Friday, February 22, 2008
Vermeer's Hat by Timothy Brook
Ah! Remember when you first learned about stream of conciousness? I remember well, because it was like a light went on in my head! I loved it, from the day I set eyes on The Sound and The Fury and read Faulkner with gusto, my next favorites being , A Rose For Emily, and As I Lay Dying
Now, with Vermeer's Hat, we have a new form of stream of consciousness. Yes, this time the author goes into a Vermeer painting and discovers thru a doorway from the painting, (and from his learned history of the world), a glimpse through the eyes ( stream of consciousness almost) of the author of what was happening at the time of Vermeer in his world.
Tobacco, silver, beaver hats, chinese trade, the perils of the shipping industry and much more as the world started on its course to become smaller. It is amazing from the ship register's of the time where people came from, and how traveled they were.
It is a memorable book, slow reading because it is not full of suspense, but full of facts, that draw you back to learn more. Also, the idea of visiting the world of the time through the paintings of Vermeer, is clever, and insightful. It is worth reading, the sub title is ,The Seventeeth Century and the Dawn of the Global World.
Posted by madlyn at 7:31 AM 0 comments
Labels: Books, mostly books, newest read
Friday, January 11, 2008
Richard Dawkins vs Rupert Sheldrake
In the interest of God, and the interest of mankind, this is worth reading....a point of view that promotes a book at the expense of the truth, is not what a scientist should be searching for. I wonder what you think?
This release came to me from the Rupert Sheldrake site, I subscribe to.
News Release from Rupert Sheldrake Online
11th January 2008
From Rupert Sheldrake
"Richard Dawkins Comes to Call" has just been published in Network Review: The Journal of the Scientific and Medical Network and is now on the web site - It is also pasted below.
Richard Dawkins comes to call
Rupert Sheldrake
Richard Dawkins is a man with a mission – the eradication of religion and superstition, and their total replacement with science and reason. Channel 4 TV has repeatedly provided him with a pulpit. His two-part polemic in August 2007, called Enemies of Reason, was a sequel to his 2006 diatribe against religion, The Root of All Evil?
Soon before Enemies of Reason was filmed, the production company, IWC Media, told me that Richard Dawkins wanted to visit me to discuss my research on unexplained abilities of people and animals. I was reluctant to take part, but the company’s representative assured me that “this documentary, at Channel 4’s insistence, will be an entirely more balanced affair than The Root of All Evil was.” She added, “We are very keen for it to be a discussion between two scientists, about scientific modes of enquiry”. So I agreed and we fixed a date.
I was still not sure what to expect. Was Richard Dawkins going to be dogmatic, with a mental firewall that blocked out any evidence that went against his beliefs? Or would he be open-minded, and fun to talk to?
The Director asked us to stand facing each other; we were filmed with a hand-held camera. Richard began by saying that he thought we probably agreed about many things, “But what worries me about you is that you are prepared to believe almost anything. Science should be based on the minimum number of beliefs.”
I agreed that we had a lot in common, “But what worries me about you is that you come across as dogmatic, giving people a bad impression of science.”
He then said that in a romantic spirit he himself would like to believe in telepathy, but there just wasn’t any evidence for it. He dismissed all research on the subject out of hand. He compared the lack of acceptance of telepathy by scientists such as himself with the way in which the echo-location system had been discovered in bats, followed by its rapid acceptance within the scientific community in the 1940s. In fact, as I later discovered, Lazzaro Spallanzani had shown in 1793 that bats rely on hearing to find their way around, but sceptical opponents dismissed his experiments as flawed, and helped set back research for well over a century. However, Richard recognized that telepathy posed a more radical challenge than echo-location. He said that if it really occurred, it would “turn the laws of physics upside down,” and added, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
“This depends on what you regard as extraordinary”, I replied. “Most people say they have experienced telepathy, especially in connection with telephone calls. In that sense, telepathy is ordinary. The claim that most people are deluded about their own experience is extraordinary. Where is the extraordinary evidence for that?”
He produced any evidence at all, apart from generic arguments about the fallibility of human judgment. He assumed that people want to believe in “the paranormal” because of wishful thinking.
We then agreed that controlled experiments were necessary. I said that this was why I had actually been doing such experiments, including tests to find out if people really could tell who was calling them on the telephone when the caller was selected at random. The results were far above the chance level.
The previous week I had sent Richard copies of some of my papers, published in peer-reviewed journals, so that he could look at the data.
Richard seemed uneasy and said, “I’m don’t want to discuss evidence”. “Why not?” I asked. “There isn’t time. It’s too complicated. And that’s not what this programme is about.” The camera stopped.
The Director, Russell Barnes, confirmed that he too was not interested in evidence. The film he was making was another Dawkins polemic.
I said to Russell, “If you’re treating telepathy as an irrational belief, surely evidence about whether it exists or not is essential for the discussion. If telepathy occurs, it’s not irrational to believe in it. I thought that’s what we were going to talk about. I made it clear from the outset that I wasn’t interested in taking part in another low grade debunking exercise.”
Richard said, “It’s not a low grade debunking exercise; it’s a high grade debunking exercise.”
In that case, I replied, there had been a serious misunderstanding, because I had been led to believe that this was to be a balanced scientific discussion about evidence. Russell Barnes asked to see the emails I had received from his assistant. He read them with obvious dismay, and said the assurances she had given me were wrong. The team packed up and left.
Richard Dawkins has long proclaimed his conviction that “The paranormal is bunk. Those who try to sell it to us are fakes and charlatans”. Enemies of Reason was intended to popularize this belief. But does his crusade really promote “the public understanding of science,” of which he is the professor at Oxford? Should science be a vehicle of prejudice, a kind of fundamentalist belief-system? Or should it be a method of enquiry into the unknown?
Rupert Sheldrake
Note
Some Email filters block any messages containing links to web sites, sounfortunately we cannot include links in this newsletter, but all the links are easily accessible form the home page of the website Sheldrake.org.
Best wishes,
Editor
Posted by madlyn at 8:13 AM 0 comments
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Vermeer's Hat by Timothy Brook
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Richard Dawkins vs Rupert Sheldrake
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