Who Needs A Brain? – 2

The Flight Of Consciousness

Part 1 of this long article lies here

There is a curious scientific principle I refer to often: it can’t be true, therefore it isn’t. For most scientific intellects, they seem to think of it as some kind of magical axiom that can be trotted out to cover anything which disturbs their worldview (Zeitgeist) or challenges the status quo.

Of course they said it about heavier-than-air-flight, out-of-body experiences, telepathy, quantum biology and thousands of other applications in life where—in their view—the effect could not happen and therefore it didn’t. No need to look at the evidence: there couldn’t be any!

Well, it’s a handy, if lazy, way of looking at truths. The trouble is, these thinkers are never disturbed by concrete evidence of something contrary to their worldview; you cannot shift these people with mere facts! They have fixed prejudices which will never change. As someone wittily said (Thomas Kuhn, I think), the only way anything moves forward is when the old guard dies off and new people come onto the scene who are not prejudging the more advanced view.

So it is with the idea that consciousness does not need a physical matrix, such as a brain or even a computer. It just is! Viewpoint is a matter of choice and a person can accept their viewpoint as peeping out at the world from behind a pair of eyes in their skull. Or the person can say “I am not in my body; I don’t need my body to perceive”. When such a person is good at it, they can “see” just as well as with eyes.

So out-of-body experiences and remote viewing are not just possible but would be expected. Near-death-experiences (NDEs) have something of the same characteristics, where the person is consciously aware but clearly not working from the brain or the normal sensorium of sight, touch, smell, etc. Continue reading

The Science Of God

My copy of the lively science magazine “New Scientist” just arrived. I was pleasantly surprised to see the current issue was devoted to God and the science of religion. Most especially, it seemed to be saying that secularists and atheists shouldn’t be too hasty in dismissing the notion of God as nonsensical.

Unfortunately, the tone of some of the pieces fell a little short of that admirable sentiment. On page 47 I got to a piece by Victor J. Stenger. He pointed out that a survey revealed that 93 percent of scientists don’t believe in a personal god. Well, so what? He is presumably trying to infer that these are the people who should really know; that scientists are the sole bearers of true wisdom and what they don’t know isn’t worth knowing!

He goes on to say that, if God really exists, there ought to be scientific evidence scattered around that we can pick up on. I agree with that. But only if the scientists are honest, competent and using right tools for the job, surely?

Pretty soon, he gets really foolish. He says that experiments on a world beyond matter will “prove” that God doesn’t exist. I really don’t see that reasoning: we know that there are information fields and forces beyond our immediate knowledge. That doesn’t prove there is no God.

So already, my enthusiasm is waning. Stenger is not somebody to light my intellectual fires! Continue reading