After TED Talks removed Rupert Sheldrake’s talk on—you guessed it—the problems with materialism in science.
A global community of scientists, academics, and concerned citizens united in the effort to free science and education from the outdated dogma of philosophical materialism
After its successful 2014 TED.com Campaign, Set Science Free (SSF) is now spearheading a related campaign to support post-materialist consciousness studies in university programs. The purpose of the TED Campaign was to demonstrate to TED that there is support among the scientific and academic community to challenge dogmatic materialistic belief systems. Our goal was also to challenge TED to live up to its own mission statement.
We discovered in our conversation with Chris Anderson, curator of TED, that he alone made the decision to pull Rupert Sheldrake’s controversial TED talk (about the limits of materialistic science) based on an “informal discussion” with a few unnamed scientists and journalists. In short, belief-laden interests as well as willful ignorance of valid post-materialistic science guided TED’s actions. To be fair, Mr. Anderson’s decision reflects a common and well known academic and institutional bias in support of philosophical materialism. With that said, willful ignorance and institutional bias do not constitute any semblance of a plan of action for the next generation of scientists. The very spirit of science itself is at stake when solid research (from Sheldrake and a multitude of others) is dismissed sight unseen, solely based on the subject matter and not on the content or merits of the actual research. The education system continues to regurgitate tired and outdated dogmas against post-materialist consciousness studies. The educational system must change to combat this hindrance to scientific progress.
First, materialist studies of consciousness have gone nowhere—except nice venues for conferences—for decades. A failure that is all the odder because great physicists have so often failed to endorse the nonsense anyway.
More, origin of life studies are a Potemkin village in science because life differs from non-life principally in the vast amount of information it embodies, not in a lucky lightning strike somewhere. A lightning strike will not do that.
In any event, once science became committed to materialism (some of us would have said naturalism), any materialist/naturalist explanation became more “scientific” by virtue of its origin than any explanation that took account of facts that didn’t fit that view.
That is how evolutionary psychology, for example, came to be a science, despite the clown shoes, hat, and makeup.
And why compassion, philanthropy, and self-sacrifice are supposed to be some kind of a problem, along with free will. Who said we had to study these phenomena as problems, instead of just facts?
The materialists did. That’s who. And if they can’t come up with a coherent explanation, no one else is allowed to.
Increasing numbers of thinkers from a variety of perspectives are just checking out, one guesses.
Goals of Science Set Free?:
While many scientists and academics worldwide understand and regularly experience the challenges of materialist politics firsthand, they are justifiably engaged with research and professorial duties, and thus do not have the time to act as educational activists. This is where Set Science Free aims to insert itself—in the role of aid and advocate. Our new campaign can be defined as tersely thus:
Set Science Free is currently working with any professor or student organization that has an interest in starting a Consciousness Studies program at their respective university.
Won’t be easy keeping out the legacy science fascists and the new age crackpots at the same time.
But heck, why shouldn’t they try? Has anything else worked?
Will try to keep you posted.
Follow UD News at Twitter!