Manifesto for Post-Materialism science

Lukas1986

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This is becoming ridiculous. Almost every year the pro-believer side is making these manifestations. Here is a similar manifesto year before with a critical comment on it:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blo...there-scientific-taboo-against-parapsychology

This year we have this:

http://www.opensciences.org/about/manifesto-for-a-post-materialist-science

It has people like Deepak Chopra among its ranks and other known people in the paranormal circles:

Gary Schwartz, PhD, Psychology, Neurology, Psychiatry & Surgery
Professor, University of Arizona
Director, Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health, USA

Rupert Sheldrake, PhD, Biochemistry, Developmental Biology, Consciousness Studies
Fellow, Institute of Noetic Sciences, Fellow, Schumacher College
Author of A New Science of Life, UK

Charles T Tart, PhD, Transpersonal Psychology
Core Faculty Member, Sofia University
Professor Emeritus of Psychology, University of California, USA

Over 100 Scientists, Doctors and Philosophers Who Agree with this Manifesto

Robert Almeder, PhD, Philosophy of Science and Epistemology
Professor Emeritus, Georgia State University Department of Philosophy, USA

Dr Philippe Antoine, neuropsychiatry, hypnotherapy
Founder, School of Integrative Meditation, Belgium

Julia Assante, PhD, Ancient Near East, Parapsychology
Author of The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death, Germany and USA

William Bengston, PhD, Sociology, Energy Healing
President, Society for Scientific Exploration, Professor of sociology, St Josephs College, USA

Daniel J Benor, MD, Wholistic Psychotherapy
Editor-in-Chief, International Journal of Healing and Caring, Professor, Energy Medicine University, Canada

Christine Berger, PhD, LCPC Counselor Education, Mental Health Counseling and Pastoral Counseling
Assistant Professor, Old Dominion University, USA

Stuart B Bonnington, EdD
Professor of Psychology Austin Peay State University Clarksville, USA

Ivor Browne, MD, Psychiatry
Former Chief Psychiatrist, Eastern Health Board, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at University College Dublin, Ireland

James Carpenter, PhD, Clinical Psychology, Parapsychology
Psychotherapist, Researcher, Associate Professor, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, President, Parapsychological Association, USA

Deepak Chopra, MD, Endocrinology, Mind-body Medicine
Fellow, American College of Physicians, Adjunct Professor, Northwestern University, Executive Scholar, Columbia University, Senior Scientist, Gallup, and author of 82 books, 21 NYT best-sellers, USA
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Taken from: http://www.opensciences.org/about/manifesto-for-a-post-materialist-science

If you do not have the evidence make a manifesto. It is really ridiculous.
 
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More last year than this year. I spent some time on the Naked Scientists forum - often amusing, occasionally educational - discussing (arguing?) this heap of drivel, mostly with someone who habitually posted large excerpts from fringe books and papers.
 
I read the manifesto from start to finish. Two points stick out to me:

However, the nearly absolute dominance of materialism in the academic world has seriously constricted the sciences and hampered the development of the scientific study of mind and spirituality. Faith in this ideology, as an exclusive explanatory framework for reality, has compelled scientists to neglect the subjective dimension of human experience. This has led to a severely distorted and impoverished understanding of ourselves and our place in nature.
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Psi and parapsychology have received extensive study and funding, especially in military research regarding remote viewing. If psi were a real phenomenon, the scientist who discovers it would win the next 10 Nobel prizes. There's such a huge incentive for pushing the fringes of science and making paradigm-shifting discoveries, and so many scientists who are ready and willing to study novel phenomena, that it makes the whole "world-wide conspiracy of evil materialist scientists" hypothesis seem like a joke.

Mind (will/intention) can influence the state of the physical world, and operate in a nonlocal (or extended) fashion, i.e. it is not confined to specific points in space, such as brains and bodies, nor to specific points in time, such as the present. Since the mind may nonlocally influence the physical world, the intentions, emotions, and desires of an experimenter may not be completely isolated from experimental outcomes, even in controlled and blinded experimental designs.
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What a strange thing to put in a scientific manifesto. How is anyone supposed to study parapsychological phenomena, if the basic requirements for scientific experiment -- repeatability -- is off the table? How does a parapsychologist differentiate because an experiment which failed due to unconscious experimenter's psychokinetically biases the test, as opposed to plain old negative test?
 
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Apparently, all these folks have forgotten the fiasco that was "parapsychology" research in the 70s. Hardly a major university but didn't have a program or at least a "chair" and everyone, spurred on perhaps by all the New Age nonsense in pop culture, was out to prove something, anything paranormal.

Even the Cold Warriors...The US and the Soviets both spent billions on failed experiments in "distant viewing" and other nonsense. Uri Geller rode this wave....

All dust in the wind, apparently; hardly any of these programs still exist. My own university had a "chair" funded by local aerospace magnate McDonnell.... Which came to a shameful end after being pranked by Randi himself.
 
The weirdest thing about this manifesto is the implication that if you wish hard you will get what you want. That's a mental condition which in mental health technical jargon is called being really really stupid. It just makes me cringe that in 2015 people still have the mindset of those that burned the library of Alexandria.
The offensive thing is they hark on about academic conspiracy's or academic freedom. What they really want is to retard intellectual progress.
Yea we all laugh at these quacks and their made up job titles but these folk are really worrying. Go into a bookshop tomorrow and make a quick appraisal of say woo alt healing books compared to the amount of science based health books and it'll worry you too.
 
From the manifesto:

e) NDEs in cardiac arrest suggest that the brain acts as a transceiver of mental activity, i.e. the mind can work through the brain, but is not produced by it. NDEs occurring in cardiac arrest, coupled with evidence from research mediums, further suggest the survival of consciousness, following bodily death, and the existence of other levels of reality that are non-physical.

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So the mind can work without the brain? huh? Are they basically using the word 'mind' to indicate what is commonly called a 'soul'?

NDE's suggest with some other unspecified research suggests non-physical levels of reality?

WTF?

And this is just one of many parts of the manifesto that made me say wtf?

Not anywhere in the manifesto is any of the claimed research or evidence cited.

Well, there's at least 100 doctors, philosophers and scientists that I'll never trust.
 
Dessi said:
Psi and parapsychology have received extensive study and funding, especially in military research regarding remote viewing. If psi were a real phenomenon, the scientist who discovers it would win the next 10 Nobel prizes.
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Maybe, but maybe not. If the military research uncovers hard evidence, I feel pretty confident that it would be about as classified as it could be. Furthermore, I would think that any such evidence uncovered by anyone would threaten a heck of a lot of theories of a lot more than 10 Nobel laureates. Assuming my take on human nature isn't overly cynical, a not insignificant subset of those would make it their business to discredit any such evidence in any way possible.

There's such a huge incentive for pushing the fringes of science and making paradigm-shifting discoveries, and so many scientists who are ready and willing to study novel phenomena, that it makes the whole "world-wide conspiracy of evil materialist scientists" hypothesis seem like a joke.
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I couldn't agree with you more. However:

How does a parapsychologist differentiate because an experiment which failed due to unconscious experimenter's psychokinetically biases the test, as opposed to plain old negative test?
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Interesting question, from which derives another interesting question: if the possibility of unconscious psychokinetic bias is on the table, how does any scientist make that differentiation? And why should it be off the table exactly, the extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence notwithstanding? While I make no claim of the existence of psychokinetic bias in scientific experiments, I also don't find that such existence is impossible.

As such, I find myself viewing our entire understanding of the physical world with varying degrees of skepticism. I think it's healthy to do so; the "we used to think x, now we know that y is true" attitude that many people take towards scientific evidence in general strikes me as unimaginative. It seems to me that any absolute assertion about the world based on physical evidence is to some (varying) extent the opinion du jour, given the propensity for the discovery of new evidence that refutes the assertion.
 
BobR said:
Maybe, but maybe not. If the military research uncovers hard evidence, I feel pretty confident that it would be about as classified as it could be. Furthermore, I would think that any such evidence uncovered by anyone would threaten a heck of a lot of theories of a lot more than 10 Nobel laureates. Assuming my take on human nature isn't overly cynical, a not insignificant subset of those would make it their business to discredit any such evidence in any way possible.


I couldn't agree with you more. However:

Interesting question, from which derives another interesting question: if the possibility of unconscious psychokinetic bias is on the table, how does any scientist make that differentiation? And why should it be off the table exactly, the extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence notwithstanding? While I make no claim of the existence of psychokinetic bias in scientific experiments, I also don't find that such existence is impossible.

As such, I find myself viewing our entire understanding of the physical world with varying degrees of skepticism. I think it's healthy to do so; the "we used to think x, now we know that y is true" attitude that many people take towards scientific evidence in general strikes me as unimaginative. It seems to me that any absolute assertion about the world based on physical evidence is to some (varying) extent the opinion du jour, given the propensity for the discovery of new evidence that refutes the assertion.
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Do you walk in front of buses a lot? Jump off tall cliffs?
 
BobR said:
Interesting question, from which derives another interesting question: if the possibility of unconscious psychokinetic bias is on the table, how does any scientist make that differentiation? And why should it be off the table exactly, the extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence notwithstanding? While I make no claim of the existence of psychokinetic bias in scientific experiments, I also don't find that such existence is impossible.
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The problem with this argument is that the evidence shows that the better the design and controls, and the more blinding in the methodology, the less evidence of psi phenomena appears, until in the best designed experiments, it doesn't rise above background noise. These controls are specifically designed so that experimenters and participants don't know which way to apply bias, conscious or unconscious.

If 'unconscious psychokinetic bias' results in a world that looks exactly like a world without the paranormal, and yet doesn't prevent us discovering, quantifying, and taking advantage of such weird and counter-intuitive phenomena as general relativity and quantum mechanics - to observe black holes via gravitational lensing, to use superconductors in re-creating the earliest moments of the universe, to imitate the fusion reactions at the heart of stars, etc., it sounds like special pleading of the most egregious kind.
 
Funny how whenever Randi stands within 10 miles of these things, the phenomena dry up.

sometimes n. Whenever James Randi is not nearby to expose trickery. The mind can influence matter nonlocally, i.e. not brain or body, sometimes.
 
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BobR said:
While I make no claim of the existence of psychokinetic bias in scientific experiments, I also don't find that such existence is impossible.
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Applying the argument in reverse: Is it impossible for psi to be impossible? If so, then there's a tiny chance that psi is impossible.

It seems to me that any absolute assertion about the world based on physical evidence is to some (varying) extent the opinion du jour, given the propensity for the discovery of new evidence that refutes the assertion.
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Sure, but these new discoveries have a funny way of fitting the shape of Theories past. Rarely, and I could be wrong, do they shatter — more often, do they enhance.

We don't find Bigfoot levitating by means of psychic water memory; instead, we find ever more good reasons to exclude such tropes from reality.
 
Ugh. Just the usual New Age nonsense, blended with a fair amount of post-modernist pseudo-intellectualism to try and not sound like raving lunatics. And everything that even remotely touches on science is laughably wrong.
 
luchog said:
Ugh. Just the usual New Age nonsense, blended with a fair amount of post-modernist pseudo-intellectualism to try and not sound like raving lunatics. And everything that even remotely touches on science is laughably wrong.
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THe name "Deerek Chopra" alone should set your Woo Alarm sounding at it;s highest level.
 
Manifesto sounds like a cheesy supervillian name.

Lol out loud! I am Manifesto. Manly man made manifest magnificently marring materialism most meaningfully. So it be written, so it be dumb. Read it and seep.
 
Bikewer said:
Apparently, all these folks have forgotten the fiasco that was "parapsychology" research in the 70s. Hardly a major university but didn't have a program or at least a "chair" and everyone, spurred on perhaps by all the New Age nonsense in pop culture, was out to prove something, anything paranormal.

Even the Cold Warriors...The US and the Soviets both spent billions on failed experiments in "distant viewing" and other nonsense. Uri Geller rode this wave....

All dust in the wind, apparently; hardly any of these programs still exist. My own university had a "chair" funded by local aerospace magnate McDonnell.... Which came to a shameful end after being pranked by Randi himself.
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You also had a flood of interest in "Advanced Mental Powers" in the Early 50's.
It's not a coincidence that was when L Ron Hubbard started Dianetics, which morphed into the Church of Sceintology.
 
Manifesto for a Post-Woo-Woo Science

We are a group of internationally unknown forum participants, from a variety of fields (biology, neuroscience, psychology, medicine, psychiatry, plumbing, computer programming, gardening, truck driving, financial management, coffee vending, eh, er, etc. etc. etc.), who did not participate in an international summit on post-materialist non-science, spirituality and society. Mainly because the summit was co-organized by well-known crackpot researchers Gary E. Schwartz, PhD and Mario Beauregard, PhD, the University of Arizona, and Lisa Miller, PhD, Columbia University. This summit was held at Canyon Ranch in Tucson, Arizona, on February 7-9, 2014 -- a very nice time of year to visit beautiful Tuscon (see your travel agent). Instead, our purpose is to discuss the impact of woo-woo mongering on science and the annoying insistence by woo-meisters that a nonsensical "post-materialisticalish" paradigm for science, spirituality, and society is somehow deserving of the attention of the best and brightest minds engaged in actual science. We have come to the following conclusions:

1. Deepak Chopra is a poopy-head.

...
 
Okay, I'll give you my honest opinion about this. I'm interested in cognitive theory so this one caught my eye first:
A call for an open, informed study of all aspects of consciousness.

This sounds reasonable. But then you get to this:

Research on parapsychological phenomena (psi)...

So, this actually has nothing to do with "all aspects of consciousness" rather it is only about psi. Sigh.

All right, let's look at the other one.

Manifesto" said:
However, the nearly absolute dominance of materialism in the academic world has seriously constricted the sciences and hampered the development of the scientific study of mind and spirituality.
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Not so fast. My interest is cognitive theory. There have been a lot of very smart people working on this problem for the past century. The primary goal of cognitive theory is to explain the mind. However, I've never heard of a theory of spirituality and have no idea what one would consist of. How exactly would you study something without a theory?

As far as this being neglected because of materialism, this is simply false. Cognitive theory has been approached from the point of view of philosophy in an almost entirely non-material way for over two millennia without solution. Keep in mind that this is the same type of investigation that succeeded in solving highly complex problems in geometry and math. A more recent approach has been biology which led to neuroscience and the most recent approach has been computational theory which of course is the basis of computers and artificial intelligence.

Faith in this ideology, as an exclusive explanatory framework for reality, has compelled scientists to neglect the subjective dimension of human experience.
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Well, no. Cognitive theory includes subjective experience as does psychology. Secondly, the premise is absurd. No one has solved cognition in the past century even with computational theory. If I could explain cognition in a non-material manner then why wouldn't I? But a simpler question would be why didn't anyone solve it in the past 2,000 years if a non-materialistic explanation worked? I've tried this myself but every non-material explanation I've considered leads directly to contradictions. The only open route seems to be a materialistic explanation so this is what I'm working on.

I don't think the title is accurate:

Manifesto for a Post-Materialist Science

I would say that a more honest title would be:

Manifesto for an Anti-Materialist Wishlist
 
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BobR said:
Furthermore, I would think that any such evidence uncovered by anyone would threaten a heck of a lot of theories of a lot more than 10 Nobel laureates.
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Let's check on that.

Johannes Fibiger won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1926 for identifying a parasite, Spiroptera carcinoma, that supposedly caused cancer in mice and rats. It doesn't.

Julius Wagner-Jauregg won the same prize in 1927 for treating patients suffering from syphilis by giving them malaria. As you can imagine, this treatment is not used.

António Egas Moniz won it in 1949 for using lobotomy to treat psychosis. I think this one is fairly obvious.

The 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Ilya Prigogine "for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, particularly the theory of dissipative structures" which was actually known to be false in 1974.
 
You can create a manifesto about spaghetti, isn't a manifesto simply a vain glorious opinion?
 
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