From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Jul 07 2000 - 23:13:45 MDT
At 02:41 PM 7/07/00 EDT, Nadia wrote:
>PS: For the record, I think Tipler is a crack-pot along the lines of Rupert
>Sheldrake.
I too assume that `morphogenetic fields' is a crackpot notion, and maybe
even incorrect :) , but I was startled by a quite impressive paper by
Sheldrake and a colleague in the latest number of the Journal of Scientific
Exploration. They closely observed a pooch for evidence that he responded
to his owner's intention to return home from work etc some kilometres
distant. The obvious cautions were undertaken - random returns (within a
window of a few hours), videotapes of the animal's behavior, blind judging,
etc. The graphs look quite compelling.
If this is substantiated, I doubt that it supports Sheldrake mysto fields -
but it does help to corroborate claims of long-distance non-inferential
information transfer. Since I have other reasons for taking this class of
possibility more seriously than, say, Eliezer (with his sniping at
`telekinesis'), I'll be interested to see if the study can be replicated
successfully.
Damien Broderick
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