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Currently the blog contains 113 entries.
Homeopathy and placebo
The placebo effect is often dismissed as an annoying source of error in medical trials, when it is of course an amazing phenomenon. It shows how beliefs have an effect on our physical state, so much so that they can reduce pain and heal wounds. Perhaps medicine should be trying to harness the placebo effect, rather than trying to get rid of it.
So here is a thought experiment to ponder over. If you were given the task of developing a form of treatment that would harness the placebo effect, where would you start? Well, firstly you would have to devise something that would appear to be a medical treatment, but would have no direct physical effects at all. We know from countless medical trials that the activity of taking sugar pills that are thought to contain medical ingredients is an activity that elicits a strong placebo response. So introducing an impressive-looking range of pills that were nothing more than sugar pills would be a good option for a placebo-harnessing treatment.
In order to further enhance the medical credibility of the placebo-harnessing treatment, it would make sense to develop names for your pills. Latin-derivative names would be ideal, for they would give a strong sense of medical authenticity, let’s say one could use words like Belladonna, or Aconitum Napellus, or Pulsatilla. That would be perfect.
But in order to give your placebo-treatment the final seal of believability, you would need an ans
wer to the patient’s possible questions of – how does it work? You would therefore need to think up a mechanism of action that was sufficiently vague to prevent further prying, but sufficiently credible to be acceptable. Perhaps one could draw on medical folklore and vaccination logic, and suggest that the treatment operates according to a ‘like-treating-like’. It may help to have a macroscopic amount of a naturally occurring substance in your sugar pill, so your placebo-harnessing ruse would not be too easily uncovered.
And the best bit is, we know for sure that the range of impressive-sounding pills would work! You would have thousands of satisfied patients walking away from your clinic feeling better thanks to the incredible power of placebo.
But before you embark on this, you think to yourself – would it be unethical to do this? There would be deception involved, and that is ethically highly suspect. However on the flipside you would be helping thousands of people to get better. And you would know that deception was essential to the placebo path of healing - if you did ever give the game away that your pills were operating through the process of belief rather than a physical process, then they would no longer work. So would your allegiance be to honesty, or to healing? I don’t think the answer is clear-cut.
As a caveat, I should say that I have no expertise in whether homeopathy is reliably better than placebo, and therefore is working via physical means, but if it was a ritualised placebo, it would still be a brilliant, if ethically ambiguous, idea.
Of Computers and Visual Perception
The vision researcher, Steven Lehar, challenges the computer/artificial intelligence view of the brain. He describes the problems that computers have with visual perception. Computers can detect edges in objects, and this is accepted as being one of the first steps in processing visual input into the brain. However, computers have difficulty in turning this data into useful information, because they detect too many features indiscriminately. They do not just detect relevant edges, but also much less important data referring to textures etc., without the ability of biological vision to determine the relative importance of different edges.
Prosperity without growth
If there is one thing that is completely unarguable about how the future will need to pan out, IF we are going to a viable species in the long-term, it is that we will move beyond a paradigm for living that REQUIRES incessant growth. We KNOW that this change must come to pass because infinite growth on a finite planet, with finite resources, is impossible. It is arguably essential to maintain economic growth while the population is growing, but BOTH will have to stabilise, if we are to be sustainable.
An interesting account of dowsing
The below account of an experience of dowsing helping retrieve a stolen object is fascinating. The speaker is Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, author of Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism and the Extraordinary Powers of the Human Mind. She is a psychoanalyst - writing the book seems to have been in large part a response to this anomalous experience.
An Investigation into Out-of-Body Experiences
What has always been fascinating to me are the books and texts about unimaginable spiritual things, written through experience, but without a well-defined source of where this information came from. If we look carefully, we can see that there have only really been a small number of these books throughout the history of mankind. On the other hand we have myriads of books that are discussions, ideas or studies about the things that these books have spoken of; some which contain brilliant theories and concepts. However, when you begin to read them, you can very easily see the difference between the first kind of books and the latter kind. The original ones touch you in a completely different way, I would say in a spiritual way, a deep touch in your heart, talking to your consciousness in a way that you cannot explain. The other ones touch your mind, creating complex ideas and processes that are intriguing and fascinating, but most of the times not truly profound. They can also touch your feelings, but this is a 'touch' in a more crude way not in a deep, elegant way. And I have seen how easy it is to get fascinated with the mind processes that this kind of touch creates, and how you can get trapped in a false reality created by you, a self-fascination which will even alter anything that you perceive through your senses.
Richard Dawkins and the birth of consciousness.
I thought I would post this correspondence with myself and “The Forum” on Richard Dawkins’ website, on the Scimednet forum and see whether I get more intelligent discussion.
Quantum coherence in living organisms at room temperature - Implications for quantum computing and quantum consciousness
A paper in the leading peer-reviewed journal 'Nature' refutes what has been the central tenet of the argument against quantum consciousness theories, to the effect that quantum coherence could not be sustained in living matter for long enough to play any role in its processing. It seems possible that this low-key paper could in time come to be seen as one of the decisive studies of the 21st century. This work shows that room-temperature quantum coherence can occur in biological matter, in contradiction of the previous dogma that this was impossible. In 2007, Engel et al had shown that coherence was possible in organic matter, but this was only demonstrated at very low temperatures, whereas the latest study by Elizabetta Collini et al demonstrates similar activity at ambient temperature.
Enlightened Prince
Prince Charles has now declared himself an enemy of the Enlightenment http :// www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article7013764.ece . He doesn’t say which of its fruits he dislikes; whether it be free speech, modern science, liberal democracy, human rights (abolition of slavery), women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights or the constitution of the United States; and neither does he say with what he would replace reason as the guiding principle – except perhaps some vague concept of ‘holism’, too ill-defined to be capable of being judged rational or not. But he thinks that the time has come for Enlightenment ideas, now two hundred years old, to be re-examined (never mind that those of hereditary monarchy are even older).
What I doubt that he realizes though is that these ideas are being examined and developed by a lot of serious people. As one example, I would commend http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/beyond-belief-enlightenment-2-0 This was an event that took place a couple of years ago, and involved over thirty world-class speakers. The introductory blurb says the following:
The aim of Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0 is to invite participants to undertake together an ongoing reconnaissance of Enlightenment ideas in the light of advances in primarily cognitive neurosciences, evolutionary biology, physics etc. though not by any means scanting history, philosophy, law. The word reconnaissance is used advisedly. The hope is to explore our current sense of Reason, Truth, Belief, Human Nature, Progress, Virtue and the Good Life in this light. It could be argued that the Enlightenment was not quite the disaster that some critics have suggested, and that version 2.0, and subsequent releases, could conceivably be a dynamic improvement if we set our minds to it, guided by that eudaemonic impulse.
It was a three day event, so will require stamina to watch it all, but just dipping in would be worthwhile.
Lecture for the Society For Psychical Research - Thursday 4th February 2010
Some of you may have read the review of my book "The Daemon - A Guide To Your Extraordinary Secret Self" in the latest edition of Network Review. If this has interested you in my "angle" on things you may be interested to know that the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) are also intrigued by the implications of my "Cheating The Ferryman" hypothesis and have invited to give a talk for them in the lecture room at Kensington Central Library. This will take place tomorrow (Thursday 4th February 2010) starting at 1835. I will be talking for about an hour and then there will be the opportunity for questions and a short mingling session over tea and biscuits. This will finish at 21:00. This is a fully "open" event so if you have nothing better to do why not pop along?
Is nuclear fusion our best hope?
While climate change and energy reform campaigners focus on the potential of renewable energy sources that come direct from nature, such a wind and solar power, scientists have been quietly making huge strides towards the possibility of nuclear fusion and its potential as an energy source. In the climate change and environmentalist movements, there tends to be a back-to-basics, nature-based sensibility that can prevent focusing on cutting-edge technological breakthroughs as real solution to the energy and environmental crisis. Yet, a news item emerged last week that, for a change, was genuinely GOOD news.
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