Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery (original: 2012; edição: 2013)

If the author was writing several thousand years ago before we had any of the modern science and trying to explain phenomena like genetic inheritance or memory then his metaphor of psychic resonance would probably be just as good as the competing magic theories but today, with what we know, this has got to be a joke. The author's snide remarks and confident claims are not backed by any evidence. The author appears to be angry he isn't treated seriously - I gave up my time to read this book in good faith as I never heard of his ideas before and I'm not convinced. ( )

Bland. ( )

I didn't read the whole thing. Still, I appreciated the point of view and the fact that someone is questioning scientific dogma. Even if some of his ideas are "out there", it's thought-provoking and we need more thought provokers! ( )

I didn't read the whole thing. Still, I appreciated the point of view and the fact that someone is questioning scientific dogma. Even if some of his ideas are "out there", it's thought-provoking and we need more thought provokers! ( )

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 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.

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