Monday, April 29, 2013

Kurt Gödel, greatest philosopher of all time, did not believe in materialism, or that consciousness was produced by the brain, or that the brain was produced by Darwinian Evolution. Gödel believed a human is a spirit connected to a body.


I have updated my web page on Eminent Researchers to include Kurt Gödel. Gödel, possibly the greatest philosopher of all time, did not believe in materialism, or that the mind was produced by the brain, or that the brain evolved through Darwinian evolution. He believed a human is a spirit connected with a physical body and that there were beings higher than humans and other worlds than earth.

The update to my web page includes:

From Wikipedia:

Kurt Friedrich Gödel (April 28, 1906 – January 14, 1978) was an Austrian American logician, mathematician, and philosopher. After World War II, he emigrated to the United States. Considered with Aristotle and Frege one of the most significant logicians in human history, Gödel made an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when others such as Bertrand Russell, A. N. Whitehead, and David Hilbert were pioneering the use of logic and set theory to understand the foundations of mathematics.

Kurt Gödel did not believe in materialism, or that the mind was produced by the brain, or that the brain evolved through Darwinian evolution. He believed a human was a spirit connected with a physical body and that there were beings higher than humans and other worlds than earth.

Kevincarmody.com lists these quotes by Kurt Gödel (among many others) from A Logical Journey by Hao Wang.

Kurt Gödel said:

  • Materialism is false.

  • The world in which we live is not the only one in which we shall live or have lived.

  • The brain is a computing machine connected with a spirit.

  • I don’t think the brain came in the Darwinian manner. In fact, it is disprovable. Simple mechanism can’t yield the brain. I think the basic elements of the universe are simple. Life force is a primitive element of the universe and it obeys certain laws of action. These laws are not simple, and they are not mechanical.

  • In materialism all elements behave the same. It is mysterious to think of them as spread out and automatically united. For something to be a whole, it has to have an additional object, say, a soul or a mind. “Matter” refers to one way of perceiving things, and elementary particles are a lower form of mind. Mind is separate from matter.

  • There are other worlds and rational beings of a different and higher kind.

Copyright © 2013 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Sunday, April 28, 2013

Selected Peer-Reviewed Journal Publications on Psi Research at deanradin.com


Parapsychologist Dean Radin author of The Conscious Universe and Entangled Minds has created a list of Selected Peer-Reviewed Journal Publications on Psi Research. He explains why in his latest blog post.

Critics are fond of saying that's there is no scientific evidence for psi. They wave their fist in the air and shout, "Show me the evidence!" Then they turn red and have a coughing fit. In less dramatic cases a student might be genuinely curious and open-minded, but unsure where to begin to find reliable evidence about psi. Google knows all and sees all, but it doesn't know how to interpret or evaluate what it knows (at least not yet).
...

So I've created a SHOW ME page with downloadable articles on psi and psi-related topics, all published in peer-reviewed journals.

The list of journal publications can be found at deanradin.com:

Selected Peer-Reviewed Journal Publications on Psi Research

Subjects include:

  • Healing at a Distance
  • Physiological correlations at a distance
  • Telepathy & ESP
  • General Overviews & Critiques
  • Mediumship & Survival of Consciousness
  • Precognition & Presentiment
  • Theory
  • Mind-Matter Interaction
  • Potential Applications
  • Recommended books
  • Other websites with access to articles

Copyright © 2013 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Saturday, April 27, 2013

Sir J. J. Thomson, Nobel prize winning physicist, believed in psychic phenomena. He was a member of the Governing Council of the Society for Psychical Research for 34 years.


I have updated my web page on Eminent Researchers to include J. J. Thomson. Thomson was awarded the Nobel prize in physics for discovering the electron. He believed in psychic phenomena and was a member of the Governing Council for the Society for Psychical Research for 34 years.

The update to my web page includes:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_J_Thomson

Sir Joseph John "J. J." Thomson, OM, FRS (18 December 1856 – 30 August 1940) was a British physicist. He is credited with discovering electrons and isotopes, and inventing the mass spectrometer. Thomson was awarded the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the electron and for his work on the conduction of electricity in gases.

J. J. Thomson believed in psychic phenomena and was a member of the Governing Council of the Society for Psychical Research for 34 years. (Source: Entangled Minds by Dean Radin)

Thomson is the eleventh Nobelist I know of who believed in paranormal phenomena or that consciousness was non-physical based on their own research, their own experiences, or after studying the research of others. The other Nobelists are:

  • Max Planck - Believed consciousness is not physical based on his own research.

  • Wolfgang Pauli - Believed that his own unconscious PK wrecked experimental equipment.

  • Erwin Schrödinger - Believed consciousness is not physical based on his own research.

  • Brian D. Josephson - Believed in the results of ESP research.

  • Charles Robert Richet - From his own research believed in macro PK, precognition, anomalous cognition, and ectoplasm.

  • John William Strutt - Believed physical mediumship was a serious field of study based on his personal observations.

  • Marie Curie - Observed physical mediums hoping the phenomena might lead to an understanding of radioactivity.

  • Pierre Curie - Same as Marie Curie, attested to genuineness of physical mediumship.

  • Eugene Wigner - Believed consciousness is fundamental.

  • John Eccles - Neurophysiologist who believed the brain did not produce consciousness and that promissory materialism is superstition.

Other Eminent Researchers:

  • Charles Darwin - Believed natural laws were designed, this is a form of intelligent design.

  • Alan Turing - Believed in the results of ESP research.

  • Wernher von Braun - Believed consciousness survives death.

  • David Bohm - Believed in the results of parapsychology.

  • Karl Popper - Believed in dualism (which falsifies materialism).

  • Sir William Crookes - Invented cathode-ray tube, believed in survival after death and proved macro PK in 1871.

  • Sir Robert Boyle - Discoverer of Boyle's law, studied laying on of hands healing healing, attested to the results.

More information and references are on my web site at Eminent Researchers.

Copyright © 2013 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Monday, April 22, 2013

Due to the History of Important Scientific Discoveries Initially Rejected and Ridiculed, the Public Should not be Afraid to Demand Public Funds be Spent on Afterlife Research.


Most people would say that Science has been a huge success. We all know the of the successes in medical science, agriculture, transportation, communications, computers, etc. etc. But what about Science's failures? Consider the list (below) of important scientific discoveries, including discoveries that led to Nobel prizes, that were initially rejected and ridiculed by mainstream science. Scientists have a huge problem accepting the truth when it contradicts their preexisting beliefs. Science should be judged based on its failures as well as its successes.

There is extensive evidence to support belief in ESP and the afterlife. But mainstream science refuses to acknowledge the truth of these phenomena calling the evidence "pseudoscience". People don't often think about Science's colossal failure to study psi and the afterlife. What could be more important to humanity than our immortality? What could be more important to science than this huge gap in its understanding of the universe? What would the world be like if everyone knew that in the afterlife, they would experience a life review where they felt how their actions affected other people from the other person's point of view? In this regard, Science has failed humanity and itself. Science has given us medicines and conveniences, as well as weapons and pollution, but it has not given us the whole truth.

Most people believe in ESP and the afterlife. This shows that ordinary people can know things that Science denies. Given the difficulty scientists have recognizing important areas for research, the public and politicians should not be afraid to direct research funds into studies of ESP and the afterlife despite mainstream science's rejection of these subjects.

Nobel Prize Winning Discoveries that were First Ridiculed as "Pseudoscience".

(See Notes below for details and references.)

  • Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar: Black Holes
  • Binning, Roher, Gimzewski: Scanning-Tunneling Microscope
  • Barbara McClintlock: Mobile Genetic Elements
  • Stanley Prusiner: Prions
  • Jacobus Henricus van't Hoff: Theory of 3D Molecules
  • Peyton Rous: Viruses Transmit Cancer
  • Dan Shechtman: Quasicrystals ("There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists." - Linus Pauling, before Shechtman won the Nobel Prize for discovering quasicrystals.)
  • Hans Krebs: The Krebs Cycle, Metabolic Energy Production
  • Svante Arrhenius: The Properties of Electrolytes are Caused by Charged Atoms
  • Hannes Alfvén: Magnetohydrodynamics
  • F. Sherwood Rowland, Mario Molina, and Paul Crutzen: Choloroflurocarbons Destroying the Ozone Layer

More Important Discoveries that were First Ridiculed as "Pseudoscience".

Many more important discoveries that were first ridiculed by Science can be found at: amasci.com, megafoundation.org and Crackpots Who Were Right. Here are just a few:

Notes:

Nobel Prize Winning Discoveries that were First Ridiculed as "Pseudoscience".

  • Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar: Black Holes

    From amasci.com:

    Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (black holes in 1930, squashed by Eddington)
    Chandra originated Black Hole theory and published several papers. He was attacked viciously by his close colleague Sir Arthur Eddington, and his theory was discredited in the eyes of the research community. They were wrong, and Eddington apparently took such strong action based on an incorrect pet theory of his own. In the end Chandra could not even pursue a career in England, and he moved his research to the U. of Chicago in 1937, laboring in relative obscurity for decades. Others rediscovered Black Hole theory thirty years later. He won the 1983 Nobel Prize in physics, major recognition only fifty years. Never underestimate the authority-following tendency of the physics community, or the power of ridicule when used by people of stature such as Eddington.

  • Binning, Roher, Gimzewski: Scanning-Tunneling Microscope

    From amasci.com:

    Binning/Roher/Gimzewski (scanning-tunneling microscope)
    Invented in 1982, other surface scientists refused to believe that atom-scale resolution was possible, and demonstrations of the STM in 1985 were still met by hostility, shouts, and laughter from the specialists in the microscopy field. Its discoverers won the Nobel prize in 1986, which went far in forcing an unusually rapid change in the attitude of colleagues.

  • Barbara McClintlock: Mobile Genetic Elements

    From amasci.com:

    B. McClintlock (mobile genetic elements, "jumping genes", transposons)
    Won the Nobel in 1984 after enduring 32 years being ridiculed and ignored

  • Stanley Prusiner: Prions

    From amasci.com:

    Prusiner, Stanley (existence of prions, 1982)
    Prusiner endured derision from colleagues for his prion theory explaining Mad Cow Disease, but was vidicated by winning the Nobel.

  • Jacobus Henricus van't Hoff: Theory of 3D Molecules

    From amasci.com:

    Jacobus Henricus van't Hoff (theory of 3D molecules)
    As a relative newcomer and unknown, he was attacked and ridiculed for proposing that a 3D tetrahedral structure would explain many problems in chemistry. His foes rapidly went silent, and finally his ridiculous cardboard models won the first nobel prize in chemistry (1901.)

  • Peyton Rous: Viruses Transmit Cancer
    (Francis) Peyton Rous ForMemRS[1] (October 5, 1879 – February 16, 1970) born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1879 and received his B.A. and M.D. from Johns Hopkins University.[2] He was involved in the discovery of the role of viruses in the transmission of certain types of cancer. In 1966 he was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work.

    ...

    As a pathologist he made his seminal observation, that a malignant tumor (specifically, a sarcoma) growing on a domestic chicken could be transferred to another fowl simply by exposing the healthy bird to a cell-free filtrate, in 1911.[3][4] This finding, that cancer could be transmitted by a virus (now known as the Rous sarcoma virus, a retrovirus), was widely discredited by most of the field's experts at that time. Since he was a relative newcomer, it was several years before anyone even tried to replicate his prescient results. Although clearly some influential researchers were impressed enough to nominate him to the Nobel Committee as early as 1926 (and in many subsequent years, until he finally received the award, 40 years later—this may be a record for the time between a discovery and a Nobel Prize).

  • Dan Shechtman: Quasicrystals
    Dan Shechtman (born January 24, 1941 in Tel Aviv) is the Philip Tobias Professor of Materials Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, an Associate of the US Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory, and Professor of Materials Science at Iowa State University. On April 8, 1982, while on sabbatical at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., Shechtman discovered the icosahedral phase, which opened the new field of quasiperiodic crystals. He was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "the discovery of quasicrystals". Shechtman is the fourth Israeli to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in under a decade.

    ...

    From the day Shechtman published his findings on quasicrystals in 1984 to the day Linus Pauling died (1994), Shechtman experienced hostility from him toward the non-periodic interpretation. "For a long time it was me against the world," he said. "I was a subject of ridicule and lectures about the basics of crystallography. The leader of the opposition to my findings was the two-time Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, the idol of the American Chemical Society and one of the most famous scientists in the world. For years, 'til his last day, he fought against quasi-periodicity in crystals. He was wrong, and after a while, I enjoyed every moment of this scientific battle, knowing that he was wrong."

    Linus Pauling is noted saying "There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists." Pauling was apparently unaware of a paper in 1981 by H. Kleinert and K. Maki which had pointed out the possibility of a non-periodic Icosahedral Phase in quasicrystals (see the historical notes). The head of Shechtman's research group told him to "go back and read the textbook" and a couple of days later "asked him to leave for 'bringing disgrace' on the team." Shechtman felt rejected. On publication of his paper, other scientists began to confirm and accept empirical findings of the existence of quasicrystals.

  • Hans Krebs: The Krebs Cycle, Metabolic Energy Production
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Adolf_Krebs
    Sir Hans Adolf Krebs (25 August 1900 – 22 November 1981) was a German-born British physician and biochemist. Krebs is best known for his identification of two important metabolic cycles: the urea cycle and the citric acid cycle. The latter, the key sequence of metabolic chemical reactions that produces energy in cells, is also known as the Krebs cycle and earned him a Nobel Prize in 1953, which he shared with Fritz Lipmann.
    Krebs, Hans (ATP energy, Krebs cycle, his work was both ignored and ridiculed for the first ten years)

  • Svante Arrhenius: The Properties of Electrolytes are Caused by Charged Atoms

    From megafoundation.org:

    Svante Arrhenius - Ion Chemistry
    His idea that electrolytes are full of charged atoms was considered crazy. The atomic theory was new at the time, and everyone "knew" that atoms were indivisible (and hence they could not "lose" or "gain" any electric charge.) Because of his heretical idea, he only received his university degree by a very narrow margin. The value of Arrhenius' work was not well understood because the idea of a connection between electricity and chemical affinity, once advocated by Berzelius, had vanished from the general consciousness of scientists in his university at Uppsalla but attention from a couple of established scientists in Stockholm helped him to get recognition for his work. Arrhenius was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1903.

  • Hannes Alfvén: Magnetohydrodynamics
    Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén (30 May 1908 – 2 April 1995) was a Swedish electrical engineer, plasma physicist and winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on magnetohydrodynamics (MHD).

    ...

    Alfvén's work was disputed for many years by the senior scientist in space physics, the British mathematician and geophysicist Sydney Chapman. Alfvén's disagreements with Chapman stemmed in large part from trouble with the peer review system. Alfvén rarely benefited from the acceptance generally afforded senior scientists in scientific journals. He once submitted a paper on the theory of magnetic storms and auroras to the American journal Terrestrial Magnetism and Atmospheric Electricity only to have his paper rejected on the ground that it did not agree with the theoretical calculations of conventional physics of the time. He was regarded as a person with unorthodox opinions in the field by many physicists, R. H. Stuewer noting that "... he remained an embittered outsider, winning little respect from other scientists even after he received the Nobel Prize..." and was often forced to publish his papers in obscure journals. Alfvén recalled:

    When I describe the [plasma phenomena] according to this formulism most referees do not understand what I say and turn down my papers. With the referee system which rules US science today, this means that my papers are rarely accepted by the leading US journals.

  • F. Sherwood Rowland, Mario Molina, and Paul Crutzen: Choloroflurocarbons Destroying the Ozone Layer

    From megafoundation.org:

    They were ridiculed for their work for years before being vindicated by the discovery of a massive hole in the ozone layer over Antarctic. Rowland, along with Mario Molina and Paul Crutzen, won a Nobel Prize in 1995 for their work.

Copyright © 2013 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Monday, April 15, 2013

Proof of ESP: 1871 - 1997. Beating the Odds at Ten Million Billion Billion to One.


This post reviews the history of ESP research from 1871 to 1997. It is based on information in The Conscious Universe by Dean Radin unless otherwise noted. (Many prominent pseudoskeptics, including Richard Wiseman, Chris French, Ray Hyman, Donald Hebb, and George Price, admit evidence for ESP meets the scientific standard of proof but they refuse to believe ESP is real because ... they don't want to.)

Clairvoyance

  • In 1889, Charles Richet, winner of the Nobel prize in physiology and medicine, conducted experiments where hypnotized subjects were able to identify the contents of sealed envelopes with the odds against chance explaining the result of 25,000 to 1 (Reference: Entangled Minds by Dean Radin).

Telepathy

  • In 1927 George Estabrooks at Harvard University conducted tests of telepathy between students in adjoining rooms. He obtained positive results that were highly significant. The odds against these results occurring by chance was greater than a million to one.

  • 1930: Mental Radio was published. In this book, Upton Sinclair described his wife's ability to duplicate a sketch that someone else had drawn without her having to see it. After the book was published, Dr. Walter Franklyn Prince did an independent analysis of the data and concluded the results could not be explained by chance or by any other natural means.

  • 1920s - 1965: Professor Joseph Banks Rhine and colleagues at Duke University conducted ESP tests using a deck of 25 cards with one of five possible symbols on each card. They found that subjects were able to guess the symbol on a card more frequently than could be explained by chance. One study of all similar card tests from various experimenters from 1882 to 1939 found the odds against chance were more than a billion trillion to one.

  • 1966 - 1972: Montague Ullman and Stanley Krippner conducted dream telepathy experiments at Maimonides Medical Center. In these experiments, one person looked at a picture while another person was dreaming. The dreamer was then awakened and described her dreams. The descriptions were judged and it was found that the picture was included in the dreams often enough so that the odds against chance explaining the results were 75 million to one.

  • Mid 1970s: Charles Honorton began the Ganzfeld experiments. In these experiments a subject was put into a relaxed state for a period of time while listening to white noise with translucent plastic covering her eyes to help reduce mental "noise". While this was happening, a second person looked at a picture. Afterward, the subject was shown four different pictures, one of which was the picture the second person had looked at. The subject was able to identify which picture had been looked at a frequency greater than could be explained by chance. When the results of several experiments were combined they obtained odds of ten billion to one against chance.

Remote Viewing

Remote viewing is a type of experiment where a subject attempts to mentally view a remote location.

  • 1973 - 1988: Edwin May reviewed all remote viewing experiments conducted at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). The experiments were successful overall, with combined odds against chance of more than a billion billion to one.

  • 1989 - 1993: Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) obtained positive results that could not be explained by chance.

  • 1978 - 1987: Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) remote viewing experiments produced positive results with odds against chance of 100 billion to one.

Precognition

  • 1989: Charles Honorton and Diane Ferrari analyzed all "forced-choice" precognition experiments conducted by sixty two different investigators that were conducted from 1935 to 1987. In a these experiments, a test subject tried to predict which of a fixed number of objects would be selected at a later time. For these experiments, Honorton and Ferrari calculated odds against getting the same results by chance was 1025 or ten million billion billion to one.

  • Early 1980s: Holger Klintman conducted experiments where he showed a subject a color patch and asked the subject to name the color. Then the subject was shown a word for a color and asked to read the word. Klintman found that when the patch and the word were the same color, the reaction time for saying the color of the patch was faster even though the word for the color had not yet been displayed. He calculated the odds against chance for these results were 500,000 to 1.

  • Before the publication of The Conscious Universe was published in 1997, Dean Radin explored a similar phenomenon by measuring the skin conductivity of a person (which is an indicator of sweat gland activity) as a series of images were shown. Sweat gland activity always increased just before an image was shown to the subject as the subject was waiting to see the next image. However, Radin found that if the image was one that would produce an emotional reaction, sweat gland activity increased more than for other images. He called this phenomenon "presentiment". Professor Dick Bierman reported replicating this phenomenon in 1996.

Psychokinesis

  • William Crookes tested the psychic Daniel Dunglas Home in 1871 and proved telekinesis is real. Crookes tested Home under laboratory conditions that prevented fraud. Crookes described these experiments in his book: Researches into the Phenomena of Modern Spiritualism.

  • 1935: J. B. Rhine, Lousia Rhine, and colleagues at Duke University began experiments to see if mental intention could influence dice rolling. In 1989 Dianne Ferrari and Dean Radin analyzed the combined results of fifty two investigators from 1935 to 1987. They found mental intention could influence dice rolling, and they calculated the odds against obtaining the result by chance was more than a billion to one.

  • 1959 - 1987: In 1987 Roger Nelson and Dean Radin combined the results of experiments in which a test subject tried to alter the results of a random number generator. They considered 832 studies (597 of which were conducted at PEAR) and found a positive result. They calculated the odds against obtaining this result by chance were more than a trillion to one.

Psychic Healing

In The End of Materialism Dr. Charles Tart writes:

For many years, when talking about parapsychological findings, I referred to the "big four," the four psi phenomena for which there was so much accumulated evidence that we could take them as the foundational findings of the field: three forms of ESP (telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition), plus PK. Each had hundreds of well-controlled experiments supporting its existence. In the last two decades, though, enough positive studies of psychic healing have been published (see www. stephanaschwartz.com for an extensive, current bibliography, with abstracts) that I now speak of the "big five."
The bibliography Dr. Tart mentions is Therapeutic Intent/Healing Bibliography of Research Compiled by Larry Dossey, M.D., and Stephan A. Schwartz

Copyright © 2013, 2015 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Friday, April 12, 2013

Materialism Cannot Explain the Origin of the Genetic Code. Intelligent Design is a More Reasonable Explanation.


Materialism cannot explain the origin of the genetic code. The probability that the necessary chemical reactions could occur through the unguided working of physical laws is too low. No one who has investigated the problem believes there is a satisfactory explanation of how life or the genetic code could arise through natural means.1

For the genetic code to work, there has to be a semiotic2 system to use DNA or RNA to represent the sequence of amino acids in each protein and there has to be a cybernetic3 system to produce the machinery that uses the genetic code to produce proteins. This requires:

  • The development of the code whereby each possible triplet of nucleotides represents an amino acid.
  • The determination of the sequence of amino acids for each protein that is to be produced.
  • The creation of the specific genes (molecules of DNA or maybe RNA) that use the triplet code to specify the proteins.6
  • The many tRNAs, one for each triplet, and the amino acids and enzymes that combine amino acids and tRNA.
  • Ribosomes.

All of this has to come into existence at the same time because:4

  • The parts are not useful individually.
  • But paradoxically, according to materialism these parts are the information and machinery that is needed to produce itself.
  • Furthermore, the genetic code is finely tuned5 to reduce the effects of point mutations and there is no explanation as to how the genetic code could evolve from something simpler, something less finely tuned. Any change in the genetic code would be catastrophic because it would effect every gene. It would be like changing every letter "n" to the letter "p" in an entire book. It would create so many "misspellings" for an organism that it is impossible that it could survive.
  • Evolving from a double code to a triplet code would require simultaneous changes in every codon in every gene and in all the tRNAs and the mechanism that moves the mRNA with respect to the ribosome during protein synthesis.7
  • All these parts have to be produced in the correct numbers and arranged in a configuration where they will work together.
These factors all contribute to the impossibly low probability of the genetic code arising through the unguided action of natural forces, chance, self assembly, and/or evolution.1

However, we know there is a phenomenon that can create semiotic and cybernetic systems that would otherwise have no chance of arising through natural processes. This phenomenon is intelligence. Therefore it is reasonable to suppose that the genetic code was created by an intelligence. This is not a "god of the gaps" argument. It is the same mode of logic, "like phenomena have like causes"8, whereby the measurement of gravity on earth leads to the conclusion that gravity causes the planets to orbit the sun. It is the same mode of logic used by many early naturalists, such as geologist Charles Lyell, to explain phenomena that occurred in the remote past by identifying causes known to be effective in the present time. Additionally, you don't need evidence of who the intelligence was to make this supposition. If a NASA space craft found machinery on Mars, we would not think that the machinery arose naturally just because there were no Martians around who could have made it. The existence of machinery that could not arise naturally is sufficient to conclude the existence of an intelligent maker.

However, the belief that naturalism can explain something that current science says is impossible is a "god of the gaps" argument. Our current understanding of chemistry and the conditions on the early earth says there is no good natural explanation for the origin of life and the genetic code.1 To disregard science and maintain faith in naturalism is a "god of the gaps" argument. To paraphrase the Nobel prize winning neurophysiologist Sir John Eccles: Promissory materialism is superstition.9

Sources

Notes

Copyright © 2013, 2014 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Sunday, April 7, 2013

Sir John Eccles, Nobel Prize Winning Neurophysiologist: The Brain Does Not Produce Consciousness


I have updated my web page on Eminent Researchers to include Nobel prize winning neurophysiologist Sir John Eccles. Eccles is the tenth Nobel prize winning scientists I have added to that page who believed in the soul or in some paranormal phenomenon based on their own research, experiences, or studies. The other Nobel prize winning scientists are:

  • Max Planck
  • Wolfgang Pauli
  • Erwin Schrödinger
  • Brian D. Josephson
  • Charles Robert Richet
  • John William Strutt
  • Marie Curie
  • Pierre Curie
  • Eugene Wigner

Other eminent researches discussed on the same web page who held such beliefs include:

  • Charles Darwin
  • Alan Turing
  • Wernher von Braun
  • David Bohm
  • Karl Popper
  • Sir Robert Boyle

You can learn more about these scientists and their beliefs at the link above.

The section on Sir John Eccles is this:

Sir John Eccles

Sir John Eccles was a neurophysiologist who won the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1963 for his work on the synapse. He did not believe that the brain produces consciousness. In Evolution of the Brain: Creation of the Self (1989) he wrote:
I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition ... we have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Carew_Eccles

Copyright © 2013 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Astronauts Say UFO's are Real


This excerpt from The Enduring Enigma of the UFO by Dean Radin quotes astronauts saying UFOs are real:

Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell repeatedly has said that high-ranking military officers have privately admitted that for many decades factions of the U.S. government have been aware that UFOs and alien technology are real. Many other astronauts have provided corroborating statements. Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter photographed a UFO while in orbit on May 24, 1962, later saying, “At no time when the astronauts were in space were they alone. There was a constant surveillance by UFOs.” In 1985, Mercury and Gemini astronaut Gordon Cooper, in an address to the United Nations, said: “I believe that these extraterrestrial vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets . . . For many years, I have lived with a secret, in a secrecy imposed on all specialists and astronauts. I can now reveal that every day, in the United States, our radar instruments capture objects of form and composition unknown to us. And there are thousands of witness reports and a quantity of documents to prove this, but nobody wants to make them public.” Such statements are not limited to U.S. astronauts. In 1979, Russian cosmonaut Victor Afanasyev commented on a UFO he saw while en route to the Solyut 6 space station: “It followed us during half of our orbit . . . It was an engineered structure, made from some type of metal, approximately 40 meters long with inner hulls.” —DR
Astronaut Deke Slaton described an encounter with a UFO while he was flying a military plane.
As I closed on this thing, it looked like a weather balloon and that's what I presumed it was. I had plenty of gas and time so I decided I'd just come back around and make make a pass on it. I got around where I should have been coming back on this thing all of a sudden it didn't look like a balloon anymore. It looked like a saucer sitting on edge about a 45 degree angle. I didn't have any gun camera film on board unfortunately or I'd a shot some pictures of it. About that time I guess, whatever it was, for whatever reason, it took off climbing at about a 45 degree angle and and just accelerated and disappeared. I obviously couldn't follow it with an old piston engine fighter so I turned around went home.

Copyright © 2013, 2017 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.