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try Audible free for 30 days. Hello.

1:00

Hello. And welcome to Philosophy for

1:02

Our Times, bringing you the world's leading

1:05

thinkers on today's biggest ideas. My name's

1:07

Mia, and I'm an assistant producer at the Institute of Art and

1:09

Ideas. And my name's Charlie, and I'm a senior producer here at

1:11

the IAI. So today

1:13

we've got On the Edges of Knowledge,

1:15

featuring radical scientist Rupert Sheldrake and world-leading

1:18

skeptic Michael Shermer. This took

1:20

place in 2023 at the Howard School of Philosophy. And

1:23

we're going to be talking about the importance of

1:25

the knowledge of the mind. This took place in

1:28

2023 at the How the Light Gets In Festival

1:30

in Hay, the philosophy festival produced by the team

1:32

here at the IAI. So Charlie,

1:34

tell us a bit more about this debate. So

1:36

this debate explores how we access

1:38

claims to scientific knowledge and how

1:40

we assess those claims as well.

1:42

And it's between pretty much two

1:44

of the leading people on opposite

1:46

sides of the spectrum scientifically. On

1:48

the one hand, you have Michael

1:50

Shermer, who's an avowed atheist and

1:52

skeptic. On the other side,

1:55

you have Rupert Sheldrake, who's famous

1:57

for criticizing that very mindset of

1:59

being too. Get to go

2:01

about planes and for believing that

2:03

the scientific worldview polls the potential

2:05

to accessible friends come and get

2:08

have had my method on that.

2:10

There was an incredibly good had

2:13

to have moments not only over

2:15

the question of whether science cannot

2:17

treat in principle, but also over

2:20

some of the i'm sure photo

2:22

things that skeptics it unfairly heading

2:24

towards a specific. Actually, towards the

2:27

second time today they were debating

2:29

the issue. Of censorship comfort you

2:32

don't need. Rupert Sheldrake is made

2:34

some scientific claims about the

2:36

existence of ghosts and other

2:38

spiritual entities that Michael Shermer rejection.

2:40

Rupert Sheldrake is believed that

2:42

he's been unfairly pushed out

2:44

of the scientific mainstream soap. This

2:47

was something that was hotly contested

2:49

on the panel, and the

2:51

audience obviously have a lot

2:53

to the project. And ethics

2:55

or something. Very important thing that before we

2:57

got into this remember if you enjoyed say

2:59

that I target the like and describe on

3:02

your back from a choice and the the

3:04

i don't teeny for hundred per cast videos

3:06

and articles from the world's leading thinkers. Now

3:08

let's hand over to our host for this

3:10

debate. Good esto. Hi.

3:17

Honey I. Am.

3:21

It's a pleasure to be here. Thank

3:23

everybody for joining us I'm We have

3:25

a short session here so I'm not

3:27

going he hike up and. Beauty.

3:32

To set the scene for what we would like

3:34

to hear these t in assists Gentlemen. I

3:39

am. What I would like

3:41

to say is that we

3:43

will be discussing on the

3:45

edges of knowledge. So. The

3:47

question is what is it possible

3:49

to know Is the physical universe?

3:51

All areas. Or. Is the

3:54

immaterial part of reality? t. So

3:57

we have of he he joined by radical

3:59

found his movies. Sheldrake and world leading

4:01

skeptic Michael Schirmer, and they're

4:03

going to go head to head on the

4:05

subject of where the edges of knowledge lie. That's

4:09

what we're here to do. I

4:11

personally love the idea of you two just having

4:13

a full on conversation and we just get to

4:16

spectate this. But I've been

4:18

asked to get the conversation going with a particular

4:20

question, and each of you will get three minutes

4:22

to sort of set up your store, and then

4:24

we'll just go from there. How does that sound?

4:26

Great. All right, so this is a question.

4:30

What are the limits of human

4:32

understanding? Rupert, I

4:35

think you said that Michael may go first. Yes. How

4:38

gentlemanly of you. Michael, you're up.

4:40

Three minutes. No pressure. All

4:44

right, well, what are the limits of human knowledge? How would

4:46

I know? If I knew I

4:48

would change my beliefs or whatever, we're stuck

4:50

in the 21st century and we know what

4:52

we know. So I

4:54

begin with the Copernican principle that we're not

4:56

special, and I apply it to myself. I'm

4:58

not special, and so I'm

5:01

not God, omniscient

5:03

and omnipotent. You're not God either, so

5:05

we're in this together, or if you

5:07

prefer the secular version. There is

5:10

an objective reality, but I don't know

5:12

what it is and you don't either. So

5:14

we have to kind of collectively go through what

5:16

we know and try to evaluate what we

5:19

should believe. And I don't

5:21

wanna believe things that have to be believed in

5:23

to be true. That

5:25

is, reality is that which, when you stop

5:27

believing in it, doesn't go away, as Philip

5:29

K. Dick said. So that's our goal, and

5:32

how do you get there? Well, through

5:34

the tools of rationality and science. Reason

5:37

and arguments, logic, and empiricism. You actually go out

5:40

there and look out the window and see what

5:42

the world is actually like and see if it

5:44

matches your ideas, which may or may not be

5:46

right, and to the best that

5:48

you can collect data from out there to

5:51

see if it matches your ideas of what you think

5:53

it should be like, and then try

5:55

to hone those. So I

5:58

guess it depends on the particular topic of how.

6:00

confident we could be in the current

6:02

theories. The theory of

6:04

evolution is over 150 years old now, and it's pretty

6:08

well established. But if we

6:10

take a kind of a Bayesian approach by

6:12

assigning some probability of something being true, true

6:15

with a small t or not, somewhere between 1 and

6:17

99, so the Cromwell principle

6:22

in Bayesian reasoning, Oliver Cromwell, I

6:24

beseech you in the bowels of Christ, you might

6:26

be mistaken. He was talking about some

6:29

political issue. But in Bayesian reasoning, this is you

6:31

never apply a 0 or a 100

6:34

to anything, because you never know. You

6:36

may be wrong on this end, you may be wrong on this end.

6:39

So the theory of evolution, it's like 99% probably true with

6:43

fine tuning of you're a neo-Darwinian

6:45

or punctuated equilibrium, or some little

6:48

aspect of it. But

6:50

it's not like the creationists are suddenly going to

6:52

find something new, because they've been looking for a

6:54

century and a half, and they haven't been able

6:56

to overturn the theory. So it's

6:59

possible that Darwin was wrong, probably

7:02

not. And so we don't assign 100%

7:04

to it. We always have

7:06

an open mind just in case. And

7:09

the Big Bang theory, it's probably true.

7:11

Here's a whole pile of evidence for

7:14

it. Now it's possible. It could be

7:16

wrong, and this could be overturned. Probably

7:19

not overnight, probably not one experiment's going

7:21

to overturn it. It would have

7:23

to be a convergence of evidence to

7:25

some other theory that explains everything, the

7:27

Big Bang theory explains, and these other

7:29

anomalies. One of the problems we

7:32

face in all theories is what's called the

7:34

residue of anomalies. No theory explains everything, so you

7:36

always have this residue of stuff that's not

7:38

explained. And you have, so I

7:40

use this example for UFOs, UAPs. You've

7:42

seen these grainy videos and

7:45

blurry photographs, what is that? And

7:47

the pro-eophologists say, well, we acknowledge

7:50

95% of all those

7:52

sightings are fully explicable by terrestrial

7:54

phenomenon, geese and drones and Chinese

7:56

spy balloons. So here we have

7:59

this huge. bin of 95% and

8:01

then you have the other little

8:03

bin. It's aliens or it's the

8:05

Russian-Chinese drones or whatever. So

8:07

you have a new sighting. Which bin do you put

8:09

it in? Well it's 95% likely

8:12

to be in this big bin. So and

8:14

it's you know two and a half percent for each of the

8:16

two little bins. It might be there. Keep an open mind just

8:18

in case this is the one. Probably

8:20

not right. So you know as we as

8:22

the saying goes if you hear a foot

8:24

hoof prints outside think horse not

8:27

zebra or I guess here in Wales think

8:29

sheep. Not

8:31

zebra. I've seen a lot of sheep here. So

8:37

that's the approach you know just you know

8:39

just assign some probability to it. I keep

8:41

an open mind with Rupert's ideas. He might

8:43

be right but we'll see. Okay

8:46

well oh

8:48

there you go. Rupert

8:52

can you can you tell us what your

8:54

thoughts are on the limits of human understanding?

8:58

I think there are certain intrinsic limits to

9:00

understanding. There are certain things our minds may

9:02

never be able to grasp. I mean after

9:05

all we live in a cosmo 15 billion

9:07

years old with an incredible number

9:09

of galaxies and so on. It's it'd

9:12

be very strange if human minds in

9:14

the 21st century could grasp all of

9:16

it. But

9:18

I agree with Michael that one

9:20

of the best methods we have is

9:22

science, reason, discussion, evidence.

9:26

We don't disagree about that. Where

9:28

we disagree is where we think the

9:30

limits of science are or should be.

9:33

I think that there are many

9:35

things that we can investigate scientifically

9:37

which are present to boo within

9:41

the academic and scientific world.

9:44

And those to boos are maintained

9:46

by organized groups of skeptics and Michaels

9:49

as it were one of the

9:51

archbishops of the skeptic movement. And

9:56

so and many

9:58

skeptics patrol the frontiers

10:01

of knowledge and there are vigilante

10:03

skeptic squads set up all around

10:05

the world and Michael's

10:07

trained many of them. He used to He

10:12

used to give workshops with the late magician

10:14

James Randi on how to be a skeptic

10:16

and I know that

10:18

they're very effective because their slogan

10:20

was next time a charlatan shows up in

10:22

town Be the skeptic who the

10:25

media ask you know their opinion of and

10:27

how can you be an expert on this?

10:29

Just say you are anyway.

10:31

I know that because when I show up

10:33

in town all these trained skeptics Feel

10:36

that they ought to cancel me Because

10:38

I'm doing research that goes beyond the boundaries

10:41

of what they think science should be So

10:44

this is an issue that's not just an academic

10:46

issue. It comes into it

10:48

feeds into cancel culture I had

10:50

a TED talk that was a

10:52

TEDx talk that was censored because

10:55

it ran foul of some pretty

10:59

dogmatic scientists So

11:03

I think that there are realms that we can

11:05

investigate Which are at present

11:08

almost impossible to study or get funded

11:10

within the university or academic or scientific

11:12

system I? Call them

11:14

the mysteries of everyday life Some

11:18

favorite skeptics slogan is extraordinary

11:20

claims demand extraordinary evidence, but

11:23

I'm dealing with ordinary claims 95%

11:26

of people say they've had the

11:28

experience of being looked at from behind

11:30

Turning around and seeing someone looking at

11:32

them the sense of being stared at

11:35

About 85% of people

11:37

say they've had the experience of what

11:39

seems like telephone telepathy thinking of someone

11:42

who then calls About

11:44

50% of dog owners say their

11:46

dog knows when an owner's when

11:48

a person a member of the family is coming home

11:51

Now these are ordinary claims They're

11:54

made by millions of people and lots

11:56

of people say they happen on a

11:58

regular basis. They're not weird strange

12:00

things like miracles that happened 2,000 years ago, they're

12:04

ordinary claims. So

12:06

can we look at them scientifically? For

12:08

example, when people think someone's

12:10

looking at them behind, is it because

12:13

people turn around all the time and

12:15

occasionally someone's looking at them and they

12:17

think, aha, there's some mysterious sense? Or

12:20

is it more than that? So

12:22

you do controlled experiments with

12:24

randomized trials in

12:27

which people are looked at or not looked at, and

12:29

they have to say whether they're looked at or not, and

12:32

they're right or they're wrong. And

12:35

is it above chance? And the answer is,

12:37

in many experiments, there have been many published

12:39

papers, yes, it is. It

12:42

even seems to work through closed-circuit television.

12:45

People who work in

12:47

the surveillance industry are completely convinced this

12:49

is real. We've interviewed lots of private

12:52

detectives, security officers, surveillance

12:54

officers, the drug squad at

12:56

Heathrow, the store detectives at

12:58

Harrods, places of people like

13:00

that whose job it is to watch others. And

13:03

in that world, there's almost no doubt this

13:05

is real because they see it all the

13:07

time. Yet, moving

13:09

to the world of academic science

13:11

and the world, the citadel that's

13:14

defended by the skeptic

13:17

movement patrolling the frontiers, and

13:20

this is just pseudoscience, doesn't exist.

13:23

Telephone telepathy, is it just coincidence? Do

13:25

people think of others all the time?

13:27

Occasionally, someone rings when they're thinking of

13:29

them, they imagine it's telepathy, but they

13:32

forget all the millions of times they're

13:34

wrong. Well, we do tests

13:37

for potential callers. The person's filmed

13:39

the whole time, landline phone, a

13:42

no-caller ID. We pick the

13:44

caller at random, ask them to ring

13:46

the person, their friend, and

13:49

when the phone rings, they have to guess which of

13:51

these four people it is before they answer the phone.

13:54

By chance, they'd be right 25% of the time in

13:57

our film trials, they're right about 45%. of

14:00

the time, hundreds of trials is very

14:02

significant. Dogs that know when their

14:04

ends are coming home, we film the dog,

14:07

we have people come home at non-routine

14:09

times, they don't know in advance, traveling

14:11

by unfamiliar vehicles, does the dog still

14:13

go and wait at the door 10

14:16

minutes or more before the person comes

14:18

home? Yes, at least with the

14:21

dogs we've studied. So I

14:23

think the evidence is quite strong these things are

14:25

real, but if you try and

14:27

do a PhD on these things at a

14:29

university, except for two or three exceptions, most

14:32

of them here in Britain actually, you

14:36

can't because these are completely taboo

14:38

topics and these taboos

14:40

are maintained in force by active

14:43

skeptics. So Michael's

14:45

a very nice chap, he's friendly,

14:48

he's funny, but where

14:50

he and I- I

14:52

knew that was coming. Where he

14:54

and I differ, you see, is that I

14:57

think these- to investigating things

14:59

we don't understand, that we

15:01

don't have necessarily a theoretical

15:03

explanation for, is the

15:05

very essence of science to explore what we don't

15:07

know. Whereas some people- well,

15:11

he says he's open-minded, let's say he

15:13

is, but some of his

15:15

colleagues are very definitely not open-minded, and

15:18

they just want to shut this down and

15:20

stop what little

15:22

investigation there is on these subjects, because

15:25

it doesn't fit their model of reality,

15:27

which is usually the model of mechanistic

15:29

materialism that says the mind is nothing

15:31

but the brain, and therefore all your

15:33

thoughts and intentions are inside the head,

15:35

so how could they possibly affect someone's

15:38

distance? These things are impossible,

15:40

therefore the evidence for them is not

15:42

worth taking seriously or even looking at.

15:45

Now, just to finish by saying that

15:47

that's not just a vague accusation,

15:52

Stephen Pinker in his book Rationality,

15:55

where he argues for a rational and scientific

15:57

approach, says that No

16:00

need to look at the evidence for

16:02

psychic phenomena. There's a so improbable, on

16:04

Bayesian statistics grounds, so incredibly improbable, it's

16:06

a waste of time looking at the

16:08

evidence. James Alcock, a leading

16:11

member of the committee for

16:13

skeptical inquiry, which is one

16:15

of the other skeptic organizations. Michael

16:18

runs the Skeptic magazine. They run

16:20

the Skeptical Inquirer. Ours

16:23

is a good one. Well,

16:25

I subscribe to the Skeptical Inquirer, actually.

16:30

I will make you an honorary member of

16:33

the Skeptic magazine. Well,

16:35

James Alcock, who's one of their most

16:37

informed luminaries, a professor of psychology, wrote

16:39

a paper in the American Psychologist two

16:41

years ago saying, exactly

16:46

arguing that, that there's no need to

16:48

look at the evidence, because these phenomena

16:50

are simply impossible. Therefore, it's a waste

16:52

of time investigating them or looking at

16:54

the evidence. Now, that, in

16:56

my opinion, is dogmatism, which holds

16:58

back science. OK. First

17:06

of all, let's debunk the notion that these

17:09

subjects are taboo and you're not allowed to

17:11

talk about them. Here we are

17:13

in a packed house talking about these ideas.

17:15

You're one of the most famous public intellectuals

17:17

in the world. You have numerous best-selling books.

17:19

I see you on TV all the time

17:21

talking about that. Who is censoring you? Nobody.

17:25

So that's not what you mean. You mean mainstream

17:28

scientists that you're trying to convince

17:30

are not convinced of your evidence.

17:32

That's the real argument

17:35

I think you're making. Why is

17:37

it that the Stephen Pinkers, myself or

17:39

whoever, don't accept them? Now,

17:41

acknowledging that some skeptics are, as you

17:43

describe. But

17:46

there's often a good reason for

17:48

that, because the evidence is not

17:50

cumulative enough, converged to a particular

17:52

hypothesis that overturns the mainstream theory

17:54

and nudges us to

17:57

accept that. It's just not there.

18:00

Again, it's not that these things are taboo and

18:02

no one is doing this research. As you know,

18:05

by the way, Rupert and I have a book called

18:07

Arguing Science. You can order it on Amazon, in which

18:09

we go back and forth, back and forth, back and

18:11

forth on all these. And

18:14

most of the hypotheses he just described, staring at

18:16

the back of the neck, the dog knows when

18:18

the owner's coming home and

18:20

so on, have been tested over and

18:22

over. They fail to replicate most of

18:25

the time, not all the time. There

18:27

may be an experimenter bias. The

18:30

most famous one here was the replication

18:32

by Marilyn Schlitz and Richard Wiseman. Richard

18:34

Wiseman is a skeptic. Marilyn Schlitz is

18:36

a believer. Okay, those terms are problematic,

18:39

but whatever. They're kind of in those

18:41

two different camps. And they each found

18:43

different results. So

18:45

okay, where's the bias? Is it on the part of

18:47

the skeptics to not accept the data? Is it on

18:49

part of the believers to accept data that's not sound?

18:52

Well, you just have to read the evidence.

18:55

So like, well, here I have

18:57

these replicated experiments. Well,

19:00

sort of. But

19:02

half of all psych experiments have

19:04

failed to replicate. Since

19:07

the replication crisis began in 2008, not

19:10

just your research, but half of

19:12

all the most famous psych experiments

19:14

you've ever heard of should have

19:16

probably never been published. They

19:18

were based on one experiment, in

19:20

which all we know is the

19:22

one that was published. The experimenter

19:24

ran nine different experiments. Eight

19:27

of them found non-statistically significant results. They published

19:29

the one, the rest go on the file

19:31

drawers, called the file drawer problem. And so

19:33

this is very common, not just in

19:36

psychical research, but all research, right?

19:38

So acknowledging that, Pinker is skeptical

19:40

of half of these psych

19:43

experiments. You're standing at the top of the

19:45

escalator. You give more money than at the bottom of

19:47

the escalator. Or you have the power pose. You know, if

19:49

you put your shoulders back in your chin up and so

19:51

on, your testosterone goes up. This is what

19:53

women should do. They should have the power pose when they go.

19:55

Yeah. I

19:58

noticed that. It was working. I was intimidated. No. That

20:01

failed. This is one of the most famous

20:04

TED Talks. There's like 40 million views of

20:06

this power-posed TED Talk. It never replicated. So

20:08

now the pinkers of the world are skeptical

20:11

of all that, too, not just yours, because

20:13

of the failure to replicate. So

20:16

it's not enough to just have, I have

20:18

this one experiment in which I found the

20:20

statistically significant result. That's not enough. You have

20:23

to have it replicated over and over and

20:25

over until it's really obvious. And

20:27

almost everybody looking at it goes, yeah,

20:29

OK. That probably really happened. And

20:31

you get kind of a consensus. Again, not 100%, but

20:35

the majority. Like climate consensus. What does that

20:37

mean? It's not a boat. It's that most

20:39

of the scientists that study climate change agree.

20:42

It's probably human-caused. So on, it's happening.

20:44

That kind of thing. Well,

20:46

we agree that most papers in

20:48

psychology don't replicate. Most papers in

20:50

biomedical science don't replicate. Yeah, exactly.

20:52

But psychic researchers were accused of

20:54

this. So they've been subject to

20:56

much more scrutiny than any other

20:58

branch of science for much longer.

21:01

And in

21:04

psychical research, people publish

21:06

negative results and failed replications. In

21:08

most of science, they don't or

21:10

didn't until the replication crisis. And

21:13

it's simply not true that most of these

21:15

things don't replicate. The sense of being stared

21:17

at has been replicated many, many times. And

21:20

even skeptics who've tried doing the experiments.

21:22

Most skeptics don't do any experiments. But

21:24

there's a few who do. And

21:26

most of them got positive results when they tried this.

21:29

Susan Blackmore, leading British skeptic, had

21:34

a PhD student. They got

21:36

positive results. They were never published. And when I

21:38

was to see the raw data, they'd

21:40

been lost. Richard Wiseman, who

21:43

did staring experiments, got positive results first time

21:45

around when the students were doing the staring.

21:48

So he replaced them with himself as

21:50

the starrer. And then he got the

21:52

results he expected. No effect. In

21:55

his experiments with Marilyn Schlitz that

21:57

Michael referred to, they were

21:59

looking at people's through CCTV measuring

22:01

whether they could be, whether

22:04

their skin resistance, their emotional arousal changed

22:06

when they were being looked at at

22:08

random times through closed-circuit

22:10

television. She produced

22:13

positive effects. They changed when she was

22:16

looking at them. Richard Wiseman, when

22:18

he was looking, they didn't produce positive

22:20

effects. Now, it's not symmetrical.

22:22

She couldn't produce positive effects in this

22:25

just by wanting to, unless there was

22:27

a real sense of being stared at.

22:29

But he could produce non-significant effects by

22:31

not looking very hard. When

22:34

he was interviewed afterwards, he said it was such

22:36

a boring experiment. He just didn't

22:38

look very hard. So these

22:40

are not symmetrical. And

22:43

so if you go into this actual

22:45

literature, you'll find that the

22:47

idea it just doesn't replicate is not true.

22:50

And the sense

22:52

of being stared at has been

22:54

replicated, telephone left has been replicated

22:56

independently at Freiberg University

22:58

and Amsterdam University. There's a much

23:01

more persuasive body of literature than

23:03

Michael's summary would lead you to

23:05

believe. And the result of

23:07

this is that if you

23:10

listen to skeptics, say, oh, it's all

23:12

inconclusive, it's been replicated, all disputed, et

23:14

cetera, then what's the

23:16

point in going into the detailed literature? It

23:18

just seems like a waste of time, even

23:20

though there is all this evidence. But

23:23

the main reason, I think, for

23:26

the rejection

23:28

of dogmatism or prejudice against

23:30

these phenomena, by

23:33

prejudice I mean prejudging the

23:35

issue. The main reason is

23:37

the materialist theory of mind,

23:39

which is very much the

23:41

belief system of most card-carrying

23:43

skeptics I know are materialists.

23:45

For them, the mind is the brain and it's inside

23:48

the head and it shouldn't be able to do all

23:50

these other things. Therefore, the prejudice

23:52

is much greater. It's not just a

23:54

matter of evidence. The same materialists are

23:56

perfectly happy to accept the theory

23:58

of physicists. trillions of

24:00

universes beside our own, the multiverse

24:03

theory, without one shred of evidence.

24:05

Dark matter and dark energy,

24:07

95% of reality, physical

24:10

reality, just theories, no

24:12

evidence at all, except they

24:14

make the equations balanced. So you can

24:16

add in a fudge factor of just

24:18

as much as you like titrate in

24:20

as much dark energy to make the

24:22

equations of physics balanced to explain the

24:24

universe as it is. That

24:27

doesn't provoke anger or attacks

24:29

from most skeptics. Physicists

24:32

have a get out of jail free card, but

24:35

as soon as you come to anything that challenges

24:37

the central belief, the mind is nothing but the

24:39

brain, and therefore there's no

24:42

consciousness out there in the universe, there's

24:44

no God, there's nothing beyond

24:47

consciousness limited to human and animal

24:49

brains and possibly the brains of

24:52

extraterrestrials. When you challenge

24:54

that world view, that's where the problem kicks

24:56

in, and almost no amount of evidence is

24:58

going to be enough, because

25:01

we're dealing here with a

25:03

fixed belief system highly aided

25:05

by confirmation bias. Should I? Well,

25:07

I just wanted to say, for the

25:10

audience's sake, so I'm also a scientist,

25:12

I'm a researcher, I

25:15

work in the bench, and what's remarkable about

25:17

this conversation that we're seeing unfolding is, of

25:19

course, there's multiple subjects. The central

25:21

point is about what

25:24

is evidence, whose evidence

25:26

do you believe, and therefore what

25:29

constitutes actual knowledge. And

25:31

this is the type of conversation that happens

25:33

regardless of whether or not you're talking about

25:36

a particular phenomenon within a cell, or whether

25:38

we're talking about the kind of phenomena that

25:40

Rupert's discussing here. So I think

25:43

actually there's a really big subject

25:45

happening that we're touching upon here

25:48

about basically knowledge, and what is

25:52

knowledge, but the evidence provided

25:55

by different people, and who do you choose to

25:57

believe, right? Right, yep. Yep, that's the

25:59

hard part. So, you know,

26:01

again, it's a social community of people that

26:03

work in a field and,

26:06

you know, then there are people that are kind of on

26:08

the margins and then there are people that are way out

26:11

here. And, you know, Rupert and

26:13

I both get these alternative theories

26:15

of physics. There's hundreds of them. Like, you

26:17

know, you get them every week. And,

26:19

you know, what do you do with those? And

26:21

why don't they have a platform here? Well, which

26:24

ones? And so the

26:26

mainstream scientists, sort of by

26:28

necessity, have to think, well, they're probably in

26:30

the little bins that are not going to

26:33

like me to pan out. So we have

26:35

to kind of concentrate on the, you know,

26:37

the mainstream and just the few challenges from

26:39

maybe some, I don't

26:41

know, renegade scientists or whatever. They're here. I

26:43

mean, there's several people here that are challenging

26:46

the dark energy, dark matter of the Big

26:48

Bang and so on. I've heard them. And

26:50

they're not fringe. They're not tinfoil hat

26:52

wearing wackadoodles. They're like professors, like real

26:55

scholars. Okay. So, again,

26:57

where's the censorship? They are out

26:59

there. They are books about string

27:01

theory as just being complete bullshit.

27:03

So, and I get

27:05

them all the time. So where's the censorship? The

27:08

problem is that you want those kind

27:11

of anecdotal or fringe or challenging ideas

27:13

to become the mainstream. Why

27:16

aren't they? And I would argue you

27:19

just haven't made the case strong enough.

27:22

Because it is an extraordinary claim in a

27:24

sense saying that, you know,

27:27

400 years of physics

27:30

is wrong. Because

27:33

I ran this experiment in which somebody could detect

27:35

somebody staring at the back of their neck. Or

27:38

the BEM experiment of subjects looking at

27:41

computer screens trying to guess which side

27:43

the erotic image was going

27:45

to pop up versus the neutral image

27:47

left or right. And

27:51

BEM ran nine experiments. This one gets published,

27:53

53 percent, you know, 50-50, but 53

27:56

percent of the images that were erotic.

28:01

basically pornography, were

28:03

detected by college students more than the neutral

28:05

image, right? So when Bem goes on the

28:08

Colbert Report, he called this extrasensory

28:10

pornception, right? And that, you know,

28:12

so what's more likely, that 400

28:14

years of physics is wrong because

28:17

some social scientists showed porn pictures

28:19

to college students, or

28:22

he's just mistaken in there. There's some

28:24

error he made. He just screwed up

28:26

the methodological problems. So before you overthrow

28:29

the 400 years of physics, maybe

28:31

we should look at this one a little more

28:34

carefully and really make sure it replicates over and

28:36

over and over before you throw out the big

28:38

theory there. That's my response. Well,

28:41

that's a rhetorical argument I've heard many

28:43

times, Michael. Well,

28:45

thank you. Overhearing, overthrowing 400

28:48

years of physics. I mean, you know,

28:51

Susan Blackmore, for example, used this against

28:53

me in an article she wrote in

28:56

the Times Educational Supplement. What's more likely

28:58

that 400 years of physics,

29:00

the whole edifice of science, all modern

29:02

technology, mobile phones, TV, all of that

29:04

is wrong, all that held rates right.

29:06

You know, that is a false opposition.

29:08

Damn, I thought I came up with

29:10

that argument. That

29:13

was Susan's argument. The, nobody's saying 400

29:15

years of physics is wrong. I'm

29:20

certainly not saying that. What I'm saying

29:23

is that mechanistic materialism, the dominant orthodoxy

29:25

or paradigm of science for more than

29:27

100 years, is

29:29

that it's very weakest dealing with

29:32

consciousness and minds precisely because it

29:34

denies that consciousness is anything but

29:36

the activity of matter. And

29:39

its least successful areas are to

29:41

do with mind. And

29:43

the least understood things, really, that's why

29:46

consciousness studies is such an important field

29:48

in science now, the last

29:50

20 years or so, because we

29:53

understand, oddly enough, least

29:55

of all about the nature of our own

29:57

minds. And we don't even

29:59

know. the extent of our minds. And

30:03

so it's not as if physicists have

30:05

actually studied the nature of consciousness or

30:07

minds. They've studied quantum particles and galactic

30:10

movements and planetary

30:12

orbits and the behavior of electrons.

30:14

So the fact that physicists haven't

30:17

studied these subjects at all, it

30:19

means that physics is almost irrelevant

30:21

to this question. There may be

30:23

properties of minds that go

30:25

beyond anything that physicists study in quantum

30:28

particles, it's found, just as there are

30:30

properties of life that

30:32

go beyond what physicists would... But

30:35

Rupert, Roger Penrose is here. He's one of

30:37

the greatest scientists of all time. He wrote

30:40

a book about the hard problem

30:43

of consciousness being somehow explained by

30:45

these quantum fields inside the

30:47

microtubules of neurons and so on.

30:50

His whole theory that you,

30:52

I think, would be attracted

30:54

to, because he's challenging the mainstream and he's

30:56

a physicist. So what are you talking about? Well,

30:59

his theory of quantum non-locality,

31:01

he applies quantum theory to

31:03

consciousness, but he

31:06

confides it to microtubules, which

31:08

are small macromolecular structures inside

31:10

nerve cells. And I

31:12

think the mind is extended far beyond the

31:14

brain. I think my image of you is

31:17

located where you're sitting, not inside my head.

31:19

I don't think there's a little micol inside

31:21

my head. I think my image of you

31:23

is projected out to where you are. And

31:25

because it's projected out, if I were looking

31:27

at you from behind and

31:30

you didn't know I was there, it

31:32

might affect you because it's projected out.

31:34

And I did once say to Roger

31:36

Penrose, you believe that consciousness is extended,

31:39

but why stop at sort of 10

31:41

microns inside the microtubule? Why

31:43

not let it extend for hundreds of

31:45

yards or even miles when we're looking

31:47

at distant things? And he

31:49

hadn't really got an answer to that. He only said,

31:51

you've got to start somewhere. I mean,

31:55

nothing is good as an answer, is

31:57

any. But,

32:03

you know, if you look up, just look

32:05

under Wikipedia of hard problem of consciousness. There's

32:07

like two dozen theories, right? So you have

32:09

one, Roger Penrose has one, but they're not

32:12

the only ones. And none of

32:14

them have convinced the majority of neuroscientists and

32:16

so on that that's the right one. So

32:18

what do you do? Well, you just wait.

32:20

Let's just keep trying to figure it out. So

32:23

we don't have very long left in the debate,

32:25

unfortunately. But in these last five minutes, I actually

32:27

want to pick up exactly where you just left

32:30

that, which is all right. So, of

32:33

course, even academic science is a pursuit

32:35

of many different theories and some theories

32:37

are less likely. But there

32:39

are many things that we now hold to

32:41

be true. The classic one, of course, being

32:43

that we are in a solar system going

32:45

around the sun. That used to be a

32:48

fringe idea, right? That was very much to

32:50

the edge of academic acceptance. And

32:52

now it's just true. So here's my question.

32:54

And for the last sort of few minutes

32:57

of this debate, how is

32:59

it that ideas go from being

33:01

an idea to being tested to actually

33:04

becoming accepted? And

33:07

of course, evidence is a big part of it. I'm

33:09

a scientist, so I would say that. But also,

33:12

you know, we all kind of have

33:14

that human experience of knowing that popular

33:17

opinion tends to also sort of seep

33:19

in on occasion. You know, even when

33:21

talking about scientific theories will be like,

33:23

oh, well, you know, everyone

33:26

sort of agrees on this one, right? So

33:28

what happens in that uncomfortable interface

33:31

between actual evidence and the fact

33:33

that we are sort of susceptible

33:35

to what everyone else thinks? And

33:37

how does sort of the prevailing

33:39

knowledge and dogma come into formation

33:41

through those two interfaces? Well,

33:43

that is that is the hard question. It's kind

33:45

of a sociology of science question

33:47

or a history of science question. And

33:50

it really, so it's a burden of proof

33:52

argument. Who has the burden of proof? You

33:54

know, the mainstream person to refute

33:56

your arguments or the burden on you. And

33:59

you end up with this what Dan Dennick calls burden tennis.

34:01

No, the burden is on you. Whack, no, the

34:03

burden is on you. No, whack. And everybody has

34:06

their data sets. And just

34:08

different fields, say climate

34:10

skeptics. There's a lot of them in America, you may

34:12

have heard. And so they write me all

34:14

the time. And they

34:17

want to know why the climate community

34:19

won't accept their alternative theories of global

34:22

warming. That it's not human caused. It's

34:24

volcanoes or sunspots or whatever. And

34:26

the answer is, is because A, you're not a

34:29

climate scientist. You're a lawyer or

34:31

whatever. And you're

34:33

not publishing in mainstream climate journals. You

34:35

don't go to climate conferences. You don't

34:37

know anybody that works in the field.

34:40

And your evidence isn't very good. So the

34:43

burden is on you to convince all these

34:45

climate scientists you've got some viable alternative. And

34:47

they haven't done that. And

34:49

this is where this 97% figure. 97%

34:52

of climate scientists say, well, that just comes from a

34:55

study of the abstracts of 10,000 papers

34:57

on climate science. And the 3% are over

34:59

here. And

35:01

they go, well, I have all my alternative theories. But

35:03

they don't converge to anything that would overthrow the

35:06

anthropogenic theory of climate change. OK, so that's

35:08

it. And that's true for all

35:10

fields. That's just the way it goes. You're

35:13

not the only one. There's a bunch of

35:15

people with alternative theories of consciousness and so

35:17

on. And they haven't convinced everybody.

35:20

So too bad. Keep working. Well,

35:22

I mean, your

35:24

position is basically one of conservatism.

35:27

You're a scientific conservative. Not politically. What?

35:29

No, not political. No

35:32

doubt a social liberal. We haven't discussed that.

35:36

But scientific conservatism. Basically,

35:38

what the authorities say, what's published

35:40

in Nature and Science, what gets

35:42

funded by the National Science Foundation,

35:45

that's science. And that's

35:47

really part of the paradigm

35:49

or sociological aspect that Ganesh

35:51

said, talked about. What

35:54

Thomas Kuhn showed in his famous book

35:56

on the structure of scientific revolutions is

35:59

it's not just about everything. evidence and reasoning

36:01

logic. It's to do with what is

36:03

collectively a collective belief system

36:05

at a given time. And

36:08

if you have really good evidence that

36:10

doesn't fit into that system, it'll be

36:12

ignored or treated as an anomaly or

36:14

marginalised. And then a scientific

36:17

revolution occurs which incorporates these anomalies.

36:19

Like in the early 20th century

36:21

when the idea of continental drift

36:23

was first put forward, because if

36:25

you look at the globe the

36:27

continents fit together and they might

36:29

have drifted apart. When Vega

36:32

produced that idea, it was

36:34

ridiculed for decades until a

36:37

mechanism was found and then it's now

36:39

the standard view, plate tectonics. There

36:42

have been many cases where in the

36:44

18th century when people found hot stones

36:46

falling from the skies, they were denounced

36:48

by the scientific authorities as being credulous

36:51

peasants because there couldn't be stones falling

36:53

from the sky because there are no

36:55

stones in the sky. We

36:57

now know their meteorites

36:59

and so on. So

37:01

it depends really on

37:03

a larger consensus change.

37:06

And I think we are actually on the

37:08

threshold of a change, a larger change, which

37:10

would, and part of it would be

37:13

a change that includes consciousness as part

37:15

of our model of reality instead of

37:17

marginalising it as to an epiphenomenon of

37:19

the brain. And when

37:21

that happens, I think we'll have a

37:24

much broader view. It will lead to

37:26

knock-on effects in say areas like medicine

37:28

where at present official medicine is mechanistic

37:31

medicine, physics and chemistry, surgery and drugs.

37:33

There are many alternative therapies

37:36

and if we have a broader,

37:39

more holistic worldview, then I think I'm

37:42

not suggesting we accept every claim of every

37:44

therapy, but we could have, as

37:47

there already is it to some degree in the United

37:49

States, comparative effectiveness research,

37:51

finding out what works. And

37:54

it may be some of these therapies

37:56

work as well or better than traditional

37:59

mechanistic and then

38:01

skeptics also will adjust the placebo effect,

38:04

but then say, well, okay, that's really

38:06

interesting. The placebo effect is itself a

38:08

healing modality, and if one treatment can

38:11

unleash more placebo effect than another, it

38:13

may work better. So we

38:15

can open up a whole new way of thinking

38:17

instead of just closing down. Here in

38:19

Britain, the Medical Research Council, as

38:22

far as I know, funds no research

38:24

on alternative or complementary medicine. Its

38:26

focus is more on mechanistic

38:29

medicine. So I think this world

38:31

view, which would, I think it'll

38:33

also be propelled by political factors,

38:35

because mechanistic materialism, which treats the

38:38

whole earth as a

38:40

devoid, inanimate, et cetera, underlies

38:42

the exploitative model we have of nature,

38:44

it's led to the great

38:46

imbalance between humanity and nature.

38:49

That itself, the political, the

38:51

climate crisis, will, I

38:54

think, force a change in the way we think.

38:57

I think we're on the threshold of a major

38:59

shift in consciousness in which the kinds

39:01

of anomalies I've been talking about that

39:03

don't fit into the mechanistic picture will

39:06

become part of a new world model.

39:08

Now, I'm someone rooting for that. Michael's

39:11

on the other side saying, let's keep, it

39:13

works well enough as it is, let's keep

39:15

thinking, say, oh, this is usual. Well, that's

39:18

a bit unfair, surely. I'm talking about, isn't

39:20

your mouse, Michael? This is what's called the

39:22

survivorship bias. He

39:24

just gave examples where the scientists turned out

39:26

to be wrong and the alternative theorists turned

39:28

out to be right, played tectonics

39:30

with continental drift and meteorites and so

39:33

on. But what about the 10,000

39:35

alternative theories that turned out not to be

39:37

right? Where are those people?

39:39

No one writes biographies of them. All

39:41

the alternative people think they're Galileo, going up

39:44

against the church. But most of

39:46

the people in the past several centuries

39:48

that had these alternative theories, they were

39:50

wrong. And that's why we never hear

39:52

about them. Well, as

39:55

is always the case in these situations, we

39:57

really don't have enough time. Please,

39:59

can you put your hands up? hand together in sign. close

40:11

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40:14

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