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If you are a member of the SMN, you can become a contributor to the blog. To be added to the list of official blog contributors, contact Dr Olly Robinson on: olly@scimednet.org
Currently the blog contains 112 entries.
"The Trouble with Atheism"
Recently, the Scientific and Medical Network held a conference in Switzlerland called "The Challenge of Dogmatism and Fundamentalism in Science and Religion". It was considered whether scientists can become as dogmatic and closed to alternatives as fundamentalist religious believers, and it was concluded that yes, quite clearly they can. This debate has recently been on TV too. Rod Liddle presented an excellent programme called The Trouble with Atheism which argues that the problem is rigid certainty, whether that is found in science or religion.
The programme is avilable on Youtube. The first installment is below. To watch the remaining six installments, go to http://www.youtube.com/ and search for "The Trouble with Atheism".
The programme is informed, sensitive and interesting. John Polkinghorne, an honorary member of the Network is featured in Part 3. Bernard Carr, a director of the Network, is featured in Part 4.
Dr Olly Robinson
Fritjof Capra: Criteria of Systems Thinking
This following was written on a piece of paper given to me by Fritjof Capra, when he was at IMI in 1986. (The additions in italics are mine.)
Ion Channels as the Gates to Consciousness
Gustav Bernroider of Salzburg University has proposed that quantum entanglement in the ion channels of brain cells (neurons) underlies information processing in the brain and ultimately also consciousness.
The neuroscience of mysticism
If you walk down Las Ramblas in Barcelona, there's a section of the boulevard, in between the bird-sellers and the flower-stalls, that is filled with mimes. There's usually five or ten of them, standing there like statues, waiting for someone to drop a coin.
Radio 4: Beyond Belief on UFOs
On Monday, Radio 4 produced a Beyond Belief programme on what religion and science tell us about UFOs and alien life. It is an interesting question, because in the absence of definitive proof (which let's face it, there isn't), it is a question of faith for both scientists and those of religion, as to whether there is other intelligent life in the universe. Some say its a matter of high probability given the size of the universe, but probability only works on things we don't know about. There either are or are not other intelligent life forms in the universe.
Spiritual healing
Here's an article I wrote on spiritual healing, which is in The Times' magazine today. They edited it, but here is the director's cut:
Knowledge and ignorance
Man is driven by the need to create patterns from his experience of reality. Pattern seeking is instinctive to human beings. It is the driving force behind our search for meaning and order. Individuals pick up a variety of ‘pattern forming techniques’ through education and social conditioning. Such skills are used to comprehend and connect the multitude of experiences, to form meaningful patterns out of the cacophony of sensory inputs.
Peter Russell on Consciousness
Peter Russell’s book From Science to God was one of the first books I read that reflected the ideas that I had been holding in my head about the primacy of consciousness. Russell is a physicist/philosopher who rejects the idea that consciousness emerges from the material world, but instead takes the position that consciousness is primary, and that the material world is within the space of consciousness. He is iterating a very long-held philosophical idea, that of “idealism”, which Einstein was apparently fond of. What Russell does so well is remove all the jargon, and make the issues apparent in plain language. In the following two clips, he expounds his position in his typically clear and concise way.
Happy Birthday, Natural Selection
Yesterday, 150 years ago, two papers were read out at the Linnean Society in London, one by Alfred Russell Wallace and the other by Charles Darwin, which first laid out to the world Darwin's theory of natural selection. Darwin's theory continues to have a profound influence on psychology, via the increasingly dominant theory of Evolutionary Psychology (EP) which, like a particularly aggressive turtle on the Galapagos Islands, is busy fighting off all competition and establishing itself as the alpha male of psychological theories.
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