Policing orthodoxy on Wikipedia: Skeptics in action? – Brian Martin
Wikipedia has been accused of being biased against challengers to scientific orthodoxy due to efforts by editors having affinities with the Skeptics movement. Examination of Wikipedia, including entries on fluoridation, the origin of AIDS and vaccination, reveals several characteristics typical of a Skeptics sensibility, including the definition of scepticism, lists of deviant ideas, derogatory labelling of heterodox viewpoints, and categories established without reference to reliable sources.
The effects of Near Death Experiences on dreaming: A pilot study
The findings indicate that NDEs resulted in significantly a) more positive dreams, b) more vivid dreams, c) improved dream recall, d) an increased number of spiritual dreams, e) an increased interest in dreams, and f) an increased interest in the dreams of others; results that are consistent with the continuity hypothesis of dreaming. As the pilot study indicated that NDEs also have profound effects on the dream life of the individual, more in-depth studies are warranted.
Science of Information – A. K. Mukhopadhyay
Nature and character of information defy observable, positivistic, and reductionist science. Still, a science of information could be possible with logically woven ideas expressed in a common universal language in the third person’s perspective connected with the physical science of matter, energy, space and time on the superficial hand, and the cognitive faculty on the deeper hand. With the thread left out by twentieth century’s science the paper begins with a linguistic analysis of information, narrates its properties, mechanics, different geometrical states, and relates dark energy of cosmology with visible energy of cell biology with credible impacts on science, humanities, and consciousness studies.
Science and Spiritual Practices
However, Rupert immediately experienced tension between the mechanistic objectivity of the scientific approach and his own feelings for animals and plants - they were killed in order to be studied, and everything was broken down into reductionist components.
Religion as Metaphor
Subtitled ‘beyond literal belief’, this searching study steers a middle course between the Scylla of uneducated belief or religious literalism and the Charybdis of educated disbelief or fundamentalist atheism. As a sympathetic scholar of Jung, David parts company with Freud and Dawkins by maintaining that religion is in fact metaphorical rather than illusory or delusory.
Psychic Phenomena and the Brain: Exploring the Neurophysiology of PSI
In his Introduction Williams outlines the scope of his inquiry, discusses the pioneering survey achievements of the early years of the Society for Psychical Research, presents some interesting anecdotal cases, looks at the work of J.B. Rhine and surveys the range of modern neurological research into psi phenomena.
Evolution and the Transcendence of Mind – Theodore Roszak
Perhaps, then, with a bit of humility and a sense of humour, computer science can help us learn something about the mind's radically transcendent nature. After all, it is the human mind that invents artificial ones (as much for the fun as for the utility of it) and then has room left over to defy the logic or grow bored with their predictable correctness. That 'room' is the evolutionary margin of life still waiting to be explored. What computers can do represents so many routinised mental functions we can now delegate and slough off as we move forward to new ground. The machines are behind us, not ahead.
The Physics of Organisms and the Naturalistic Ethic of Organic Wholeness – Mae-Wan Ho
Participatory knowledge knows no bounds nor boundaries. There is no fragmentation into disciplines, no demarcation into secular versus sacred domains: it is at once sublime and practical. It is one, and integral to life. By living our life as parent, builder, gardener, labourer, artist, scientist, all, we participate in celebrating and creating reality.
The Issue Before Us: Reassessment of the Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science – Willis Harman
The scientific and medical communities have given a rather unfriendly reception to research in psi phenomena, dissociative states, altered states of consciousness, extraordinary healings, and other areas related to consciousness in some of its non-normal forms. This has been mainly because the meaning and significance people tended to attach to these experiences seemed to clash so directly with prevailing assumptions about the nature of scientific reality. But perhaps it is our "official" concept of reality that is wrong.
– Erwin Schrödinger
– Prof David Bohm
– Albert Einstein
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