Science Magic

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When the philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend made his famous call to let 'Anything and everything go in science', one commentator, reflecting the disbelief of many other critics, responded: so you're saying that we may as well choose to do voodoo?

Yet Feyerabend meant exactly that. What this critic did not realize was that they were using their own mental image of Feyerabend as a voodoo doll — a crude simulacrum of his views that they wanted to stick pins into!

But Feyerabend responded, go right ahead!

"... to the extent that the special kind of knowledge that voodoo practicioners and scholars of this religion has something to say about some phenomena that the Big, Pretentious, Pompous, Science doesn't want to look at."

And he pointed at several scientifically and philosophically interesting phenomena associated with voodoo beliefs and practise. For instance, Voodoo magic often uses simulacra magic, or the magic of using objects with a "likeness" to something in the outer world, to create an effect in the outer world. This is a theme which philosophers of nature such as Francis Bacon and Samuel Hahnemann explored from their more orthodox perspectives too.

In this strand, PI will ask, should there be a limit imposed on what science studies? How does science deal with extraordinary claims? What is skepticism?

How to disinvite a Nobel Prize and full professor at Cambridge University and a Ph.D. in physics who worked with the great physicist David Bohm.¹

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Good! That's one done. Now to deal with the assistant. 'Native American Indian thought and modern physics' indeed!
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Rupert Sheldrake, a respected biologist, came to the conclusion that the tools he was given were logically incapable of explaining how life develops the way it does: it provided the building material, but not the blueprints. When he published in a book his analyses and hypotheses, the most respected journal, Nature, called his book "a book for burning" through the voice of John Maddox, the editor-in-chief.²

"This infuriating tract... is the best candidate for burning there has been for many years."

On BBC television in 1994,

"Sheldrake is putting forward magic instead of science, and that can be condemned in exactly the language that the Pope used to condemn Galileo, and for the same reason. It is heresy."

Rupert Sheldrake had proposed the notion of morphic fields, a notion not unlike Plato's Ideas.

The term [morphic fields] is more general in its meaning than morphogenetic fields [theorized in developmental biology], and includes other kinds of organizing fields in addition to those of morphogenesis; the organizing fields of animal and human behaviour, of social and cultural systems, and of mental activity can all be regarded as morphic fields which contain an inherent memory.

—Rupert Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past (Chapter 6, page 112)