1. Unknown 'Structures' Tugging at Universe, Study Says

Comment #281022 by Dr. Hameer on November 9, 2008 at 10:32 am

Comment by mmurray:[[If you take that fact, the comments of people like Sue Blackmore have given up on the whole area, the fact that CIA, KGB etc have found nothing useful and throw in the fact that it is really difficult to see how telepathy could work in our current scientific understanding of reality then I think it is reasonable to conclude that (a) it is very unlikely that there is any such thing and (b) it is very likely that they experiments above with the telephone, if looked at carefully, would show some flaws]]


May be. May be not.

"Our current scientific understanding of reality" will ALWAYS be incomplete. That is something we should not forget.

For example, the Newtonian model of the Universe was thought to be complete and sufficient until Quantum Physics came in 1920s and turned our understanding of reality upside down.

Quantum Physics is currently interpreted within our materialistic understanding of the Cosmos (which is FAR from complete and fails to explain many things) by most physicists like Stenger, etc.

BUT it is also argued very convincingly by other physicists like Goswami, Pagel, Von Neumann, etc that there is a need to involve an nonmaterial/spiritual "Consciousness" model (this argument also is not 100% conclusive).

This latter interpretation of the atoms being "tendencies of possibilities" (and not matter) require, according to some physicists, the need of a non material observor (called it God if you like) to choose and collapse the possibilities into actuality and thus matter. Thus instead of matter giving rise to consciousness, Consciousness gives rise to matter and is the ground of all being.

This concept also postulates the idea of "non-locality" which can IN THEORY accommodate for "supernatural" phenomenon like Telepathy or ESP.

Whether the Materialistic Interpretation of Quantum Physics or the Spiritual Interpretation of Quantum Physics is true, remains to be found out.

My point: We need to be open to possibilities, look in to the data with skepticism (and open mindedness as well - a hard thing to do!) and come to the conclusion which in most cases is INCONCLUSIVE.

As scientists and scientific philosophers, the true spirit of Science is to learn to be comfortable with uncertainty. Otherwise we will fall in to dogmatism (either religious or atheistic).

Dr. Hameer

2. Unknown 'Structures' Tugging at Universe, Study Says

Comment #280876 by Dr. Hameer on November 8, 2008 at 4:42 pm

Comment by mmurray: [[The need to keep an open mind to new possibilities is one part of science but another is weighing the evidence and testing the theory.]]

I agree but let that not be an excuse for dismissing any data that may disrupt your current "world view" of what is possible and what is not. I take you back to what Dr. Rupert Sheldrake has written:

"We then agreed that controlled experiments were necessary. I said that this was why I had actually been doing such experiments, including tests to find out if people really could tell who was calling them on the telephone when the caller was selected at random. The results were far above the chance level. The previous week I had sent Richard copies of some of my papers, published in peer-reviewed journals, so that he could look at the data. Richard seemed uneasy and said, “I’m don’t want to discuss evidence”. “Why not?” I asked. “There isn’t time. It’s too complicated. And that’s not what this programme is about.” The camera stopped."

Dr. Hameer

3. Unknown 'Structures' Tugging at Universe, Study Says

Comment #280794 by Dr. Hameer on November 8, 2008 at 11:11 am

Okay I didn't know where to post the following article so I thought here would be appropriate since this article is about "unknowns" in Science and the true spirit of science being open to possibilities and free from dogmatism.

Having come across the article below I can only say I am really disappointed with Professor Dawkins in this regard. You can all make your judgments about this.

But we of the scientific community must remind ourselves to always remain AGNOSTIC and be open to possibilities that may surprise us or even topple our current scientific understanding of the Universe. The goal of Science should NOT be to "prove there is no God" or "anyone who believes in science but also God and the non material realm is stupid" but rather to search for the true nature of the Cosmos.

If its all a materialistic and mechanistic universe out there: nice and dandy. If its a universe that has a transcendental realm that we have yet to understand: even more wonderful.

My point is let us be extremely careful of not falling in the same fanatic and fundamentalistic trap we so often accuse our religious counterparts to be guilty of.

Dr. Hameer

http://www.sheldrake.org/D&C/controversies/Dawkins.html


Richard Dawkins comes to call

A crusading atheist and author of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins is Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. He is a Fellow of CSI (The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, formerly CSICOP) and a strong supporter of James Randi. His earlier books were on evolutionary biology, the best known being The Selfish Gene. In 2007, he visited Rupert to interview him for his TV series Enemies of Reason:

Richard Dawkins is a man with a mission – the eradication of religion and superstition, and their total replacement with science and reason. Channel 4 TV has repeatedly provided him with a pulpit. His two-part polemic in August 2007, called Enemies of Reason, was a sequel to his 2006 diatribe against religion, The Root of All Evil?

Soon before Enemies of Reason was filmed, the production company, IWC Media, told me that Richard Dawkins wanted to visit me to discuss my research on unexplained abilities of people and animals. I was reluctant to take part, but the company’s representative assured me that “this documentary, at Channel 4’s insistence, will be an entirely more balanced affair than The Root of All Evil was.” She added, “We are very keen for it to be a discussion between two scientists, about scientific modes of enquiry”. So I agreed and we fixed a date. I was still not sure what to expect. Was Richard Dawkins going to be dogmatic, with a mental firewall that blocked out any evidence that went against his beliefs? Or would he be open-minded, and fun to talk to?

The Director asked us to stand facing each other; we were filmed with a hand-held camera. Richard began by saying that he thought we probably agreed about many things, “But what worries me about you is that you are prepared to believe almost anything. Science should be based on the minimum number of beliefs.”

I agreed that we had a lot in common, “But what worries me about you is that you come across as dogmatic, giving people a bad impression of science.”

He then said that in a romantic spirit he himself would like to believe in telepathy, but there just wasn’t any evidence for it. He dismissed all research on the subject out of hand. He compared the lack of acceptance of telepathy by scientists such as himself with the way in which the echo-location system had been discovered in bats, followed by its rapid acceptance within the scientific community in the 1940s. In fact, as I later discovered, Lazzaro Spallanzani had shown in 1793 that bats rely on hearing to find their way around, but sceptical opponents dismissed his experiments as flawed, and helped set back research for well over a century. However, Richard recognized that telepathy posed a more radical challenge than echo-location. He said that if it really occurred, it would “turn the laws of physics upside down,” and added, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

“This depends on what you regard as extraordinary”, I replied. “Most people say they have experienced telepathy, especially in connection with telephone calls. In that sense, telepathy is ordinary. The claim that most people are deluded about their own experience is extraordinary. Where is the extraordinary evidence for that?”

He produced no evidence at all, apart from generic arguments about the fallibility of human judgment. He assumed that people want to believe in “the paranormal” because of wishful thinking.

We then agreed that controlled experiments were necessary. I said that this was why I had actually been doing such experiments, including tests to find out if people really could tell who was calling them on the telephone when the caller was selected at random. The results were far above the chance level.

The previous week I had sent Richard copies of some of my papers, published in peer-reviewed journals, so that he could look at the data.

Richard seemed uneasy and said, “I’m don’t want to discuss evidence”. “Why not?” I asked. “There isn’t time. It’s too complicated. And that’s not what this programme is about.” The camera stopped.

The Director, Russell Barnes, confirmed that he too was not interested in evidence. The film he was making was another Dawkins polemic.

I said to Russell, “If you’re treating telepathy as an irrational belief, surely evidence about whether it exists or not is essential for the discussion. If telepathy occurs, it’s not irrational to believe in it. I thought that’s what we were going to talk about. I made it clear from the outset that I wasn’t interested in taking part in another low grade debunking exercise.”

Richard said, “It’s not a low grade debunking exercise; it’s a high grade debunking exercise.”

In that case, I replied, there had been a serious misunderstanding, because I had been led to believe that this was to be a balanced scientific discussion about evidence. Russell Barnes asked to see the emails I had received from his assistant. He read them with obvious dismay, and said the assurances she had given me were wrong. The team packed up and left.

Richard Dawkins has long proclaimed his conviction that “The paranormal is bunk. Those who try to sell it to us are fakes and charlatans”. Enemies of Reason was intended to popularize this belief. But does his crusade really promote “the public understanding of science,” of which he is the professor at Oxford? Should science be a vehicle of prejudice, a kind of fundamentalist belief-system? Or should it be a method of enquiry into the unknown?

4. Children need to be sprinkled with fairy dust

Comment #273197 by Dr. Hameer on October 28, 2008 at 9:35 am

Even though I am a fan of Richard's writings and have tremendous respect for him, I don't necessarily agree with him on everything.

It is quite true that God most probably does not exist. And that everything that defines us as being "human" is most probably a product of evolution.

However, I am careful not to look at the world through rational eyes only. Sure, rationality and science is wonderful and important for a healthy mind, but I also think so is irrationality to some degree.

Prof. Dawkins loves Music and Poetry and I am sure he loves and cares for his beautiful wife Lala Ward (A heroine of mine from those wonderful Dr. Who days). However these are all IRRATIONAL behavior. There is no rationality involved, only emotions. Yet they are wonderful and necessary in making us who we are.

What I am getting at is we should be careful of "hyper"-rationality to the point of obsessiveness. I as a child used to read fairy-tales and fiction, and I turned to be a well educated intellectually fulfilled agnostic/atheist. I would constitute as a case study (along with many others) that would support Libby Purves statements in her wonderful article above.

But if Prof. Dawkins wants to get research done, than that is his 'taste' and by all means he should look in to it. But that is not my cup of tea.

And while I agree totally with Richard, that the universe doesn't owe me comfort and happiness, I owe myself comfort and happiness (without compromising my rationality of course). Being a physician, in my opinion mental health is just as important as scientific pursuits. The quest for truth is just as important and lofty and necessary as the quest for happiness. And I very much agree with Libby Purves when she says:

"They probably also enjoy a rush of irrational pleasure when watching a really good close-up conjurer “doing” impossible things - pushing bottles through tables and cigarettes through coins. We know it's not real and yet we see it: thus we are temporarily released from the iron corset of reason, even as we laugh at ourselves for being fooled. Feels good."

As Robert Louis Stevenson wrote "“The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”

Amen to that!

5. The Retirement of Richard Dawkins: Reflections on a Stewardship

Comment #264389 by Dr. Hameer on October 14, 2008 at 10:33 am

I beg to disagree with the author of this article. I bet Prof. Richard Dawkins would disagree as well just like lates Carl Sagan and Stephen Gould would have disagreed.

Throughout European history Science "may" have been an Aristocratic affair, but it certainly is NOT today.

And its thanks to great scientists like Sagan, Gould and Dawkins, who have made it possible for you to meet an average John Smith with no formal training as a scientist but yet quite quite knowledgeable with matters of Science. The late Douglas Adams would be a good case in point.

A horrible article by Mr. Hammerton in my opinion as a tribute to such an eminent and magnificent Science popularizer such as Richard Dawkins!

6. Without God

Comment #252716 by Dr. Hameer on September 23, 2008 at 2:32 pm

Steven Weinberg's words are music to me ears!

7. Genes might not be so selfish after all

Comment #249153 by Dr. Hameer on September 17, 2008 at 3:33 pm

This is fascinating indeed. It reflects on the potential "plasticity" of genes if you like.

However, I do not know what the limitations are exactly on the role of epigenetics in nature and if it exerts any signifant effect on the Evolution of life, which would hint towards a type of Lamarckian evolution in addition to Darwinian Evolution via natural selection.

Professor Dawkins, I would love to know your thoughts on this.

8. Nine face stoning death in Iran

Comment #215123 by Dr. Hameer on July 21, 2008 at 10:35 am

And people still think that religion is harmless.

Islam is a tyrannical religion which involves total mind and body enslavement to the will of God! And the will of God is that adulterers should be flogged in public (according to the Koran) or stoned to death (according to Islamic tradition).

Pathetic to say the least!

9. Disproving Conventional Wisdom On Diversity Of Marine Fossils And Extinction Rates

Comment #211691 by Dr. Hameer on July 16, 2008 at 8:53 am

Comment #211439 by Steve Zara

I agree Steve. Point taken. I guess Punctuated Equilibrium (PE) taken to the "extreme" is a controversial idea.

Even though I am a physician and not an evolutionist, I think that the world is a very dynamic place with lots of processes of nature taking place concurrently. To think that Natural Selection alone is the prime mechanism, seems a little too over "reductionistic" and naive to me.

So while I do think Natural Selection is an important mechanism in the evolution of life on earth, I do not think it is the only mechanism. I am open to entertain the possibility of PE as an equally fascinating "add on" to Darwin's grand theory of Natural Selection.

10. Disproving Conventional Wisdom On Diversity Of Marine Fossils And Extinction Rates

Comment #211031 by Dr. Hameer on July 15, 2008 at 12:44 pm

Reading the article above seems to suggest that there is now confirming evidence that the theory of Punctuated Equilibrium (Periods of rapid evolution - on a geological time scale of course! - followed by prolonged periods of stasis and no change) might very well be correct.

Fascinating indeed. How delighted and ecstatic the late Professor Gould would have been to hear this news!

11. Happy Birthday, Richard Dawkins!

Comment #150154 by Dr. Hameer on March 26, 2008 at 1:51 pm

Greetings Dr. Dawkins,

Wishing you a very Happy Birthday and a wonderful year to come for you!

Best wishes,

Murtaza Hameer, M.D.