Documents / FOIA release
This is a CIA JPRS translation, dated 1 January 1991, of an editorial roundtable written up by V.I. Shamshurin for the Moscow journal Sotsiologicheskiye Issledovaniya. Soviet scientists, physicians and philosophers discuss medicine and biology as sociohumanitarian sciences and the links between the natural and social sciences. One participant says public interest in parapsychology, UFOs and astrology reflects a human need for miracles during social crisis. He also criticizes parapsychology experiments and Uri Geller's performances.
“National Academy of Sciences”1 page
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## UNCLASSIFIED ## Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1991 Document 8 of 10 Page 6 12. I do not want to doubt the abilities of Geller or the necessity of investigating the depths of the human psyche, but at the same time it cannot be doubted that tricks are possible in such practices. The same Randy describes a case when young persons trained by him joined a collective at the Parapsychology Laboratory of Washington University, convinced the co-workers of this laboratory of their "'supernatural"' abilities and then at a press conference unmasked both this "'supernaturalness'" and the convictions and activities of the parapsychologists. 13. Fourthly, and now from the truly philosophical viewpoint (that is, from the metaphysical and metaspiritual viewpoint divorced from the concrete realities of our life), here the problem arises of the relationship of the spirit and the body, the psychic and the physi(ologi)cal, the mind and matter. Again the old ''accursed'' problem arises of what was first-matter or mind? Clearly, on the abstract level the positing of this question makes no sense. Clearly, for philosophy as well as for life, science, practice and medicine, both are important, although in concrete situations, at specific historical stages and in specific concepts (including in sociology!) preference can be given to one or the other. The idealistic system of Hegel did not prevent him from disclosing the development dialectics of the conscience. The dualistic philosophical position of the Australian neurophysiologist G. Eckles did not prevent him from investigating the ion mechanisms for the transmission of nerve impulses (he received the Nobel Prize for this). Profound materialistic convictions also do not prevent the carrying out of scientific research and the achieving of outstanding results. However, up to the present no philosopher has been able to reduce the entire diversity of the world to just the spiritual or just the corporal. For this reason, of course, we do have grounds for putting medicine and biology into a sociohumanitarian context. 14. I.I. Sventitskiy: I would like to examine the relationship of social and natural sciences from the following position. The exacerbation of the global natural scientific, social and production problems clearly has a common prime cause. The essence of this is that man in his activities has not considered the important laws of nature. One of these is the energy extremality of self-organizing and, particularly, living systems. The latter in their development spontaneously strive for the fullest utilization of the free (accessible) energy under the existing external conditions. Modern achievements in the 1970s and 1980s in nonequilibrium thermodynamics (G. Nicolis, I. Prigogine), the physics of self-organization and evolution (V. Ebeling, R. Feistel) as well as ecological bioenergetics show that the structural organization of living systems and their functional relations have a common energy extremality or bioenergetic purpose. An energy economicness of living nature can be
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 13 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.