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Thread: The psi wars come to TED

  1. #11
    Founder Luc's Avatar
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    We’ll have to do this again. And again, and again. Each time we’ll have more people on our side and we’ll make a little more noise. At some point, we’ll be loud enough that our wrath will be more unpleasant than allowing us a place at the table. It’s a long road, but we just took a big step. I’ve never seen anything like it.
    Keep walking. Just keep walking.

  2. #12
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    Update —

    Rupert Sheldrake commented:

    I appreciate the fact that TED published my response to the accusations levelled against me by their Scientific Board, and also crossed out the Board’s statement on the “Open for discussion” blog. http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/14/open-...ert-sheldrake/

    There are no longer any specific points to answer. I am all in favour of debate, but it is not possible to make much progress through short responses to nebulous questions like “Is this an idea worth spreading, or misinformation?”

    I would be happy to take part in a public debate with a scientist who disagrees with the issues I raise in my talk. This could take place online, or on Skype. My only condition is that it be conducted fairly, with equal time for both sides to present their arguments, and with an impartial moderator, agreed by both parties.

    Therefore I ask Chris Anderson to invite a scientist from TED’s Scientific Board or TED’s Brain Trust to have a real debate with me about my talk, or if none will agree to take part, to do so himself.


    http://www.ted.com/conversations/171....html?c=629710
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    "An initiation into shamanic healing means a devaluation of all values, an overturning of the profane world, a peeling away of inveterate handed-down notions of the world, liberation from everything preconceived. For that reason, shamanism is closely connected with suffering. One must suffer the disintegration of one's own system of thought in order to perceive a new world in the higher space."
    -- Holger Kalweit

  3. #13
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    I would be happy to take part in a public debate with a scientist who disagrees with the issues I raise in my talk. This could take place online, or on Skype. My only condition is that it be conducted fairly, with equal time for both sides to present their arguments, and with an impartial moderator, agreed by both parties.
    That would be incredible to watch. Level playing field, no sound bites, and with some savvy audience immune to rhetorical tricks, and I already know who is going to come out on top.
    Keep walking. Just keep walking.

  4. #14
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    I heard Sheldrake speak in San Francisco last Fall, and it was very moving. He’s a really revolutionary thinker and a very nice person....I spoke to him and have written to him about AD w/d.
    Meds free since June 2005.

    "An initiation into shamanic healing means a devaluation of all values, an overturning of the profane world, a peeling away of inveterate handed-down notions of the world, liberation from everything preconceived. For that reason, shamanism is closely connected with suffering. One must suffer the disintegration of one's own system of thought in order to perceive a new world in the higher space."
    -- Holger Kalweit

  5. #15
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    TED removes TEDxWestHollywood license

    kurzweilai.net
    April 1, 2013
    thanks to nhne-pulse.org for the find

    TED has removed the license of TEDxWestHollywood for their planned “Brother, Can You Spare a Paradigm?” event, says the TEDxWestHollywood blog.

    The takedown was only a couple of weeks before the April 14 event (and after they had spent more than a year preparing), the blog says.

    In an email to Suzanne Taylor, the organizer of TEDxWestHollywood, a representative of TED outlined the objections: “And when we look at your speaker line-up, we see several people who promote — as fact — theories that are well outside what most scientists would accept as credible. … We disallow speakers who use the language of science to claim they have proven the truth of ideas that are speculative and which have failed to gain significant scientific acceptance.”

    Pseudoscience or suppression of radical ideas?

    So which specific speakers does TED object to? “The names of note they wanted us to qualify for them were Marianne Williamson, Russell Targ, Larry Dossey, and Marilyn Schlitz,” Taylor told KurzweilAI in an email.
    ….

    Nonetheless, the newly renamed “ExTEDWestHollywood” is moving ahead, Taylor said. “Speakers all are on board — miraculously — and energized.”

    A public dialogue needed

    “The current worldview needs a sea change to where we become a compassionate humanity, and taking care of one another, species wide, becomes the bottom line,” said Taylor. “This issue of what is or isn’t legitimate subject matter for TED could be the opening for the larger dialogue to loosen the hold on the culture of such a narrow, old, Newtonian, cause an effect perspective.
    ….

    Russell Targ speaks out

    “In cancelling the TEDx event in West Hollywood, it appears that I was accused of ‘using the guise of science’ to further spooky claims (or some such),” said physicist Dr. Russell Targ in “The debate about Rupert Sheldrake’s talk” on TED Conversations. (Targ was/is scheduled to speak on “The Reality of ESP: A Physicist’s Proof of Psychic Abilities” at ExTEDWestHollywood.)

    “People on [the TED Conversations] blog have asked what I was going to talk about . That’s easily answered. I was co-founder of a 23-year research program investigating psychic abilities at Stanford Research Institute. We were doing research and applications for the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, Air Force and Army Intelligence, NASA, and others.

    “In this $25 million program we used ‘remote viewing’ to find a downed Russian bomber in North Africa, for which President Carter commended us. We found a kidnapped U.S. general in Italy, and the kidnap car that snatched Patricia Hearst. We looked in on the US hostages in Iran, and predicted the immanent release of Richard Queen, who was soon sent to Germany. We described a Russian weapons factory in Siberia, leading to a U.S. congressional investigation about weakness in U.S/ security, etc.

    “We published our scientific findings in Nature, Proc. IEEE, Proc. AAAS, and Proc. American Institute of Physics. I thought a TED audience would find this recently declassified material interesting. And no physics would be harmed in my presentation.”

    ………………

    UPDATE: April 1, 2013

    TED has now posted “A note to the TED community on the withdrawal of the TEDxWestHollywood license” and has opened a discussion on this here. The note states that a TED-like experience should exclude “talks that use the language of science to present speculative claims as fact.”
    Meds free since June 2005.

    "An initiation into shamanic healing means a devaluation of all values, an overturning of the profane world, a peeling away of inveterate handed-down notions of the world, liberation from everything preconceived. For that reason, shamanism is closely connected with suffering. One must suffer the disintegration of one's own system of thought in order to perceive a new world in the higher space."
    -- Holger Kalweit

  6. #16
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    I used to love Ted. Same with Kurzweil, what he wrote and what he said. *Until* I realized what their real agenda is. Bestowing the good fruits of science upon themselves, the most privileged ones, and using the bad side of it to control the rest (us!). When you look at the Kurzweilianet site, it's one spooky, "mad scientist" run place. These are just a few examples;

    Non-invasive brain-to-brain interface: links between two brains. Direct communication between the brains of human and rat .... or between humans

    = let's use it in the battlefield first (by the fraudulent military-industrial-banking complex theocracy) *and* as the future form of societal control. The combo of pre-programming and conditioning will work great. On a side-note, it is perfectly obvious they already have it ready for years now, and, what they have now, is aready an order of magnitude more advanced.


    The real Limitless drug ("smart drug") = The Prozac Ultimata

    Even more of the Brave New World-like control, Aldous Huxley's Somnia to the max. And methinks that the theocratic "elites" won't touch it even with a ten-foot pole. "We", the commons, can have our psych drugs, GMO food, vaccines and more. After all, there are "too many of us" as they say in their "scientific" Malthusian papers for years now; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsAracLBCxI


    Can an algorithm write a better news story than a human reporter?

    Ok, *who* is going to create the algorithms? Now there will be no need to pay off a corrupted journalist to write the expected piece (or hit-piece), no need to threaten the honest one to do the same.



    I've always loved science. But not in this specific form; dehumanizingly slickish, egocentric, used for all wrong purposes.

    But, their entire empire, fed by the fradulent FRS (most countries have their own "FRS"/central bank, too) is crumbling, so they fight back. They try to attack what they consider the most powerful weapon against them and their schemes --- > knowledge = people learning *the truth*.

    And a funny thing, not even long ago, I'd be sitting on the other side of the barricade, entrenched. But not any more.
    Keep walking. Just keep walking.

  7. #17
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    Dear ted, is it ‘bad science’ or a ‘game of thrones’?

    By Deepak Chopra, MD. FACP, Stuart Hameroff, MD, Menas C. Kafatos, Ph.D., Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D., and Neil Theise, MD
    Huffington Post
    April 18, 2013
    thanks to nhne-pulse.org for the find


    One of modern science’s great strengths is that any questionable finding dies a quick death if it’s invalid. The safeguards are mainly two: Your new finding must be repeatable when other researchers run the same experiments, and peer review by qualified scientists subjects every new finding to microscopic scrutiny. So it surprised the millions of admirers of TED, whose conferences attract wide attention to new, cutting-edge ideas, when that organization decided to practice semi-censorship.
    ….

    What the militant atheists and self-described skeptics hate is a certain brand of magical thinking that endangers science. In particular, there is the bugaboo of “non-local consciousness,” which causes the hair on the back of their necks to stand on end. A layman would be forgiven for not grasping why such an innocent-sounding phrase could spell danger to “good science.”

    The reason becomes clear when you discover that non-local consciousness means the possibility that there is mind outside the human brain or even outside material reality, that a conscious mind is in some way intrinsic to the quantum universe, and that we all are quantum entangled. One of us (Menas Kafatos) has devoted many years of research on the connection of quantum theory to consciousness. Four of us (Stuart Hameroff, Rudolph Tanzi, Neil Thiese, and Deepak Chopra) have devoted years of research to neuroscience, clinical studies and consciousness.
    ….

    Anderson’s letter is cautiously couched on the one hand — he takes pains to divorce his warnings from outright bans and acknowledges that the dividing line between real science and pseudoscience is hardly sharp and clear. But the dose of cold water is frigid enough, since his red-flag subjects include “healing” of any kind (his quotation marks) and using neuroscience to explain various mind-body puzzles (“a lot of goofballs” inhabit this area).

    TED finds itself on the wrong side of censorship, semi- or not. But this fracas actually opens a window. The general public — and many working scientists — isn’t aware that consciousness has become a hot topic spanning many disciplines, and its acceptability is demarked by age. Older, established scientists tend to be dead set against it, while younger, upcoming scientists are fascinated. There are any number of books on “the conscious universe.” There are peer-reviewed journals on consciousness and worldwide conferences on how to link mind and brain (the so-called “hard problem”).
    ….

    Freedom of thought is going to win out, and certainly TED must be shocked by the avalanche of disapproval Anderson’s letter has met with. The real grievance here isn’t about intellectual freedom but the success of militant atheists at quashing anyone who disagrees with them. Their common tactic is scorn, ridicule, and contempt. The most prominent leaders, especially Richard Dawkins, refuse to debate on any serious grounds, and indeed they show almost total ignorance of the cutting-edge biology and physics that has admitted consciousness back into “good science.”
    ….

    One of the authors of this article (Stuart Hameroff) recently gave a TEDx talk in Tucson where he made the point that critics of the possibility of consciousness outside the brain cannot explain consciousness inside the brain. While neuroscience is at a loss, the notion of consciousness being based on finer scale, deeper order quantum effects in microtubules inside brain neurons (the Penrose-Hameroff ‘Orch OR model) has been boosted by recent discoveries of quantum resonances in microtubules, and anesthetic action on microtubules. Quantum entanglement could account for Rupert Sheldrake’s findings, and consciousness occurring outside the brain. Stuart Hameroff’s TEDx talk ‘The future of consciousness’ explains how this can scientifically happen. Should it be censored also?

    But the main flaw in TED’s position has been made abundantly clear. It isn’t the organizers’ job to exclude questionable science but a job shared between them and the audience. We’re all adults here, right? Any speculative thinking worthy of the name should make somebody in the audience angry, inspire others, and leave the rest to decide if a challenging idea should be thrown out or not. Any other approach casts shame upon tolerance, imagination, and science itself.

    Signed,

    Deepak Chopra, MD. FACP, ChopraFoundation.org

    Stuart Hameroff, MD, Professor of Anesthesiology and Psychology, Director, Center for Consciousness Studies, The University of Arizona, quantumconsciousness.org

    Menas C. Kafatos, Ph.D., Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor in Computational Physics, Director, Center of Excellence, Chapman University, [email protected]

    Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D., Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard University, Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital

    Neil Theise, MD, Professor, Pathology and Medicine, (Division of Digestive Diseases) Beth Israel Medical Center — Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, neiltheise.com


    nhne-pulse.org/ted-censors-alternative-speakers
    Meds free since June 2005.

    "An initiation into shamanic healing means a devaluation of all values, an overturning of the profane world, a peeling away of inveterate handed-down notions of the world, liberation from everything preconceived. For that reason, shamanism is closely connected with suffering. One must suffer the disintegration of one's own system of thought in order to perceive a new world in the higher space."
    -- Holger Kalweit

  8. #18
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    Freedom of thought is going to win out, and certainly TED must be shocked by the avalanche of disapproval Anderson’s letter has met with. The real grievance here isn’t about intellectual freedom but the success of militant atheists at quashing anyone who disagrees with them. Their common tactic is scorn, ridicule, and contempt. The most prominent leaders, especially Richard Dawkins, refuse to debate on any serious grounds, and indeed they show almost total ignorance of the cutting-edge biology and physics that has admitted consciousness back into “good science.”
    This.
    Keep walking. Just keep walking.

  9. #19
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    TED wrote back, and Chopra, Hameroff, et al. wrote back again –

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak...722,b=facebook


    Huff Post – not known for its interest in spirituality, consciousness, or parapsychology – devoted a huge amount of space to this. I think you’re seeing history in the making, folks. This is a bloodless revolution. A great big positive shift.


    excerpts –

    In 2002 I spoke directly after Dawkins, mounted a vigorous riposte to his main points, and received a standing ovation. His talk appears in full at TED's website. Mine doesn't, nor can it be found with a Google search. I'd be grateful to see it restored as a gesture of TED's lack of censorship.

    -- Deepak Chopra


    I am a quantum physicist, cosmologist and Earth scientist, so I know these issues. We are now facing a grand revolution in scientific thought, through the dialogue between quantum theory, consciousness work, biology, and philosophy and psychology. TED has a great opportunity to help advance this transformation. I hope you do.

    -- Menas C. Kafatos


    I begin my reply with a quote from Nobel laureate, geneticist Barbara McClintock, as reported by Evelyn Fox Keller in A Feeling for the Organism:

    "There's no such thing as a central dogma into which everything will fit. It turns out that any mechanism you can think of, you will find -- even if it's the most bizarre kind of thinking. Anything . . . even if it doesn't make much sense, it'll be there. . . . So if the material tells you, 'It may be this,' allow that. Don't turn it aside and call it an exception, an aberration, a contaminant. . . . That's what's happened all the way along the line with so many good clues."

    Of course, not every scientist is a Barbara McClintock - who boldly and at great sacrifice to her own career prospects (until the "rediscovery" of her work late in life and the awarding of her Nobel) - kept on looking for those exceptions and aberrations and wove her hypotheses to encompass those most interesting "good clues." Most scientists, including some of those who have made breakthrough discoveries, carefully till the soil of our well-worn, well established paradigms. Others - like Sheldrake and Hancock - do their work by focusing on the bits left out: the exceptions, the aberrations.

    -- Neil Theise


    If the history of science teaches us anything, it is that our most fundamental ideas about the world are probably wrong.

    -- Chris Fields


    The consciousness studies community, made up of members from nearly every branch of science and academia, would like TED's anonymous scientific advisory board to be aware that the study of consciousness requires a new form of consideration: unlike traditional scientific subject matter we are obliged to look at awareness and experience as non-reductive processes and this requires an openness to exploring new methodologies, new forms of logic, new truth claims, and a different understanding of what constitutes proof. Additionally, we are finding it necessary to embrace the notion that many different perspectives and ideologies may be harboring a portion of the truth about consciousness….

    Perhaps TED would consider including members of our community on its advisory panel so as not to repeat the current misunderstanding and discord.

    -- Christopher Holvenstot


    Have you read Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of a Scientific Revolution?"

    -- Kathleen D. Noble


    I just want to take a moment to acknowledge this group. It is great to see such active collaboration and contributions from everyone. Such a united effort is what is needed to really get this field more on a level playing field with mainstream science, and it is rather fortunate timing that this TED debate is arising now to bring this topic more into the spotlight.

    -- Theresa Bullard


    TED asks, "Imagine a speaker arguing, say, that eating five Big Macs a day could prevent Alzheimer's," as an example where a science board would feel justified in excluding that topic as a TEDx talk. The claim flies in the face of common sense so no further examination is necessary. Right?

    But what if there were scientifically valid experiments published in mainstream, peer-reviewed journals that supported the apparently outrageous assertion? What if the experiments were repeatable and observed in independent laboratories over decades? What if the underlying phenomena were reported outside the laboratory throughout recorded history, and across all cultures, and by a broad range of university scientists and scholars? Would that topic, however challenging it may seem, still be excluded from TED? How many credible challenges are required before the balance tips between knee-jerk exclusion of bold and risky ideas vs. timid and safe pabulum?

    This is exactly the situation for a class of consciousness-related phenomena. They are labeled telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. These phenomena do challenge naive assumptions about the relationship between mind and matter, but there is no rational justification for continuing to exclude this line of research if TED is really interested in promoting genuine science. Empiricism must trump theory, otherwise it's no longer science that's being defended. It's dogma.

    Best wishes,

    Dean Radin PhD
    Co-Editor-in-Chief, Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing
    Chief Scientist, Institute of Noetic Sciences


    I do not understand, on one hand we have experimental proof that two quantum mechanically entangled particles communicate with 100000 times the velocity of light, and on the other hand we have faith that nothing can move faster than the velocity of light.

    -- Anirban Bandyopadhyay
    Meds free since June 2005.

    "An initiation into shamanic healing means a devaluation of all values, an overturning of the profane world, a peeling away of inveterate handed-down notions of the world, liberation from everything preconceived. For that reason, shamanism is closely connected with suffering. One must suffer the disintegration of one's own system of thought in order to perceive a new world in the higher space."
    -- Holger Kalweit

  10. #20
    Founder Luc's Avatar
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    At the time of my writing this post, the top comment under the video is this;

    The Wikipedia situation is definitely far from objective, that's the truth. I have filing incorrect information on their Buddhist page and tried to correct it only to find it later back to incorrect in reflecting a more materialist view on Buddhism.

    I don't know the background for this specific situation, though what I know for sure from my own experience, is that every time I tried to edit SSRIs-related pages on Wikipedia (withdrawal, etc.) it was swiftly changed to the faulty, Big Pharma-driven previous version of it, no matter how many reliable sources I would use to prove my point.



    Keep walking. Just keep walking.

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