‘TED’ Sparks Paradigm War
4/19/2013Internet video site TED has removed presentations by biologist Rupert Sheldrake and historian Graham Hancock because—according to TED—their ideas are “pseudoscience.”
What does this mean?
Well, simply, it means that one of the leading Internet sites for sharing intellectual ideas has shut out views that challenge deep-rooted dogmas of modern science—a decidedly unscientific act. It means the folks at TED buy into mainstream scientific materialism as the last word on what is “real” or “ideas worth spreading.”
So, what happened?
The TED organizers have decided not to allow any TED or TEDx Talk that questions scientific dogma about the nature of mind or consciousness. The standard scientific story is that “obviously” mind is produced by the brain, and that all aspects of consciousness can be reduced to electrochemical events between neurons. Anyone who dares to suggest otherwise is obviously “woo-woo,” a “fraud,” a “pseudoscientist.”
Of course, nothing of the sort is “obvious” at all. No-one—no scientist, no philosopher, no self-appointed guardian of media “truth”—can even begin to explain how purely physical brain events could ever “squirt out” subjective experiences. In different ways, Sheldrake’s and Hancock’s talks explored the idea and presented evidence that consciousness exists beyond the brain. The technical term for this is “nonlocal consciousness.”
In the “Century of the Brain,” apparently the only acceptable way to talk about consciousness or mind is in the language of cognitive science or neuroscience. The mere whiff of any alternative needs to be suppressed.
WHAT IS ‘TED’ AFRAID OF?
I’ve been tracking the TED “paradigm wars” with growing interest. And I would like to support the chorus of voices challenging TED and the dominant materialist paradigm.
As a philosopher, it is frustrating to have to keep defending non-reductionist studies of consciousness. But it seems that no matter what anyone says (or how we say it) dogmatists such as the administrators at TED and mainstream materialist scientists and philosophers (Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett are prime examples) will not open up or change their minds. They simply refuse to even discuss alternative possibilities. Like many of us, they have so much vested in their positions—careers, academic reputations, funding, mortgages to pay, etc. . .). It takes courage (or a major shock to the system) for people to change their fundamental beliefs.
This is less a scientific than a metaphysical issue. As long as science clings to methods rooted in sensory empiricism (the idea that only what can be detected and measured by the senses counts as “real”), we will never have a science of consciousness. Neither neuroscience nor cognitive science study consciousness per se. As I and others have pointed out, studying the neural correlates of consciousness is not at all the same as studying consciousness.
Part of the problem is that few scientists today are sufficiently familiar with either the history or philosophy of science, and therefore lack the perspective needed to question their fundamental metaphysical assumptions.
“Paradigm wars” are, essentially, “metaphysical wars”—conflicts between fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality. Most people (including most scientists) are not even clear about what their own basic metaphysical assumptions are; and few seem equipped to question their metaphysical beliefs, even if aware of them.