Further to “New science organization offers to set science free from materialism” (After TED Talks removed Rupert Sheldrake’s talk on—you guessed it—the problems with materialism in science), here is Open Science’s Manifesto for a Post-Materialist Science (.pdf):
We are a group of internationally known scientists, from a variety of scientific fields (biology, neuroscience, psychology, medicine, psychiatry), who participated in an international summit on post-materialist science, spirituality and society. The summit was co-organized by 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. Our purpose was to discuss the impact of the materialist ideology on science and the emergence of a post-materialist paradigm for science, spirituality, and society. We have come to the following conclusions: More.
Friends of UD weighed in on the numbered conclusions, and here is what they said:
The first six points read like Phillip Johnson, the founder of the intelligent design community.
However, Point 7—one friend says—distorts quantum mechanics (QM), in that QM does not posit immateriality but rather the non-locality and wave-like nature of matter.
Points 8-18 sound to many like a defense of dualism. But, they wonder, why must we embrace dualism in order to dump dogmatic materialism (DM)?
There are many reasons to dismiss DM as a correct account of nature. There is no need to take on the burden of defending dualism in consequence. In the same way, one can defend the evidence for design in nature without attempting a dogmatic position on the nature of the designer.
Some worry that the document tends to conflate “mind” and “spirituality”, though they are actually different things. For example, animals have minds, but don’t apparently pursue spirituality.
Others noted that a shorter Manifesto might be better: The greater the detail, the fewer who will agree. Whereas the obvious problem of the sheer uselessness of materialism in addressing issues like consciousness or the high level of information in life forms ought to be evident to most thinking people.
Some are quite concerned about point 15 d):
d) Minds are apparently unbounded, and may unite in ways suggesting a unitary, One Mind that includes all individual, single minds.
Well, maybe, maybe not. But do we have to buy into that stuff, just to see that materialism/naturalism is a circus whose ever-increasing numbers of wagons travelling in a circle don’t and can’t just leave town?
Here’s betting that we can get the circus to just leave town, without buying into stuff we hardly understand. We can start sorting wheat from chaff later.
Information theory may offer some promising paths. See, for example, Data Basic.
Follow UD News at Twitter!