(2017-09-11, 09:31 AM)Roberta Wrote: Listening right now, finding Sue Blackmore very frustrating so far. She's a charming lady and comes across very well, but is saying things that are misleading or not true. She just said if OBE's were real, then most science would have to be overthrown! Very scary sounding, but not true.
Yes, as we've noted in the past i
t's important to recall her history of dishonesty and the questionable tactics of skeptics in general.
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
I am pretty late to this party.
I had both her talk at SAND 2016 and her interview with Nicholls in the queue and finally got the time to go through them both.
She's indeed a nice lady, energetic and with a good sense of humor, but that's irrelevant.
What I found interesting is that she so emphatically claims that she's got it all figured out, OBEs, NDEs, and all other "paranormal" stuff ... and from the language alone ("paranormal", "supernatural") once can understand that she juggles this subject pretty poorly.
The most interesting part is that when pressed a little bit more about her claims (what Nicholls does in the interview with such grace) she immediately concedes that most of her arguments are ill conceived.
- if OBEs were true we'd have to throw away our physics... nope!
- dualism is untenable... who cares?! Just an appaling strawman
- one experiment on an epileptic subject trumps years of reaserch in OBEs and NDEs ... that's good science indeed! Bring it on.
Not to mention her dismissal of Sheldrake et al. based on her prejudices rather than research.
Given she's been in the field for almost 40 years I can't believe she's this sloppy and popular at the same time...
So, bottom line: she goes around book tours and conferences dismissing OBEs & C and when hard pressed she admits most of her objections don't hold water. Jeez, kudos for the integrity, Sue!
(This post was last modified: 2017-09-26, 02:02 PM by Bucky.
Edit Reason: lots of typos
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I've read through half of Blackmore's textbook on consciousness, and I must admit it is quite a good book, if you are careful in rejecting her obvious and tiresome materialistic bias. There was a thread on skeptiko where some forum members were trying to pin down her actual beliefs, and I was surprised that no one mentioned eliminative materialist. She is also of the opinion that free will is an illusion, by appealing to Daniel Wegner's research, and that the mind is an assembly of replicating memes, each battling for control, which goes even further than Dawkins' stark selfish gene theory. To her credit, she does represent dissenting opinions in brief, athough she heavily favors the views of eliminativists like Churchland and Dennet.
