But despite all the knee-slapping, I predict that scientists (at least in Japan, China, India and Europe) will continue to pursue these subjects and serious consumers (like you and I) will continue to follow them.
We certainly will, Alamo-Girl! Certainly these matters are being actively studied now, and by some first-rate thinkers from around the world – particularly as you note Eastern Europe, China, India – though not notably by American thinkers.
In particular, the conjecture of the field nature of consciousness has been actively studied, and continues in development. The work of Evan Harris Walker, (The Physics of Consciousness) for example, is notable in this regard. Unfortunately for Walker, establishment science stiffed him whenever it didn’t undermine him. Refereed, peer-review journals rejected him, in so many words, because “he wasn’t doing science the way we think science ought to be done.”
I just have to say IMHO that is a very dangerous attitude as well as an unjust one.
Especially in light of earlier theoretical work in consciousness conducted by Karl Popper and John C. Eccles (see The Self and Its Brain, 1977). The main interest here is the evolution of mind. Popper rejected the physicalist/materialist view of mind or consciousness as an epiphenomenon of the electrochemical activity of the physical brain. He also rejected the view that, in the evolutionary process, mind arises first, and then evolves language. His striking conjecture is that language – or more broadly what he calls World 3 – the world of the contents of human thought plus the “products of the human mind” -- is the source, not the product of mind. Mind and self emerge from a sociological environment: “We are not born as selves; … but we have to learn to be selves.” This is evolution continued under the aspect of the human individual.
But what is the status of language or World 3 in this context? Wolfhart Pannenberg (in Toward a Theology of Nature, 1993) draws what seems to me an eminently reasonable conclusion:
“If the human mind arises first through language, then it is certainly conceivable that some feedback of the human mind on the development and use of language may occur, but language as such cannot simply be described any longer as a product of the mind. Otherwise, the emergence of the mind would be explained by a factor that itself takes its origin from mind. If the human mind first emerges through language, then in the origin of language there must be something prior to mind, but nevertheless also different from physical reality, since the distinction of the mind from physical reality is derived from it. The field, wherein the formation of language occurs, may be called a spiritual field. This does not seem inappropriate, because the terms “spiritual” and “spirit” should not be restricted to the religious life. There is a long-standing usage of the term “spirit” in relation to intellectual activities.”
Of course that’s easy for Pannenberg to say: He is Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Marburg. That is, he is a German theologian, and I suspect a Platonist to boot. In the German language, our English word “science” translates as Wissenschaft. Its meaning is very closely related to the Greek episteme, the totality of human knowledge.
But our American concept “science” is so much narrower than what is denoted by Wissenschaft.
For Wissenschaft embraces two main subdivisions: Naturwissenschaften (i.e., the natural sciences) and Geisteswissenschaften (i.e., the humanities: philosophy, literature, history, the arts, the “social sciences,” etc.). Thus the more accurate German translation of the English “science” is not Wissenschaft, but Naturwissenschaft. For us Americans, all the “Geist stuff” gets left out. (Geist is the German word for “spirit.”)
So while German or other thinkers within the cultural orbit of German science do not have any difficulty in understanding a consciousness field as a “spiritual” matter, this concept is extraordinarily off-putting to your average American scientist, and he will resist the idea with every fiber of his being.
As an upshot of such a cultural attitude (or prejudice -- in the literal sense of “pre-judgment”), American science seemingly becomes more and more narrowly isolated and confined to “specialties,” while the Europeans and Asians are able to generalize more global (potentially hugely liberating) concepts whose premises can be scientifically elaborated and experimentally tested by means of an integrative science approach.
In effect, this seems to have been Einstein’s approach. Probably the same could be said for Sir Isaac Newton. To my way of thinking, this is the way one must go on the road to truly great scientific breakthroughs.
Certainly we know that when posts on the work of Professor Raman and Attila Grandpierre – two theoretical researchers into the field nature of “collective” consciousness -- went up here last summer, the hue and cry that followed was ear-splitting. But in retrospect, it was all heat and no light….
IMHO American science runs the risk of increasing impoverishment, malnourishment, for lack of the pursuit of truly liberating ideas. Science elsewhere does not seem to be falling into this rut.
Just my two cents worth FWIW.