Thread by @rebeca6169

“I strongly believe in the importance of the scientific approach. Yet...the sciences have lost much of their vigor, vitality and curiosity. Dogmatic ideology, fear-based conformity and institutional inertia are inhibiting scientific creativity.”
~ Rupert Sheldrake

“With scientific colleagues, I have been struck over and over again by the contrast between public and private discussions. In public, scientists are very aware of the powerful taboos that restrict the range of permissible topics; in private they are often more adventurous.” ~ RS

“...science is being held back by centuries-old assumptions that have hardened into dogmas...The biggest scientific delusion of all is that science already knows the answers. The details still need working out but, in principle, the fundamental questions are settled.” ~ Sheldrake

“Contemporary science is based on the claim that all reality is material or physical. There is no reality but material reality. Consciousness is a by-product of the physical activity of the brain. Matter is unconscious. Evolution is purposeless...” ~ RS

“These beliefs are powerful, not because most scientists think about them critically but because they don’t... But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith, grounded in a nineteenth-century ideology.” RS

“The scientific creed.

Here are the ten core beliefs that most scientists take for granted. ...

1. Everything is essentially mechanical. Dogs, for example, are complex mechanisms, rather than living organisms with goals of their own. Even people are machines, “lumbering robots,” in Richard Dawkins’s vivid phrase, with brains that are like genetically programmed computers.

2. All matter is unconscious. It has no inner life or subjectivity or point of view. Even human consciousness is an illusion produced by the material activities of brains. ...

3. The total amount of matter and energy is always the same (with the exception of the Big Bang, when all the matter and energy of the universe suddenly appeared). ...

4. The laws of nature are fixed. They are the same today as they were at the beginning, and they will stay the same forever.

5. Nature is purposeless, and evolution has no goal or direction. ...

6. All biological inheritance is material, carried in the genetic material, DNA, and in other material structures.

7. Minds are inside heads and are nothing but the activities of brains. When you look at a tree, the image of the tree is...inside your brain. ...

8. Memories are stored as material traces in brains and are wiped out at death.

9. Unexplained phenomena such as telepathy are illusory.

10. Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.”

~ R. Sheldrake

“Together, these beliefs make up the philosophy or ideology of materialism, whose central assumption is that everything is essentially material or physical, even minds. This belief system became dominant within science in the late nineteenth century,and is now taken for granted.”

“Many scientists are unaware that materialism is an assumption:they simply think of it as science,or the scientific view of reality,or the scientific worldview.They are not actually taught about it,or given a chance to discuss it.They absorb it by a kind of intellectual osmosis.”

For more than 200 years,materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry.Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs.Karl Popper called this stance “promissory materialism”

“In 1963...Crick and Brenner had recently helped to “crack” the genetic code. Both were ardent materialists and Crick was also a militant atheist. They explained there were 2 major unsolved problems in biology: development and consciousness...Both tried their best...[They] failed

... The problems of development and consciousness remain unsolved. Many details have been discovered, dozens of genomes have been sequenced, and brain scans are ever more precise. But there is still no proof that life and minds can be explained by physics and chemistry alone.” RS

“The fundamental proposition of materialism is that matter is the only reality. Therefore consciousness is nothing but brain activity. It is either like a shadow, an “epiphenomenon,” that does nothing, or it is just another way of talking about brain activity. ...

Leading journals such as Behavioural and Brain Sciences and the Journal of Consciousness Studies publish many articles that reveal deep problems with the materialist doctrine.The philosopher David Chalmers has called the very existence of subjective experience the “hard problem.”

... It is hard because it defies explanation in terms of mechanisms. Even if we understand how eyes and brains respond to red light, the experience of redness is not accounted for.”
~ Rupert Sheldrake

“In biology and psychology the credibility rating of materialism is falling. ... Some materialists prefer to call themselves physicalists, to emphasize that their hopes depend on modern physics...But physicalism’s own credibility rating has been reduced by physics itself...” RS

“... some physicists insist that quantum mechanics cannot be formulated without taking into account the minds of observers. They argue that minds cannot be reduced to physics because physics presupposes the minds of physicists.” RS

“The original hope of physics to produce a single theory explaining the apparent laws of our universe as the unique possible consequence of a few simple assumptions may have to be abandoned.”
~ Stephen Hawking

“String theories and M-theories are currently untestable so “model-dependent realism” can only be judged by reference to other models, rather than by experiment. ... [They] are a shaky foundation for materialism or physicalism or any other belief system...” RS

“... since the beginning of the 21st century, it has become apparent that the known kinds of matter and energy make up only about 4 percent of the universe. The rest consists of “dark matter” and “dark energy.” The nature of 96 percent of physical reality is literally obscure...”

“... the Cosmological Anthropic Principle asserts that if the laws and constants of nature had been slightly different at the moment of the Big Bang, biological life could never have emerged, and hence we would not be here to think about it...” RS

“... most leading cosmologists prefer to believe that our universe is one of a vast, and perhaps infinite, number of parallel universes, all with different laws and constants, as M-theory also suggests. We just happen to exist in the one that has the right conditions for us.” RS

“This multiverse theory is the ultimate violation of Occam’s Razor, the philosophical principle that “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity,”or in other words, that we should make as few assumptions as possible. It also has the major disadvantage of being untestable...

... And it does not even succeed in getting rid of God. An infinite God could be the God of an infinite number of universes.”

“Materialism provided a seemingly simple, straightforward worldview in the late nineteenth century, but twenty-first-century science has left it behind. Its promises have not been fulfilled, and its promissory notes have been devalued by hyperinflation.” ~ RS

“... the sciences are being held back by assumptions that have hardened into dogmas, maintained by powerful taboos. These beliefs protect the citadel of established science, but act as barriers against open-minded thinking.”
~ Rupert Sheldrake