TED Conversations

  • TED
  • New York, NY
  • United States


This conversation is closed. Start a new conversation
or join one »

The debate about Rupert Sheldrake's talk




Closing Statement from TED







Thanks for listening.

Chris Anderson, TED Curator

Showing single comment thread. View the full conversation.

  • Mar 22 2013: What I do in my book, The Science Delusion, which is called Science Set Free in the United States, is take the ten dogmas or assumptions of science and turn them into questions, seeing how well they stand up if you look at them scientifically. None of them stand up very well. What I'm going to do is first run through what these ten dogmas are, and then I'll only have time to discuss one or two of them in a bit more detail, but essentially the ten dogmas which are the default worldview of most educated people all over the world are -

    First, that nature is mechanical or machine-like. The universe is like a machine, animals and plants are like machines, we're like machines. In fact, we are machines, we're "lumbering robots" in Richard Dawkins' vivid phrase, with brains that are genetically-programmed computers.

    Second, matter is unconscious, the whole universe is made up of unconscious matter. There's no consciousness in stars, in galaxies, in planets, in animals, in plants, and there ought not be any in us either if this theory is true, so a lot of the philosophy of mind over the last hundred years has been trying to prove that we're not really conscious at all. So, matter's unconscious.

    Then, the laws of nature are fixed. This is dogma three. The laws of nature are the same now as they were at the time of the Big Bang and they'll be the same forever. Not just the laws but the constants of nature are fixed, which is why they're called constants.

    Dogma four: the total amount of matter and energy is always the same. It never changes in total quantity except at the moment of the Big Bang when it all sprang into existence from nowhere in a single instant.

Showing single comment thread. View the full conversation.