TED Talks resident Pseudoskeptics censor Rupert Sheldrake and Graham Hancock TED Talks videos

Not long ago, I found out that TED Talks had agreed to have Rupert Sheldrake's and Graham Hancock's Youtube videos of their TED talk taken down, and were both accused of pseudocience.
I will post Rupert Sheldrake's and Graham Hancock's refutations to this attack on their integrity below, but I think this drama is very telling about the state of things. It reveals to me how traditional religion and scientism are hand in hand with censoring open-minded inquiry into reality.

Graham Hancock, for example, in his talk, brings to peoples attention about the so-called war on drugs, which includes a war on psychedelics and the war on the freedom to explore our consciousness, and rightly emphasizes that if we are not sovereign over our own minds then we are not free in any way whatsoever.

Rupert Sheldrake deconstructs scientism meticulously, going over point by point its basic 'sacred tenets'. This seems to have ruffled some feathers. The two 'skeptics' behind their videos being taken down have been identified as Jerry Coyne and PZ Meyer.

This is not the first time that Rupert Sheldrake's theories have courted controversy. His work was slammed in the magazine, Nature, as being fit for burning! 
John Maddox. Stevens cites a quote from Maddox, Nature's editor, twelve years afterwards, which sums it up nicely: “Dr Sheldrake is putting forward magic instead of science and that can be condemned in exactly the language that the Popes used to condemn Galileo, and for the same reason: it is heresy.”




Please read Graham Hancock's and Rupert Sheldrakes responses to TED talks for the disrespectful and injust way they have treated as their guest speakers, and they both challenge TED to a debate with chosen scientists:

Open for discussion: Graham Hancock and Rupert Sheldrake from TEDxWhitechapel

This drama coincides with stuff I have been thinking about of the lst few weeks, and also planning on doing a post about this exploration. I thought of the theme of how the emergence of modern science starts with Galileo and his tele~scope, This instrument is an aid for his nervous system to explore deeper into outer space. What he discovered verified the findings of Copernicus, but this new information caused much controlversy. The scientists of the time, natural philosophers, refused to even look through gelileo's telescope, and he was put under house arrest, and his information suppressed.

Later in the timeline of dis~covery came the micro~scope, allowing the nervous system to delve deeper into matter, and then in the early nineteenth century we have beginnings of modern physics leading up to the gigantic tools used to fathom subatomic matter.

So I was thinking about this, and thought "so what now?" Well
now the central mystery in physics, and science in general is consciousness. What 'tool' do we have for delving into 'that'?..............................Oh, I know, psychedelics! But unlike the other tools which are external instruments for the extension of our nervous systems to explore reality, the psychedelic we place in our mouths, chew and ingest into our innards.

However, science, or scientism has basically dismissed this tool, or sacred medicine, and called any forthcoming experience a 'chemical ride', 'delusion', 'hallucination', or 'psychosis' --negative terms which more reflect the current physicalist worldview which states there is only matter, and the world out there is unconscious, and insentient, and that we are virtual robots who are skin bags of electrical and chemical interactions, and that our brain produces consciousness. In this scenario any psychedelic experience is just 'distortion of reality'.

So the impasse is the distrusting of direct exploration of consciousness, and conscious nature and universe! The impasse is the objectification of reality and even of consciousness, so that direct experience of consciousness is not to be trusted, because it cannot be measured which according to this worldview is not 'objective' and therefore is pseudoscience.

We have been made to feel that our consciousness itself is illusionary by physicalist neuroscientists. This situation is both extremely sad and extremely funny at the same time.  For all we really know is we are conscious beings.

People like Richard Dawkins who reveal an interest in psychedelic experience but will not, are a modern version of the philosophers who refused to look through Galileo's telescope. Dawkins even stated that even if he did have a psychedelic trip, he most likely would keep to his existing views about nature and reality.