/discussion. If you have the intellectual confidence and open mindedness to not just be attacking someone who's worldview you disagree with but actually take part in moving ideas forward then it may be productive.

[cpowell]

Does Sheldrake believe that abstract concepts we use to understand the universe that we observe are physical objects which require a physical location? Honestly, asking where the laws of nature were before the Big Bang is kind of like asking where happiness was before the Big Bang.

[HuliJingTheFox]

Memories are stored in the brain. Neurologist have done tests that show the growth of new neural tissue and new connections in the hippocampus in response to learning. This has been confirmed by ablative studies done on many types of mammalian life, and in case studies of humans. Anyone that says otherwise is over stretching our current evidence and understanding of the brain, most often for the sole purpose of supporting their own preexisting word view.

[Naia]

I have to stand up for Sheldrake on one point. "Scepticism" is the way we Brits spell the word. I assume, therefore that he's a Brit or he's using British English spelling.

[woobmonkeyp]

Point of interest, Marty: genes probably don't directly affect behaviour; they affect embryology, which affects the development of the brain, which then affects the potential for various behaviours.  Sheldrake is guilty of simplifying a set of complex phenomena, to suit his simple <ahem> understanding.

[ianmathwiz]

On the conservation of energy question; it's also supported by the fact that (as you point out later) the laws of physics, by definition, don't change with time.  According to Noether's theorem, any symmetry like this will lead to a conservation law.  In the case of time-translation invariance, it's conservation of energy.  You simply can't accept conservation of energy without accepting that the descriptive laws don't change with time, and vice-versa.  Moreover, a model in which the laws changed over time wouldn't be as useful as one in which they didn't, so we impose this "law" on ourselves in the interest of making useful models.  The same thing goes with making sure that our models are invariant with spatial translations, which leads to the conservation of momentum.

[ashcapybara]

Placebo does affect the condition, unconscious part of brain (which is regulating functions inside of a body) is always affected by beliefs given by conscious part of brain.

[osmosis]

LOL too funny.  I googled Rupert Sheldrake as I was starting this video and the first two results listed were, in order:
1) Rupert Sheldrake's site which describes him as a biologist and author.
2) Wikipedia which describes him as English author, public speaker, and researcher in the field of parapsychology.  [in other words, a crackpot]

[DjVortex-w]

The "drop a ball" example might be a bit misleading.
Take a big ball and a small ball, and put the latter on top of the former, and then drop both like that. If the big ball is even slightly elastic, the small ball will bounce higher than its initial altitude.
What's happening here, however, is conservation of momentum. The big ball is transferring some of its momentum to the small ball, causing a surprising effect. (It's basically a form of conservation of energy, and there's nothing particularly odd about it. It just can be a bit surprising because it's not intuitive behavior.)
Gravitational assists are a closely related example. It likewise can be unintuitive how a probe can exit the system faster than it entered, by simply traveling close to a planet. Conservation of momentum might seemingly be broken here (even though it's not, and it's precisely conservation of momentum that causes the probe to exit faster than it entered.)

[conferencereport]

Nice job taking on Sheldrake, who has been drifting further and further from rational thought over the last couple of decades.  

One small criticism; I don't think you can claim that consciousness is both epiphenomenal and causal.  Either it's simply an interesting side-effect of causal processes (the 'steam above the factory') or it serves a function within those chains of causation..  It pretty much has to be one or t'other imho.