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Michio Kaku, The Future of the Mind

Freeminds

Bitter defrocked apostate
Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist; a proper one, not a sad old bullshitter like L Ron Hubbard. He's a professor of physics, and writes accessible, mainstream books in this field. You may already know 'Physics of the Impossible', or you might know of his blog.

In the newly published ‘The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind', Kaku reviews the technology now being used at various university hospitals and research centres to map the brain, to understand the genes at work in our brains, etc... while making it all comprehensible to the ordinary Joe. It's just so much more plausible than Scientology's claims, and failures to deliver.

Along the way, Kaku shows that scientists have learned more about the brain in the last 15 years than in all of human history. Whatever you think of Hubbard, you have to admit that he's been dead and gone for almost twice that. Basically, if you want an owner's manual for your brain, poor old Hubbard's daydreams are looking very, very dated now.
 
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Udarnik

Gold Meritorious Patron
It's worse than that, Freeminds. I'm a bit of an amateur historian of science, and the feature that strikes me about Hubbard's writings is that he stopped reading an absorbing new scientific discoveries into his worldview sometime in the 1930s or before. Take, for example, the fear of pneumonia. That's the boogey man he threatens you with upon reading the OT materials. When Tubs was a young boy, the Spanish Flu epidemic hit. More people died from pneumonia after the flu than died from the flu itself. Pneumonia was a constant fear in those days before anti-biotics.

Today, I snerk at those warnings, because all a case of pneumonia would do is create more business for the hated Big Pharma companies.

What I'm saying is that Hubbard's writings are not just out of date since the 1970s and 80s, they were already out of date scientifically IN the 1970s and 80s. SCience has had more like 50 - 60 years to move beyond Tubs than the 30 years since his death would indicate.
 
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Dean Blair

Silver Meritorious Patron
It's worse than that, Freeminds. I'm a bit of an amateur historian of science, and the feature that strikes me about Hubbard's writings is that he stopped reading an absorbing new scientific discoveries into his worldview sometime in the 1930s or before. Take, for example, the fear of pneumonia. That's the boogey man he threatens you with upon reading the OT materials. When Tubs was a young boy, the Spanish Flu epidemic hit. More people died from pneumonia after the flu than died from the flu itself. Pneumonia was a constant fear in those days before anti-biotics.

Today, I snerk at those warnings, because all a case of pneumonia would do is create more business for the hated Big Pharma companies.

What I'm saying is that Hubbard's writings are not just out of date for the 1970s and 80s, they were already out of date scientifically IN the 1970s and 80s. SCience has had more like 50 - 60 years to move beyond Tubs than the 30 years since his death would indicate.

I totally agree. Many of Hubbard's statements have proven ridiculous since his original assertions. Statements such as "Smoking cures cancer." Lectures about implant stations and civilizations on Venus and Mars where Ron was almost run over by a freight train. Hubbard's writings about Hydrogen bomb explosions on volcanoes that didn't exist 75 million years ago.

With the information age of computers Scientology and its beliefs can no longer stand up to real science.
 
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