Rupert Sheldrake

Essential, for me, anyway: a scientist who outs reductive materialism in the sciences as an ideology, rather than a testable hypothesis, and suggests ways to test it. I was raised an atheist, and continue to feel that organized religion is basically superstition used as a form of social control. But as issues of ecology and the survival of natural systems began to seem more crucial to me, I began to wonder, is it really possible for people to fight with all their strength to "save" something show more that they don't believe is alive in the same way they believe themselves to be alive? That they don't really believe is as essential to their survival as their own body? If matter at the smallest level is dead, and the cosmos at the grandest scale is dead, and only humans are conscious, and that consciousness is reducible to a set of chemical and electrical impulses that could be replicated by a machine, so its vividness is basically an illusion, well, what meaning does "alive" have in a world like that? Not much. But many of us accept those hypotheses even though they contradict our own experience of ourselves and our world.

So I needed a scientist to say, there may be a way out of this trap, and you don't need to abandon science and retreat into some kind of untestable, irrational fantasy world in order to find it. And I'm extremely grateful. It's given me more hope than anything I can remember reading. show less

This is a book that mainstream scientists hate...

It just happens to present a coherent hypothesis that goes far toward resolving many unanswered questions.

Oh! It also has many suggestions for experiments to check its validity :-)

And, he makes a complex subject relatively easy to understand.

Sheldrake reminds us that much of what is taken for granted in popular scientific theory (the mechanical universe, the fixed laws of nature, materialism, the mind/body connection) is insightful but speculative. He asks some interesting questions, berates dogmatics, and finds some unexpected antecedents for his own theories, but fails to recognize that his key idea—‘morphic resonance’—is also speculative. Oops.

If you write a book about the afterlife or psychic abilities or anything considered "suspect" by a majority of scientists, you have to walk a narrow line. Either you end up being too scientific and overly dry or you write a nice piece of light reading that's mostly fluff. Sheldrake fails all around. The science is lousy and it's the most boring book you could ever read about telepathy. It's basically "I asked 50 people if they had ever felt like someone was looking at them from behind and 35 show more of them responded in the affirmative. As I mentioned in Chapter 2, one woman was sitting in class and felt that her boyfriend had entered the room and was looking in her direction. She turned around and he was." And so on and so on for page after page. I hate to review a book that I could only get through half of, but sometimes you just don't need to plow through a whole field of crap to know that your plow is in crap. show less