Introducing Rupert Sheldrake (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, July 23, 2014, 09:40 (3777 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I've mentioned him before. Here is a good taste of his ideas. I've read many of his experiments. He is real. I'm convinced his findings are at a quantum level: -http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2014/07/14/scientific-heretic-rupert-sheldrake-on-morphic-fields-psychic-dogs-and-other-mysteries/-
This article contains a link to an interesting one on panpsychism, contained in the paragraph below, which is on page 1:-Horgan: Why do you think your ideas are so vehemently rejected by the scientific mainstream, while multiverses, string theory, panpsychism (as defined by neuroscientist Christof Koch) and other highly speculative ideas are taken seriously?-QUOTE: "When I talk and write about panpsychism, I often encounter blank stares of incomprehension. Such a belief violates people's strongly held intuition that sentience is something only humans and a few closely related species possess. Yet our intuition also fails when we are first told as kids that a whale is not a fish but a mammal or that people on the other side of the planet do not fall off because they are upside down. Panpsychism is an elegant explanation for the most basic of all brute facts I encounter every morning on awakening: there is subjective experience. Tononi's theory offers a scientific, constructive, predictive and mathematically precise form of panpsychism for the 21st century. It is a gigantic step in the final resolution of the ancient mind-body problem."