What is Noetic Science? It will soon have millions of followers, so it pays to have it on your radar. The Institute of Noetic Sciences defines it this way:
The word “noetic” comes from the ancient Greek nous, for which there is no exact equivalent in English. It refers to “inner knowing,” a kind of intuitive consciousness—direct and immediate access to knowledge beyond what is available to our normal senses and the power of reason.
What are ‘Noetic Sciences’?
Noetic sciences are explorations into the nature and potentials of consciousness using multiple ways of knowing—including intuition, feeling, reason, and the senses. Noetic sciences explore the “inner cosmos” of the mind (consciousness, soul, spirit) and how it relates to the “outer cosmos” of the physical world.
If that is too wordy, here is a “typical person” trying to describe it:
So I came across ‘noetic science’ for the first time in the new Dan Brown novel and thought to expand my knowledge of this obscure branch of science by googling it…. Apparently, noetic science is a branch of science in which “scientists are trying to measure things we’ve long regarded as immeasurable, like prayer, intuition, or maybe even life after death, with the help of evidence-based research and peer review”. Now tell me, how do you measure prayer and/or its efficacy thereof? Really!!
A quick answer to the question: “Now tell me, how do you measure prayer and/or its efficacy thereof?” You measure it by asking, “Why won’t God heal amputees?” As soon as you pray to heal an amputation you can plainly see that prayer has no effect. This page explains why. Or you can perform scientific experiments – there have been dozens.
Or you can understand what is actually happening when people pray, as demonstrated in these two videos:
As you can see, prayer is a superstition, nothing more. We can perform more and more experiments to prove that over and over again, but it is not going to change anything. Prayer is a superstition just like “black cats cause bad luck” is a superstition. We could perform experiments on black cats for decades but nothing will change – the experiments will all demonstrate that black cats have no effect on the outcome of future events. At some point this obvious fact becomes conclusive to intelligent people, and there is no need for further study.
The following video offers an introduction to Noetic Science from the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Yes, Deepak Choprah appears, as you would expect, right after the introduction:
The Institude describes its activities in this way:
The institute explores consciousness from three perspectives:
(1) First-person perspective — Supporting individuals exploring and developing their own subjective consciousness (e.g., meditation and other spiritual practices). Emphasis on inner knowing and personal transformation.
(2) Second-person perspective — Exploring and supporting transformative relationships and intersubjective consciousness (e.g., compassionate dialogue, community building, a global wisdom society). Emphasis on transformative learning and collective wisdom.
(3) Third-person perspective — Gathering data about objective physiological correlates of consciousness (e.g., research using rigorous scientific protocols, including experiments in psi, mind-body healing, and subtle energies). Emphasis on scientific understanding.
If that sounds like “New Age” repackaged, you would be correct. This is the new New Age, and it will probably garner millions of supporters like New Age did. The fact that things like psi, mind-body healing, and subtle energies are easily debunked does not matter.
You can see the New Age/Spirituality/Religion angle in this article:
There’s an Institute of Noetic Science (IONS) near San Francisco, and it happens to be the subject of a chapter in a book I read last week, NPR religion reporter Barbara Bradley Haggerty’s excellent Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality. Haggerty investigates the scientific underpinnings of psychic phenomena. One of her themes is this idea of entanglement — that the universe is somehow knitted together in ways that materialist science currently can’t explain and maybe never will. On a certain view, a religious one, the unifying factor is God. We’re unified with each other through Him, which is why minds can affect each other across vast distances. That’s the case for the elementary reason that, as in the Jewish prayer Shema, “the Lord is One” (Deuteronomy 6:4). That doesn’t mean just that there’s one God instead of two or three. Rather, God really is One. Somehow, there’s a unity to God that extends to the rest of creation. If we could see to the heart of reality, we would perceive that everything that seems to enjoy a separate existence from God is really nullified before Him.
Our minds are mostly shut to evidence of this unity — it would be overwhelming otherwise, infinitely so — but occasionally, with more sensitive people or sometimes under the influence of events, spiritual practices, or certain substances, intimations will make themselves felt.
Haggerty’s book just came out in May so obviously it’s not Brown’s source on this. Still, readers of The Lost Symbol will be interested to read Haggerty’s journalistic take on the subject. She visits IONS and interviews researchers who have documented the way, for example, married couples can produce measurable physiological effects in their partners by directing loving thoughts to them even if the two are in separate, totally sealed rooms. Somehow their minds, one might venture to say their souls, are entangled. One woman, a subject in the research, turns out to be psychically sensitive to an unusual degree.
Let’s say this were true – either the part about married couples or the part about a woman who is “psychically sensitive to an unusual degree”. Then it would be possible to win a million dollars by demonstrating the effect to James Randi:
It is a very simple and friendly process to win $1 million:
At JREF, we offer a one-million-dollar prize to anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event. The JREF does not involve itself in the testing procedure, other than helping to design the protocol and approving the conditions under which a test will take place. All tests are designed with the participation and approval of the applicant. In most cases, the applicant will be asked to perform a relatively simple preliminary test of the claim, which if successful, will be followed by the formal test. Preliminary tests are usually conducted by associates of the JREF at the site where the applicant lives. Upon success in the preliminary testing process, the “applicant” becomes a “claimant.”
Here James Randi explains how the challenge got started and how people can claim the prize:
Anyone with real ability could easily claim the money.
The million dollars will not be claimed by these people because Noetic Science is nonsense.