This course called “Bionoetics” is designed inter alia to show that Sheldon may have a point here (!);

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_TQea0aOnE

Seekers are looking for knowledge and understanding. The universities and other official academic institutions claim, with much justification, to be the providers and arbiters of knowledge. Yet academia is so full of trendiness and vicious competition that it often leaves alone the big, interesting questions, the ones that impelled Einstein to say that a human being who has lost the ability to wonder is already half-dead.

Several other problems confound the area of third-level scholarly activity – that is, learning, teaching and research, in that order of priority. Education is taking a backseat to research; the recent British Browne report envisages dropping the state’s subvention of teaching altogether. The emphasis on “research” at the expense of teaching has meant that even undergraduate programs are now very hard to assemble as each teacher insists on teaching her micro-specialization. Moreover, scholars who might usefully have learned a variety of different subjects have been forced into academic blind alleys in order to maintain funding for a lab.

Were the results of current trends obviously an increase in finding and disseminating truth, there might indeed be a strong argument for the status quo. Yet what really seems to have happened is, first of all, a notorious and sometimes literally fatal bias in the results of critical medical trials toward the corporate funders of those trials; less dangerously, a drive toward huge facilities like CERN that means cutting-edge experimental science can be performed only in a vanishingly small set of locales; finally, an exponential increase in the data collected, which are then processed by statisticians at a vast expertise remove from the experimentalists. Ironically, most of the cutting-edge findings are locked away from their public funders in highly profitable privately owned journals with an opaque review process.

The results of these trends are peculiar. One is a blatant denial of Rutherford’s dictum “If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.”. While it is not necessary to go as far as the Nobel laureate physicist, a recent – peer-reviewed and published – meta-analysis of fmri neuroscience “findings” showed that fully half of them clearly involved specious statistical reasoning. Moreover, it does seem to be the case that the emphasis on data-driven science has contributed to the current satisfaction with “darkness” – dark energy, dark matter, dark non-coding areas of the genome, all assumedly to be sorted out by further number-crunching instead of advancing to a new paradigm.

Einstein’s childlike sense of wonder is surely a precondition for physics, and as such a basis for all the sciences. Likewise, those in biology should feel that their engagement with their discipline has emerged from a reverence for life; those in the informational sciences like computing should insist on an insatiable curiosity; those in the social sciences should feel that their goal is ultimately understanding their apparent innermost urges to be often an almost mechanical result of forces within their societies.

Why Bionoetics?

· The convergence occurring between science, particularly physics, and ancient teachings abut creation from a point, the fact that the cosmos seems to show design in “fine tuning” and much else, invites the prospect of integrating science and religion in one “Magisterium”. With that enters the possibility of taking on board the higher achievements of the arts and humanities, which – all together- is the content of this course.

· True knowledge is objective, at least in the sense of being consensual to the point of being “exigent”, to compelling the knower to accommodate it. In any case, the raw expression of such knowledge – be it mathematical, moral, or spiritual – is psychologically prior to its explanation in terms of the mental operations required to understand it. Indeed, in the case of quantum mechanics and other such disciplines, it seems to be the case that our cognition cannot encompass the valid operations by which undoubtedly true knowledge is generated. Thus, the category of the “noetic” is introduced to propose a category of knowledge higher than the “cognitive”, which is expressed in terms of transparent mental operations.

· As a cognitive scientist the writer is aware of the radical nature of this move. The new term “Bionoetics”, coined by the author in 2007, is the study of how we biological creatures yet have access to objective knowledge. Bionoetics extends the analysis already undertaken by those who study codes in biology, and has its own vocabulary with which the natural world is parsed.

· The view that stresses a teleology in nature, and that attempts to describe all its phenomena with this theme in mind, does not conflict with best practice in science; in fact, particularly in biology, it results in a sense-giving explanatory framework and informative, testable hypotheses

· The most elliptical, economical and veridical description of the physical world in mathematics. The most elliptical, economical and veridical description of the mind is cognitive science, with its vocabulary of schemes, recursion, symbols and so on. The most elliptical, economical and veridical description of our being-in-the world is the concepts of intention, freedom, joy, and self-transcendence; in short, folk psychology.

· There is a level of description of every area of human activity that is logically and psychologically prior to how that description is processed. So we have an area called “physics” and also an area called “politics”. To eschew participation in the political sphere as an activity toward the betterment of man is itself a political decision; our age is full of backdoors to achieve this end while pretending one has not done so.

This course is oriented toward graduates from degrees who have felt certain burning questions in themselves remain unanswered by their studies at a conventional institute. Let us look first at a few such from some of the sciences;
PHYSICS

Do the Copenhagen and ontological interpretations of wave-function breakdown reflect different psychological dispositions, or are they in principle formally distinguishable?

Why is there so little progress to a grand unified theory that string theory is starting to be derided?

Is there really an external ordering process in the cosmos, one labelled “God” by proponents of intelligent design?

What have the chaoplexity sciences actually wrought?

Can information really be lost in black holes?
BIOLOGY

Why was Darwinian evolutionary theory accepted even before there was a plausible theory of genetics, and is this premature acceptance underlying the intelligent design debate?

Does the very limited success of the human genome project imply that we need a new theory of symbol systems in nature, encompassing gene expression all the way to natural language?

What is the relationship between diet, metabolism, thermodynamics, and biochemical pathway?
THE INFORMATIONAL SCIENCES

Why cannot we parse any complete natural language after a half-century of trying?

Will quantum computing change our notion of computability?

How far can the notion of information be extended as an explanatory tool, or, as in the case of Murray Gell-Mann, a moral imperative?
PSYCHOLOGY

Is consciousness best regarded as a property of the cosmos, or an epiphenomenon of mental processing?

Does this also go for emotion?

Is there any physiological basis for meditation?

Are there formal limits to any attempted scientific formalization of mind and/or if such a formalization was achieved, would anyone even understand it? Many math theorems are now too complicated to be checked by a person.
SOCIAL SCIENCES

Is there a real progression evident from feudalism to democratic republics?

Is a caliphate-type theocracy desirable, given its undoubted capacity to give stability?

What is the relationship between science, society, and religion that best does justice to all?

Are there objective rules in art, or is it all personal preference?

http://creativecommons.org/science Perhaps a little disappointing given the cc hype

http://www.openinventionnetwork.com/ – good link to patent attacks

http://daviswiki.org/LUGOD Linux/Gnu fans

http://keionline.org/ “Knowlege ecology” Good, informative

http://apply.fundscience.org/about.html small projects a bit suspect

http://sciflies.org/project_list.php?view=all small projects a bit suspect but less so

http://www.righttoresearch.org/ for students and very good

http://thirdreviewer.com/ general comments

http://roar.eprints.org/ is reprints free

http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/ similar – Stevan Harnad, who pioneered “skywriting” is here!

http://foresight.org/ as it says on frontier tech with example http://opensourcesensing.org/

http://speakscience.org/ better still includes videos

http://okfn.org/ good = open knowledge, has tools

http://okfn.org/okcon/2010/ open nlj conferences some ste

http://www.biotorrents.net/browse.php loads of data incl astrophysics

http://www.mendeley.com/ soc netw for sci w tools

http://colabscience.com/ collaborations parallel scientific

http://corp.kaltura.com/ video

Biology and Biomedical Applications

http://p2pfoundation.net/Product_Hacking Hardware and has real sites as links

http://blog.stodden.net/A pioneer speaks

http://www.mindthehealthgap.org/ great idea neglected diseases

http://openpcr.org/ Good PCR tools

http://www.synthesis.cc/ a bit dangerous and very good indeed – rob carlson

http://www.yale.edu/macmillan/igh/ seems “open source” pharma?

http://www.myelinrepair.org/

http://www.sagebase.org/ well worked out organization for biomed apps

http://www.collaborativedrug.com/ well worked out good idea

http://www.pipra.org/ energy as well as biomed help – – cool

http://pinkarmy.org/ breast cancer etc – good and important

http://diybio.org/ what it says – is a bit suspect

http://exponentialbiosciences.com/ suspect

http://www.pearlbiotech.com/buy/ real

http://www.polonator.org/ open sequencing

Cog Sci/Neuroscience

http://thirdreviewer.com/neuroscience/ comments

http://opensourcecognitivescience.wordpress.com/ gone-ish

The following are all pretty good in this category;

Neurevolution

Mind Hacks

Neuroscience-Net Home Page

Brains

neurodudes

Talking Brains

ScienceBlogs : Brain & Behavior

Cognitive Daily : About

Deric Bownds’ MindBlog: Correlation of conscious perception with synchronization of neural activity across cortical areas.

Chemistry

http://www.chemhacker.com/ pretty real

http://chemwiki.ucdavis.edu/

OPEN SCIENCE SITES; GENERAL RESOURCES

Science Commons

Synthetic Biology

PLoS ONE : Publishing science, accelerating research

Nature Network

3quarksdaily

OpenHelix Blog

Open Humanities Press

Cognitive Daily : About

Neurevolution

Mind Hacks

Brains

neurodudes

Talking Brains

ScienceBlogs : Brain & Behavior

ScienceBlogs

Neuroscience-Net Home Page

Skeptic: Home: The Skeptics Society & Skeptic magazine

Deric Bownds’ MindBlog: Correlation of conscious perception with synchronization of neural activity across cortical areas.

TOOLKITS

Deferential Geometry – beta

Main Page – OpenWetWare

Welcome to the OpenEEG project

Connotea: free online reference management for clinicians and scientists

UsefulChem » home

ChemBark

Reference SNP(refSNP) Cluster Report: rs41279541

More resources

http://www.openscience.org/

http://arxiv.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_peer_review

http://www.theopensourcescienceproject.com/

http://okfn.org/

http://www.mindthehealthgap.org/

http://okfn.org/okcon/2010/

http://www.biotorrents.net/browse.php

http://www.mendeley.com/

http://thirdreviewer.com/

http://thirdreviewer.com/neuroscience/

http://colabscience.com/

http://openpcr.org/

http://speakscience.org/

http://www.chemhacker.com/

http://p2pfoundation.net/Product_Hacking

http://www.polonator.org/

http://www.righttoresearch.org/

http://roar.eprints.org/

http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/

http://sciflies.org/project_list.php?view=all

http://pinkarmy.org/

http://www.pearlbiotech.com/buy/

http://foresight.org/

http://opensourcesensing.org/

http://www.yale.edu/macmillan/igh/

http://keionline.org/

http://www.myelinrepair.org/

http://www.myelinrepair.org/

http://www.sagebase.org/

http://www.collaborativedrug.com/

http://www.pipra.org/

http://www.openinventionnetwork.com/

http://chemwiki.ucdavis.edu/

http://daviswiki.org/LUGOD

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?isbn=9780226028552

http://blog.stodden.net/

http://creativecommons.org/science