Every major idea?
Perhaps many hypotheses were considered inconceivable. But certainly not quackery.
Scientific ideas tend to me testable. A lot of what this guys suggests is entirely unfalsifiable. He may as well be discussing Pastafarianism.
Ok, maybe not even almost every major idea (I did use the word "almost"), but pretty much by definition every major conceptual shift, from a round earth, to relativity, to microorganisms.
> Scientific ideas tend to me testable. A lot of what this guys suggests is entirely unfalsifiable. He may as well be discussing Pastafarianism.
Scientific ideas do tend to be testable. This doesn't mean we can't have ideas that are not testable or not yet testable. Hopefully, every idea will some day be falsifiable, but we can't rely on that. We may need to speculate in untestable territory before we find a plausible and reasonable theory that is testable. And as you know, science does not tell us that anything is true, only that some things can't be proven false.
There is more to life than testable scientific understandings. I could love my mother or I could not love my mother. Can you test that? Because you can not test it, does it mean it should not be mentioned and is not important?
Human love, creativity, and consciousness are perhaps the most interesting and important parts of existence, yet they are not currently testable from an experiential viewpoint, and they may never be.
There are qualities of the consciousness, which by definition are qualities of existence - love, color, taste, beauty, suffering, pain, joy - which can only be explained scientifically in their mechanical reflections in brain matter. Science can not tell us anything about the qualitative conscious experience of these qualities are, yet those qualities may be the most important part of the universe. What would the universe be without the conscious experience of its wonder and beauty?
No, but it does mean that it's not science.
In theory, yes. What happens inside your brain isn't untestable or sacred, we're just not there yet technologically (but we'll get there).
Whether of not you can test for love is immaterial to explaining the experience.
Well, you were asking me to retract this statement based on the theoretical existence of a test:
> Love is a subjective experience of consciousness. We must first have some clue about what consciousness is, then perhaps we will be able to scientifically explain what love is.
Anyhow, I was using it as an example of something that we can't currently test for, not asserting that it will never be testable. So no, I'm not arguing that it will never be testable.
If we do test, however, it will most likely be a test for the brain activity associated with love, not for the actual qualitative feeling of love. As I've said, we know nearly nothing about what subjective experience is despite all we know being subject to it.
Now, it's entirely possible that reasoning about "love" scientifically requires several layers of new language / models on top of the currently established models in neuroscience, which is why I said it's _theoretically_ possible.
A meta-analysis has supported the sense of being stared at. I will find the link later and included it. I believe it was in the British Journal of Social Pyschology around 2005.
It's just astronomically more likely that a dog sensing their owner's arrival is going to be explained within the framework of established science, and not invalidate every layer of our model of the world from mammal biology to quantum foam.
B. I was responding to the parent comment about empirically verified dog's-sixth-sense phenomena, and what I think about those.
I'd add that if one can sense a stare, this opens the door to a huge array of psychic abilities. Perhaps we can communicate more than a stare, perhaps this really all is pseudo-science, experimental bias, and statistical anomaly. I'd like to know.
The mechanism may be as simple as the brain's high sensitivity to electromagnetic fields from other brains, or as mysterious as a cosmic consciousness.
On a side note, Jessica Utts is wonderful. I actually did my undergraduate thesis on this, but didn't find a significant effect (there was an effect, but the study was underpowered).
But, you know, selling books and doing TED talks. Ok. Fine. Whatever.
He is doing research. I can't say if he's doing enough but he's done quite a lot.
The problem is that he's already condemned for drawing the "wrong" conclusions so every scientist who even goes near his ideas and tries to test them is ostracized.
So have all of the dumb ones.
As others have suggested, Sheldrake does have quite a bit of research behind him attempting to find evidence or disprove his hypotheses - and he does not claim them to be any more than hypotheses.
It does separate it from those hypotheses we can disprove.
Certainly some conjectures are not falsifiable with current science, and some may never be. When we must make decisions based on non-falsifiable hypotheses, such as whether love is more valuable than misery, whether our life has purpose, whether we are actors or observers in the world, we must have some basis for belief or be paralyzed by believing nothing.
Given the long history of philosophical and spiritual discussion by humanity, little of which is scientifically testable, there may in fact be more to life than science.
Don't get me wrong - I love science and am a big believer that where science can be used it should be. Where science does not apply though, we must resort to reason, intuition, feeling, and whatever other basis for judgement we can have. Just as with science, no hypotheses or belief should be unassailable, but we must have a basis for belief other than science to place any value on our lives or experience.
If something is supposed to be there, you can test for it. Take the Higgs particle. A model of particle physics was proposed. That model predicted the Higgs particle. Many years later we were able to build a machine that proved its existence within reasonable doubt.
God conveniently eludes the scientific method by a technicality, which is exemption by design. Love, faith, even artistic merit are things that can be hypothesized on using scientific models. But we generally agree that these are subjective qualities.
Think about what intuition is. It is your brain applying known patterns of how the world works to a new situation. If something works as expected, or close to what is expected, that's great for normal situations, but leads to false positives, where you get an expected result for completely different reason. Intuition teaches you nothing about the underlying processes.
If you come across a situation which doesn't behave intuitively, the human brain scrambles to find something - anything - that might come close to explaining how how it works, filling in the blanks as appropriate. The human brain is great for filling in the blanks and finding patterns where there are none. In other words, it often makes stuff up. Again, intuition and feelings are not helpful for understanding underlying processes except for formulating an initial hypotheses.
The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them. In this methodological uncertainty, one might suppose that there were any number of possible systems of theoretical physics all equally well justified; and this opinion is no doubt correct, theoretically. But the development of physics has shown that at any given moment, out of all conceivable constructions, a single one has always proved itself decidedly superior to all the rest. Nobody who has really gone deeply into the matter will deny that in practice the world of phenomena uniquely determines the theoretical system, in spite of the fact that there is no logical bridge between phenomena and their theoretical principles.
The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshiper or the lover; the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.
Touché
Einstein famously said "God does not play dice"; his instinct was that probability did not have a place inside the fundamental laws of physics. His stubbornness prevented him from fully accepting the Heisenberg model for some time, although as an exemplary scientist he was able to put aside his instincts and accept that a probabilistic quantum model did describe the known observable a very well.
Consciousness of inanimate objects and the universe itself is not as crackpot as it sounds. Of course it is not something scientifically verifiable at this time, but science has negligible understanding of the nature of consciousness, awareness, the illusion (or reality) of free-will, the reason for existence itself, and what might exist outside space-time. Many such fundamental questions are wide open, and neither can they be addressed by current science, nor can wild ideas be discounted. How do we know consciousness is not a property of the universe as a whole if we do not even know what consciousness is or how it arises?
If you suggested that a massive explosion of energy would result in a stable universe that would come to know itself through intelligent, self-aware bundles of molecules, you'd be shouted out of the cosmos, yet that seems to be why we are here discussing such things.
EDIT: After watching the video, I don't agree that all of his "scientific dogmas" are false, nor does he say they are. I do agree that some of them possibly are false and should be questioned, which is all he suggests. What is science worth if it does not allow the questioning of it's own assumptions? What is the use of science applied to realms it is unable to address?
Most emphatically, we do not understand the nature of consciousness, and we do not know that consciousness is not comprised of something more than the matter in our brains. Yet all we know enters, or perhaps exits, through that window of consciousness and perception. Science works from what Sheldrake calls a materialistic view to explain the testable laws of the universe based on our perception. Science does nothing to help us with larger questions of what this all is and why we are in it.
"Morphic resonance" is indeed a "bizarre" idea, but it is also not implausible nor is it untestable. At one time, relativity was a bizarre idea. And is string theory and quantum entanglement really not a bizarre idea? "Morphic resonance" could arise in any number of ways, from a unified dimension of consciousness, to some as yet unknown quantum interaction, to simple electromagnetic field sensitivity, to some yet undiscovered energy field that is impacted by consciousness.
The arrogance of the "scientific" folks to push out alternative ideas they can not disprove is akin to the arrogance of a religious leader. Science is amazing. So are the things science can not yet explain.