Program Notes
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
02:09 Terence McKenna: “Somehow as a part of the agenda of political correctness it has become not entirely acceptable to criticize, or demand substantial evidence, or expect people, when advancing their speculations, to make, what used to be called, old fashioned sense.”
04:10 Terence: “These phenomenon, which we know exist, and which we find rich in implication, would simply not be allowed as objects of discourse, they would be ruled out of order. So there’s something wrong on one level with what’s called empiricism, skepticism, positivism, it has different names.”
08:09 Terence:“[Empherical science] is a coarse-grained view of nature, and what it mitigates against seeing are the very things that feed the progress of science, which is the unassimilated phenomenon, the unusual data, the peculiar result of an experiment.”
11:04 Terence: “What I have a problem with is unanchored, eccentric revelations.”
13:39 Terence: “Nonlocality, accepted, permits some of the things we’re interested in.”
15:26 Rupert Sheldrake: “Weirdness and cults and most of the phenomenon you’ve named are phenomenon of Hawaii and California. When you live in England, things take on a rather different perspective. There’s a general level of popular skepticism, such that the general tone of an English pub is one of sort of skepticism.” Terence: “Well, but aren’t crop circles, and Graham Hancock all homegrown British phenomenon?”
20:33 Rupert: “There is the possibility to return to a more common sense approach, common sense of the British pub type, and probably of standard American kind too, will often deal quite satisfactorily with the probono proctologists from outer space.”
21:59 Terence: “You speak from your knowledge of the calculus and world history, and this person speaks from their latest transmission from fallen Atlantis. And this is all placed on an equal footing, and it’s crazy-making, and it also guarantees the trivialness of the entire enterprise. I just don’t think any revolution in human history can be made by fluff-heads.”
23:49 Ralph Abraham: “In other words, there is no simple measuring stick of simplicity.”
23:49 Ralph says he wishes we could create a measuring stick to measure the truth of something and then goes on to describe how one could be designed.
31:31 Terence: “The history of alchemy is far older than the history of science. It has always been in existence. It’s thinkers have always evolved and adumbrated their field of concern. So that’s one kind of fluff. Fluff with punch, because it has historical continuity.”
34:51 Ralph: “The problem with this ’strict parent’ approach to fluff, is that some important discoveries may be shuttled aside.”
39:13 Terence: “What we have to legitimize is critical discussion. So that when someone stands up and starts talking about the face on Mars people behave as they apparently behave in British pubs and just stand up and say, ‘Malarkey mate.’And force people to experience a critical deconstruction of their ideas.”
48:13 Rupert: “If [scientific research] priorities were set by popular opinion, pet research would be at the top of the biological agenda, not the sequencing of more proteins, the cloning of more sheep to help the biotechnology industry. But instead, pet research isn’t even on the agenda. So it’s set by a small elite who bear no relation in their interests to the voters in a democracy who actually provide the money.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:24 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:33 ►
Well, I just couldn’t put this off any longer, but I’m afraid I’m in need of another little hit of McKenna, Abraham, and Sheldrake in one of their trilogues.
00:00:40 ►
But I don’t want you to get worried now. I’m not going to go into another one of those long series of nothing but trilogues.
00:00:44 ►
I just needed a little McKenna fix, if you know what I mean.
00:00:53 ►
The conversation I’m going to play today was actually recorded on June 8, 1998, at Santa Cruz, California.
00:00:59 ►
And in the box of cassette recordings of these trilogues that Ralph Abraham loaned to me for this project,
00:01:02 ►
this trilogue was the most recent one.
00:01:07 ►
Actually, there were three tapes with that date on them, and they’re each about an hour and a half long.
00:01:11 ►
So right now I’m going to play the first hour of the first tape,
00:01:15 ►
and we’ll get to the rest of that tape in another podcast later this week.
00:01:21 ►
But since today’s program is so long, I’m going to dispense with most of my usual chatter and join you in listening to Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert
00:01:25 ►
Sheldrake talk about skepticism and the balkanization of epistemology.
00:01:38 ►
Well, what I thought it would be interesting to discuss as part of our new series of dialogues because I think it’s an issue
00:01:47 ►
that more and more people are becoming aware of
00:01:50 ►
is the whole question of skepticism
00:01:55 ►
and what I call the balkanization of epistemology.
00:02:00 ►
And what I mean by that is that somehow as a part of the agenda of political correctness,
00:02:11 ►
it has become not entirely acceptable to criticize or demand substantial evidence or expect people when advancing their speculations to make what used to be called old-fashioned sense.
00:02:32 ►
And I think this tolerance of unanchored thought and speculation is confusing the evolutionary progress of discourse.
00:02:49 ►
But I’m also aware that if you draw the parameters too tight,
00:02:55 ►
the baby goes out with the bathwater,
00:02:58 ►
or you become a defender of scientism or some kind of orthodoxy.
00:03:04 ►
So in my own situation,
00:03:07 ►
I’ve been trying to both understand
00:03:10 ►
what is strong and to be supported in science
00:03:15 ►
and what needs to be criticized
00:03:18 ►
and equally to look at the alternatives to science,
00:03:24 ►
the counterculture, the new age,
00:03:26 ►
and to ask myself what is strong,
00:03:29 ►
what serves the evolution of discourse,
00:03:33 ►
and what is in fact this type of unanchored thinking
00:03:38 ►
that I’m concerned about.
00:03:42 ►
So first let me talk a little bit about how I see science if any one of us
00:03:48 ►
were to take what is called a scientific approach to many of the phenomena that
00:03:53 ►
interest us psychic pets the source of the content of the psychedelic
00:04:00 ►
experience etc etc if we were to take a hard scientific view of these things
00:04:08 ►
these phenomena which we know exist in which we find rich in implications would
00:04:15 ►
simply not be allowed as objects of discourse they would be ruled out of
00:04:21 ►
order so there’s something wrong on one level
00:04:25 ►
with scientific what’s called empirical
00:04:28 ►
empiricism, skepticism, positivism
00:04:31 ►
it has different names
00:04:32 ►
on the other hand
00:04:35 ►
if we go to the other end of the spectrum
00:04:38 ►
and are willing to admit the testimony of
00:04:41 ►
iridologists, crop circle enthusiasts
00:04:44 ►
victims of alien abduction those who channel Atlantis the testimony of iridologists, crop circle enthusiasts,
00:04:49 ►
victims of alien abduction, those who channel Atlantis,
00:04:52 ►
those who suspect undetected planets, those who believe vast alien arcologies
00:04:57 ►
docked the planes of Mars and so forth.
00:05:01 ►
And pro bono, better get that in.
00:05:04 ►
Yes, pro bono proctologists from other star systems
00:05:08 ►
making unscheduled house calls late at night in our homes. I mean, both of you realize, I’m sure,
00:05:18 ►
that medical professionals, regardless of their species or star system of origin do not make house calls anymore.
00:05:29 ►
So I see then this problem.
00:05:32 ►
Science is too tight-fisted.
00:05:34 ►
It misses much of what is interesting.
00:05:37 ►
To abandon the approach of science
00:05:41 ►
is to just be without rudder
00:05:44 ►
in an ocean of strident claims and counterclaims,
00:05:49 ►
many of which are preposterous, and certainly not all of which can be true.
00:05:55 ►
So I have to think about this for a while. My approach was to say, well, science went from superstition to its present positivist position
00:06:06 ►
through a process of evolution, temporal unfoldment.
00:06:11 ►
So, using a method I’ve advocated in other situations,
00:06:15 ►
I conducted the following exercise.
00:06:18 ►
I said, I will move backward through the epistemological history of science
00:06:24 ►
to the last sane moment science knew
00:06:28 ►
and then analyze what that consists of.
00:06:33 ►
And I’m not completed in this process,
00:06:38 ►
but what I find is that a curious betrayal has occurred in science, that with the rise of
00:06:50 ►
capitalism and industrialism, science has actually allowed assumptions to be made that
00:07:01 ►
betrayed its original intent.
00:07:07 ►
And what I mean by that is modern science relies on statistical analysis of data.
00:07:16 ►
Measure 10 times, add the values, divide by 10.
00:07:20 ►
This tells you how much rain is falling,
00:07:23 ►
how much voltage is flowing through a wire something like that this approach to phenomena mitigates against
00:07:34 ►
unusual phenomena inevitably because they are statistically insignificant
00:07:41 ►
that’s the phrase that is actually used so So we can talk about this in detail. I don’t
00:07:48 ►
want to spend a lot of time on it, but I think you see my implication that the method of statistical
00:07:55 ►
analysis, true, produces general formalizations of nature’s mechanisms and wonderful products which can be sold and patented and so forth.
00:08:07 ►
But it’s a coarse-grained view of nature
00:08:11 ►
and what it mitigates against seeing
00:08:14 ►
are the very things which feed the progress of science,
00:08:18 ►
which is the unassimilated phenomena,
00:08:21 ►
the unusual data,
00:08:22 ►
the peculiar result of an experiment so looking at
00:08:27 ►
that then I said well where are we in the history of science where this
00:08:32 ►
happened and how was it before and you may wish to correct me a hundred years
00:08:38 ►
either way but I’m very interested in sort of bringing back and re-appreciating William of Ockham,
00:08:48 ►
who, aside from the things I’m saying about him here, which are very nice,
00:08:53 ►
also had a notion not much appreciated of what he called unlimited progress.
00:09:01 ►
And it comes very close to novelty theories,
00:09:03 ►
and it comes very close to novelty theories belief that the universe progresses
00:09:06 ►
into emerging with the nature of God
00:09:10 ►
but the thing about Occam that bears on all this
00:09:14 ►
is of course his famous razor
00:09:16 ►
which simply says
00:09:18 ►
it’s been interpreted in many ways
00:09:21 ►
but hypotheses should not be multiplied without necessity.
00:09:26 ►
Or to put it more simply,
00:09:28 ►
the simplest explanation of any phenomena
00:09:31 ►
should be preferred until found inadequate.
00:09:35 ►
Explanation should not be complexified
00:09:38 ►
beyond the demands of the problem
00:09:41 ►
against which it’s being brought to bear.
00:09:45 ►
This, so what I’m feeling is if we abandon statistical analysis of nature
00:09:53 ►
and realize that probably the assumption of temporal invariance
00:09:59 ►
that that assumes about the underlying fields of nature
00:10:04 ►
is in fact a cheerful assumption
00:10:07 ►
untested and unprovable so we should get rid in my hypothetical Reformation of
00:10:15 ►
epistemological dialogue we should get rid of statistical analysis we should
00:10:20 ►
dial science back to the late medieval period of Occam. And we should do science that way.
00:10:28 ►
And applying Occam’s razor, we are quickly able to cut away the underbrush that these peripheral and alternative people have brought to the table.
00:10:41 ►
Some of it’s good.
00:10:47 ►
brought to the table. Some of it’s good. Things like hypnotism, acupuncture, nutrition therapy,
00:10:56 ►
rational approaches to telepathy, clairvoyance. None of this is what I have a problem with.
00:11:04 ►
I don’t have a problem with people proposing new models of nature. What I have a problem with is
00:11:05 ►
unanchored eccentric
00:11:08 ►
revelations
00:11:09 ►
taking their place at the table
00:11:12 ►
the channelings from the
00:11:14 ►
Palladians for example
00:11:17 ►
the
00:11:18 ►
Sitchinite reconstruction
00:11:20 ►
of the ancient near eastern
00:11:22 ►
archaeology
00:11:23 ►
the Arguellian distortion of the Mayan accomplishment.
00:11:30 ►
I find these things pernicious and easily dealt with
00:11:36 ►
if we use Occam’s razor.
00:11:39 ►
But when we go too far into statistical analysis of nature, then we begin to cut away at our own
00:11:50 ►
beliefs and assumptions about nature. Yours, Rupert, of the morphogenetic field, mine of
00:11:57 ►
novelty theory, and there must be some aspect of all this that would threaten you, Ralph,
00:12:05 ►
if extremely empiricist and positivist criteria were brought to bear.
00:12:13 ►
In other words, we’ve all been called soft in our time.
00:12:17 ►
But in fact, I think our softness indicates a failure of science.
00:12:23 ►
Science has hoard itself to the marketplace and to technology
00:12:28 ►
and interesting high-order phenomena like societies, economic crashes,
00:12:36 ►
complex system behavior is going to remain forever blurred in our understanding
00:12:44 ►
as long as we rely on statistical analysis
00:12:48 ►
it’s a tool that had its place but to hold on to it indefinitely is going to
00:12:54 ►
retard mathematics ability to give a deeper account of nature a perfect
00:13:01 ►
example of this and then I’ll stop would be the enshrinement of the
00:13:07 ►
so-called uncertainty principle in physics throughout the 20th century, the supposed
00:13:12 ►
great bridge between science and mysticism. Well, it turns out it’s just malarkey. There
00:13:18 ►
is no uncertainty principle. David Bohm’s formulation of the quantum physics gives perfect knowledge of velocity and position
00:13:26 ►
without ambiguity
00:13:27 ►
it calls forth the notion of
00:13:29 ►
non-locality, that’s why
00:13:31 ►
the Heisenberg formulation
00:13:34 ►
was preferred
00:13:35 ►
but again
00:13:36 ►
non-locality
00:13:39 ►
accepted
00:13:41 ►
permits some of the things we’re interested
00:13:44 ►
in, telepathy, information from other worlds arriving via the morphogenetic field,
00:13:50 ►
and so forth and so on.
00:13:53 ►
So I haven’t been maybe as rabble-rousing as you expected
00:13:59 ►
by naming in turn various heresies to be consigned to the flames,
00:14:04 ►
but I do think there are too many
00:14:06 ►
loose heads in our canoe
00:14:08 ►
and that no revolution
00:14:10 ►
of human thought that I’m
00:14:12 ►
aware of succeeded
00:14:14 ►
through
00:14:15 ►
fuzzy thinking
00:14:18 ►
well
00:14:21 ►
I’ve certainly got a lot to say about
00:14:24 ►
all that. Very interesting. I think that the,
00:14:29 ►
first of all, we have to see that there’s a regional problem here, that skepticism and
00:14:37 ►
alchemism and so on, are carrying different social balances in different parts of the world. You live in Hawaii and visit places like Maui
00:14:45 ►
quite frequently. Ralph lives right here in Santa Cruz, California, where you only have
00:14:53 ►
to mention the name to anyone in England who knows California at all and they immediately
00:14:57 ►
say, oh yeah, where all the old hippies hang out. And it’s the kind of, it’s a totally
00:15:03 ►
alternative place and as we’ve seen in our joint appearances
00:15:08 ►
in Santa Cruz there’s a level of weirdness among some theories people have and the crank
00:15:14 ►
obsessions they follow which from outside the perspective of the West Coast most people would
00:15:19 ►
recognize as typically California there’s a kind of level of weirdness and cults and these,
00:15:27 ►
I mean, most of the phenomena you’ve named
00:15:29 ►
are phenomena of Hawaii and California.
00:15:31 ►
When you live in England,
00:15:33 ►
things take on a rather different perspective.
00:15:35 ►
There’s a general level of popular scepticism,
00:15:38 ►
such as that the general tone of an English pub
00:15:40 ►
is one of sort of scepticism.
00:15:43 ►
All the darn dark crop circles
00:15:46 ►
and Graham Hancock
00:15:47 ►
all home grown British
00:15:50 ►
phenomena, they are but every single
00:15:52 ►
one of them in any single pub where
00:15:54 ►
it’s debated would always have sceptics
00:15:56 ►
in the discussion
00:15:57 ►
you’re never going to have a kind of
00:15:59 ►
thing where you have all believers
00:16:01 ►
except in small crank societies
00:16:03 ►
of true believers which exist
00:16:05 ►
but the thing is the general cultural tone is one of skepticism and so the need for a great
00:16:13 ►
deal more of skepticism doesn’t feel quite so urgent if you live in london as it does if you
00:16:18 ►
live in hawaii or california that’s my first point. But secondly, I think that the
00:16:26 ►
scientific
00:16:27 ►
scepticism you talk about
00:16:29 ►
is indeed a serious threat
00:16:32 ►
and I think that’s done more than anything
00:16:33 ►
to drive science in this direction.
00:16:36 ►
It’s a kind of dogmatic
00:16:37 ►
scepticism that rules out at any
00:16:39 ►
cost weird phenomena like
00:16:41 ►
telepathy, non-locality, etc.
00:16:44 ►
And so to rule those out you have to say that
00:16:47 ►
a lot of phenomena don’t really exist like telepathy and stuff and if non-locality happens
00:16:53 ►
it’s just a peculiarity of the details of quantum theory statistical anomaly gets rid of all problems
00:17:00 ►
so you can you can take these points of view but the scepticals
00:17:05 ►
those kind of dogmatic sceptics
00:17:07 ►
who I find myself confronted with quite often
00:17:10 ►
the sceptical enquirer crowd
00:17:11 ►
who are on my case whenever they can be
00:17:14 ►
because they’ve classified me
00:17:16 ►
with the pro-brono proctologists
00:17:18 ►
from distant star systems
00:17:20 ►
so the thing is
00:17:22 ►
I’ve had the experience of being put in that category by
00:17:25 ►
sceptics, including the editor of Nature. And the sceptics in Britain who regularly
00:17:34 ►
appear, and good for a quote any time by the press, my old friend Professor Lewis Walpert,
00:17:40 ►
at any moment and to any journalist several times a year will say,‘t take this kind of thing so seriously and then last year when he said
00:17:48 ►
Professor Wolpert don’t you think you should keep an open mind about some of these things
00:17:53 ►
he says not so open that your brain drops out
00:17:56 ►
laughter
00:18:03 ►
that kind of skeptic has done a great deal to force science
00:18:07 ►
into this narrow thinking mold
00:18:09 ►
it’s forced the investigation of telepathy
00:18:12 ►
into more and more ridiculously detailed
00:18:14 ►
and unrealistic parapsychology lab experiments
00:18:18 ►
seeking to provide the statistical proof of regularities
00:18:22 ►
however
00:18:23 ►
what I’ve found is with the
00:18:26 ►
staring experiments and with the
00:18:27 ►
psychic pet experiments
00:18:29 ►
one can achieve results, positive results
00:18:32 ►
which fit with all this
00:18:34 ►
normal statistical thing, they’re repeatable
00:18:36 ►
positive, they meet all these statistical
00:18:37 ►
criteria, they’re not evenness and phenomena
00:18:40 ►
like human synchronicities
00:18:41 ►
these are regularities of nature
00:18:44 ►
so the old style statistical approach
00:18:47 ►
can actually take us much further, I think.
00:18:49 ►
I’m using old style statistical methods in my own research
00:18:53 ►
because I don’t want to change both the content and the style at the same time.
00:18:57 ►
I want to show that by the old methods,
00:19:01 ►
these are valid criteria.
00:19:03 ►
So, if I have valid phenomena so they’re valid phenomena
00:19:05 ►
they actually happen and you can prove them in the old
00:19:08 ►
style scientific way
00:19:09 ►
but I do agree that the
00:19:12 ►
kind of discussion we have
00:19:14 ►
in science doesn’t need to
00:19:16 ►
have all these things, what I like most
00:19:18 ►
I think my most heroic example
00:19:20 ►
in the kind of thing I do
00:19:22 ►
is none other than the great
00:19:23 ►
late Charles Darwin and like most
00:19:27 ►
other biologists I greatly admire him but what I see in him and admire is different from what
00:19:32 ►
others admire I like his um the way he draws on information from non-professionals plant breeders
00:19:40 ►
pigeon fanciers horse trainers and horse horse trainers, cabbage breeders, rose planters and specialists, horticulturalists.
00:19:51 ►
He draws on all these people’s experience, colonial explorers, sailors who tell of feral
00:19:55 ►
pigs on remote islands and how they’ve gone wild and so forth. All this is what Darwin
00:20:01 ►
draws on and he discusses it in a common sense way, there’s no statistical test
00:20:05 ►
chi squared test
00:20:07 ►
5% levels of probability
00:20:09 ►
it’s wonderful science
00:20:11 ►
it draws on experience and
00:20:13 ►
treats it in the light of common sense using
00:20:15 ►
rules of evidence but without rigid
00:20:18 ►
statistical test
00:20:20 ►
rigid methods and it’s wonderful
00:20:22 ►
science he discovered a great deal
00:20:23 ►
he’d never heard of 5% levels of probability and yet it’s wonderful science he discovered a great deal he’d never heard of 5% levels of
00:20:26 ►
probability and yet it’s
00:20:28 ►
great science
00:20:28 ►
so I think that there is
00:20:32 ►
a possibility to return to a more
00:20:33 ►
common sense approach and common sense
00:20:35 ►
of the British pub type and probably
00:20:37 ►
of standard American kind too
00:20:39 ►
will often deal quite satisfactorily
00:20:42 ►
with the pro-brain
00:20:43 ►
proctologists from outer space.
00:20:45 ►
Anyone who claimed that in a British pub,
00:20:47 ►
this would be the butt of a great deal of humour within minutes.
00:20:52 ►
No pun intended.
00:20:59 ►
Yes.
00:21:01 ►
Well, let me just say about that there is a political problem
00:21:06 ►
you’re right
00:21:07 ►
though the British have this reputation in America
00:21:12 ►
for being the epitome of politeness
00:21:14 ►
actually in a British pub
00:21:17 ►
people are willing to blow the whistle
00:21:19 ►
on what they perceive as absurdity
00:21:22 ►
five jokes
00:21:23 ►
always with humour
00:21:24 ►
in the new age it is a utterly humourless what they perceive as absurdity. Five jokes, always with humour.
00:21:29 ►
In the new age, it is utterly humourless,
00:21:32 ►
and the reigning paradigm of political correctness demands that you treat all of these testimonies
00:21:36 ►
and bits of news with complete equanimity,
00:21:39 ►
and it’s thought to be rather out of sorts
00:21:44 ►
to suggest that anybody shouldn’t be taken seriously.
00:21:49 ►
The belief is that truth can’t be known,
00:21:54 ►
and so all there is is opinion.
00:21:56 ►
So, you know, you speak from your knowledge of the calculus in world history,
00:22:01 ►
and this person speaks from their latest transmission from
00:22:06 ►
fallen Atlantis and this is all placed on an equal footing and it’s crazy
00:22:12 ►
making and it also guarantees the trivialness of the entire enterprise I
00:22:19 ►
mean I just don’t think any revolution in human history can be made by fluff heads.
00:22:28 ►
Well, I think we, in order to understand what you’re saying,
00:22:31 ►
I have to really try to figure out what a fluff head is.
00:22:36 ►
This is the crux.
00:22:38 ►
I like your historical approach, as we agree that science is rather in a bad place now.
00:22:44 ►
We can look back, find where
00:22:45 ►
it went wrong, go back there, start over again.
00:22:48 ►
This is exactly what fundamentalists
00:22:50 ►
do.
00:22:51 ►
Our ethics are gone, so we’re going to go back to
00:22:53 ►
the first speeches of Muhammad or something.
00:22:57 ►
So
00:22:57 ►
William
00:22:59 ►
of Ockham, I feel
00:23:02 ►
uncomfortable with
00:23:03 ►
his idea of
00:23:05 ►
simplicity. I mean, the modern form
00:23:08 ►
is probably Kolomogorov’s
00:23:10 ►
measure of complexity, which
00:23:12 ►
would be, given a data set,
00:23:14 ►
what is the length
00:23:16 ►
in bytes of the smallest computer
00:23:18 ►
program that can approximate the
00:23:20 ►
data set within epsilon or something
00:23:22 ►
like that.
00:23:23 ►
And a problem with this technically speaking is that
00:23:29 ►
last year’s technology would give a camal graph measure of this much this year’s technology would
00:23:35 ►
give a much smaller measure because we’ve learned a new trick of building models or it may only
00:23:41 ►
depend upon the computer language more or less that’s used to build a model.
00:23:46 ►
So, in other words, there is no simple measuring stick of simplicity.
00:23:52 ►
And given three explanations, we’re not sure what is the simplest one.
00:23:56 ►
There’s no mathematics that could really be applied.
00:24:00 ►
It becomes a subjective judgment.
00:24:03 ►
And therefore, I think that this whole question,
00:24:05 ►
where I think that you’ve suggested a one-dimensional scale of fluff,
00:24:09 ►
the kind of fluff scale,
00:24:12 ►
where down at this end we have what even Walpert thinks is okay.
00:24:21 ►
And over at that end,
00:24:23 ►
we have the test that can be applied to Pleiadians
00:24:27 ►
to see if they’re real or not so in in this scale I think you’ve marked two
00:24:33 ►
points there’s the point at which you think that to the right of this is too
00:24:38 ►
fluffy into the left is okay and then there’s another point where science
00:24:46 ►
agrees it’s okay
00:24:47 ►
you’re ruling out like the channeling
00:24:50 ►
no, but the telepathy okay
00:24:53 ►
but Walker says the morphogenetic
00:24:55 ►
fields is not okay
00:24:56 ►
but DNA is okay
00:24:58 ►
so I’m thinking of these two
00:25:00 ►
points that you described
00:25:02 ►
as being on some linear scale of fluffness
00:25:04 ►
and I’m thinking that some linear scale of fluffness.
00:25:07 ►
And I’m thinking that this entire scale of fluffness is not… I mean, you’d like
00:25:09 ►
to appeal to mathematics
00:25:11 ►
and to some kind of
00:25:13 ►
real science, that there is a real science
00:25:16 ►
that the
00:25:17 ►
community or the religion
00:25:19 ►
of science has gotten off the track of the real
00:25:22 ►
science, and that there…
00:25:24 ►
This is what bothers me, and I wish that this were true, but I have no the real science and that there this is what bothers me
00:25:25 ►
and I wish that this were true but I have no faith
00:25:28 ►
in it, that there is somewhere
00:25:29 ►
in the sky or in the deepest
00:25:32 ►
bowels of the earth
00:25:33 ►
a measuring stick where we could
00:25:35 ►
somehow measure the truth
00:25:37 ►
of something even if it’s just a degree
00:25:39 ►
of truth as in chaos
00:25:41 ►
logic, you don’t have
00:25:43 ►
true and false, you have a truth as a percentage
00:25:47 ►
between zero and a hundred percent
00:25:50 ►
and is only
00:25:52 ►
chaos logic would be a good alternative for you
00:25:56 ►
the truth of a proposition
00:26:00 ►
let’s say a formal logic
00:26:01 ►
like Zeno’s paradox
00:26:03 ►
is only a temporal assessment
00:26:09 ►
and is the input of the measuring stick of truth after which we get another measurement.
00:26:17 ►
You see, so under what we know so far it’s 60% true.
00:26:21 ►
Now we assume that it’s 60% true, that’s the input to another assessment. When we find out it’s
00:26:25 ►
66% true, we know that
00:26:28 ►
the input of another assessment then is
00:26:29 ►
64% true. Hopefully this
00:26:31 ►
process of successive
00:26:33 ►
judgments, which could be regarded as
00:26:35 ►
the history of science from the past
00:26:37 ►
through William Malcolm on into the infinite
00:26:39 ►
future, would converge
00:26:42 ►
on something. But
00:26:43 ►
in chaotic logic it doesn’t converge, because
00:26:48 ►
certain kinds of propositions, which are circular in a way, like Zeno’s paradox, in circling
00:26:54 ►
around they have a chaotic attractor, and so they’re always giving different results.
00:26:58 ►
It never settles down. It gives a dense set of estimates between 0 and 100%. And from this perspective,
00:27:05 ►
which is the successor of Aristotelian logic,
00:27:08 ►
which served science up until the year 1985 or something,
00:27:17 ►
you can’t have a clear measuring stick of truth,
00:27:23 ►
and you can’t have a clear scale of fluff.
00:27:27 ►
And so the attempt to make something perfectly clear
00:27:31 ►
might be doomed to failure.
00:27:33 ►
We understand it then as something psychological.
00:27:35 ►
So I just want to give a…
00:27:38 ►
I’m applying Ludwig Fleck here to you.
00:27:43 ►
And Ludwig Fleck is the founder of the sociology of
00:27:47 ►
science where you sort of do Freudian analysis of the scientific community as
00:27:52 ►
is as a social as a flock of sheep as it were and with like in the 60s we were as
00:28:01 ►
parents very libertine with our children. Now we see those children have grown up,
00:28:06 ►
and my children are having children,
00:28:09 ►
and they’re much stricter.
00:28:11 ►
And there’s the idea that in successive generations,
00:28:14 ►
people are more or less strict with their children,
00:28:16 ►
and I think they’re more or less strict about fluff also.
00:28:20 ►
So the fluff scale is actually a sociological aspect
00:28:23 ►
of a given culture or civilization,
00:28:26 ►
which fluctuates wildly in time.
00:28:29 ►
And I think that this is just one of many theories for you personally.
00:28:34 ►
And maybe we are also affected by this, that as we age,
00:28:40 ►
and then we are in contact with young people, and then we are receiving input from them
00:28:45 ►
as far as the morphogenetic sequence of a fluff scale is concerned,
00:28:54 ►
that we’re affected by them and we’re becoming a little more critical.
00:28:58 ►
You see, so then we become critical of ourselves in a way
00:29:01 ►
because a decade ago we were more open.
00:29:05 ►
So our fluff scale is changing,
00:29:07 ►
and therefore we have to rearrange all our social grid
00:29:13 ►
that some people that were previously okay are now too fluffy for us.
00:29:18 ►
Their brains have fallen out.
00:29:21 ►
Well, let me say a couple of things about this.
00:29:23 ►
First of all, I think I agree with almost
00:29:25 ►
everything you say. On the end of pointing out that truth is a very difficult thing to
00:29:36 ►
assess, you didn’t mention Kurt Gödel, but certainly his proof that no formal system produces all true statements
00:29:47 ►
shows that even ordinary arithmetic is subject to debate
00:29:54 ►
and represents a kind of circularity.
00:29:58 ►
So on one end I completely agree with you that truth is a very complicated concept
00:30:04 ►
and why shouldn’t it be? And I completely agree with you that truth is a very complicated concept.
00:30:06 ►
And why shouldn’t it be?
00:30:10 ►
It’s motivated thinkers since thinking began.
00:30:16 ►
And we as yet have no certain index for it. You mentioned that you thought my approach was one-dimensional,
00:30:22 ►
and I agreed from your example.
00:30:27 ►
approach was one dimensional and I agreed from your example but much of your criticism was couched in the vocabulary of symbolic logic
00:30:32 ►
analytical deconstruction here’s a way we might go at this agreeing that it’s a
00:30:39 ►
messy problem let’s agree that the solution may also be somewhat messy. So for instance, we
00:30:48 ►
perhaps need to talk about kinds of fluff. I immediately identify two kinds of fluff.
00:30:57 ►
One is unscientific speculation persistent throughout history
00:31:06 ►
and with a consistent provenance.
00:31:11 ►
How do you religion?
00:31:12 ►
Well, mythology…
00:31:14 ►
I wasn’t going to attack religion.
00:31:15 ►
I was thinking of more marginal ideas,
00:31:18 ►
but religion is a good example.
00:31:20 ►
I was going to suggest alchemy.
00:31:23 ►
Alchemy believes certain things about
00:31:25 ►
matter which science absolutely abhors and rejects. The history of alchemy is far older
00:31:31 ►
than the history of science. It has always been in existence. Its thinkers have always
00:31:37 ►
evolved and adumbrated their field of concerns. So that’s one kind of fluff. Fluff with punch
00:31:45 ►
because it has historical
00:31:48 ►
continuity. But what are we
00:31:50 ►
to make of someone
00:31:51 ►
who brings to the idea a complete
00:31:54 ►
cosmological model
00:31:56 ►
generated
00:31:57 ►
in the past ten years
00:32:00 ►
by themselves alone.
00:32:02 ►
They never read Plato.
00:32:04 ►
They know no mathematics. They never read the Bible. They never read Plato, they know no mathematics,
00:32:06 ►
they never read the Bible, they never read Wittgenstein,
00:32:09 ►
they just got it all in one download.
00:32:14 ►
And it is, on the face of it, preposterous.
00:32:20 ►
It’s a faith that tells you that vegetables lose their auric fields
00:32:24 ►
unless peeled with wooden implements,
00:32:28 ►
that major earth changes have already happened
00:32:32 ►
but are invisible to most people,
00:32:35 ►
that there are only 100 real people alive on the planet anyway,
00:32:39 ►
everyone else is a simulacrum from another dimension.
00:32:44 ►
In other words, preposterous on the face of it,
00:32:48 ►
history-less, idiosyncratic, and utterly unanchored to any body of previous human thought,
00:32:58 ►
sanctioned or unsanctioned. So the question before us is is how do we distinguish all these books from
00:33:05 ►
one that superficially might appear
00:33:07 ►
to be in that genre, the invisible
00:33:09 ►
landscape. How do we
00:33:11 ►
make a division between the invisible
00:33:13 ►
landscape on the one hand
00:33:15 ►
and the rest on the other?
00:33:18 ►
The invisible landscape
00:33:19 ►
the category of the
00:33:21 ►
invisible landscape is
00:33:23 ►
each in commentary.
00:33:26 ►
But it’s a dumb thing.
00:33:27 ►
I’m writing one right now.
00:33:28 ►
The I Ching is a legitimate object of speculative discourse,
00:33:34 ►
has been since pre-Han times.
00:33:37 ►
Okay, so let’s say we accept a two-dimensional model for fluff,
00:33:42 ►
where there’s deeper fluff like I Ching commentaries
00:33:45 ►
and more superficial fluff
00:33:47 ►
like the entire
00:33:50 ►
manifest universe is
00:33:51 ►
the circulation of a single electron
00:33:53 ►
let’s use the Urantia book
00:33:55 ►
as an example
00:33:56 ►
the pattern we were given last night
00:33:59 ►
a spiral form
00:34:01 ►
we have one here
00:34:03 ►
made of wire
00:34:04 ►
so I think that
00:34:06 ►
I’ll give you a point
00:34:09 ►
here in that
00:34:11 ►
Occam’s razor is
00:34:13 ►
intuitively a good way to describe
00:34:15 ►
this new dimension
00:34:17 ►
the simpler and more
00:34:19 ►
complicated
00:34:20 ►
explanations for an effect
00:34:23 ►
which is a matter of fact, not established.
00:34:29 ►
So this is my worry about the anti-fluff posture that you now project in public and so on.
00:34:41 ►
I’m sympathetic with a lot of things and worry greatly about the pattern.
00:34:49 ►
The problem
00:34:51 ►
with this
00:34:52 ►
strict parent approach to fluff
00:34:56 ►
is that some important
00:35:03 ►
discoveries may be shuttled aside,
00:35:07 ►
as Wolfert shoves aside Rupert’s idea of the morphogenetic field.
00:35:12 ►
What is it that science hates?
00:35:14 ►
Besides Rupert, science hates homeopathy,
00:35:19 ►
acupuncture or alternative medicine altogether.
00:35:22 ►
Science hates cold fusion.
00:35:25 ►
I mean, there are certain things say well you know to open-minded to even think about them to
00:35:32 ►
open mind too much in conflict so a lot of things would have been missed you
00:35:36 ►
think of these paradigm shifts of the past of science for example the
00:35:41 ►
continental drift or the ice ages I I can see, you know,
00:35:45 ►
this is a really terrific discovery
00:35:47 ►
of mountain climbing guides,
00:35:49 ►
of the ice age, which is
00:35:51 ►
that we don’t take for granted, rejected
00:35:53 ►
by science for 30 or 40
00:35:55 ►
years, and
00:35:57 ►
is one of the few successful
00:36:02 ►
examples of a paradigm shift
00:36:03 ►
in science. This scientific community is so beautiful.
00:36:06 ►
Brilliant. I’d never even thought of it as a paradigm shift.
00:36:08 ►
Oh, it’s a terrific story.
00:36:10 ►
It’s incorporated into science.
00:36:11 ►
I tell a great detail in my book,
00:36:13 ►
P.S. Guy Arras, including a heroic picture of Agassiz himself.
00:36:17 ►
He was taken into the mountains by these,
00:36:19 ►
a mountain climbing guide said,
00:36:23 ►
look here at these mountains at the Jura mountains,
00:36:26 ►
the limestone mountains, what are these hunks of granite doing here?
00:36:29 ►
They’ve been brought here from over there where we know where the granite is.
00:36:34 ►
Wonderful story.
00:36:35 ►
You mentioned 30 or 40 years, Ralph.
00:36:37 ►
I think one way of thinking about this problem is
00:36:41 ►
some school of fluff
00:36:45 ►
should be given a certain amount of time
00:36:49 ►
to advance their agenda.
00:36:51 ►
It’s a very messy.
00:36:54 ►
But if after 20, 30, 40 years
00:36:57 ►
they’ve gotten nowhere,
00:36:59 ►
they should not lose their place
00:37:01 ►
in the discourse
00:37:03 ►
or move to the back of the room or something.
00:37:06 ►
And I think this should be applied to science as well. For example, science has been beating
00:37:12 ►
its breast since 1950 about how they were about to elucidate the mechanism of memory.
00:37:18 ►
I think it’s time to just pull the plug on that. You’ve had 50 years to flail at this
00:37:25 ►
with every tool available
00:37:26 ►
and you have zilch
00:37:28 ►
to show for it.
00:37:29 ►
Similarly,
00:37:30 ►
the flying,
00:37:32 ►
the people who believe
00:37:33 ►
aliens from other star systems
00:37:36 ►
are visiting this planet
00:37:37 ►
with great plans for mankind,
00:37:40 ►
they’ve been running that rift
00:37:42 ►
since 1947.
00:37:44 ►
It’s time for them
00:37:44 ►
to lower their voices
00:37:46 ►
and let other people have something to say
00:37:49 ►
well maybe a century or two
00:37:50 ►
why are you so tight?
00:37:53 ►
because if there is no progress
00:37:56 ►
there are other fields
00:37:58 ►
have created multiple revolutions
00:38:00 ►
in the same time scale
00:38:03 ►
progress is very
00:38:05 ►
subtle. So while
00:38:07 ►
looking for memory and grains in the
00:38:10 ►
brain, they didn’t find them
00:38:11 ►
but they did figure out how to do a certain kind
00:38:13 ►
of surgery so that if you
00:38:16 ►
have a tumor
00:38:18 ►
or something, they can
00:38:19 ►
do a really good job of helping you out.
00:38:23 ►
Well, I would
00:38:23 ►
challenge you to make a list of spin-off effects from the new age that have eased the suffering of
00:38:29 ►
mankind I mean there have been a few back scratchers and some nutritional
00:38:36 ►
supplements and a mantra or two but in terms of the money consumed the lives distorted the hypo that we’ve all
00:38:46 ►
had to put up with
00:38:48 ►
the fostering
00:38:50 ►
I think okay
00:38:52 ►
if we were the National
00:38:54 ►
Science Foundation
00:38:56 ►
we’ve been funding channelers
00:38:59 ►
for years hoping that they would find
00:39:00 ►
gold in South America
00:39:02 ►
we might withdraw our funding
00:39:04 ►
at this point,
00:39:05 ►
but we can’t make it illegal somehow for them to channel.
00:39:10 ►
No, no, what we have to legitimize is critical discussion,
00:39:14 ►
so that when someone stands up and starts talking about the face on Mars,
00:39:19 ►
people behave as they apparently behave in British pubs,
00:39:22 ►
and just stand up and say, malarkey, mate!
00:39:26 ►
And, you know, force people to experience
00:39:30 ►
a critical deconstruction of their ideas.
00:39:35 ►
The face on Mars thing is a perfect example.
00:39:40 ►
Here in, what, 76,
00:39:41 ►
Voyager sends a low-resolution image.
00:39:46 ►
Might be a face.
00:39:48 ►
All of these self-promoting so-called ex-NASA scientists.
00:39:52 ►
I mean, when I hear the phrase ex-NASA scientist in the New Age,
00:39:56 ►
I reach for my revolver.
00:39:59 ►
So all of these ex-NASA scientists gather around,
00:40:03 ►
proclaim this thing, an alien artifact.
00:40:06 ►
When the first Mars orbiter fails at orbital injection around Mars,
00:40:11 ►
they scream conspiracy.
00:40:13 ►
Mankind isn’t ready for the truth.
00:40:16 ►
Eighteen months later, the second Martian orbiter goes into orbit flawlessly.
00:40:22 ►
NASA, responding to the previous hullabaloo,
00:40:25 ►
actually moves this site up in its photographic agenda,
00:40:31 ►
photographs it exactly under the conditions
00:40:33 ►
these people say it must be photographed on.
00:40:36 ►
It’s clearly an eroded mesa,
00:40:40 ►
part of the Martian landscape,
00:40:42 ►
no different from any other.
00:40:44 ►
And immediately the face on Mars people scream that the data has been tampered with
00:40:50 ►
That all kinds of terrible things have gone on one guy sent me email saying well
00:40:56 ►
It is there isn’t a face on Mars, but there will be in the future
00:41:00 ►
Well, someone else wrote me and said well obviously the aliens wouldn’t leave an artifact
00:41:06 ►
the face on mars is cleverly disguised as an eroded mesa well i agree but it i’m not sure that
00:41:14 ►
it’s good to rant against the face of mars because there’s no way by a william of alchemy or whatever
00:41:21 ►
that you could have ruled out the possibility that there was really a pocket watch on Mars.
00:41:26 ►
And now, in fact, they do.
00:41:29 ►
There’s life here and there.
00:41:30 ►
There’s water on the moon.
00:41:32 ►
There’s a pocket watch on Mars.
00:41:34 ►
There’s not a face on Mars,
00:41:35 ►
but there’s something that nobody suspected
00:41:38 ►
that was found by going there.
00:41:40 ►
So my fear is that by drawing the line too tight,
00:41:44 ►
that many discoveries will
00:41:46 ►
be
00:41:47 ►
missed, they’ll be missed
00:41:50 ►
and that a certain amount
00:41:52 ►
of
00:41:53 ►
open mindedness is necessary
00:41:57 ►
to
00:41:57 ►
for novelty to
00:42:00 ►
come in and to nourish the evolution
00:42:03 ►
of the collective mind
00:42:04 ►
and I’ve got an answer to this a political answer because however much to come in and to nourish the evolution of the collective mind.
00:42:07 ►
And I’ve got an answer to this, a political answer,
00:42:11 ►
because however much we choose to make criteria or define them,
00:42:14 ►
we’d have no power whatever to enforce them unless we were on a funding committee of the National Science Foundation
00:42:18 ►
or the government or the British Medical Research Council
00:42:20 ►
or we were an editor of a prominent journal like Nature or Science,
00:42:30 ►
and so forth. Under those conditions, through controlling grants or through controlling editorial policies of major journals, you really shape and influence the science community.
00:42:35 ►
You are the ones that draw the line about what papers are published in Nature. People
00:42:39 ►
like Sir John Maddox, who opposed my work, in public in an editorial this work seemingly
00:42:46 ►
scientific by someone with seeming
00:42:48 ►
scientific credentials etc
00:42:49 ►
was actually outside the possible area
00:42:52 ►
of rational scientific discourse
00:42:54 ►
so there was a line drawn
00:42:56 ►
put on an index
00:42:58 ►
so there are people who do that
00:43:00 ►
but we’re not in those positions
00:43:02 ►
nor are people in those positions
00:43:04 ►
very likely
00:43:05 ►
to listen to what we say. So the realistic question is how in fact does all this work
00:43:12 ►
and how politically could the system be reformed. Here I rely on a book by a dissident Cambridge
00:43:19 ►
biochemist who wrote a book called The Economic Laws of Scientific
00:43:27 ►
Research
00:43:28 ►
and his name I forget
00:43:30 ►
but I remember it
00:43:32 ►
but anyway in this book he shows
00:43:34 ►
that if you look at the structure of scientific
00:43:36 ►
research funding
00:43:37 ►
you find that in the 19th century
00:43:40 ►
when there was a great deal of scientific creativity
00:43:42 ►
and originality in both Britain and America
00:43:44 ►
there was a great deal of scientific creativity and originality in both Britain and America. There was a great diversity of sources of funding. There was very little
00:43:49 ►
public money in science, practically none. And it came from innovators, companies that
00:43:55 ►
needed to do the science in order to make the chemicals and stuff. No one was going
00:43:59 ►
to tell them or give them. They had to do this. Engineering research, a study of the Adam Smith study
00:44:06 ►
of the industrial revolution in Lancashire found that the improvements in spinning jennies
00:44:11 ►
and steam driven machinery came not from experts, not from mathematicians, but it was mostly
00:44:18 ►
done by illiterate technicians who were improving the machines that they ran and understood
00:44:22 ►
from day to day, the mechanics.
00:44:26 ►
And this innovation was mechanic.
00:44:29 ►
New technology came from old technology.
00:44:30 ►
Science had nothing to do with it.
00:44:34 ►
He shows if you study the history of technology, most of it,
00:44:36 ►
most new technologies were used in this way.
00:44:41 ►
Science was funded by a diversity of bodies and was quite diverse.
00:44:43 ►
On the continent in Germany and France,
00:44:46 ►
where they had centrally state-controlled policies in the 19th century,
00:44:47 ►
the universities were funded by the state
00:44:49 ►
and there was a ministry of science
00:44:51 ►
and they had central institutes.
00:44:53 ►
It was highly professionalized and institutionalized
00:44:56 ►
with professors with great power.
00:44:58 ►
In Britain and America at that period
00:44:59 ►
there was actually no science in the universities.
00:45:03 ►
And now after the Second World War, the And now, after the Second World War,
00:45:05 ►
the biggest change happened after the Second World War
00:45:07 ►
when people like Vannevar Bush got the idea of a military-industrial complex
00:45:12 ►
with big science, huge government funding for defence research,
00:45:16 ►
which linked in the universities to a huge government-funded programme of research.
00:45:22 ►
And then with the National Science Foundation,
00:45:24 ►
this model was extended to medicine
00:45:26 ►
but the primary one is the military
00:45:28 ►
research budget, billions
00:45:30 ►
and billions of dollars driving research
00:45:32 ►
in laboratories, Los Alamos
00:45:34 ►
Lawrence Livermore
00:45:35 ►
and so forth, all around the
00:45:38 ►
United States and in the major contracts
00:45:40 ►
of universities, then you have
00:45:42 ►
a centralized system of science funding
00:45:44 ►
through, we have
00:45:45 ►
it in Britain, through research councils, central government research councils, which
00:45:49 ►
define spending for engineering research, sociology research, medical research, who
00:45:54 ►
gets the grants. And these are run by small committees of professors and experts, you
00:46:01 ►
know, people like Edward Teller were on these committees, and they decide the science funding, the structure of what’s permitted and funded through the
00:46:09 ►
whole system of system. This imposes a kind of monopoly control, a kind of uniformity
00:46:15 ►
of thought which is the enemy of deviant thinking that doesn’t fit within that system. However
00:46:21 ►
well or badly the lines are drawn, you can’t do anything that’s not within the central
00:46:25 ►
the only answer to this
00:46:28 ►
he suggests because he’s an
00:46:30 ►
Adam Smith follower is not
00:46:32 ►
to follow Bacon’s idea
00:46:34 ►
which is Francis Bacon’s version
00:46:36 ►
was central government spending
00:46:38 ►
an academy of scientists
00:46:40 ►
state owned like a sort of state
00:46:42 ►
priesthood of scientists
00:46:43 ►
and then they think of new ideas, which then go to the mechanics to turn into new technologies.
00:46:49 ►
And science fuels this progress.
00:46:52 ►
He shows that, in fact, technology fuels technology.
00:46:55 ►
Science hasn’t got that much to do with it.
00:46:57 ►
If you look at different science spending in different advanced countries,
00:47:00 ►
pure science, for such, has not that much to do with it.
00:47:03 ►
But the pure science people have to do it on
00:47:05 ►
the centralised funding programme in
00:47:07 ►
accordance with defence aims, the war
00:47:10 ►
against cancer, AIDS,
00:47:12 ►
you know, all the great agendas set by
00:47:14 ►
centralised science, molecular
00:47:16 ►
biology and biotechnology,
00:47:17 ►
now taking over the life sciences.
00:47:20 ►
The only answer in practice is a free
00:47:21 ►
market answer. Whether you
00:47:23 ►
abolish or greatly reduce central government spending.
00:47:27 ►
Science is then paid for in accordance with enough lobby,
00:47:31 ►
any interest group that’s got enough lobbying power would fight for it.
00:47:35 ►
There’s a huge organic consuming community.
00:47:39 ►
They’d lobby for money to be spent on organic farming research.
00:47:43 ►
At present it gets practically nothing
00:47:45 ►
because it’s not part of the central agricultural research programme
00:47:48 ►
geared towards monsante chemicals and so forth.
00:47:52 ►
So if you, in fact, this central monopolistic legacy
00:47:57 ►
of the Baconian heritage, which is really what…
00:47:59 ►
He was the Lord Chancellor of England.
00:48:01 ►
It’s an old-style monarchical church and state,
00:48:06 ►
top-down hierarchical structure run by
00:48:08 ►
a small elite accountable to nobody
00:48:10 ►
whose these
00:48:11 ►
priorities, if priorities were
00:48:13 ►
set by popular opinion,
00:48:16 ►
pet research would be top of the
00:48:18 ►
biological agenda,
00:48:19 ►
not the sequencing of more proteins,
00:48:22 ►
the cloning of more sheep
00:48:23 ►
to help the biotechnology industry.
00:48:27 ►
But instead, pet research isn’t even on the agenda.
00:48:31 ►
So it’s set by a small elite who bear no relation in their interest
00:48:35 ►
to the voters in a democracy who actually provide the money.
00:48:40 ►
But on the other hand, you would have then,
00:48:42 ►
the astronomical budget would be entirely spent looking for UFOs.
00:48:48 ►
No, it wouldn’t, because if you had…
00:48:51 ►
You’d have some kind of funding agency
00:48:53 ►
which would give matching grants to organisations.
00:48:58 ►
If a UFO organisation applies for a grant for UFO research,
00:49:02 ►
you’d have a sort of advanced funding agency which could fund this kind of thing.
00:49:06 ►
If you had a central funding agency,
00:49:08 ►
it would either have many more subdivisions or sub-offices
00:49:12 ►
or would have a great deal more less hierarchical structure.
00:49:16 ►
It would be done on a regional basis, a state basis,
00:49:19 ►
anything to allow for quirkiness and deviation
00:49:22 ►
and multiplicity of decision-making.
00:49:25 ►
But all of these would be answerable.
00:49:27 ►
If you got a grant for your UFO project for five years,
00:49:31 ►
you got $50,000 a year for five years or something.
00:49:34 ►
At the end of the five years, you submit a report,
00:49:37 ►
and this is published in scientific journals,
00:49:38 ►
which are open to this kind of thing,
00:49:40 ►
like the Journal of Scientific Exploration.
00:49:42 ►
It will publish scientific papers on the face on Mars,
00:49:46 ►
but anyone can write in and say why they think this isn’t good enough evidence,
00:49:50 ►
and the debate’s there in the journal.
00:49:53 ►
And you can see both sides of the aisle.
00:49:54 ►
They do this. They’ve done the face on Mars.
00:49:57 ►
Then the new evidence, someone then publishes a new picture,
00:49:59 ►
the new evidence of the face on Mars,
00:50:01 ►
and the person who wrote the original can write a reply but
00:50:05 ►
for most people a kind of
00:50:07 ►
new consensus would develop
00:50:09 ►
that there isn’t much in it
00:50:11 ►
well one of the things I’ve noticed
00:50:13 ►
in talking to people about these problems
00:50:15 ►
is that pseudoscience
00:50:18 ►
is very difficult
00:50:20 ►
for most people to discern
00:50:22 ►
in other words
00:50:24 ►
if you dig into the face on Mars
00:50:26 ►
problem, you’ll find all kinds of articles with pretentious titles about
00:50:33 ►
information theory and higher dimensional reconstructions of the data
00:50:40 ►
so that before the spacecraft arrived we supposedly had terrain models of what it was going to see
00:50:49 ►
based on extrapolation of the early data.
00:50:52 ►
And inevitably, these people are all PhDs
00:50:55 ►
and they use these technical languages very adroitly.
00:51:01 ►
So, you know, along with the idea
00:51:04 ►
that there should be some kind of historical continuity,
00:51:08 ►
and I agree diversifying the hierarchical spending patterns would help.
00:51:14 ►
The other thing is there needs to be some way of,
00:51:18 ►
and this has never been done in science
00:51:20 ►
because I guess it was never necessary
00:51:22 ►
because the collegial atmosphere was
00:51:25 ►
self-policing
00:51:27 ►
but there should be a way
00:51:30 ►
of looking at the messenger
00:51:31 ►
I’m not
00:51:34 ►
very keen on your messenger point
00:51:35 ►
because it leads to ad hominem arguments
00:51:38 ►
you see
00:51:39 ►
the classic thing you should avoid in proper
00:51:42 ►
rational discourse traditionally is
00:51:43 ►
ad hominem arguments, attacking the
00:51:46 ►
messenger and not the message
00:51:47 ►
and ad hominem attacks
00:51:49 ►
where people who say things that
00:51:52 ►
you don’t like, they can be
00:51:53 ►
destroyed by smear campaigns
00:51:56 ►
like Randy trying
00:51:58 ►
to smear Geller or Geller
00:51:59 ►
hitting back by saying Randy is a pederast
00:52:02 ►
and a paedophile and a totally
00:52:04 ►
dishonest and disreputable character,
00:52:06 ►
pervert and so on. And this kind of ad hominem argument is all too common in practice. When
00:52:12 ►
Randy attacks Geller on the ad hominem grounds, look at the messenger, a guy who was on did
00:52:17 ►
cheap music hall acts in Israel and stuff, and then comes, he’s just a showman. He hits
00:52:23 ►
back, you see, but that’s where you get without homonym arguments
00:52:25 ►
you get Geller and Randi
00:52:27 ►
and Randi is supposed to be a rationalist
00:52:29 ►
well it’s a problem
00:52:31 ►
I mean I would like
00:52:33 ►
to know these things
00:52:35 ►
about someone I was debating
00:52:38 ►
but I agree with you
00:52:40 ►
it’s not a valid point
00:52:41 ►
to bring forward
00:52:43 ►
but if for example you’re dealing with
00:52:45 ►
a supposed guru
00:52:47 ►
but you know that he’s done time
00:52:49 ►
for fraud, embezzlement
00:52:51 ►
and auto theft
00:52:52 ►
I think that in a debate about
00:52:55 ►
his theology that would not
00:52:57 ►
be proper to bring forward
00:52:59 ►
but on the other hand you certainly
00:53:01 ►
would want to know that
00:53:03 ►
yes but it is a venue.
00:53:06 ►
You get the worst kind of prairie and popular press ad hominem attack
00:53:11 ►
where anyone in public life,
00:53:13 ►
immediately they’re going to find out if they’ve got mistresses
00:53:16 ►
or legitimate children and blaze the stuff all over the papers.
00:53:20 ►
That means that people in public life, politicians and so on,
00:53:23 ►
the slightest sexual affair, etc., now becomes enormous.
00:53:27 ►
I mean, Clinton, no one outside America can believe
00:53:30 ►
this fascination with whether or not…
00:53:33 ►
There’s no fascination.
00:53:34 ►
72% of the people would like to get on with it.
00:53:38 ►
It’s a slow-moving coup d’etat
00:53:40 ►
driven by religious maniacs of the extreme right.
00:53:44 ►
I don’t think it’s religious mania
00:53:45 ►
I think there’s some kind of
00:53:47 ►
ad hominem business
00:53:49 ►
it’s the stuff of popular TV
00:53:52 ►
the press etc etc
00:53:53 ►
there’s too much of it in the modern world
00:53:55 ►
it’s inescapable I think
00:53:57 ►
I mean the
00:53:59 ►
monopolistic control of the
00:54:02 ►
financing of scientific
00:54:04 ►
research worldwide is
00:54:05 ►
bad and it’s important and so on. Nevertheless,
00:54:08 ►
the National Science Foundation
00:54:09 ►
does rely on the judgment
00:54:11 ►
of these peer reviewers
00:54:14 ►
and group of experts and so on.
00:54:15 ►
Finally, it’s their opinions
00:54:17 ►
that direct the flow of money, and that would
00:54:19 ►
also be true if
00:54:21 ►
there was no central control
00:54:23 ►
and had every industry
00:54:25 ►
financing its own research.
00:54:28 ►
Actually, there is. You’d get more
00:54:29 ►
opinions. The cat food industry, there are two
00:54:31 ►
or three companies that are outstanding for their
00:54:33 ►
research on the dietary
00:54:35 ►
needs of cats and dogs
00:54:37 ►
and they do this research based on
00:54:39 ►
funds that are coming in from pet owners
00:54:42 ►
and so on. That’s the 19th century
00:54:44 ►
model. It still exists to a degree.
00:54:46 ►
And even in those companies,
00:54:48 ►
there’s a group of people who are deciding how to spend their money.
00:54:51 ►
And maybe they’re influenced by the criminal records
00:54:54 ►
of some of the researchers and so on.
00:54:57 ►
But finally, it’s the opinion of any,
00:55:01 ►
even a person in the street with a dollar to give
00:55:03 ►
to the March of Dimes or something.
00:55:05 ►
It’s a question of opinion,
00:55:07 ►
and that’s where Ludwig Fleck comes in,
00:55:09 ►
the sociology of science.
00:55:12 ►
These journals are important.
00:55:13 ►
What you can publish,
00:55:14 ►
that’s why we don’t like censorship.
00:55:16 ►
People should at least be able to voice their theory
00:55:19 ►
about the face on Mars or whatever,
00:55:21 ►
the pattern and so on.
00:55:23 ►
So it’s, I think, very important who can publish and not publish
00:55:27 ►
in magazines like Magical Blunt.
00:55:30 ►
And even if we aren’t on committees of the National Science Foundation,
00:55:34 ►
if we do speak and give opinions about these magazines and so on,
00:55:38 ►
then we’re affecting their editorial policies.
00:55:40 ►
How do they decide whether to publish these articles or not?
00:55:45 ►
The hope that
00:55:46 ►
there is some measuring stick of
00:55:48 ►
truth that you could
00:55:49 ►
be clear-headed.
00:55:51 ►
We like to use Aristotelian logic
00:55:54 ►
or something. We want to be clear-headed.
00:55:55 ►
It’s very hard to distinguish.
00:55:58 ►
We do not have a science,
00:56:00 ►
as a matter of fact, that allows us to
00:56:02 ►
distinguish
00:56:02 ►
one theory versus another. Occam’s razor,
00:56:06 ►
or any other way we don’t have.
00:56:08 ►
Finally, we’re going to use our intuition,
00:56:11 ►
and we may take into account arguments ad hominem
00:56:16 ►
while doing so secretly, of course,
00:56:20 ►
and while saying the opposite,
00:56:22 ►
we nevertheless consider the gender and so on.
00:56:26 ►
So this is what’s worried me about things like crop circles, the pattern and so on.
00:56:33 ►
I do not stand up and speak against them
00:56:35 ►
because I do not trust my own bias against them.
00:56:40 ►
It could be true a new face on Mars could be discovered,
00:56:41 ►
them. It could be true.
00:56:43 ►
A face on Mars could be discovered.
00:56:45 ►
A channel containing a quartz
00:56:48 ►
crystal watch could be found
00:56:50 ►
under the left paw of the Sphinx.
00:56:52 ►
I mean, I’m not sure that
00:56:54 ►
these claims are not true. I think they’re
00:56:56 ►
not very simple. There’s some things that aren’t interesting.
00:56:58 ►
I don’t care if there’s a face on Mars
00:56:59 ►
or not. I do think the age
00:57:02 ►
of the Chops Pyramid is kind
00:57:04 ►
of an interesting question because
00:57:06 ►
the whole
00:57:08 ►
skeleton of history is
00:57:10 ►
Newton wrote a book called
00:57:11 ►
Chronology of
00:57:14 ►
Ancient Kingdoms, Amended
00:57:15 ►
interested in getting the
00:57:18 ►
chronology of the Old Testament
00:57:20 ►
into the proper order
00:57:21 ►
and so on
00:57:22 ►
Well I think we’re all interested in these things.
00:57:28 ►
The thing is not to be led astray by people who have, for whatever reason,
00:57:35 ►
a different notion of evidence, a different notion of truth than we do.
00:57:40 ►
Well, the medical profession, I think that it’s based on good science and so on.
00:57:45 ►
Now, I believe in vitamin C. I don’t believe in it, but I have it.
00:57:48 ►
I take vitamin C. I took some today.
00:57:52 ►
Ten years ago, my doctor, the best doctor I had, told me that vitamin C was hogwash.
00:57:59 ►
It was just like morphogenetic fields to him.
00:58:02 ►
Now he believes in it. What’s happened, it took a while
00:58:05 ►
to accumulate enough,
00:58:08 ►
not evidence, enough
00:58:10 ►
convergence of opinion,
00:58:13 ►
enough consensus,
00:58:14 ►
really, that he could have faith in it
00:58:16 ►
among the people who are in it.
00:58:17 ►
Question authority.
00:58:18 ►
Something that is making the conversation
00:58:21 ►
difficult, and it has to do with…
00:58:29 ►
I’m sorry to have to cut this off right here,
00:58:32 ►
but we’re already a little over the one-hour time limit I try to impose on these podcasts.
00:58:34 ►
And as I mentioned in the beginning of this program,
00:58:37 ►
I’m going to keep my own comments to a minimum
00:58:39 ►
and get the rest of this trial log out to you
00:58:42 ►
in the next couple of days.
00:58:44 ►
There are only about 30 minutes or so left in this conversation about skepticism,
00:58:49 ►
but there are several comments from our fellow salonners that I think are important,
00:58:53 ►
and I don’t want to just squeeze them in in a hurry here.
00:58:56 ►
So I’ll get to those comments and the rest of this trialogue,
00:58:59 ►
and I’ll get them out in a separate podcast as soon as I can.
00:59:03 ►
In the time I have left, however,
00:59:07 ►
I do want to thank our fellow salonners,
00:59:09 ►
Terry, Corey, Patricia, and Adam,
00:59:13 ►
all of whom sent in donations in the past couple of weeks.
00:59:16 ►
It’s incredibly wonderful of you all to do that,
00:59:19 ►
and I want you to know that your gifts will reach a lot of people because they’re going to be used 100% in support of these podcasts.
00:59:24 ►
So, many thousands of fellow salonners the world over also,
00:59:28 ►
thank you for your support of the Psychedelic Salon.
00:59:31 ►
Without you guys and the others who have sent in donations
00:59:34 ►
to help with equipment and hosting expenses,
00:59:37 ►
I might have given up doing this a long time ago.
00:59:40 ►
But the fact that so many of you feel so strongly about these podcasts,
00:59:44 ►
that you send some of your hard-earned cash this way, well, it brings tears to my eyes to know that
00:59:49 ►
you care that much.
00:59:50 ►
It really does.
00:59:51 ►
And I’m also talking about all of you who have told your friends about these podcasts
00:59:56 ►
too.
00:59:57 ►
You know, each week, hundreds of new listeners join us, and it’s quite amazing, really, to
01:00:02 ►
see how much interest there is in the area of consciousness
01:00:06 ►
expansion. I don’t know
01:00:08 ►
where we’re going with these podcasts, but
01:00:09 ►
I do know that it’s a very enjoyable
01:00:11 ►
ride, at least for me, and so
01:00:13 ►
thank all of you for your kind words
01:00:16 ►
and support, and in particular,
01:00:17 ►
thank you again, Terry, Corey, Patricia,
01:00:20 ►
and Adam, who
01:00:22 ►
are among the salon’s staunchest
01:00:24 ►
supporters.
01:00:27 ►
It’s good to know you’re here with us in cyberdelic space.
01:00:35 ►
And as always, before I go, I should mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 2.5 License.
01:00:41 ►
And if you have any questions about that, you can click on the creative commons link at the bottom of the psychedelic
01:00:47 ►
salon webpage,
01:00:48 ►
which you can find at matrix masters.com slash podcasts.
01:00:53 ►
And if you still have any questions about that or anything else,
01:00:56 ►
just send them to Lorenzo at matrix masters.com.
01:01:00 ►
Thanks again to my good friends,
01:01:03 ►
Jacques Cordell and Wells who collectively go by by the name Chateau Hayouk,
01:01:06 ►
for letting us hear your music here in the salon.
01:01:09 ►
And thanks again to Ralph Abraham,
01:01:11 ►
not only for participating in these amazing conversations,
01:01:14 ►
but who also provided the recordings for me to use in these podcasts.
01:01:18 ►
And thank you again to Bruce Dahmer,
01:01:20 ►
who not only made the arrangements for the use of Ralph’s tapes,
01:01:23 ►
but who also stayed up with me for several nights as we digitized them.
01:01:27 ►
So, hey, thanks again, Bruce.
01:01:29 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:01:33 ►
I’ll be back with you soon, but until then, be well, my friends.