Time to lighten up!
"It is an establishment that persists is frenetically sweeping legitimate genres of new anomalous phenomena under its intellectual carpet, thereby denying its own well-documented heritage that anomalies are the most precious raw materials from which future science is formed." Robert Jahn, PEAR, Princeton
Rupert Sheldrake: The Sense of Being Stared At
excerpt:
Genetically Programmed
How do plants grow from simple embryos inside seed into foxgloves, or bamboos? How do leaves, flowers and fruits take up their characteristic forms? These questions are about what biologists call morphogenesis, the coming into being of form.
The same problems arise in understanding how fertilized egg cells in animals give rise to fruit flies or elephants. The naive answer is to say that everything is genetically programmed.
Somehow each developing plant or animal follow the instructions coded in its genes. The problem with this theory is that we actually know what genes do: they code for the sequence of building blocks, called amino acids, that make up protein molecules. This is a very different matter from "programming" or instinctive behaviour.
Genes enable cells to make the right proteins at the right times as the organism develops. But how does having the right proteins explain the shape of a flower or the structure of a mouse? No one knows. This is one of the major unsolved problems of biology.
To say the cells, tissues and organs simple assemble themselves automatically is like saying that if all the materials were delivered to a building site at the right times, the building would automatically assemble itself in the right shape as a result of blind physical forces.
Since the 1920s, many biologists who have studied the development of plants and animals have been convinced there must be organizing fields with the developing organism, called morphogenetic fields. These fields not only help explain normal development but also regeneration. If you cut a flatworm into pieces, each piece can regenerate to form an entire new organism. (If you cut a magnet up into parts, each part is a complete magnet with a complete magnetic field.)
The trouble is that no one knows exactly what morphogenetic fields are or how they work.
Morphogenetic fields not only shape cells, tissues, organs and living organisms but also work at the molecular level. For example, the morphogenetic fields of protein molecules shape the way that chains of amino acids fold up in the right way to give the proteins their characteristic form. Genes specify the sequence in which amino acids are strung together, but they do not determine how these chains of amino acids fold up. A given chain could potentially fold up into an astronomical number of different forms.
A typical chain of 100 amino acids has trillions of possible three-dimensional forms. If it folded up by "exploring" these at random until it found the most energetically stable form, it could take longer than the entire age of the universe to do so. (the Levinthal paradox, after molecular biologist Cyrus Levinthal.)
In fact, the folding process may take only a few seconds or at most a matter of minutes. Worse still, proteins do not have only a single possible form with a minimum energy; many alternative minimum-energy forms are possible, according to calculations. In the literature on proteins folding, this is called the "multiple minimum problem." Despite thirty-five years of intensive research, the folding of proteins is still one of the major unsolved problems in molecular biology.
Morphogenetic fields are part of [as Sheldrake puts forth] a larger class of fields, called morphic fields, all of which contain inherent memory given by morphic resonance. Other kinds of morphic fields include the behavioural fields that underlie the behaviour and instincts of animals.
[the explanation that my cats do 'that' out of instinct explains nothing]
Morphic fields also underlie our perceptions, thoughts and other mental processes. The morphic fields of mental activities are called mental fields.
Sensory communication by itself would be totally inadequate to explain how termites could build such prodigious structures, with nests up to ten feet high, filled with galleries and chambers and even equipped with ventilation shafts. These insect cities have an overall plan that far exceeds the experience of any individual insect. There is already evidence that co-ordination of the insects' activities depends on field-like influences that cannot be explained in terms of the normal senses.
The Astonishing Hypothesis
Look around now. Are the images of what you see inside your brain? Or are they outside - just where they seem to be?
The inward movement of light is familiar enough. As you look at this book, reflected light moves from the book through the electromagnetic field into your eyes. The lenses of your eyes focus the light and form upside-down images on your retinas.
The light falling on your retinal cone and rod cells causes electrical changes within them, and these trigger changes in the nerves that connect the cells to the brain. Nerve impulses move up your optic nerves and into the brain, where they give rise to complex patterns of electrical and chemical activity.
So far, so good. All these processes can be, and have been, studied in great detail by neurophysiologists and other experts on vision and brain activity.
Then something very mysterious happens. You consciously experience what you are seeing, the pages of this book. You also become conscious of the printed words and their meanings. From the point of view of the standard theory, there is no reason why you should be conscious at all. Brain mechanisms ought to go on just as well, without consciousness.
Then comes a further problem. When you see this book, you do not experience your image of it as being inside your brain, where it is supposed to be. Instead, you experience the image of the book as being located about two feet in front of you, where the book itself is.
Your image of this book is just where it seems to be, in front of your eyes, not behind your eyes. It is not inside your brain. Your mind is projecting it outward to where it seems to be.
...
The identity theory says that mental activity is nothing but the subjective experience of brain activity. Francis Crick, a Nobel laureate and one of the found fathers of molecular biology [the DNA double helix], has called this the Astonishing Hypothesis: 'You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people alive today that it can truly be called astonishing.'
It makes nonsense of our social and legal systems, which hold that sane adults are responsible for their actions. In practice, people cannot be treated as mere automata with no choice or free will, nor do most people really think of themselves as choiceless mechanisms. From religious, legal, social, and personal points of view, we are not merely the automatic activity of vast assemblies of nerve cells and their associated molecules.
"It is an establishment that persists is frenetically sweeping legitimate genres of new anomalous phenomena under its intellectual carpet, thereby denying its own well-documented heritage that anomalies are the most precious raw materials from which future science is formed." Robert Jahn, PEAR, Princeton
Rupert Sheldrake: The Sense of Being Stared At
excerpt:
Genetically Programmed
How do plants grow from simple embryos inside seed into foxgloves, or bamboos? How do leaves, flowers and fruits take up their characteristic forms? These questions are about what biologists call morphogenesis, the coming into being of form.
The same problems arise in understanding how fertilized egg cells in animals give rise to fruit flies or elephants. The naive answer is to say that everything is genetically programmed.
Somehow each developing plant or animal follow the instructions coded in its genes. The problem with this theory is that we actually know what genes do: they code for the sequence of building blocks, called amino acids, that make up protein molecules. This is a very different matter from "programming" or instinctive behaviour.
Genes enable cells to make the right proteins at the right times as the organism develops. But how does having the right proteins explain the shape of a flower or the structure of a mouse? No one knows. This is one of the major unsolved problems of biology.
To say the cells, tissues and organs simple assemble themselves automatically is like saying that if all the materials were delivered to a building site at the right times, the building would automatically assemble itself in the right shape as a result of blind physical forces.
Since the 1920s, many biologists who have studied the development of plants and animals have been convinced there must be organizing fields with the developing organism, called morphogenetic fields. These fields not only help explain normal development but also regeneration. If you cut a flatworm into pieces, each piece can regenerate to form an entire new organism. (If you cut a magnet up into parts, each part is a complete magnet with a complete magnetic field.)
The trouble is that no one knows exactly what morphogenetic fields are or how they work.
Morphogenetic fields not only shape cells, tissues, organs and living organisms but also work at the molecular level. For example, the morphogenetic fields of protein molecules shape the way that chains of amino acids fold up in the right way to give the proteins their characteristic form. Genes specify the sequence in which amino acids are strung together, but they do not determine how these chains of amino acids fold up. A given chain could potentially fold up into an astronomical number of different forms.
A typical chain of 100 amino acids has trillions of possible three-dimensional forms. If it folded up by "exploring" these at random until it found the most energetically stable form, it could take longer than the entire age of the universe to do so. (the Levinthal paradox, after molecular biologist Cyrus Levinthal.)
In fact, the folding process may take only a few seconds or at most a matter of minutes. Worse still, proteins do not have only a single possible form with a minimum energy; many alternative minimum-energy forms are possible, according to calculations. In the literature on proteins folding, this is called the "multiple minimum problem." Despite thirty-five years of intensive research, the folding of proteins is still one of the major unsolved problems in molecular biology.
Morphogenetic fields are part of [as Sheldrake puts forth] a larger class of fields, called morphic fields, all of which contain inherent memory given by morphic resonance. Other kinds of morphic fields include the behavioural fields that underlie the behaviour and instincts of animals.
[the explanation that my cats do 'that' out of instinct explains nothing]
Morphic fields also underlie our perceptions, thoughts and other mental processes. The morphic fields of mental activities are called mental fields.
Sensory communication by itself would be totally inadequate to explain how termites could build such prodigious structures, with nests up to ten feet high, filled with galleries and chambers and even equipped with ventilation shafts. These insect cities have an overall plan that far exceeds the experience of any individual insect. There is already evidence that co-ordination of the insects' activities depends on field-like influences that cannot be explained in terms of the normal senses.
The Astonishing Hypothesis
Look around now. Are the images of what you see inside your brain? Or are they outside - just where they seem to be?
The inward movement of light is familiar enough. As you look at this book, reflected light moves from the book through the electromagnetic field into your eyes. The lenses of your eyes focus the light and form upside-down images on your retinas.
The light falling on your retinal cone and rod cells causes electrical changes within them, and these trigger changes in the nerves that connect the cells to the brain. Nerve impulses move up your optic nerves and into the brain, where they give rise to complex patterns of electrical and chemical activity.
So far, so good. All these processes can be, and have been, studied in great detail by neurophysiologists and other experts on vision and brain activity.
Then something very mysterious happens. You consciously experience what you are seeing, the pages of this book. You also become conscious of the printed words and their meanings. From the point of view of the standard theory, there is no reason why you should be conscious at all. Brain mechanisms ought to go on just as well, without consciousness.
Then comes a further problem. When you see this book, you do not experience your image of it as being inside your brain, where it is supposed to be. Instead, you experience the image of the book as being located about two feet in front of you, where the book itself is.
Your image of this book is just where it seems to be, in front of your eyes, not behind your eyes. It is not inside your brain. Your mind is projecting it outward to where it seems to be.
...
The identity theory says that mental activity is nothing but the subjective experience of brain activity. Francis Crick, a Nobel laureate and one of the found fathers of molecular biology [the DNA double helix], has called this the Astonishing Hypothesis: 'You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people alive today that it can truly be called astonishing.'
It makes nonsense of our social and legal systems, which hold that sane adults are responsible for their actions. In practice, people cannot be treated as mere automata with no choice or free will, nor do most people really think of themselves as choiceless mechanisms. From religious, legal, social, and personal points of view, we are not merely the automatic activity of vast assemblies of nerve cells and their associated molecules.
But this is what I cannot figure out, if a brain weighs 1-3kgs (so says encrata) and its nothing but a mass of pink and grey jelly like tissue, how come it can think? what up with thinking meat?