Thanks a lot for summarising that for me. I have a few remarks and questions that I am going to address to you as if you were Dr. Sheldrake, for convenience. It is more directed to people agreeing with the video than directly to you.
He turns the dogmas of materialism and turns them into questions.
10 dogmas of materialism:
- Nature is mechanical/machine-like.
- Matter is unconscious
- The amount of matter and energy in the universe is always the same. (Conservation of energy)
- The laws of nature are fixed (always the same), from the big bang, to the present, to ever after. The constants of nature remain fixed (like the speed of light).
- Nature is purposeless.
- Biological inheritance is material.
- Memories are stored in the brain and are wiped out at death.
- Mental activity is brain activity.
- Psychic phenomena are impossible.
- Mechanist medicine is the only kind that really works.
1-2/ I can’t see the difference between these two. They are equivalent statements. If you want to attribute something to objects or humans, you first have to define it. If you provide a clear, precise definition of consciousness, then we can derive a test that we can apply to anything and say “this is conscious” “this is not”. What is “being aware ?”. This is very fuzzy, and useless from a strict scientific point of view. There is no reason to assume the galaxy is intelligent in some way. So we assume it is not until the day we see unexplainable patterns in its structure coherent with a form of intelligence. A principle of science is to not assume useless entities and to stick to the facts.
3/ This is simply plain wrong in the frame of General Relativity. Conservation of energy doesn’t always strictly apply.
As for dark matter, it is probably one of the most controversial scientific concepts in modern science in the eyes of the public. If you see muddy footsteps magically appearing on the floor in your house, objects being thrown around and your cat running into an invisible obstacle, you’re going to say “there is an invisible man in my house”. Yes, Dark matter was first theorized to explain galaxy rotations, but since then, we confirmed the existence of an invisible and massive
something leaving clear patterns in cluster collisions, and leaving holes in the cosmological background. Three independant physical phenomenon all explained by the same thing. We don’t know what it is yet, but relativity works REALLY well, and changing gravity laws could maybe solve the galaxy rotation problem, but not the cluster collision.
I don’t know much about dark energy, but I know it is far from being a fully accepted dogma in science. The problem is that nobody can come up with something to replace it.
Zero-point energy is interesting, and maybe it will emerge one day if it is possible. In the meantime, science and technology is made by humans. Humans are flawed, and great thinkers often are persecuted for their ideas. It is sad and shouldn’t be so, but there is not much we can do except trying to be as much open minded as we can.
4/ Scientists are actually investigating this. They are searching for variations in the planck constants in the early universe, because that would suggest interesting new physics. Nothing has been found yet. Can you provide a link to a paper reporting that change in light speed ? Considering creationnists are always ready to remind life wouldn’t be possible without the fine-tuning of constants, you might find some people here quite hostile to this idea.
5/I’m sorry, what is he defending here ?
6/ I guess this comes from the morphic field theory ?
Questions:
If he throws away reproducibility, science is not coherent anymore. I don’t see his point.
Yes, as I said, scientists are human and are sometimes afraid of change. However, they probably accept change much easily than most humans. Simply because they build their lifework on the concept of refutability. They are flawed human, but compared to the rest of mankind, pretty open-minded flawed humans.
