Christianity & Rationals & Science Thomas on 29 Dec 2009 01:06 am
Noetic Science
What is Noetic Science? It will soon have millions of followers, so it pays to have it on your radar. The Institute of Noetic Sciences defines it this way:
The word “noetic” comes from the ancient Greek nous, for which there is no exact equivalent in English. It refers to “inner knowing,” a kind of intuitive consciousness—direct and immediate access to knowledge beyond what is available to our normal senses and the power of reason.
What are ‘Noetic Sciences’?
Noetic sciences are explorations into the nature and potentials of consciousness using multiple ways of knowing—including intuition, feeling, reason, and the senses. Noetic sciences explore the “inner cosmos” of the mind (consciousness, soul, spirit) and how it relates to the “outer cosmos” of the physical world.
If that is too wordy, here is a “typical person” trying to describe it:
So I came across ‘noetic science’ for the first time in the new Dan Brown novel and thought to expand my knowledge of this obscure branch of science by googling it…. Apparently, noetic science is a branch of science in which “scientists are trying to measure things we’ve long regarded as immeasurable, like prayer, intuition, or maybe even life after death, with the help of evidence-based research and peer review”. Now tell me, how do you measure prayer and/or its efficacy thereof? Really!!
A quick answer to the question: “Now tell me, how do you measure prayer and/or its efficacy thereof?” You measure it by asking, “Why won’t God heal amputees?” As soon as you pray to heal an amputation you can plainly see that prayer has no effect. This page explains why. Or you can perform scientific experiments - there have been dozens.
Or you can understand what is actually happening when people pray, as demonstrated in these two videos:
As you can see, prayer is a superstition, nothing more. We can perform more and more experiments to prove that over and over again, but it is not going to change anything. Prayer is a superstition just like “black cats cause bad luck” is a superstition. We could perform experiments on black cats for decades but nothing will change - the experiments will all demonstrate that black cats have no effect on the outcome of future events. At some point this obvious fact becomes conclusive to intelligent people, and there is no need for further study.
The following video offers an introduction to Noetic Science from the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Yes, Deepak Choprah appears, as you would expect, right after the introduction:
The Institude describes its activities in this way:
The institute explores consciousness from three perspectives:
(1) First-person perspective — Supporting individuals exploring and developing their own subjective consciousness (e.g., meditation and other spiritual practices). Emphasis on inner knowing and personal transformation.
(2) Second-person perspective — Exploring and supporting transformative relationships and intersubjective consciousness (e.g., compassionate dialogue, community building, a global wisdom society). Emphasis on transformative learning and collective wisdom.
(3) Third-person perspective — Gathering data about objective physiological correlates of consciousness (e.g., research using rigorous scientific protocols, including experiments in psi, mind-body healing, and subtle energies). Emphasis on scientific understanding.
If that sounds like “New Age” repackaged, you would be correct. This is the new New Age, and it will probably garner millions of supporters like New Age did. The fact that things like psi, mind-body healing, and subtle energies are easily debunked does not matter.
You can see the New Age/Spirituality/Religion angle in this article:
Spooky Coincidences and “Noetic Science”
There’s an Institute of Noetic Science (IONS) near San Francisco, and it happens to be the subject of a chapter in a book I read last week, NPR religion reporter Barbara Bradley Haggerty’s excellent Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality. Haggerty investigates the scientific underpinnings of psychic phenomena. One of her themes is this idea of entanglement — that the universe is somehow knitted together in ways that materialist science currently can’t explain and maybe never will. On a certain view, a religious one, the unifying factor is God. We’re unified with each other through Him, which is why minds can affect each other across vast distances. That’s the case for the elementary reason that, as in the Jewish prayer Shema, “the Lord is One” (Deuteronomy 6:4). That doesn’t mean just that there’s one God instead of two or three. Rather, God really is One. Somehow, there’s a unity to God that extends to the rest of creation. If we could see to the heart of reality, we would perceive that everything that seems to enjoy a separate existence from God is really nullified before Him.
Our minds are mostly shut to evidence of this unity — it would be overwhelming otherwise, infinitely so — but occasionally, with more sensitive people or sometimes under the influence of events, spiritual practices, or certain substances, intimations will make themselves felt.
Haggerty’s book just came out in May so obviously it’s not Brown’s source on this. Still, readers of The Lost Symbol will be interested to read Haggerty’s journalistic take on the subject. She visits IONS and interviews researchers who have documented the way, for example, married couples can produce measurable physiological effects in their partners by directing loving thoughts to them even if the two are in separate, totally sealed rooms. Somehow their minds, one might venture to say their souls, are entangled. One woman, a subject in the research, turns out to be psychically sensitive to an unusual degree.
Let’s say this were true - either the part about married couples or the part about a woman who is “psychically sensitive to an unusual degree”. Then it would be possible to win a million dollars by demonstrating the effect to James Randi:
One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge
It is a very simple and friendly process to win $1 million:
At JREF, we offer a one-million-dollar prize to anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event. The JREF does not involve itself in the testing procedure, other than helping to design the protocol and approving the conditions under which a test will take place. All tests are designed with the participation and approval of the applicant. In most cases, the applicant will be asked to perform a relatively simple preliminary test of the claim, which if successful, will be followed by the formal test. Preliminary tests are usually conducted by associates of the JREF at the site where the applicant lives. Upon success in the preliminary testing process, the “applicant” becomes a “claimant.”
Here James Randi explains how the challenge got started and how people can claim the prize:
Also interesting:
Anyone with real ability could easily claim the money.
The million dollars will not be claimed by these people because Noetic Science is nonsense.
on 29 Dec 2009 at 1:43 pm 1.Foster said …
JREF million dollar is a know hustle. See why…
http://www.dailygrail.com/features/the-myth-of-james-randis-million-dollar-challenge
on 29 Dec 2009 at 2:17 pm 2.bernerbits said …
Ugh.
Much earlier this year, NPR did a week long story on the “science of God”, and kept glossing over all evidence that pointed to naturalism, bringing in “experts” like seminary professors to “explain” apparent naturalistic effects. On their last day they covered Noetic Sciences, attempting to pass it off as legit. I expect a lot better from public radio than pandering to “spiritualists”.
I pushed it out of my mind until I read the Lost Symbol, which tried to use Noetic Sciences to suggest, nay ram it down your throat, that ancient mysticism and modern science are the *same thing*. He even wrote blubbering scientists into the novel trying valiantly but failing to actually show how they don’t reconcile.
Of course there’s a scene in the book where a “basement hacker” is using super secret methods that alert the attention of the CIA in order to… do DNS resolution on an IP address. It was at that point that I discovered that Dan Brown is very good at BSing on stuff he knows nothing about, unless you actually know something about what he’s talking about.
Anyhow two rants I’ve been saving for a while. Cool story bro.
on 29 Dec 2009 at 10:39 pm 3.Anengiyefa said …
“The million dollars will not be claimed by these people because Noetic Science is nonsense”
As the “typical person” who tried to describe Noetic science at paragraph 2 of this post, I cannot agree more with the quote above. :)
Dan Brown is a good story teller. And its okay too to tell a good story even as many others are doing. But it really isn’t necessary to go all out to assert that what you have written about is factual and true, when anyone with a bit of intelligence can see it for the humbug that it is..
on 29 Dec 2009 at 11:10 pm 4.Hovind Reprise said …
First of all, there is no doubt that Randi has used his alleged offer over a period of many years – to generate enormous publicity for himself and his cult of debunkers.
Second of all, Randi’s offer sets himself up as judge and jury. And, of course, he has not the slightest interest in losing the very game that he has created. A true prize would have an independent panel of neutral judges and these judges, not Randi, should be in control of prize money, to determine if and when it shall be released.
So while James Randi and his cult go around accusing the general public of falling for a wide variety of psychic scams, they themselves are engaged in perpetrating a scam of an equal and opposite sort. The final irony is that they are the very near a mirror image of the phonies they try to expose.
In their fanatical zeal, they sometimes endeavor to put a stop to legitimate scientific and academic inquiry. They even attempted to interfere with the doctoral degree program in parapsychology at the University of California, Berkeley. When they go this far, as they did with Brenda Dunne, they simply reveal the philosophical and moral emptiness of their position.
on 30 Dec 2009 at 1:10 am 5.Sister Chromatid said …
You are wrong about Randi. He simply makes claimants assert what they can do and to agree upon a test that shows they can do it.
If there was evidence for any invisible conscious entities or real mystical experiences, scientists (and all people) would have a strong interest in refining and honing that information. Who doesn’t want to believe in life after death? But wanting something to be true, doesn’t make it true. Nor does having a strong belief that something is true.
There is no evidence that the supernatural exists. We know humans are easily fooled by certain explanations. That seems to be the likely explanation for ALL mysticism. There is no evidence of “higher truths” or “divine knowledge” and anyone who claims such is lying to themselves and/or others.
on 30 Dec 2009 at 8:01 pm 6.John said …
“There is no evidence that the supernatural exists. We know humans are easily fooled by certain explanations. That seems to be the likely explanation for ALL mysticism. There is no evidence of “higher truths” or “divine knowledge” and anyone who claims such is lying to themselves and/or others.”
This isn’t entirely accurate. If you are willing to actually look at the valid research being done in the area you’ll find that there is at least enough evidence to think that our understanding of certain things is incomplete and warrants further study.
The only way you can say there is no evidence is if you dismiss the evidence out of hand first. I’m not saying that there is enough evidence to prove anything, but there are a number of intriguing studies in a many areas that indicate to me that perhaps there are phenomena at work beyond what we’re typically open to considering, and maybe we should consider them.
It’s not scientific to say that we already know all there is to know. That’s just silliness. Real science pursues the evidence where it leads no matter where it goes. If there’s nothing there, then it was still worth the research to explain away the anomalous evidence that they initially found.
on 30 Dec 2009 at 9:23 pm 7.RTS said …
You may find this link useful at some point. On the Tiller experiment:
http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/aju9e/can_reddits_scientists_unwrap_the_pseudoscience/
on 31 Dec 2009 at 7:15 am 8.Sister Chromatid said …
John, scientists spend millions to obtain stardust from a comet because of what it can teach us. If there was anything to explore, then scientists would be on it for their own reasons as well as for those they love. Just because science doesn’t have an answer (yet) doesn’t mean that some guru does or that there’s some mystical “higher truth” involved.
Randi, myself, and everyone would love for there to be evidence of life after death– then we could refine and hone that knowledge. But there IS NO EVIDENCE that any kind of consciousness can exist absent a material brain even though there’s lots of reasons humans would like to believe in such things. It’s not like any scientist would deny the evidence if it was really there.
Sure, scientists don’t know everything, but mystics have never been shown to know ANYTHING true ahead of science. Science has an error correcting mechanism; mysticism does not.
on 31 Dec 2009 at 11:11 am 9.whats up said …
Foster - that is a good link but it ignores something. Psychics dont claim minor effects that need a thousand hours to research to slightly detect. They claim to be able to predict the future and they accept money to do it on the spot. The article notes someone “psychically sensitive to an unusual degree”. That should be instantly detectable.
on 31 Dec 2009 at 11:12 am 10.Severin said …
John 6
“…that our understanding of certain things is incomplete and warrants further study.“
Of course it is incomplete, and will be incomplete probably for very long time in future. Understanding of lightning was incomplete too some time ago (attributed to gods!), but was explained later by scientific arguments.
The „measure“ („quantity“) of incompleteness of our knowledge is what matters!
We (humans) had to wait for milleniums lightning to be explained. Then we waited only a century to explain it deeper. Then we waited only a few years to have more complete „picture“ of it. Today, we learn new details about lightning probably every day.
Our lack of DETAILED understanding of lightning (or anything else), in 21st century, does not give us „stuff“ to speculate that „it must be something more“ in the „holes“ of our knowledge.
„Holes“ are getting smaller and smaller!
Science is developing exponentially these days.
I doubt that any „hole“ in our knowledge will ever (in 21st century and later) leave place for speculations about anything unnatural. Beacuse most things assumed as unnatural some time ago appeared clearly explained and lost their unnatural „aura“ today. Remeber „flogiston“, „ether“, etc?
Even Einstein’s theory is incomplete, but we are close to make a breaktrough (string theory).
Noetic Theory is bullshit, as all the “theories” invented to “fill up the gaps” in our knowledge, but not as the main purpose!
Main purpose is, as always: give us your money!
on 13 Jan 2010 at 3:49 am 11.The Nihilist said …
Thanks for putting together such a comprehensive article. It’s strewn with useful research material. :)
on 17 Jan 2010 at 8:55 pm 12.Jim Doggett said …
Are we over-thinking this? Need we disprove everything conjured up since the beginnning of civilization?
I remember reading years ago a “scientific” explantion for every events in the Exodus. Yet, they failed to ask the first and most important question: did it happen? (Nope; not a shred of archelogical evidence. Pure fiction.)
So I’m wondering if it might not be better to understand and simply explain the orgins of these beliefs/superstitions. Carl Sagan advanced a pretty plausible theory, which I’ll preface with this:
In the course of huuman evolution, a big thing happened: fire. Kept us warm; protected us from animals that would eat us; made food softer, thus easier to digest — and tastier. All good. More importantly, it was the catalist for our socialization; sitting around a fire it seems is a terrific conversation-starter.
Dr. Sagan added this possible senario: sitting around our fires, we looked skyward and saw stars. Not a lot conversation was needed before someone assumed we were seeing others sitting around their fires, maybe even chatting just as we were. But we were pretty dang amazed that “they” were not tethered to the ground as we were. Surely they had special powers.
And we’ve been going hog wild ever since ascribing all manner of special powers possessed by beings that were entirely conjured-up. But what really boggles the mind is that we ain’t been slowin’ down any, despite our current level of understanding. Absolutely astonishing.
In short, it’s all made up. That’s patently obvious. So why debate the many minutia? Seems kinda pointless, IMO.
FWIW,
jd
on 17 Jan 2010 at 10:39 pm 13.Max said …
Not much, your argument does not hold up. In fact, this is exactly what we would expect. The British Museum in London displays inscriptions from the walls of the palace of the Assyrian Emperor, Sancheriv. These show scenes from Sancheriv’s military campaigns from the 8th century BCE, including graphic depictions of destroyed enemies (decapitations, impalings, etc.). Sancheriv himself is depicted as larger than life.
But one element is missing from these inscriptions: There are no dead Assyrians! That is consistent with the ancient “historical” style — negative events, failures and flaws are not depicted at all. When a nation suffers an embarrassing defeat, they usually whitewash the mistakes and destroy the evidence.
This idea has significant ramifications for archeology and the Exodus. The last thing the ancient Egyptians wanted to record is the embarrassment of being completely destroyed by the God of a puny slave nation. Would the Egyptians ever want to preserve details of the destruction of fields, flocks, and first borns plus the death of Pharaoh and the entire Egyptian army at the Red Sea?
In other words, we wouldn’t expect to find prominent attention to Moses’ humiliation of Pharaoh even if it occurred.
In one major event, the battle of Kadesh on the Orantes River between the Hitites and the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II, both sides record it as a major victory, and is depicted as such.
Interestingly, the Torah is unique among all ancient national literature in that it portrays its people in both victory and defeat. The Jews — and sometimes their leaders — are shown as rebels, complainers, idol-builders, and yes, descended from slaves.
This objective portrayal lends the Torah great credibility. As the writer Israel Zangwill said: “The Bible is an anti-Semitic book. Israel is the villain, not the hero, of his own story. Alone among the epics, it is out for truth, not heroics.”
on 17 Jan 2010 at 10:58 pm 14.Severin said …
There is an excellent explanation of persistance of keeping illogical beliefs by humans,connected with evolution.
Animal and human youngs are conditioned by genes to obey immediatelly and uncoditionally their parents before they collect some experience of their own.
If the signal is “run”, then run, do not wait, do not ask anything, do not postpone your reaction, do not question parents decision, just BELIEVE.
This was inherited through genes to save lives of unexperianced youngs and to keep the existance of species.
Such an unconditional obedience was not imposed by genes to be for a life, but only for the “childhood”.
As evolution solutions are far of being perfect (examples on request), and it is more confortable for a young individual (especially human) to keep a “supreme being” (parents) responsible for their lives, it seems that it is very difficult to get out off this “unconditional obedience gap”.
It is especially difficult for humans, as their childood/dependance on parents period, compared to their total life time, is far the longest one among all the mammals.
That might be a good explanation for insane behaving of some very intelligent people: they understand everything, they can be ingenious, but they DO NOT WANT to quit believing religious nonsensens, probably forced by prolonged “unconditional obedience gap” imposed by genes.
Additional reason could be fear of death. All religions offer eternal life in case one obeys rules this religion imposes, and people are terrified by death.
on 20 Mar 2010 at 11:06 am 15.Anonymous said …
prove you exist
on 20 Mar 2010 at 11:55 am 16.Anonymous said …
prove you exist, o ya and do it with someone elses words in a book ya have…..
if this world is not real
then you are not real
if everything is in constant change
then there can be no constant proof
words cannot touch the tip
nor thoughts
so you keep on preaching your o-so wise thoughts
and when you can in every way describe the entire
universe in the english language….
the only language your huge brain have mastered
then minds will listen
as for your proof for non existence of a “god”
you are like a common lawyer in which you use words
to contradict words
disprove this
you are imperfect
therefore…. there cannot be perfect: to include the earths life and inhabitants
if and only if there is only you the “wise man” you are the top of the food chain… the master
and your world is imperfect and nature and the earth cannot live or repair itself because you as the earth has been organized “accidently” to fail. so mankind should pollute and cut down the rainforest and destroy everything. You see its too late once you start to ruin an already imperfect nature it will only fail faster. Imperfection can not perfect or repair itself back to its begin. Unless it is programed to.
Its people like you that rule here on psuedo thrones and twist words like monkey you came from.
I hope you change your mind and understand that what you know is that you might be breathing and living….
But you are dying
and that is the only thing that mankind can prove.
so what anyone believes or disbelieves is up to debate.
there is truth and lie
and there is a void in deciet
See you in 2012 monkey boy