There are many aspects of reality which remain unanswered or unanswerable by standard scientific materialism, which might yield to a post-materialist viewpoint. Some of these are explored in the articles below.
- Are 'above unity' or 'free energy' devices possible?
- Are psychic phenomena illusory?
- Are the conventional explanations of nerve impulses and muscle contractions wrong?
- Are galaxies shaped by electrical and magnetic forces?
- Are memories stored as traces in brains?
- Are the laws of nature fixed?
- Can causation work from the future?
- Can some people live for long periods without food?
- Do we live in a universe or a multiverse?
- Has theoretical physics lost its way?
- How do animals and plants develop?
- How do animals navigate?
- How do complementary and alternative therapies work?
- Is all inheritance material?
- Is nature purposeless?
- What is the nature of consciousness?
So-called above unity or free energy devices are said by their promoters to tap sources of energy which current technologies ignore, and which are denied by orthodox science. One of the longest-standing taboos in science is against perpetual motion machines, and claims that devices produce more energy than is put into them are extremely controversial.
Nevertheless, is it possible to gain useful amounts of energy from cold fusion, or by tapping the quantum vacuum field, or by picking up energy from ambient electromagnetic fluctuations, or in other surprising ways? Several people claim to have such devices and there are organisations and conferences devoted to examining them. For sources of information see below.
The nature of consciousness is one of the great unsolved questions for science. In the seventeenth century, the founding fathers of modern science, especially Rene Descartes, divided the world into two realms, unconscious matter, which was mechanical in nature and was intrinsically purposeless, and immaterial spirit or mind which underlay the being of God, angels and human rational minds. This view is often called Cartesian dualism.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the theory of materialism became predominant within the sciences. Materialism arose from Cartesian dualism by denying the existence of any separate realm of spirit, thus getting rid of God and angels at one stroke, and treating human consciousness as a product of the brain, or as an aspect of brain activity. The materialist view is still dominant within the academic and scientific world but is increasingly questioned. Some opponents of materialism have advocated a form of dualism, most notably the philosopher of science Karl Popper and the neuroscientist John Eccles in their book The Self And Its Brain.
Surprisingly, many contemporary cosmologists take seriously the idea that our universe is one of a huge number of co-existing universes. There is no experimental evidence for such universes, but their possibility arises from several theories: The cosmic inflation theory, according to which new universes could be created during a rapid inflationary phase; superstring theory which is compatible with the existence of 10500 universes; and also the assumption that all the laws of nature in our universe were fixed at the moment of the Big Bang. In order to avoid the idea that these fixed laws were intelligently designed by a kind of creator god, some cosmologists prefer the multiverse to avoid this theological option. However they do not succeed in avoiding it because an infinite god could be the god of an infinite number of universes.
Most scientists take it for granted that the laws of nature were fixed at the moment of the Big Bang, and many assume that the fundamental physical constants were fixed as well. This assumption underlies many of the discussions about the cosmological anthropic principle and the debate between proponents of the universe and multiverse. However, in an evolving universe the regularities of nature may be more like habits than laws and depend on an inherent memory within the natural world. The philosopher CS Peirce suggested this idea in the early 20th century.
In his hypothesis of morphic resonance, Rupert Sheldrake suggests that memory works through a transfer of information between self-organising systems on the basis of similarity, with this resonance taking place from the past to the present. Each species has a kind of collective memory and on which each individual draws, and to which it contributes. This hypothesis is discussed in detail in Sheldrake's book A New Science of Life (Called Morphic Resonance in the US) and The Presence of the Past, his main theoretical book. A similar idea was proposed by a theoretical physicist Lee Smolin in his book Time Reborn. Lee Smolin calls his hypothesis the 'principle of precedence'.
Papers by Ephraim Fischbach, Professor of Physics at Purdue University, and Jere Jenkins, Director of Radiation Laboratories School of Nuclear Engineering at Purdue have revealed annual variations in nuclear decay rates (also see The strange case of solar flares and radioactive elements).
"What we are showing is that decay constants are apparently not fundamental constants of nature."
— Ephraim Fischbach, Purdue University
No one knows how pigeons home, or how swallows migrate, or how green turtles find Ascension Island from thousands of miles away to lay their eggs. These kinds of navigation involve more than following familiar landmarks or orientating in particular compass directions: they are goal directed.
Most research on animal navigation has been done on homing pigeons, and it is generally agreed that they can use familiar landmarks when they are near home, but racing pigeons routinely find their way home from unfamiliar places over distances of 600 miles. They do not do it by remembering the twists and turns of the outward journey and they do not seem to be navigating by the sun or the stars, although on sunny days they may use the sun as a compass. They may use a sense of smell when relatively close to their home, but this cannot explain homing from hundreds of miles away irrespective of wind direction. All this leaves a magnetic sense, and a range of animal species can detect magnetic fields, including termites, bees and migrating birds.
One of the principle changes in thinking brought about by the scientific revolution of the 17th century was a rejection of the idea that nature has any intrinsic purposes. Nothing worked in accordance with goals or final causes and teleology was excluded from the realm of science. However, it is undeniable that humans have purposes, and most biological phenomena are goal-directed. How is this possible? And what about the evolutionary process as a whole? The conventional assumption of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory is that evolution takes place through a combination of chance and necessity, through blind mutations and the impersonal and unconscious forces of natural selection. This is a dogmatic assumption rather than an experimentally proven fact.
Some philosophers, like Teilhard de Chardin in his book The Phenomenon of Man, have suggested that the entire evolutionary process does indeed have a purpose and is heading towards what Chardin called the Omega Point, a kind of attractor for the evolutionary process. The palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris has suggested in his book Life's Solution that for many examples of convergent evolution suggests some underlying principles in the evolutionary process that are not accounted for by the idea of blind chance. And the philosopher Thomas Nagel, an atheist, argues in favour of what he calls natural teleology, a purposive process at work in the universe (see his book Mind And Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False).
There have been reports over the centuries of people living for long periods without food, including stories about Christian saints like St Theresa of Avila, and of contemporary Indian holy men and women. Breatharians also claim to be able to live with little or no food for periods of years. These claims are, of course, dismissed both on grounds of common sense and because they contravene the assumption that living organisms obey standard laws of conservation of energy. But some scientific investigations of people who claim to live without food suggest that strange phenomena are indeed occurring.
For a discussion of this phenomenon in the context of energy conservation see Chapter 2 of Rupert Sheldrake's book Science Set Free/The Science Delusion. See also a documentary film In The Beginning There Was Light, a film by P.A Straubinger. See also the book Life From Light: Is It Possible To Live Without Food? A Scientist Reports on His Experiences by Michael Werner and Thomas Stoeckli.
An Excerpt From In The Beginning There Was Light
For many years, nerve impulses have been understood in terms of action potentials moving along nerves, with the whole system depending on ion pumps and ion channels. Muscle contraction has been understood in terms of molecular bridges between actin and myosin molecules. But research on structured water by Gerald Pollack and his group at Washington State University has revealed that there are many surprising properties of water and gels that shed new light on both nerve impulses, muscle contraction and vesicle secretion by cells.
Many of the phenomena previously attributed to ion pumps, channels and molecular mechanisms can be explained more simply and elegantly in terms of phase transitions in gels and structured water. Many aspects of cell biology may need to be reinterpreted radically. For an in depth discussion of structured water see G.H. Pollack The Fourth Phase of Water, and for the application of this new understanding to cell biology see G. H. Pollack, Cells, Gels and The Engines of Life: A New, Unifying Approach to Cell Function.
Gerald Pollack's Talk on Electrically Structured Water and the Body at the EU 2013 Conference
Most neuroscientists and philosophers assume that memories must be stored as physical traces within brains, although the mechanism by which this happens remains elusive. But several philosophers, including Henri Bergson and Ludwig Wittgenstein have doubted that memory can work in this way, and Rupert Sheldrake has proposed that memories are better understood in terms of morphic resonance, a process whereby patterns of activity in the past resonate with patterns in the present on the basis of similarity, with this resonance passing across or through space and time from the past to the present. He has discussed this hypothesis in detail in his book The Presence of the Past and summarised in Chapter 7 of Science Set Free/The Science Delusion.
- by Gerald Pollack
In this age of advanced technology, with so many scientific discoveries under our collective belt, it may seem that our understanding of nature is essentially complete, with only a few details to be worked out. Yet when we look closer, these "details" sometimes prove significant. Profound mysteries remain unexplained, even when it comes to ubiquitous phenomena that concern us on a daily basis, like the weather. The behavior of earth's atmosphere is not only difficult to predict, but exhibits properties that challenge our fundamental understanding of air and water.
For example, clouds are composed of negatively charged droplets of water, called aerosol droplets. If negative charges repel one another, how can those droplets coalesce to form clouds? Further, the density of water droplets exceeds the density of air, which means they should settle to the ground, yet they do not. What keeps clouds aloft?
Besides oxygen and nitrogen, the atmosphere contains other gases including carbon dioxide and argon. The densities of these latter two gases actually exceed those of oxygen and nitrogen. If denser gases settle beneath the lighter ones, then why are we not breathing pure argon?
While the concentrations of atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide can vary, the nitrogen-to-oxygen ratio remains stubbornly constant at 3.727. Atmospheric scientists work assiduously to push the measurement precision from four to five significant digits in the hope of uncovering even trivial variants. This constancy seems to hold everywhere — in cities, on farms, atop mountains, in deserts, over oceans. Even in wintry Siberia, where photosynthesis is nil, still the nitrogen-oxygen ratio is the same as in the jungles of the Amazon. Why does the nitrogen to oxygen ratio remain so remarkably constant? Is there some kind of stoichiometric constraint?
Humid environments retard evaporation. How then does an evaporating water molecule know the level of humidity in the air above, and therefore whether or not to evaporate?
The atmosphere supposedly rests on the earth because of pressure. We think of gas molecules pressing upon one another like a pile of bricks, the lowest ones pushing on the earth's surface. However, the atmosphere is a gas. By definition, gas molecules rarely touch one another. Therefore, atmospheric molecules should press rather loosely if at all. If so, why don't the strong winds up there blow the atmosphere away?
For answers to these and other questions about the nature of water, see my 2013 book...
Related Question
Most theoretical physicists currently work on versions of superstring or M theory, which are complex mathematical structures based on the idea that there are 10 or 11 dimensions. These theories are currently untestable and critics argue that they have therefore ceased to be scientific. Many other aspects of temporary physics are also untestable, such as the multiverse theory, and conventional cosmology depends on the postulation that 96% of the universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy, whose nature is unknown. Some physicists are worried that physics has lost its way: See for example Lee Smolin's book The Trouble With Physics and the writing of George Ellis.
The materialist theory that the mind is nothing but the activity of the brain makes it impossible that psychic phenomena should exist, or at least extremely unlikely. Therefore many materialists dismiss the possibility of psychic phenomena, and militant sceptics try to debunk the evidence for them. Nevertheless there is now much evidence that these phenomena really exist, as summaries for example in Dean Radin's book Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality, and Rupert Sheldrake's book The Sense of Being Stared At, And Other Unexplained Powers of Human Minds.
For a discussion of the evidence in relation to debates with sceptics, see Chris Carter's book Science and Psychic Phenomena: The Fall of The House of Sceptics and Robert McLuhan's book Randi's Prize.
Men Who Stare at Photons
Dean Radin's presentation at the EU 2013 conference, in which he reviews the history of scientific investigation into psychic phenomena, his research at IONS and the growing evidence.
There has long been a dispute among philosophers about whether causation must by definition work only from the past, and some argue that there is no reason in principle why causation should not work from the future as well. Some science fiction writers have explored possible paradoxes caused by causation from the future, and in general there is a cloud of confusion over this whole area. Many of the equations of physics are reversible and some interpretations of quantum mechanics allow for influences to pass backwards in time. For example in Richard Feynman's interpretations of quantum mechanics a positron can be regarded as an electron moving backwards in time.
In John Cramer's transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics when a photon is emitted from the sun and takes 8 minutes before it is absorbed by something on earth, the absorber on earth sends a reverse signal to the emitter on the sun 8 minutes before the photon from the sun strikes the absorber. There is a kind of 'handshake' between the emitter and the absorber. Retrocausation takes on a practical significance in trying to interpret evidence for precognition, which is relatively common in dreams, and also for presentiment or "feeling the future."
Recommended Book
Quantum Retrocausation: Theory and Experiment (AIP Conference Proceedings)
The conventional assumption is that developmental biology will ultimately be explained in terms of mechanistic interactions, the activation of genes, the interactions of proteins and other molecular mechanisms. In other words the current orthodoxy favours a bottom-up approach. But for many years a minority of biologists have argued in favour of a top-down approach and one of the most popular concepts in this holistic tradition is the morphogenetic field, or form-shaping field.
However biologists use this term to mean very different things. For mechanistic biologists, it refers to modular patterns of development by particular groups of cells, and the field is assumed to be explicable in terms of regular chemical and physical interactions, such as gradients of morphogenetic chemicals or electrical gradients. But some biologists, notably Rupert Sheldrake, think of morphogenetic fields as a new kind of field as yet unrecognised by science. Moreover, Sheldrake proposes that these fields contain an inherent memory given by the process of morphic resonance. From this point of view the inheritance of form depends to a large degree on morphic resonance, not just on genes. For a discussion see Rupert Sheldrake’s book A New Science of Life, now in its third edition (called Morphic Resonance in the US).
It is normally taken for granted by biologists that all biological inheritance (as opposed to cultural inheritance) is material and is transferred from one generation to the next genetically, in DNA, or is cytoplasmic inheritance (as in the case of mitochondria) or as epigenetic modifications of the DNA. However there are many problems with this seemingly straightforward view, not least the missing heritability problem. Through analysing tens of thousands human genomes, the attempt to find genes 'for' various physical traits and disease-proneness have been remarkably unsuccessful, except in the case of a few rare hereditary diseases like cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anaemia. Instead of accounting for about 80% of inheritance, the genes seem to explain only 5 - 10%. The remaining unexplained inheritance is called the 'missing inheritability' problem. The biologist Rupert Sheldrake has proposed an alternative hypothesis according to which most of the inheritance of form and behaviour depends on morphic resonance rather than genes. For a detailed discussion of his ideas see his book The Presence of the Past or for a briefer summary of the issues of these fundamental questions see Chapter 6 of his book Science Set Free/The Science Delusion.
Most contemporary cosmology is based on gravitational theories, and has the disadvantage of explaining the nature of galaxies and the universe only by assuming that 96% of physical reality consists of dark matter and dark energy, whose nature is literally obscure. Some critics suggest that some of the problems of contemporary astronomy and cosmology could be solved if the contribution of huge electric currents and magnetic fields within and between galaxies were more fully taken into account.
The Electric Universe Movement organises conferences and has a website devoted to exploring these questions. One of their most shocking ideas is the proposition that the main source of energy in the sun is not coming from within it through nuclear fusion of hydrogen, as usually assumed, but rather depends on electromagnetic energy flowing through the galaxy that flows into the sun. A real-world laboratory test of the electric sun hypothesis, called the Safire Projct, is currently underway.
The usual assumption within conventional mechanistic medicine is that complementary and alternative therapies only appear to work because people would have got better anyway, or because they lead to improvements through the placebo effect. But the placebo effect is itself a problem for conventional medicine since it shows the influence of belief, hope, or expectation over the healing process, including the activity of the immune system.
There are many different kinds of alternative and complementary therapy and some come with their own theories as to how they work. As integrated medicine becomes more important it will become increasingly urgent to find out how other therapeutic systems work, and this may help trigger off more fundamental enquiries into areas of biology which have not been explored so far.
