A Conscious Universe? – Dr Rupert Sheldrake

[Music] I'm going to speak about consciousness starting from a completely different point of view I'm not starting with the brain I'm not starting with saraberry centric view of consciousness but with the the bigger picture it's been taken for granted by almost every civilization and traditional society that there are many forms of consciousness in the universe not just ours and not just those of animals other animals so it's been often assumed that the entire universe is conscious and this these this view of consciousness doesn't try and tie it all down to particular regions of the brain or interactions or electrical impulses going from one bit to another it sees consciousness in a completely different way and the reason why people in all these cultures think that there are many forms of consciousness beyond our own is because they experienced them through mystical experiences through altered states of consciousness through spiritual practices through psychedelics traditionally taken in a number of cultures around the world people have the experience of being in contact with the greater consciousness than their own when Sir Alastair Hardy in the 1960s started the religious experience Research Unit in Oxford he was asking people in Britain if they'd had experiences that seemed to involve a conscious presence greater than their own mystical experiences he was astonished as thousands of reports poured in it turned out these are much more common than anyone had previously thought most people don't talk about them because they were they're shy to do so they're afraid they'd be classified as mentally ill or something like that and but recent surveys have shown that as many as 50% of the population have had experiences of other kinds of reality near-death experiences spontaneous mystical experiences including ones that occur in childhood and other kinds of altered states of consciousness which suggest that their consciousness is part of something later than themselves now in in ancient Greece they had the Eleusinian mysteries most of the the the culture there was influenced by this kind of mystery cult of which involved in initiation in a cave which involved taking psychoactive substances we don't know what they were but this was a pervasive feature of Greek philosophy and Plato in his book the tamir's talks about the conscious universe hmm what he says is this world came to be in very truth a living creature with soul and reason a single visible living creature containing within itself all living things whose nature is of the same order this is a vision of the entire cosmos as a living being a living organism and this kind of view was in inherited by medieval philosophers in in Europe in the universities and in the Cathedral schools they were also influenced very much by the philosophy of Aristotle who thought that all living beings have souls the soul is the form of the body it's what shapes the body and it's what attracts our being towards its end point a corner as it germinates into an oak seedling is pulled towards the material form of an oak tree by the soul of the oak so plants have souls animals have souls the planets have souls the Stars have souls according to this view in fact the Greeks including Plato called the Stars and the planets and the Sun the visible gods and indeed we still call the planets by the names of the gods and goddesses Venus Mars Mercury and so on so in medieval Europe this was the standard world view there theologians like st. Thomas Aquinas integrated this Greek view particularly Aristotle's view with Christian theology to produce a view an animistic view of nature nature is alive the earth is alive planets and stars are alive they're conscious beings whole universe is a conscious being animals and plants have souls and the human rational mind is embedded in a level of the human soul which relates us to plants with shaping our body the vegetative soul shapes our bodies and underlies regeneration and wound healing the animal soul that we have we share with animals gives us our animal instincts and emotions like fear hunger thirst sexual desire and so on but the rational mind is that which is specifically human and to do with conscious thought of a language and reason and that was the standard view in the Middle Ages now the reason I'm saying all this is because it's important to realize what a completely radical break the 17th century mechanistic revolution in science was with everything that had gone before in our own culture and in all others in the 17th century the Scientific Revolution was a revolution precisely because it denied these traditional views for the founders of modern science nature was not a living organism it was a machine animals and plants were not living organisms they were Sheens automata unconscious inanimate automata the human body was a machine and in the vision of Rene Descartes who's founded this mechanistic philosophy most explicitly the whole universe is made of inanimate matter which works mechanically by pushing by being pushed from the past through physical mechanical causes the stars and planets and mechanical objects made of unconscious matter the Earth's an unconscious object our body is the animal bodies our plants are the only things that were not a mechanical and unconscious in the universe were God angels and human minds basically what Descartes did was D animate the whole of nature drain the soul out of the whole of nature say that all was left in nature was inanimate matter but outside nature were God angels and human mind and God was supposed to have created the world machine in the first place by being a brilliant engineer and mathematician I pressed the start button and then it was all supposed to go on more or less automatically thereafter so we have an idea of completely autonomous unconscious mechanical universe were the only role for God left who being to start it off and to interact with human minds which were the only and non-material things left in the universe this is Cartesian dualism and it dominated science for the first two or three centuries of its existence and it created three splits raelia split between religion and science religion got God angels and human minds and morality science got the entire physical universe including the human body it created a split between mind and body in ourselves that our minds were somehow utterly separate from our bodies in it but interacted with them in a way that was profoundly mysterious he thought it happened in the pineal gland modern Cartesians think it happens in the cerebral cortex it's basically the same theory just moved a couple of inches and the it also created a split between man and the animals we have rational conscious minds and purposes animals don't they're just machines therefore we can treat them as cruelly as we like in vivisection experiments we can grow them in factories for factory farming they're just mechanisms that's the view which dominated science right up until the 20th century but there was another movement within science in the 19th century science and philosophy which where people tried to go beyond this dualistic view a lot of people felt it's to have two completely different kinds of thing doesn't make sense there should be just one reality so one school of thought the idealists said the one reality is consciousness everything is ultimately conscious the consciousness underlies everything matter is kind of done down mind this is the school of idealism in philosophy idealism here means the primacy of consciousness it doesn't mean being idealistic about helping others or making the world a better place it means the the focus on consciousness as the primary indeed only reality that school of thought is undergoing resurgence today the best-known exponent of it is Bernardo Kastrup a philosopher of mind but the other school the other school of thought in the 19th century that finally came became dominant and became the dominant philosophy of science was materialism materialist said there's no such thing as this realm of immaterial spirit doesn't do anything you can't measure it you can't wear it you can't see it therefore it doesn't exist God and angels don't exist they're just figments of the imagination so at one stroke God and angels disappear from this mechanical universe and as all that's left is human consciousness the only thing left out of this Cartesian dualism then you have the problem for materialists that they haven't been able to get rid of human consciousness they've got rid of God and angels but this human consciousness annoyingly persists and this is where materialist philosophers have such a terrible job trying to explain it away as haneul says said in a Daniel Dennett's book consciousness explained it's really an attempt to explain consciousness away as a kind of illusion the problem is that by saying consciousness is an illusion doesn't explain it because illusion is itself a mode of consciousness and for those who say consciousness is merely an epiphenomenon it doesn't really do anything and consciousness has no activity and we may experience it but it doesn't do anything it's like a shadow of the activity of the nervous system has no agency can't interfere with physical causality we have no free will this is standard materialist stuff but the trouble is that it's a hard problem because all attempts to explain it away in the end run into intolerable problems cansel the philosopher of mind described the debate within the philosophy of mind over the last 50 years as follows a philosopher advances a materialists theory of the mind he then encounters difficulties criticisms usually take a more or less technical form but in fact underlying the technical objections as a much deeper objection the theory in question has left out some essential feature of the mind and this leads to ever more frenzied attempts to stick with the materialist thesis well some philosophers have decided to give up on that task of trying to stick with materialist thesis and that's really one of the origins of the modern versions of Pan psychism the idea of those forms of consciousness in many different levels of nature Garren Strawson is one of the leaders of this new Penn psychist movement and he argues that if we assume that some kind of level of mentality experience or consciousness even in atoms and electrons then the appearance of consciousness the emergence of consciousness in in humans is no longer something completely different emerging from utterly unconscious matter it's not a difference in kind as a difference of degree and this is why many contemporary philosophers are now going over to Penn psychism another one whose book recently came out as Philip Goff his book Galileo's error is clear and I think forceful and well argued statement of the pen psyches position and his motive is primarily to deal with the hard problem of human consciousness because if consciousness is not just confined to human brains or animal brains then it's easier to understand why we're conscious because consciousness is no longer something special just for us it's something much more widely distributed in nature a more sophisticated and mathematical version of this is integrated information theory of Giulio Tononi who points out that consciousness has an integrative it doesn't work unless there's a high degree of complexity which has to be integrated and consciousness works by integration and and so that's its defining characteristic there's a lot of technical literature on this but I'm just giving an overview now as soon as we start discussing pan psychism we realize this is not a new philosophy at all as I've already mentioned this was more or less what practically everyone in ancient Greece thought and also what in animistic forms is found in practically all traditional cultures everywhere in the world but in European philosophy in the 17th century in response to Descartes there was already a kind of pan psychist reaction to leading philosophers then were pan psyches one was Spinoza the Jewish Dutch philosopher who argued that God and nature are the same that it nature is like the body of God God is like the mind of nature and so his was a pen psychist even pantheist philosophy God and nature were identical it just looked at from different points of view another and very interesting 17th century philosopher was Leibniz a german philosopher who argued that the whole universe was made up of monads self-organizing units and each self-organizing unit including atoms mirrored the universe consciously from its own point of view said the universe was full of all sorts of individual beings with mind that each Meredydd from an Aryan point of view and each one married it differently because every monad was in a different place just like everyone in this room is mirroring this room seeing this room from a different point of view from their own point of view but everyone seeing it differently because you can't have two people in the same place at the same time so what I live in is called the identity of indiscernibles so the he was saying the whole universe is full of minds which are all mirroring the universe from every different point of view the most interesting 20th century pan cyclist was Alfred North Whitehead a British philosopher who was a mathematician as well he wrote a fundamental book in 20th century mathematics called principia mathematica with his student Bertrand Russell when they were both at Trinity College Cambridge and Alfred North Whitehead because he was a mathematician was the first philosopher who properly understood quantum theory in the 1920s when in quantum theory was just coming into being whitehead got it straight away most philosophers weren't mathematicians couldn't follow it but Whitehead instantly realized what a radical break quantum theory was he showed that in quantum theory which treats light and matter as wave-like entities the quanta a wave-like and because they are wave-like Einstein and white had realized that they you couldn't have a wave as an instant you can't have an instantaneous wave think of waves on the sea you can't take an instantaneous slice of a wave and say here's here's a wave at an instant a wave takes time to wave in and it takes space to wave in so it's spread out in time and space you can't define it in a particular time or place and that's the fundamental reason for the so-called uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics that fundamental particles are wave-like everything in fact is wave-like and atoms are wave patterns nucleus is a pattern of waves - and the electrons in their different orbitals resonant waves of activity so what Whitehead showed is that matter is not stuff 19th century physics had treated star matters stuff like little billiard balls the atoms were like tiny billiard balls hard impenetrable stuff that just persisted he showed that actually what modern quantum physics has shown is that matter is a process and it's a process because it's a wave everything is wave-like even the smallest particles even the smaller subatomic particles that you find in the Large Hadron Collider a wave-like and if it's a wave and if it's a process then it takes place in time and if it takes place in time it has a polarity in time the past in the future Pole and what whitehead argued was that this completely transforms our view of the nature of matter his most original idea about this I think the one I find most exciting and interesting is that it gives us a way of thinking of the relation of mind and body in terms of time rather than space we're used to the idea that the mind is the inside the bodies the outside there's the external world the inner world we use these metaphors all the time there's spatial metaphors my inner life the inner world inner consciousness and indeed from a materialist point of view the brain literally is in a you know your thoughts are supposed to be nothing but the activity of your brain they're inside your head they're inside and the external worlds outside and the body's outside the brain most of it so that were used to that spatial metaphor it comes into ordinary language as well we're less used to the time version that Whitehead was putting forward and what he was suggesting is that the mental pole the pole of the mind is the future pole the physical pole the body pole is the past pole he pointed out that even in quantum theory when you're working out the equations of quantum theory the Schrodinger wave equation for is the equation that enables you to predict all the possible things that an electron or other particle could do you fire off an electron from a cathode ray tube in a cathode ray tube and the Schrodinger wave equation describes all the possible things that could do now these are possibilities they're not physical facts they're part of physics but they're not physical the it's they coexist as possibilities but as soon as the electron interacts with something a measuring apparatus or with another atom then all these possibilities collapse down until you've got one measurable fact which is now you a physical fact it's now the body as it were the body of that electron has a definite place you can measure it in a particular place and it's sometimes called the collapse of the wavefunction well what Whitehead showed really was that this is a general principle about the way the minds work our own minds our arenas of possibility are in conscious Minds our consciousness is an arena where we hold together a range of possibilities if we don't have many possibilities we don't need to be conscious of it and most of our habits don't involve considering possibilities we just do it the same way we've done it before habits are generally unconscious they are mental but they're unconscious conscious Minds are concerned with possibilities and choosing among them so for example all of us chose to come here today we could have done all sorts of other things this afternoon but we chose to come here and among the many possibilities we chose this one and we made it happen it's realized it's now a physical fact we can be measured photographed weighed in this room it's a physical fact we're here and our minds now open to new possibilities so it's a constant interplay of possibility becoming physical but as soon as its physical it's in the past and then new possibilities open in the future so this is whiteheads conception of how minds work and it gives us a way of thinking of consciousness something that deals with possibility it's where I find a very helpful way of thinking about the nature of consciousness and since possibilities aren't physical their virtual their their virtual futures among which we choose it it helps us to understand that consciousness is part of nature but it's not something you can physically measure any more than you can measure all the possibilities that an electron has you can only measure the physical facts when the wavefunction collapses and you can say well these the the Schrodinger wave equation just gives us the probability distribution of what might happen not what will happen so Whitehead was also a very important part of the the birth of the holistic or organismic philosophy of nature the old mechanistic materialist view was that we should explain everything in terms of the smallest things the atoms are the ultimate physical reality and therefore reducing chemistry to atoms is the way chemistry should go reducing life to molecules as the way biology should go reduce it to the smallest things and living organisms molecules say it's a matter of reducing to the smallest because smallest is best and that's why molecular biology has an enormous Lehigh status within biology because it's dealing with the smallest bits of living organisms genes proteins etc but what Whitehead pointed out is that atoms are not the ultimate particles atoms themselves are structures of activity with a nucleus and electron orbitals and they're all processes atoms of processes molecules of processes and that molecules are like they're like organisms and atom is like a microscopic organism and molecule is an organism composed of atoms which a whole have a wholeness that goes beyond the sum of the parts in the same way in organisms a cell is self-organizing it has its own membrane its own limits its own structure and activity but cells can be organized in tissues where there's a wholeness that's more than the sum of the parts they're in organs in organisms in societies and organisms like flocks of birds or schools of fish in ecosystems in planets and planets are within solar systems which again have a wholeness that's more than some of the parts and solar systems within galaxies so we have organisms at all levels of complexity and you can't reduce them all to ultimate particles and the bottom dropped out of the atom long ago and attempt to explain everything in terms of the ultimate particle is no longer the way science works and it never really has worked that way you don't try and explain the facts of it sociology or the facts of physiology in terms of hadron x' or electrons and so on and you explain them in terms of physiological processes the science in effect although not in theory is actually holistic you study things that they're in level well if we take this view then we see that this holistic view of nature suggests that self-organizing systems have a kind of mind or consciousness or an organizing capacity therein purposes there in girls which in modern dynamics are called attractors and it also shows that certain kinds of things are not self-organizing and are not likely to be conscious an atom or molecule a cell a tissue in organ a flock of birds a galaxy a solar system have a wholeness that's more than some of the parts and may have some kind of mind dealing with their possible future actions but things which are mere composites are not likely to be conscious in this way this is also a point that Tony makes in his integrated information theory a table a chair a computer a car a rock that saucer out roll down a mountain and not self-organising holes if they were we wouldn't need factory as we'd grow them on farms instead of making them in factories by putting components together so the very worst possible model for nature is a machine because a machine is made out of parts that are put together in factories according to a design and intelligent design which is outside the machinery and it and fulfilling human purposes which are also outside the machinery organisms have their own organizing capacity within them their self-organizing their own purposes and so this kind of pen psychism is not saying as some people assume when people are sneeringly dismissive of pen psychism it's oh are you saying this chairs conscious haha you know you get that kind of just sneering dismissal many of you would have been counted it you know well this rock is this they always pick cups rocks socks chairs computers as examples and which no one is claiming no serious pen psychics is claiming that these are conscious they may be made of conscious crystals or with us a very low level of consciousness or atoms but the sock or the chair or the computer is not a conscious being and self-organizing systems have their own ends or girls and again you get the contrast with if you if you're trying to get somewhere you get into a car the car doesn't have any goal of its own where it wants to go its go wherever you want it to if you get onto a horse the horse may well have its own idea about where it wants to go it has happened to me in Ireland once I rented a horse with some friends and - I'm not an expert horse rider I found myself going down paths that I didn't think were part of the standard route until I found myself riding into stable the horse had simply gone home it didn't want to go on this long ride with me on its back so this gives us a view of how Minds might work and it also shows that if if we're talking about plants our plants can there's a whole conference every year in London called plant consciousness now there are whole books on plant intelligence and the secret life of trees and so on if plants are conscious they're likely to be conscious about things where they have a choice they're not likely to be conscious about things which are just purely habitual same as us we are not conscious of most of our mental activity most of our lives are we're creatures of habit most of our mental life is habitual we only use our consciousness when we're thinking about possible actions we had to choose between now I think the interesting point about this Penn psychist argument in the present climate is that most Penn cyclists who around today's strossen golf Tononi the neuroscientist who used to work with Francis Crick he used to be absolutely hardline reductionist materialist has recently gone over to Penn psychism as well this is a large scale movement within philosophy and neuroscience but the main reason they that they've adopted Penn psychism is to try and explain the hard problem human consciousness and so they talk about electrons atoms molecules maybe cells and tissues but they stop when you get to human beings I think this debate is most interesting when you carry on you know flocks of animals or social groups ecosystems the whole planet I mean we already have a holistic view of Gaia the planet in the Gaia hypothesis which is telling us that the entire planet is like a living organism and then if we carry on to the solar system and particularly to the Sun I'm particularly interested in this question of is the Sun conscious and as soon as you raise that question you realize that you're breaking a taboo you know as a modern educated person you're not meant to ask that question it's you're meant to sneer if somebody says is the Sun conscious you're meant to do Smith it has absurd or ridiculous or childish and the reason it's so easily dismissed as childish and ridiculous is that practically all humans except us have taken it for granted so the idea is we're better than them because we're smarter more educated and more scientific and they're all wallowing in ridiculous superstitions also children think the sun's conscious that's why they draw it with a smiley face again proof that it's a childish superstition and well in most cultures people think the Sun is conscious and usually think of it as a god or a goddess the Greeks thought of the Sun as a god Apollo the Romans as a God saw but some people think it is a god the Hindus Syria but some people think of the Sun as a goddess the Japanese for the Japanese the Sun is a very important goddess in their whole cosmology in the in the cosmologies of northern Europe the Sun was a goddess and that's why in German and in the Germanic language the Sun is feminine dishonor and the moon is masculine Delmont whereas in the romance languages it's the other way around lissa lay in French is masculine Sun and la lune that moon is feminine so sometimes people think over the moon's feminine sons masculine said it does it depends on the mythic system you're working with and I personally think that the this view of the Sun and similar aspects of the natural world is one reason for the evolution of the English language as we know it in parentheses you know think about the evolution of our language the people living in England at the time of the Norman Conquest were speaking Germanic languages Anglo Saxon and other Germanic languages in which the Sun is feminine and the Norman invaders spoke French and the court language in England for several centuries was French and the English language as we know it is a kind of hybrid of French and German or French type and in type languages and what did the our ancestors do when they were trying to deal with the gender of the son you know one lot say it's feminine the other lot say it's masculine the moon again he offers it way round how do you deal with that well what they did do was expanded the neuter gender which in Germanic languages as masculine feminine and neuter expanded new to include practically everything except people and ships so and so we neutralized the entire world in English and I think that this these conflicting mythologies and genders are actually probably one of the main reasons why there happened but that's an aside and my point here is that traditional cultures have thought of the Sun as alive and conscious and they actually in India I lived in India for seven years and in India Hindus for example take it for granted that the Sun as a conscious being and they relate to it there's a yoga exercise that many of you might do I've done it every morning for more than 40 years the Surya Namaskar the salutation to the Sun which you do facing the Sun in the morning greeting the Sun and this isn't just for physical health and to stretch and stuff I mean Yoga has been secularized in the West but in India it's about actually prostrating to the Sun it was the great power of the Sun is that on which all our lives depend and the most well perhaps the most fundamental mantra in Hinduism the Gayatri mantra it's a little bit like the Lord's Prayer in Christianity is that something that is very very widely known as a fundamental mantra is a prayer to the glorious splendor of the Sun to illuminate our meditation the divine and glorious splendor of the Sun so devout Hindus every morning make this prayer to the Sun asking for its blessings on our lives implicitly there's a thinking of the Sun as a conscious being that can respond to prayers now of course as soon as you look in this it's textbook then you realize that's not the way physics ceases it's just a kind of giant hydrogen bomb with physical processes going on that's totally unconscious but it's not as if scientists have ever proved the Sun all the other stars are unconscious they've just assumed it because Descartes said so in the 17th century defined all matter as unconscious by definition not by proof empirical inquiry rational discussion a simple prejudice and taboo has become established on these questions where they're not valid topics for discussion except perhaps at the weekend University and in most educational institutions this would not be something you could talk about so I think that the the question there it's an open question is the Sun conscious and then if we think about that a little bit more well the first we'd have to recognize straight away that if the sun's conscious then all the other stars are probably conscious too so you can't just confine it to the Sun because it's the nearest one to us this must be a general argument dense the question if it's conscious then what's the interface between its mind and its body well what's the interface between our brains and our minds our bodies and our minds most people would think that that interface is to do with the electrical patterns of activity in the brain that that's what it relates to our consciousness you know eg you Alpha rhythms theta waves Delta rhythms and so on depend on your state of consciousness that the somehow the electrical activity of the brain is what underlies mental activity this is what electrochemical activity because of course there are neurotransmitters but so but it's principally the electrical activity that people are interested in a neurophysiologist measure and neuroscientists measure this activity through all sorts of electrical devices not just EE G's electroencephalograph well does the Sun have electrical activity well yes it does the Sun immensely complex patterns of electrical activity it has its whole surface is covered with granulations millions of them each side of the Sun has at least a million of these granulations which are like convection cells which are made of electrically charged plasma they set up electrical currents through their movements then you have annual you have 11-year cycles of solar activity the sunspot cycle where you get more and more sunspots and each sunspot is dark because there's such intense magnetic fields coming out of it that they form huge loops with other sunspots and they sort of push everything else aside and those sunspot those magnetic fields interact and underlie the heat in the solar corona the corona of the Sun is about five million degrees centigrade the photosphere the bit you see when you look at the Sun it's only about five thousand degrees centigrade so there's a lot of heat generated and it's thought to happen through the interaction of these magnetic fields and this is completely unpredictable the behavior of the Sun that's why NASA the American Space Administration issues weather forecasts solar weather forecasts because the activity of the Sun is very variable even these 11-year cycles a rather variable every 11 years around the middle of the sunspot cycle the sun's magnetic polarity reverses say it's north magnetic pole becomes the South Pole so the entire polarity of the Sun flips but sometimes it doesn't flip that natural or these cycles are rather weak recently we've had a very weak solar cycle so the Sun is full of immensely active highly differentiated electrical activity and magnetic activity and this is instantly integrated through the electrical and magnetic fields of the Sun which permeate the entire Soviet solar system the solar wind comes out of the Sun and it reaches right to the end the whole the whole solar system has a kind of membrane around it called the heliopause where the solar wind encounters the Galactic no charge particles moving through the galaxy and where they interact it forms a kind of membrane around the solar system were all enclosed in a kind of bubble and within that bubble everything's dominated by the sun's electromagnetic field it's radiation and the solar wind of charged particles that are coming out of the Sun all the time sometimes there are more than others there are coronal mass ejections when huge billions of tons of matter pushed out of the Sun there's also solar flares which send out intense pulses of charged particles if one of them hits the earth it takes out our power transmission systems and if a really powerful one hit the world earth it would our whole civilization because a National Grid and other electrical transmission systems act as aerials for this and would absorb this energy and would blow out all the Transformers take months to make enough new Transformers to restore the National Grid so the Sun can have enormous effects here on earth its 11-year cycles affect the climate the weather and it could if it chose take out civilization as we know it at any time so the Sun may have all sorts of possibilities in its mind if it's conscious those possibilities will include deciding where and when to far-off solar flares or coronal mass ejections perhaps we're not we haven't had any recently or perhaps had been relatively few and they mostly missed the earth but fun hits it's assumed to be totally random within regular science but you know hindus who do their daily prayer with them Gayatri mantra think that the sun's being kind to us because they're asking it to be kind to us and you know we may scorn what they're doing say or ridiculous superstition but it may be we're all benefiting from it without realizing it certainly the average physics department isn't going to do much in terms of making the Sun feel good about us treating it as some totally inanimate object that's nothing but the realization of a few equations in physics textbooks I mean that even physicists of course recognize that the Sun is highly dynamic and there's still a great deal we don't know about it so if the Sun is a conscious being then what about the entire galaxy that contains the solar systems within it like cells within a body the entire galaxy may have a galactic mind and it may communicate with other galaxies the Sun may communicate with other stars primarily as consciousness is I suppose directed towards its body the solar system and the Sun itself but it's also got a peer group are the stars within the galaxy and we know very little about galactic thoughts or galactic thought transference it's unlikely I think if galaxies do communicate with each other that they do it just by electromagnetic radiation because some of them there are thousand light-years apart which means it would take a thousand years for a light impulse or electro magic magnetic impulses go from one galaxy to another and and then another thousand years not well the hundreds of thousands every billion years some of them were billion years apart take a billion years to send a message to a distant galaxy in another billion years to get a reply even if it was by return of post so two billion years is a long time so if they do communicate and I think there must be some kind of intergalactic telepathy but obviously this is getting into a realm of speculation that is it's way way beyond anything we actually know but and then if all the galaxies have a kind of consciousness then what about the entire universe the entire universe may have a mind a mind of the universe which is exactly what Plato was suggesting in the time years the entire cosmos may have a mind and how did sensory system work well there are some neuroscientists who think that the interface between the mind and the brain is not just electromagnetic fields acting as an interface but they think that the electromagnetic fields in the brain actually are conscious that that is the basis of consciousness John J McFadden for example has proposed that that's the electromagnetic field theory of consciousness and Todd Murphy and a Canadian neuroscientist has proposed the magnetic field theory of consciousness that these fields are the basis of consciousness well if we take those theories seriously and apply them to the whole universe the universe is pervaded by the gravitational field and the electromagnetic field and therefore a mind that could interact with that would know everything in the universe because it would be the basis of where where everything is and how everything is its activity there'd be an instant method for omniscience throughout the universe then I know where I'm piling speculation on speculation but I just want to deal with a further point that if we say the whole universe is conscious then are we saying that's the ultimate limit of consciousness if we are it's a form of pantheism like Spinoza but all traditional religions have said that the universe is alive and conscious in some way but there's a consciousness that transcends even the universe that there's a mind beyond the universe as well as the mind within the universe rather like our own minds are concerned with the welfare of our bodies and our social behavior and so on but they can also transcend all our immediate concerns we can think about as we are doing now the nature of the universe the nature of other minds and the universe things that have nothing to do with catching the tube home this evening or what we have for dinner there are immediate preoccupations but we're but with the the fact that our minds can transcend totally the immediate concerns of our bodies and our social lives and so there the idea has always been as a mind that goes beyond the universe so when we then come to the question of what might such an ultimate mind be then we have to turn not philosophy of mind which is on the whole concerned with much smaller problems but to theology because theology is the subject which deals with the nature of ultimate consciousness and this surprising surprisingly sort of lively activity going on in theology at the moment partly because different world systems like the Hindu worldview the Buddhist world view this as a Sufi worldview the Christian worldview and now accessible to scholars and in a very brilliant book by a theologian called David Bentley Hart HAART in American theologian a recent book it's called the experience of God being consciousness bliss and what he does is takes the this threefold analysis of ultimate consciousness from the Hindu system sat-chit-ananda being consciousness bliss is about how the Hindus think the ultimate mind works the ground of being is conscious that there's a conscious ground on which everything rests and it's being and it's consciousness that's its primary qualities such as conscious being in the present or in all time as well chit is names is consciousness itself what can be known names and forms as the Indians say Nanda Roopa names and forms the whole universe is made up of forms plants animals planets stars cells atoms molecules these are all forms forms of organization and we have names for them which are forms in our minds which enable us to relate to what's out there in the world so nama Rupa is names and forms there these are within the conscious mind they're not the conscious mind itself that's like the basis on which through which these are known think of a screen of your computer the screens there whatever you look at on the computer but there's a a basis for everything you see there you can see all sorts of different things read all sorts of different texts but there's something there underlying them all and the idea is there's a conscious mind the Neva which is that which knows everything that can be known there's the contents of consciousness are not the same as consciousness itself then does a dynamical principle which is the principle of energy breath movement change which is part of consciousness as well and being in the flow of that change is joyful that's why ananda chit Ananda joy is part of the ultimate divine mind so we have a very similar model in the Christian holy trinity the official definition of God in the Creed's the various Christian Creed's aralia statements of this threefold nature of God God the Father as the ground of being in the Old Testament when God announces himself to Moses he says I am that I am conscious being in the present God the Son is the logos the principle of name and form through which all things were made it's the like the platonic realm of forms or ideas or archetypes of all things in nature and the spirit is the breath the principle of energy change and movement the principle metaphor in the in the Holy Trinity is speaking the I mean all these things are metaphorical obviously the ultimate mind is beyond our conception but we can have metaphors which help us to think about it and the art they in many traditions the Hindu one as well speaking has a particular role as a metaphor when I'm speaking now there is on one hand as me the speaker and there's two other things involved as the speaker as the words which have struck form meaning connection etc patterns definable patterns they're distinct from each other there's lots of different possible words and there's also the breath on which the words are carried if i weren't breathing out as i spoke you wouldn't hear anything if i don't breathe well i think thoughts or have words in my mind they're just silent in my mind if I have just breath without words there's a flow of air but the nose particular structure or pattern so you have to have both the flow of energy and the form which gives structure meaning and pattern and the ground of both and that's the basic model therein in the Christian tradition and in the Hindu tradition and there's a very similar model in the Islamic tradition as David Bentley Hart shows or parallels in the Buddhist cosmology as well and so what this is this is as basic archetype of consciousness that underlies all things as reflected in the whole universe the whole universe has forms and it has energy forms are given by fields and fields in the standard science are governed by the laws of nature in my view they're habits that have a kind of memory so the the everything in nature has both a combination of form and energy and electron and atom has formed given by the principles of quantum field theory and energy if it hadn't got the energy it wouldn't exist if it hadn't got the form it wouldn't be a definable entity it would even light which is undifferentiated energies undifferentiated as it can get still has wavelengths it still has some form or pattern where it light has different wavelengths so everything has form and energy and a conscious being underlying it and that same model would apply to our own consciousness we have of course we need energy we have food we have elect energy in our nerves we we have formed that our bodies take up during embryology there are patterns of activity in our brains there's energy flowing through our brains and some of these patterns of energy and some of these forms are become conscious and our conscious minds are full of all sorts of forms names and forms we can form pictures in our dreams we can see images of things that aren't actually in front of us there's always a dynamical principle with moving in in our dreams so I think that the when we ask the question is the universe conscious then it's possible to say yes it could be conscious and what's more its consciousness could tell us something about the ultimate source of all consciousness everything within the universe could be like Frank our versions of this universal consciousness with a unity of the given of whatever system it is the ground of being of that system together with the forms and the energy that make it up and we can see this as underlying our own mental activity now of course this leads to all sorts of detailed changes in our brains which neuroscientists can study but we're never going to understand the nature of consciousness just through studying brains because then we get back to the hard problem you can't just explain consciousness in terms of brain activity you can find out ever more details about the activity you can believe as some materialists believe that if we go on studying brains line up sooner or later the answer to consciousness will just appear but I think on philosophical grounds that's simply not going to happen and what we're in that moment is this fascinating transition point between mechanistic materialism which works very well for physics it works very well for making machines eye phones televisions jet airplanes and so forth but it works very badly for explaining consciousness and spiritual experiences which many people says through a whole range of spiritual practices and there's a revival of spiritual practices today I discussed seven in each of my two recent books science and spiritual practices and ways to go beyond and why they work these spiritual practices are ways in which we can actually get into a closer direct experience with these forms of consciousness beyond the human level meditation are they're practiced by many people as a way of distressing after a busy day or contracting anxiety and depression it's now practiced as a secular at well-being type exercise in the cultures from which it comes contemplative Christianity monks and nuns in in in monasteries Hindu meditators Buddhist meditators Sufi meditators the people who've done it traditionally in the religious context have done it not just so they're less stressed and they can cope with the stresses of modern life they've done it because they think that by getting to the very ground of consciousness itself the when you get past the ruminations you cease to identify with the constant flow of thoughts that gained through your mind you can reach states where you're in the state of awareness just you're conscious of being that that conscious being puts us in touch with the ground of conscious being are all things the Hindus like to use an analogy they say think of lots of buckets of water at night with the moon and you can look in each bucket of water you'll see a reflection of the moon it looks as if there's hundreds of moons but actually it's just one moon reflected in all these buckets and as one ultimate mind reflected in all conscious beings in the universe in each one of us in every conscious animal in every conscious being of every kind stars galaxies in the entire universe so that meditation is a practice for getting to the ground of being other spiritual practices like music dancing and sports which i think is the most common spiritual practice in the modern world that takes people into altered states of consciousness especially being in the present it works quicker and more effectively than meditation you can't when you're fifty feet up a rock face start worrying and ruminating about whether you paid the gas bill and or not if you're in the middle of a football game and someone's passing you the ball the child's the crowds are cheering you can't think about some remark your girlfriend made that pissed you off the day before you you totally in the present and sports of the principle way I think in the modern world in which people come completely into the present meditation is a slower process but sports and moving spiritual practices like sacred dance music but I think connects us from the dimension of spirit the moving principle of ultimate reality and I think aesthetic enjoyment enjoying the beauty of flowers of beautiful architecture of art is more connecting with the logos or beauty aspect of spiritual reality so these spiritual practices connect us in different ways with different aspects of this ultimate consciousness I personally think that this is a better way of experiencing it's how I think that myself and I spent years as a card-carrying materialist an atheist so I'm very familiar with that worldview but if you want to stick to a materialist worldview and dismiss all these experiences as make-believe then what you have to do is dismiss your any experience of consciousness especially if you've had mystical experiences or senses of connection through spiritual practices including psychedelics which can provide spiritual openings you a you have if you're going to dismiss your own experience in favor of a theory the theory that is nothing but the activity of the brain that consciousness isn't really doing anything you're putting a theory ahead of your own experience but since consciousness is experience and since we're meant to be empirical if we're going to be scientific empiricism is experience also it means in Greek empirical means experiential to do with experience you have to make a personal choice so each one of us does whether to put our end experience of these things to take pay more attention to that especially when it gives us a sense of forms of consciousness beyond our own or keep going back to the materialist theory it's nothing about the brain the materials theory as I say is brilliant for machines it's not brilliant for understanding in consciousness it leads to the hard problem and so it's not really the best theory in the world for explaining consciousness it's probably the worst theory in the world for explaining it otherwise it wouldn't need a hard problem but this is a question that lies before everybody today because we're on a cusp I think between a paradigm shift from mechanistic materialism which has dominated academic life in our society for decades to a more rich view of nature as live a more pants IKEA store animist view of the world and what our view of the world in which consciousness is more than just an activity in human brains and it's an activity the greater forms of consciousness we can actually access through our own direct experience the choice is up to each one of us and we'll have to use both our rational minds and our experience in trying to decide between these are different possibilities thank you we're now going to have a short break five to seven minutes is what Neil said and then we'll have a session when the can be questions answers comments Roopa hello I've got I don't know wait to start really my I guess firstly an observation and that is that I thought that you were going to sort of posit posit your theory of consciousness we're around morphic resonance around the sense the consciousness is out there in the universe and there in a sense if I understand it correctly you believe that you could say our brains a bit more like a kind of radio they sort of pick up a slice of that Kanye consciousness which is which is unique to us so I was kind of rather looking forward to you explaining that explaining to us where the evidence where your evidence for that is and in particular why you haven't published why there isn't a published paper with this idea which has been peer-reviewed you know by scientists because let's be really honest and I'm really not trying to be unkind here I'm trying to be truthful um you have been your ideas have been very shunned in the scientific community and I've sort of wondered what what your reaction to that was and my second question is really to ask you about your personal beliefs um my understanding is that you're a Christian and I completely respect and understand the human need for spirituality I'm not I'm not just a materialist but I'm wondering how you have come to the Christian Way of explaining the world and why that would be correct and not for example the Islamic or the Jewish or an atheist or Hindu or any other so those two two things really why didn't you talk about your actual central idea and secondly what are your personal beliefs these are both huge questions but but I think hugely relevant all right we talk yes they're very relevant well first of all I had intended to talk about morphic resonance in this talk but I always speak from notes and there just wasn't time if I'd brought it up at all I would have had to explain the whole theory which would take at least 20 minutes and since the title I was working on this is the universe conscious rather than does morphic resonance exist that's what I was speaking about I mean I didn't make up the title or Neil the vice-chancellor of The Weeknd University gave me this title and you know I wanted to talk about what the advertised title was as it so happens I am very interested in this question of is the Sun conscious and in fact right now I'm writing a paper called is the Sun conscious for the journal of consciousness studies a peer-reviewed journal I've written a lot of papers in peer-reviewed journals I mean they're including ones on morphic resonance on my website there's dozens of I mean there's 90 papers altogether probably six or seven on morphic resonance quite a lot on telepathy quite a number on other aspects of the extended mind so I do publish in peer reviewed journals the it I mean I do it out of a sense of duty and so I don't do it because anyone actually reads the papers and hardly anyone I know has read any of my papers in peer-reviewed journals and so it's more effective way of getting ideas across as books and talks but they're all there for anyone who's interested including empirical studies on morphic resonance and many empirical studies on the nature of the mind particularly the extended mind I haven't talked today at all about all my work on telepathy the extended mind premonitions animal unexplained powers of animals homing pigeons I mean I have to focus on something I mean the entire universe seemed to be enough for one afternoon in fact so in terms of my own path I went through as by the age of about fourteen I became a fairly militant atheist a painting as thorn in the flesh of the chaplain of my Church of England school and I I was a sort of atheistic materialist for quite a long time you know until my thirties then I went to India I travelled through India in 1968 I was working in Malaysia for a year and I later in 1974 went to live in India where I had a job there in an agricultural Research Institute and traveling in Asia opened my mind to all sorts of other ways of looking at reality I met perfectly rational Indians who thought in terms of the consciousness as sachet and nando you know meditation and the what's going on in that so I became very influenced by the Hindu tradition I had Hindu gurus I did yoga I did med then I had a Sufi teacher I got interested in Sufism I had some Muslim friends in Hyderabad I spoke which is where I lived I spoke Urdu and I was drawn into a kind of Sufi world which I found very attractive and interesting and for a while had Sufi practices and then I thought well you know it wasn't where I'm going to become a Sufi a Sufi means you've got four kind of Muslim first you know and and I didn't particularly want to have too fast in Ramadan and buy into the whole Quran and I mean I had been circumcised so that one of the main obstacles for people the more painful aspect was it was alright so but I did seriously consider it for about 10 minutes and and then I thought that I can't really be a Hindu because you know Hindus is know so much about the land of India the temples of India the traditions of India and when I went to see a Hindu guru and asked his advice on a spiritual path he said well you come from a Christian background you should try being a good Christian you know all paths lead to God and you know that's the one that's most natural for you your own tradition so I thought well I hadn't thought of that I thought okay so I tried it out and it worked really well for me and then I met a wonderful Christian teacher father beed Griffiths who lived in an ashram a Benedictine monk in an ashram in South India where I spent some time I wrote my first book in his ashram and when I came back to England I found reconnecting with the Christian tradition was really helpful the great cathedrals the holy places the churches in the the festivals fasting in Lent all these things made sense to me but I'm not an evangelizing Christian since I think everyone should be questioned ideally they should I know I think Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists have fine the way they are and if I'd been born in India I'm sure I'd be a Hindu or a Muslim or whatever but I'm English I was born in England this is the tradition of my ancestors and on morphic resonance principles is the one that works most naturally and easily for me and well this is another big question I think that the doctrine of the nature of ultimate consciousness the Holy Trinity which is the Christian view of God as I spoke about earlier I think is a very good model it's a metaphorical model of ultimate reality Hindus and other religions have rather similar ones so a Trinitarian understanding I think is probably the best model we can have whether you call it sachet and down there or Father Son and Holy Spirit so I think in that sense it's true in the sense that it's a model about ultimate reality it's probably as good as we can get obviously by definition an ultimate conscious mind that embraces the entire universe with billions of galaxies is likely to be beyond the grasp of our own very limited minds that have evolved through millions of years of sort of hunting and gathering in the hundreds of thousands of years of making stone axes and things so I think it's likely to be a limited understanding I think how the aspects of the Christian story I think religions more about practice and truth frankly I mean I pray I meditate I go to church services I go on pilgrimages I sing these are all spiritual practices that give a sense of connection and in that sense they're true now whether or not Jesus was actually born on December the 25th in it ad naught it doesn't bother me much I'm not very interested in those kinds of details I'm more interested in the bigger picture and the practices so I don't think everything in the Bible is literally true and actually most serious Christians throughout time have never thought that it's only American fundamentalists who think that so so you know I don't think materialism is true and I think I think it's actually false and I think that there are various religious approaches which are more appropriate for some people than others so I'm not saying there is one truth and this is it thank you very much for you me and my question is if natural laws the laws of physics laws of nature a best understood as most habits than laws and if natural systems tend to be shaped by these natural habits or laws reflecting on the points that you made in this talk that natural systems only tend to be conscious of that which they can choose between and that habits themselves don't tend to be conscious my question is does choice itself necessarily lying outside the laws of nature if they habitually and if so what might that tell us about the future the science of joeys well I think that all habits tend to become habitual I mean our own habits become unconscious you know when you're learning to ride your bicycle you're thinking about where to turn the handlebars and which pedal to put your feet on and that sort of thing and but once you know how to learn once you know how to ride a bicycle you don't think about it just happens automatically thinking about it probably a disadvantage you can cycle along thinking about something else or having a conversation or listening to music or whatever so I think that the the habits of nature are largely unconscious but I think when any organ a self-organizing system has to make a choice then there may be an element of consciousness within it but then it may go back into unconsciousness it may is it autumn is go to sleep you know after all we go to sleep we're conscious beings we're not conscious all the time we go to sleep and when we're asleep unconscious patterns of activity happen in our bodies no liver grows our wounds keep healing and all sorts our brains keep active all sorts of things happened unconsciously I'm not supposing anything in nature is necessarily more conscious than we are and I just think that most where the code where the consciousness would come in is especially as when the habits are blocked if we go on with our normal habits unless we're prevented if you have an accident and you suddenly can't walk anymore you can't see anymore you have to develop new ways of living in the world and most things mutations in biology many environmental changes that organisms undergo a deleterious they block their habits they make it harder for them to survive with the old habits so they have to develop new ones then you have the exploration of possibilities of new possibilities and creativity I think in the evolutionary sense and in every sense really comes about through considering new possibilities when which you have to do if the old habits are blocked if the old habits are not blocked you just go on with them and I think that the whole of the evolution of the universe is one where there's creativity at every level I mean the atoms molecules crystals none of these were there at the moment of the Big Bang all the everything in nature has come about through creativity which settles down into habits you know in carbon atoms get into the habit of being in certain kinds of molecules you know methane and hemoglobin and so on glucose cellulose but occasionally well quite often chemists invented completely new organic chemicals and they'd find themselves in a completely new chemical and a new kind of crystal these new habits are coming into being you know hundreds of them every year so I think that the the the consciousness is coming into play especially when habits are blocked and is particularly important when there's a need for creativity which there is at all levels of nature throughout the evolutionary process hello there um I was just wondering your opinion as to why there was such a pushback and in academia as to the idea of animism and why we have wine Western why the Western science science community is so reluctant to unify or think of spirit and matter as different aspects the same thing well I think it's it's a historical result of the way science has developed in Europe you know in in 17th century when the sciences were getting going there was there was his terrible Wars of Religion the 30 Years War between Protestants and Catholics and a lot of people who are in favor of science then said that science was the Third Way it involved a direct insight into God's mind these were not atheists they were Christian or Jewish but they they thought that science that God was a mathematician who'd made the world machine that God's mind was mathematical mind and that by discovering the laws of nature like Newton's law of gravitation humans were getting in direct access to the divine mind that science was a spiritual pursuit and moreover it was one that was better than a priests and and ministers and things quarreling with each other about interpretations of the scriptures so science gained enormous prestige and by the end of the 18th century it became the standard view of Enlightenment intellectuals the way forward is through science and reason and human progress and then technology and religion was seen as an obstacle and and many of these probe like in the French Revolution which was based on science and reason they cultivate in fact in 1793 during the reign of terror they pronounced the count of Reason the state religion the the cathedrals and churches were closed the monasteries devolved as of many priests were guillotine and they proclaimed the cult of Reason as the state religion and so this the this it took on this kind of antagonism to sew it to religion and and the the idea that the two were in conflict and you you if you're going to be a sign had to be anti-religious especially anti-christian then with materialism in the 19th century you you got a further burst of this kind of materialism as a philosophy of nature which excluded or religion rendered it meaningless or useless or a waste of time I wear a science represented progress and reason and the intellectual atmosphere of universities is really shaped by this kind of enlightenment rationalism that's the reason that they've come to be the way they are and it's part of the collective ideology it's anti-religious specifically anti-christian and materialist in its general tone there are plenty of exceptions of course and not all scientists believe this in fact recent surveys show that in Britain France and Germany about 25 percent of scientists are atheists about another 20% or agnostics 45% classify themselves as non-religious but 45% classify themselves as spiritual but not religious or spiritual or religious so actually the the if you look at the actual practicing scientific community there's lots of people who are not part of this atheist materialist worldview but they don't say so in public they don't want to be attacked they're afraid that some dork in sight will attack them so they keep quiet whenever I give talks in universities about my research on telepathy or morphic resonance invariably after the talk people come up to me and say you know I'm really interesting what you do I think but I'm interested in these things but I can't talk to my colleagues because they're also straight and they're so materialistic one after another comes up to me and says the same thing and I sometimes say them don't you realize that at least 10 people in this department who think like you do and they said no there aren't I said yes there are because they've just told me and and so I you know science would be very liberated so my model is that for people should come out that sounds is full of closeted ho lists or people closeted ideas on spirituality who just simply or who've had Talib Pathak experiences or whose dogs know when they're coming home from the lab that they just don't dare talk to their colleagues about it this is a sociological phenomenon with historical roots I think it's bound to change partly because these these historical prejudices that are built into science as we know it have come about through European history but the majority of scientists in the world today are not European they're Indian they're Chinese or Indonesian they're Brazilian and so on and in these cultures they have no reason at all to buy into all this baggage of European history you know most when I worked in India as a scientist I was an international agricultural Institute most of my colleagues were Indian scientists they were Muslims Sikhs Hindus san Jane's some parsees and they came from a variety of different religious backgrounds at work all of them were conventional mechanistic biologists you know with the conventional mechanistic assumptions but as soon as they got home in the evening none of them believed it they knew that that was so that you have to play the game by the rules at work if you're going to keep your job but none of them were convinced mechanistic materialists within their own private lives or in their family life they just went along with that at work and actually the same is true in our society here most people from 9:00 to 5:00 Monday to Friday err along with a count of mechanistic materialist worldview because that's the official orthodoxy the media of educational system all support that but as soon as people who in the evening at home with their friends and family or at weekends or on holiday many of them have a sense of direct connection with nature many people have mystical experiences some people take psychedelics and have totally altered states of consciousness changing their view of reality usually towards a more pen psychist view but they won't talk about this when they get back to work on the Monday morning it's a sort of split so I couldn't hear that that's right people conform to them in private it's a bit like Russia under Brezhnev you know if you if you didn't pretend to be a dialectical materialist no Marxist you didn't get very far or China today um whereas lots of people didn't believe it and when communism collapsed in Russia how many people were true Communist believers I mean there were some that they were a minority and I think the same is true of mechanistic materialism in the academic world today and you know luckily at the weekend University you don't have to pretend and this is a much more open atmosphere than in most universities all right that's all I've got time for a Rupert thank you very much for your talk [Applause] you [Music]

Channel: The Weekend University

Views: 283,570

Rating: 4.8519545 out of 5

Keywords: the weekend university, psychology lectures, psychology talks, psychology lecture, A conscious universe, Panpsychism, Is the universe conscious, Rupert Sheldrake, Consciousness explained

Id: XqWbIVlnmNM

Length: 82min 44sec (4964 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 09 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/MantisAwakening]

I love Rupert Sheldrake. He’s done some amazing work on psi research, and was the scientist who did the initial research into dogs who know when their owners are coming home.

Interestingly, most people know of the research because they heard that James Randi proved it was not true. In fact, Randi simply lied about the research he claimed to do himself—he made it up simply so he could dismiss it. His argument was that it didn’t matter because dogs aren’t actually psychic. Anyway, Sheldrake got him to admit it, but it seriously set back public awareness and acceptance of psi. Randi was truly despicable.