Memory Across Time & Space - Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, Biologist

welcome back today on the show we have a real treat we have Dr Rupert sheldrick who has joined us to discuss all sorts of ideas as usual starting with his conception of how science could be improved in the future how scientific dialogues could be more productive and of course morphic resonance and his idea of the morphogenic fields it's a real lesson in humility and persistence because Dr sheldrick has been working on these ideas for a long time since the since the 70s maybe even earlier and many people that we run into on the show are also working outside of what you would call consensus science and there's often a sense of bitterness and frustration and that is not at all the case with Dr sheldrick he has a calmness and an Equanimity about the difficulty of his task that for us as people who are working on the very edges of human knowledge is incredibly inspiring because It's A Hard Road to hoe there's many many people who are perfectly content to let the system go as it is and to have a to have a vision of what it can look like to work towards changing the paradigms and Shifting the way that we see the world in such a peaceful way is incredibly useful to me and hopefully will be incredibly useful to you as well as you go forth in the world yeah if you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did please share it with somebody it seems like the way for us to get better and better guests to come on the show and have conversations is by growing the channel for whatever reason that's just the metric people look at so share it with somebody post it wherever you do that if you've already done that consider coming over to our patreon for really just a couple dollars a month you could get involved in steering this ship and really helping us decide how to make it better in the future and we have a really tight-knited relationship with our patients thank you guys if for our patrons that are listening and yeah with that enjoy the conversation and we'll see you guys next time you're Scientific Revolution Starts Now [Applause] [Music] foreign thing that's really fascinating is like when I read about your critics like I was just looking at your Wikipedia page and it seems like people are saying that I mean there's literally a quote here that's something to the effect of um it's pretty outrageous but your work is dangerous to the very Endeavor of yeah it says popular attention paid to your work undermines the Public's understanding of Science and I'm like I don't think they understand that you that you're proposing a whole new vision of science actually and so I was really hoping that you could um tell us a little bit about your new vision for for science 2.0 what what the the reboot because you get into it at the end of the book a bit but um that's something that really excites us because we we're trying like we do this podcast but we imagine building an institution where we can do granting and we have a non-profit Wing eventually where we can actually fund uh science that might not have a place inside the academy and I think that's one road to a better scientific future but what are some of your other ideas well I've got it's hard to know where to start um I've just been giving a course an online course called six potential breakthroughs in The Sciences where I've identified six particular areas where I think the understanding is very poor indeed at the moment and we're relatively simple and inexpensive research could lead to breakthroughs and I think we desperately need this um I don't know if you saw in nature this week There's a editorial which follows up on a paper in nature the previous week about the declining uh proportion of breakthroughs and Innovative research and the Sciences basically the present scientific system is designed to give small incremental improvements along established lines and um it's despite ever greater expenditure and more and more people working in it it's become less and less creative there are very very few radically new discoveries or breakthroughs within the Sciences you know there's plenty of sort of extra proteins being sequenced or X genomes being sequenced and so forth but there's very little that's radically new so um I spend a lot of time thinking about what to do about this I mean I've been trying to work towards a broadening of the scientific worldview well for years you know more than 40 years um and so perhaps I should start with how I see the new scientific world view the big picture and then if you like I could talk about some of the more detailed areas of Investigation yeah but um the big picture I think first of all I think the mechanistic materialist world view which says everything's unconscious Machinery animals are just unconscious machines brains are just computers and so forth um that is the old Paradigm it says it were the uh pre-copene scientific Paradigm it's it's what dominates all research in all branches of science um I think that what we're shifting into is a world view of nature being alive rather than dead and mechanical the universe being more like a developing organism than a machine the laws of nature more like habits that change and evolve rather than the whole universe governed by fixed laws like a cosmic Napoleonic Code established at the moment of the big bang for no known reason um and um I think that the mind or Consciousness may be present to some degree in all self-organizing systems this is a kind of Pan psychism um and I think minds are not confined to the insides of heads um it's not just the mind it's not just a kind of Epi phenomenon uh generated by brain activity that's all inside the head that doesn't actually do anything that's the official world view um but rather minds are extended Beyond brains um just like fields are extended beyond the Earth the Earth's gravitational field extends invisibly far beyond the Earth the field of a magnet extends not Beyond magnet the fields of a mobile phone beyond the mobile phone and I think the fields of our minds extend far beyond our brains and bodies um so those are some of the ingredients in what I think of as a um a world view which we're moving towards um but uh and there are many people who think along these lines now but typically um if they work within institutional science they'll keep these opinions to themselves at least during working hours because otherwise it would endanger their career um so I I think that the whole culture is Shifting in this direction but institutional science has just got locked into this old world view um which I and you are trying to do something about to help accelerator change do you mind if I ask you where you think that the preeminence of physics in the scientific landscape came from or do you even believe that's the thing like obviously physicists believe that they have the final say and to some extent when we were working with biologists we got the impression that the biologists would often kick the final say down to the physicists especially when you get into questions about Electra chemistry just electricity in general there you know everybody kind of is pushing towards the physicists and I think the physicists feel they inhabit this supreme authority and these discussions where did that come do you have a sense of where that came from well I think it partly comes from the 17th century origins of modern mechanistic science which was dominated by physicists Galileo Kepler Newton Descartes mathematicians and physicists um and I think it comes from the the ideology of science but in the 17th century where most scientists were Christians um but with their mechanistic world view um they thought of the universe as a machine that operated more or less automatically and God is a kind of machine maker outside the universe who designed the machinery and pressed the start button and because the way the universe worked in that in their thinking was through mathematical laws the laws of nature were essentially mathematical then the people best equipped to understand the fundamental nature of reality were physicists because they understood maths and other people like biologists and chemists and geologists and so on didn't understand very much maths so this put them in the role of being the high Priests of the scientific Endeavor a role to which they claim to this day as you pointed out and think of themselves as the ultimate Arbiters it's partly not just them but you see biologists in mechanistic biology the aim of mechanistic biology as expressed in the 19th century by t.h Huxley Darwin's Bulldog the aim of mechanistic biology was to reduce the phenomena of life to chemistry and physics because then they'd be explained in terms of proper science instead of having ideas of vital factors Minds mysterious forces Etc and that would mean that they're on the solid mechanistic materialist ground of physics so biologists played along with this and and of course it was very flattering for physicists um but of course right to today we're in a very different situation in my opinion physics is stuck um they've they they're completely stuck they've got into they've got a theoretical scheme um straight super string or end theory was 10 or 11 Dimensions which predicts the existence of 10 to the 500 universes and doesn't tell us anything very specific about our own um and makes no testable predictions um they can only understand how the universe works in terms of postulating unobserved dark matter and dark energy which are now supposed to make up 95 of the cosmos material which by definition we know nothing about so what they're saying is basically 95 percent of nature is utterly unknown to us um but it must be a dark matter and dark energy um and we don't yet haven't yet figured out what they are um and then uh in order to account for the laws of nature being as they are assuming they were all there at the moment of the Big Bang they many of them postulate that they're not fine-tuned for life or for human appearance or Evolution uh we just happen to live in the only universe that's suitable for us but there are billions trillions of actually existing universes parallel to our own the Multiverse again completely untestable so what we've got is a theoretical physics which is now Naval gazing uh coming up with untestable theories with very little to say really about the nature of life and mind in my view I mean the I think the most exciting parts of physics are not the bits we read about in all these books about problems of quantum theory and the Multiverse and so forth I think the most exciting and Innovative parts of physics are in solid-state physics and um and you know materials uh Materials Science because there's really interesting Innovative research going on in those areas which is empirically driven not Theory driven and that's why it's exciting because it actually is in contact with reality yeah I feel like The Next Century the whole world of material atomics has yet to be developed you know they're so schematized the way that we think about things on a tiny level I really look forward to that there's one point in your book you make this really astute observation that most people are taught science is this iterative process of testing hypotheses and basically a laboratory oriented situation but there's so many of these big topics like cosmology and even basic astrophysics where you can't do experiments in the lab or say the Deep past like looking into the geological records so much of science is completely inaccessible to experimentation and I I wonder how that understanding can be repaired in the future or how you incorporate this kind of work into the old Paradigm about experimentation if if do you believe like experimentation isn't inherently part of Science in the in the future or or what it what is its role oh I'm very much an empiricist I mean I've spent my whole career doing experimental research I love doing experiments and um you know I'm doing I'm I've got experiments going on right now um and uh so I'm I think science has to be empirical to maintain contact with reality um now there are certain areas of science where it's not possible to do experiments you can't do an experiment on a distant star moving it around within its Galaxy to see how it behaves astronomy is essentially observational science but it's still empirical you're still making observations of stars and galaxies and you know geology is an observational science you can't really do experiments on sort of run a new Ice Age in the laboratory to see how it pans out um and evolutionary history is in a empirical because it's based on fossils and so forth but it's not experimental so I think the key word here is empirical rather than experimental you can be empirical without being experimental um but I think we have to be empirical if we're not going to be carried away with pure I mean like super String Theory or something which is seems to be entirely theoretical or the Multiverse Theory uh with not with no point of contact with empirical reality this nothing about the last century of science that to me seems like an attempt to squeeze the Divine out of science where there was it became very fashionable to be agnostic or atheistic and to reduce the world of science to something that had no place for spirit and had no no room for anything except for the physical and yet these new theories to me especially cosmological and seem foundationally very religious and it's a new religion right because if you look at something like Max tegmark's World which is our mathematical universe at the basis he proposes that we live in a computer program right because that's that's the final that's the final interpretation of that and so living in a technological age where people are hard at work developing these super sentient computer programs it seems like we are painting a new God which is uh the Hologram so to speak oh the ultimate computer programmer um yes um well I think I think a lot of atheism is just bad theology actually and you know the atheists um for example Lawrence Krauss the atheistic friend of cosmologist friend of Richard Dawkins wrote a book called Universe from nothing uh showing you don't need God because the whole universe could appear from nothing okay well what's he mean by nothing well first of all he says there are the laws of nature that's what governs the universe he takes those for granted they're already there and then he has the cosmic um you know the dark matter the cosmic vacuum field not dark matter the cosmic vacuum field which can have which is full of energy and a small spontaneous fluctuation in that can give rise to the universe governed by the universal laws well that's not really a universe from nothing what it is is a bad form of trinitarian theology um trinitarian theology in the Christian tradition it says that there's a ground of all being as God the Father there's a logos or the second person of the Trinity which is the principle of form and order a bit like platonic ideas and as the Holy Spirit which the principle of energy movement and change so um the laws of nature are really an aspect of the logos and the the energy that comes from this vacuum field is the principle of movement and change so you've got the the second person the logos and the Holy Spirit and all he's done is deleted the ground of both of them saying uh it's nothing and they spontaneously exist um and uh so it's a very very limited and peculiar form of atheism um so I don't think that um most most Asia thinkers first of all Take A peculiar form of cosmology the 17th century form as their starting point which is that the universe is a machine and the unit it's made by a machine making God who's external to it and the Machine goes on automatically and if God does anything having made the machine then he can only intervene by suspending the laws of nature in the occasional miracle in a way that's completely incredible and so the view of God that they're busy refuting or ignoring or um denying is a view of God that most religious people have never had in the first place most religious people think that God's a form of Consciousness that pervades the Universe not being external to it that present in conscious beings and indeed in space and time and um is reflected in our own minds and our own minds can communicate directly with that conscious being and that's the more much more normal religious View and most atheists aren't addressing that at all what how they've got to where they are historically speaking it seems to me fairly simple in the 17th century there's a dualistic separation of God and nature mind and matter mind and body and people and animals because animals are just machines and people have a mind inside the account mechanical brain but that's the logical rational mind that science happens with um so in the 17th century that dualism Cartesian dualism um separated mechanical nature from a supernatural world of guard angels and human intellects which were non-physical outside space and time whereas science dealt with that which is physical inside space and time and one advantage of that dualism at the time was that it kept religion and science out of each other's hair because scientists got the whole universe including the stars and bodies and animal plants to do with what they liked and with leaving God out of the pitch because it's all automatic and religious people got guard angels and human minds and morality but withdrew the realm of religion from science so it all became about humans and God and sin and so forth and withdrawn withdrawn from nature um now in this in the 19th century um you the movement towards materialism in science said no instead of two things matter and spirit there's just one thing matter and there's no such thing as guards and angels and the human mind isn't something different from matter it is matter it's nothing but the activity of the brain location inside the head and so that so the form of atheism we're most familiar with today is a kind of collapsed form of Cartesian dualism eliminating the spirit pole but to understand where it all went wrong I think one has to go back before the 17th century and see that at least in European thought the splitting of Consciousness and matter and mind and nature was not how people thought of it in the Middle Ages in Europe um you know the general theological view was that Nature's alive the Earth is alive the stars and planets a conscious being beings animals have souls the word animal comes from animal meaning soul and um it was a living Universe it was a kind of Christian animism that was the driving force that gave rise to the great Gothic Cathedrals nothing like the um the view that atheists have of the religious world today so I think there's a tremendous amount of confusion that's Arisen through this historical process um do you think that psychology was some sort of attempt to reintegrate the spiritual phenomena back into science to somehow subsume the spiritual elements well not psychology I mean if you look at 20th Century psychology I mean William James maybe if you look at the founder of American psychology um you know he's a brilliant Visionary but that didn't last long and you know by the 1920s uh the the behaviorist school had taken over BF Skinner and Watson his follower um Watson and Skinner between them had the view that psychology should just be about measuring Behavior muscular movements and glandular secretions um and the Very word Consciousness shouldn't be used at all in Psychology only measurable objectively verifiable facts counted and their aim was in fact to eliminate subjective experience completely um and so that was certainly not very Illuminating no of course you within Psychotherapy um that then you had movements to people like young who did try to integrate the realm of spirit into psychology and I think what's happened in the last 25 years which has been a much healthier development is consciousness studies which as the scientific study of Consciousness not within the narrow framework of old style Behavior as psychology which then moved on to cognitive psychology with the computer the brain as a computer model but Consciousness studies say okay well let's look at what actually happens to people's Consciousness in near-death experiences psychedelic experiences out of the body experiences dreams lucid dreams um you know various Altered States Of Consciousness uh let's actually look at Consciousness itself scientifically and when you do that then you see that the um you know there are all sorts of things going on in Consciousness that have no immediate explanation in terms of synapses or near air transmitters obviously it's all has to be related somehow to the brain but the very narrow focus of cognitive behavioral psychology and cognitive psychology um and you know and and then leading to artificial intelligence theories um based on cognitive psychology and the Brain as a computer has had a very narrowing effect on the Sciences but as I say I think Consciousness studies is a field of science which is opening this all up in a much more exciting and interesting way I'm always I was kind of struck in in looking at your work how similar the concepts of extended intergenerational memory is to Jung's basic premise of archetypes and the collective conscious business do you see your work as in that tradition or do you are you imagining something wholly different with your with your morphic resonance ideas the idea of morphic resonance is basically that there's a kind of memory in nature all self-organizing systems molecules crystals cells tissues organisms societies of organisms galaxies um all self-organizing systems at all levels have a kind of memory from past similar systems that's transmitted Across Time by a kind of resonance across time that's what I call morphing resonance and so this leads to the idea that each species has a kind of collective memory a form and of instinct and in that sense it's very similar to Jung's idea of the collective unconscious which is a collective human memory um so in in that sense it's very similar I didn't arrive at this through studying young I came to the idea of morphic resonance when I was working in Cambridge where I worked as um I was a research fellow of the Royal Society and a fellow of Claire College in Cambridge University um and I was working on plant development plant morphogenesis how leaves take out their form how plants grow um and I and my colleagues were at the Leading Edge of um a mechanistic understanding of plant growth plant hormones uh there's a hormone called auxin I worked on how it's formed in plants and with a colleague I worked out how it's transported in a What's called the polar auxin transport system um we were way ahead of anyone working in animal development we knew the key molecules we knew how they were moved around Etc but I then realized that this just wasn't enough because all plants have the same hormone and the same transport system and yet a family is very different from the hollyhock leaf or a beach leaf um and the these hormones alone can't explain the form then I got interested in um a well-established concept and developmental biology morphogenetic fields which are form shaping Fields first proposed in the 1920s the idea was an invisible field that shapes a developing organisms it grows each cell has its own kind of field each tissue Has a Field there's a nested hierarchy of form shaping fields and these have actually held up pretty well because now there's a molecular model which is carbon dioxide gradients electrical gradients and over time this has just become more more settled as a true phenomenon yeah like Michael Levin's book I'm sure you're aware of seems to play right into this Paradigm oh yes Michael Levin is is I know 11 11 and his work is probably he's the best modern representative of this point of view um and so basically it's a top-down system of explanation a field gives you a top down way of explaining things it's like if you want to explain the universe in terms of gravitational fields which physicists do it's a top-down Theory the field explains how planets and stars interact you don't start with individual atoms and try and build up the universe from atoms and whether the electromagnetic fields with the field of a magnet you start with the whole field has a pattern and a shape and the idea was that this top-down approach in biology is necessary as well as a bottom-up molecular type approach and Michael Levin shows how morphogenetic Fields could be expressed through electrical Fields electrical gradients and so forth I think he's doing very very good work on on morphogenetic fields and he speaks very persuasively about the need for this top-down explanation well I became persuaded of all this you know when I was doing research in Cambridge I was reading about morphogenetic fields which was very unfashionable Topic in the 1970s um and thinking about them and I thought okay well if morphogenetic Fields whatever they are or however they work are shaping organisms how can they possibly be inherited um and they couldn't be inherited through the genes because genes by definition are not coding for structures or forms they're coding for the sequence for minor acids and proteins or for the activation or deactivation of other genes so there's I could I thought genes were grossly overrated and that they couldn't explain all the inheritance um and so the forms the morphogenetic fields had to be inherited in some other way and I've grappled with this for about a year and I just couldn't think how it would happen then I read a book called matter and memory by the French philosopher Henry bergson or he bagson which was first published in French in 1896. and bergson argued that memories our own memories are not stored in brains but there's a form of causation that works directly across time and then I realized that the philosopher Whitehead had had something similar and Bertrand Russell had talked in terms of monemic causation memory causation that actually was a whole tradition in philosophy of another way another kind of causation across time and it had to be based on similarity and that led me to in a sudden flash I had this idea of morphic resonance and uh and then the more I thought about it the more it seemed to be capable of explaining because you see and I think that without morphic resonance morphogenetic fields are very hard to explain it's very hard to explain their inheritance you have to say I mean I don't know where Michael Levin stands on this he's well aware of morphic resonance he's read my books on the subject um but um well we will definitely he's coming back to the show in a couple months so we will definitely ask him when we see him but yeah he's a very very kind man and very thoughtful and I love talking to him he's he's one of my favorites that's great he's great I think I think he wouldn't probably want to commit himself to morphy Resonance partly because he should land him in a lot of trouble um and and partly because you know he'd want to see more evidence and right now it's very hard to get the experiments done so there is some evidence but there's very few people in the world working on this and um because you can't get grants you'll lose your job Etc um there's one experiment going on at a university in the US I can't name um and the person doing the research who's a postdoc has to do it at night when there's no one around because he fears he'll lose his job if anyone discovers he's doing research what are the what are the experiments can you can you describe in Broad Strokes what that would look like yes um according to morphic Resonance if an animal learns a new trick um say rats learn a new trick in New York then rats All Around the World in London Melbourne Australia Etc should learn the same trick more easily just because they've learned that new trick if lots of people do the word puzzle Wordle this morning um when it's just being issued it might be harder for them to solve it than people are doing it this evening when millions of other people have done that same puzzle so these are all predictions of morphic resonance Theory I've tried to get my hands on the word all data but the New York Times now own Wordle and their terrible spoil Sports and and say we are not interested in investigating this at this time you know they they just again I suppose they prefer an easy life if if someone said New York Times is doing morphic resonance research with their word puzzle you know there's been big problems for the games department and they just want an easy life um but anyway they it's a theory that would apply to all animal learning including human learning and is potentially very easy to test like with Wordle because there's a replicate experiment every single day um but in this particular case the somebody's doing experiments with the nematode worm cenorabditis elegans which is one of the main modern organisms in biological research and with no-toed worms it's possible to train them to be attracted to certain chemicals if you flavor their food with a chemical like benzaldehyde which they wouldn't normally encounter in a pure form anyway um you can train them you need a bit like pavlovian conditioning to be attracted to they go towards benzaldehyde because that means food and if you do this over several Generations um they go on doing it just without you you don't have to select them it just gets sort of built in and this is called epigenetic inheritance the inheritance of acquired characters which used to be a big Taboo in the 20th century in biology in fact it was probably the biggest taboo but no it's been rebranded epigenetic inheritance it's a major topic of research as you know within biology um well the the experiment I'm talking about is is conditioning nematode worms to be attracted to food with a particular attractant so they get used to that doing this for quite a number of generations so they become more and more attracted to it which could be an epigenetic effect that could be molecular changes and so forth but then then comparing control worms whose ancestors have never been exposed to it and see whether they've got more attracted to this chemical because the others have learned um than they would have done otherwise in other words does this spread to other worms in experiments with rats it's already been shown that rats that learn to escape from a water maze get over the generations get quicker and quicker but it's not just rats whose parents have learned it's not just a molecular epigenetic effect rats whose parents have never learned of the same breed also learn it quicker when the others have learned it so I would expect that the same kind of experiment could be done with nematode worms um the difference is that with rat experiments they take months or years whereas nematode worm experiments could be done in in a few weeks or months so it's it's also a much more convenient model organism and it would be very good to have amorphic resonance experiment at the very heart of contemporary biology using one of the morphic rare one of the model organisms and similar experiments could be done with fruit flies or other model organisms yeah or bacteria even they replicate so quickly that would maybe be a very fast way to get at it I'm beginning to see why people suggest that your work is dangerous to the heart of science because this undermines this would this would undermine pretty much everything from from the way that I see it because if all of a sudden one lab in you know Omaha Nebraska is doing work that is affecting the laboratory in Cambridge there's almost no way to be able to tease that apart and it casts doubt on the entire Endeavor of being able to say that these experiments are randomized and objective and somehow unconnected from everything else that's happening and that's a very I think that a lot of the times the immune system of science is there to protect the Enterprise in the way that we currently see it which is this objective the test tube was filled the experiment was run sort of perspective and the minute that you remove objectivity the entire edifice suddenly stands on much more fragile ground yes well it's on fragile ground anyway isn't it because replication crisis in science has shown the great majority of papers in many fields of science even in top present the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals cannot be replicated so it's not as if uh science at the moment is this totally fair metaphors it's it's not it's crumbling the the so-called objectivity of science is crumbling more and more cases of fraud come to light um and um more and more cases of paper factories where people pay you know generate papers to get promoted and stuff um and the the replication crisis um is a very serious crisis and so it's not as if um everything's fine the way it is it isn't um and I think that if we understood more about the possible morphic resonance effects um from Lab to lab and from experiment to experiment it could make science more repeatable not less so right now it's assumed that there's no influence whatever from if you do the same experiment over and over again then according to morphic Resonance if you're dealing with a new phenomenon the the worms might learn faster or something like that if you keep doing the same experiment but right now people don't pay attention to this if they notice things are getting easier as time goes on which they do they assume they're just getting better at doing the experiments for example in chemistry it's been known for a very long time that as when one lab's been able to crystallize a new compound it gets easier for labs all around the world and chemists assume that this is happening because fragments of the crystals are being wafted around the world in the atmosphere or carried from loud to lab on the Beards or closing of Migrant chemists that's the standard explanation for what everyone agrees is a well-known phenomenon melting points have been going up uh you know where they're supposed to be constant they don't go down on the whole they go up and I think that's cosmorphic resonance stabilizes Crystal structures of new compounds they become harder to disrupt and therefore the melting points go up but chemists say yes melting points do tend to go up but that's just because impurities reduce the melting point and chemists get better at making the chemicals um and they're more pure and I said well how do you know they're more purely they said well they must be more pure they've got a higher melting point so um they it's very very hard to argue with people who actually do observe these changes because instead of thinking it's happening in nature they think it's just happening because of the way the scientists themselves are learning which of course May well play a major part that's why one needs special experiments to tease apart learning effects of scientists from changes in nature herself you mentioned this uh when you were talking about the New York Times uh wordles you brought up this concept of essentially heresy that we have and this is something that comes up over and over again which is that it's increasingly it's an increasingly strangled discussion in mainstream science right there's a there's less Innovation there's smaller smaller incremental adjustments that can be made and anything that's outside of that gets attacked rapidly by the scientific immune system do you imagine that science in the future um some our friend Kurt mentioned he calls its uh science 2.0 but the future the the new version of science is their way that we can imagine encouraging open honest good faith discussions where people don't just have this allergic Championship mentality about how discussions unfold well it's not immediately obvious because science is not a culture of it doesn't really have a culture of debate you know when Thomas Kuhn gave his model of scientific revolutions at the structure of scientific revolutions the idea of paradigms and Paradigm change you get a new model actually the the thing with the kinds of revolutions he was thinking of were much more like old style South American Revolutions where one military dictatorship takes over from another one through a palace Revolution they were not an opening of the whole science to democratic participation and you know the um so they're not the the way scientific revolutions work isn't to lead to a pluralism when you get a new Orthodoxy like relativity Theory quantum theory The Big Bang Theory the training came in in 1966 till then most visitors thought the universe was eternal when the new Orthodox is in place then it becomes another dictatorship um I mean we're used to in every other aspect of Our Lives to pluralism you know you've got Democrats you've got Republicans you've got independence and within religion you've got Christians and Muslims and Buddhists and among Christians who've got Catholics and Protestants and Orthodox and you've got lots of subdivisions within those so um and in a court of law you hear the prosecution and the defense in almost every other area of our existence we're used to a full and free debate or the expression on the Level Playing Field of different views within science it's not how it works you know if you're going against the scientific Orthodoxy your papers will be rejected by Anonymous peer reviewers from mainstream journals you'll be canceled or disinvited from giving talks in Maine universities um you know I know all these things they happen to me all the time um and um the the there's a kind of as you say an immune system which prevents these things happening now I think one way they could happen is through organizations outside the scientific institutions staging debates about open questions in science where there really is a difference of opinion I think if I were running such thing I wouldn't include climate change or covid because there's already hyperpolarized opinions there where you you'll just have open Warfare and it would be very hard to deal with that but debates about our memories stored in the brain is the Mind confined to the inside of the head um is there really a Multiverse could the laws of nature be more like habits um does start matter really exist or could it be alternative theories to explain the behavior of galaxies and so on such debates would help another thing that would help is funding agencies that are prepared to fund unorthodox research this is not going to happen through Government funding agencies the NSF and and such organizations were going to be dominated in the future as they are now by Committees of eminent scientists who've come up through this system and basically will have more of the same but they can happen through foundations or independent funding agencies and there are one or two have come into being recently for example you've probably come across the emerald gate foundation in San Francisco which is made up of people who've made Fortunes in Silicon Valley they've put in something like 100 million dollars to fund unconventional research and um they're well aware as you are of the power of the immune system and the fact that it inhibits genuine Innovation and they want to be able to fund truly Innovative research um so I'm not sure how much they're funding and they only started recently but if more of these foundations or some of the many billionaires that now exist in the world who are interested in science and some of them really are interested in science so that they could make get a much bigger bang for the buck by finding by funding unconventional research than than having a building named after them at Harvard or Stanford or somewhere um you know you've heard for for fewer millions of dollars they could actually make a bigger difference then I think uh things could change because right now most scientists won't do unconventional research because they're afraid of losing their job their grants their pension Etc um I mean I'm not like that because I lost all these things so long ago I've got nothing further to lose so I feel extraordinarily free and I have actually been fortunate enough to be supported by eccentric millionaires over the years um who like what I'm doing and and support it on a on a modest scale um I do research there's really quite inexpensive so I'm not talking lots and lots of money yeah so so are we we're supported by by independent P it's interesting I'm hearing almost an a vision of separation of state and Science in some sense I mean obviously State technological engineering based science is going to be a thing forever as long as States want to have militaries and Industry and all of this stuff but it's interesting that this comes back to a sort of privatization of science at the end of the day and it also strikes me that states are fundamentally interested in science being a discipline of Truth seeking truth with a capital T that is really mixed up monolithic yeah where the state needs to be able to say that this is objectively the correct move and we will go in this direction because this is the final say and the minute that you start mucking about and that and start suggesting that well perhaps that's not that's not the case and there's a pluralism it again it can't be supported by an edifice that needs to have a final truth well the state I mean there's been no separation of Science and state for a long time and when the first vision of science organized science was put forward by Francis Bacon at the beginning of the 17th century he was Lord Chancellor of England he was a major functionary in the state and he had this version of academies of science which would be State supported like colleges of Cardinals or Bishops and his vision led to the founding of the Royal Society and then National academies of science all over the world um as state-sponsored and state recognized bodies where you'd have the top high priesthood of Science Under State control but this in fact was um although it was a kind of Ideal that has been realized in the 20th and 21st centuries for a lot of the history of science it didn't apply in Britain for example in the 19th century tree a great deal of research was done by independent researchers like Charles Darwin he never had a government job or an academic post or a state Grant he was an independently wealthy gentleman he married the pottery area so the Wedgewood Pottery RS he made a fortune on speculating in Railway stocks in the 1860s when there was a kind of like the internet boom there was a railway stop boom and then it collapsed he sold just at time in time to avoid losing every everything so Darwin funded his own research and was very very independent and if he'd had to have Grant proposals approved by committees I dare say the theory of evolution as we know it would have been much delayed and the same goes for the co-discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection Alfred Russell Wallace who was working as an independent naturalist collecting specimens in what we now call Indonesia then the Dutch East Indies collecting butterflies and so forth and selling them to collectors that's how he funded his Expeditions and he came up with the idea of evolution by natural selection um so quite a lot of the really Innovative work in science was not done by people with own state or state funding institutions and it's really only since the second world war that these enormous dominance of state and institutional science has taken over and almost squeezed out all other forms of inquiry but if we were having this conversation in the 1860s or 70s you know there would have been lots of examples of people who weren't working within State institutions and I mean including the Great Adventure inventors you know Tesla and Marconi and all those kind of people were not pro tenured professors at Harvard or anything they a lot of the great Innovations in radio the telegraph in uh and so forth um didn't happen through State institutions some happened through private companies and indeed you know there were famous examples the Bell labs and so on which were great centers of innovation in the 20th century but corporations have now become more dependent on government support government Aid has become much more integrated um and therefore the scope for Freedom has become even more diminished yeah well there's another aspect to it as well which is profitability and instrumentalization which if you are working on something like power generation in the case of Tesla there's a very clear there's a there's a very clear series of steps that gets you to a product that you can sell and that's appealing for investment in a modern sense because well that's what we do we put money into things that will make more money and that is the that's the holy grail and so with something like a morphogenic field or morphic resonance do you do you see it as something that is instrumentalizable or do you see it as something that will forever remain as a philosophical underpinning that simply changes how we see the world but can't be used directionally well I mean morphic resonance it is largely you know how nature works I think but um I think it might be possible to well if it's easier to learn things others have learned before then one way of instrumentalizing it would be to have morphic resonance educational techniques I think all our education when you learn something I think it is facilitated by morphic resonance from those who've learned it before and if one found ways of optimizing morphic resonance in education you could probably have accelerated learning that would be one fairly simple example um and then if it's possible to create artificially systems which have a holistic a genuinely holistic property um for example if it's possible to make fairly complex analog computers that have patterns within them that are holistic patterns within them that are capable of morphic resonance then one could have a whole computer system based on analog not digital computers which would have a built-in Global memory and I'm sure there'd be users for that the thing is digital computers deliberately exclude both churns and anything remotely like morphic resonance they're highly deterministic and are never going to come to life or have genuine artificial intelligence in my opinion whereas analog computers are much more likely candidates for this and yet that's not where the money is going at the moment so I would I think it would lead to possible new investment in forms of analog Computing and in relation to um some we haven't talked about my research on so-called psychic phenomena but one of them is pre-sentiment feeling the future there's quite a lot of evidence that people can feel what's going to happen in the next few seconds and um I think that to feeling what's going to happen is actually a commonplace experience I think that I've done surveys that show that about 95 of people have had the experience of waking up before an alarm goes off and most people just assume they've got some kind of biological clock that enables them to do this it's just an assumption because that's the obvious mechanistic explanation but if you think about it in evolutionary terms um Pete no one had to wake up at a precise time to catch a plane or a train or something till the 20th century or the 19th century most people didn't even have watches you know or clocks they woke up with a Crow and so the idea of this precise time that works when you're asleep and enables you to wake up at weird times in the morning to catch planes is in my opinion highly unlikely I think that it's a kind of pre-sentiment of the alarm or even of the time when you wake up because you can do it without the alarm just tell yourself to waste a certain time now I think that people who are doing day trading in in stock markets um you know where you're betting whether these these Futures is going to go up or down in the next this stock suit say German Government Bond Futures is it going to go there in the next five seconds or is it going to go there and you the people who are doing day trading are often working on time scales of a few seconds um and I've interviewed day traders in one of the most successful companies in the city of London and the key day Traders there are highly intuitive they say you know just know when news is going to break and look at the right screen and just happen to know which of the 12 screens around my desk the action is going to be out and so I think day Traders are doing this and I think if one had a training app for day traders that cultivated the sense of you know where things are going to go next with this by cultivating this feeling this pre-sentiment um then people could actually make millions out of it and if if you Market as an app a pre-sentiment app which should enable people to make millions out of day trading I think this would catch on very fast and um you know there might still be a so-called Skeptics it'd say oh it's impossible and stuff but if people are making millions then for most people that would be evidence enough that something's going on and moreover it would be something that computers wouldn't be able to simulate or catch up with so that was another idea um I'm just one of the ideas I suggest in my course on um you know six potential breakthroughs in The Sciences um because although personally I'm not very interested in making millions on stock markets or day trading there are a lot of people who are interested and um as you say for if there's an application for something people take it much more seriously um yeah along the lines of computers um if you have time I would love to hear your thoughts about the participation of artificial intelligence in morphogenic fields and if you think that these uh yeah if you think that computers are capable of participating in conscious activity if that's something that you see spreading outside of organic material or or how how that's going to integrate in the future but I don't think that as I said just now I don't think digital computers have that capacity they're highly determinate and you know and you want them to be I mean if you press an A on your keyboard if you're writing something you want a to come up on the screen you don't want a sort of 50 from the A and sort of 30 to B and 15 of C or something you don't want it to be probabilistic you want it to be determinate and even when people apply randomizing programs in computers they usually use Udo random algorithms rather than real randomness the reason I think this is important is that I think how morphogenetic Fields work and I think howomorphic resonance Works working through these fields is by patenting indeterminate events that almost everything in nature is indeterminate except computers and man-made machines but if you think about it Atomic processes are indeterminate that's Quantum indeterminism or uncertainty um the weather is indeterminate it's a chaotic system you know the breaking of a wave and the ocean is indepoterminate each wave different from the last if you look at the pattern of veins and a leaf on a tree the pattern of veins is different on each leaf and moreover different on each half of the same Leaf the two sides of the same Leaf nature is indeterminate inherently and we've created little islands of determinism through our Technologies because we want the car you want the when you press generates you want to to accelerate you don't want it to break and they say we've we have created artificially determinate systems through technology and then we've used those machines as the model for the whole of the universe the machine theory of nature is that you couldn't think of a worse metaphor from those things in nature than a man-made machine um so I think that computers uh with their deterministic programs and their granulated reductionistic plus and naught method of functioning have no holistic overall pattern the program gives a kind of overall pattern but the actual working of the computer is granular it's sort of it's lots of little pluses and minuses it's kind of atomistic and you know the screens are pixelated they're pixels they're separate units and they're not holistic overview type things um and so I think intelligence is to do with holistic patterns and the recognition of holistic patterns and and the um computers in their present form are neither carefully being conscious nor truly intelligent when you get something like deep mind which is very impressive in the way that they've managed protein structures for example Google's Deep Mind um how they do that is through a massive amount of feeding in data from thousands and thousands of different proteins and then you recognize similar patterns like facial recognition software it's not because the software understands the nature of human faces or empathizes with the Expressions on people's faces or understands how faces develop in embryology it's simply through comparing just millions and millions and millions of faces and and having a program that can pick out differences and and when you see the same one again you can recognize it but it's completely unconscious process based on kind of Brute Force um so I personally think that the most speculative attempts to create artificial intelligence is true intelligence are doomed to failure I mean we heard this 30 years ago fifth generation computers were going to take over the world and never happened um and so I think that fears of artificial intelligence are greatly exaggerated because I think artificial intelligence is very limited it can do very impressively things like play chess or go or do facial recognitions but it's not conscious and it's not real intelligence um and there's no way digital computers could ever exhibit true intelligence Consciousness uh in my opinion that's why I think if one wanted to look for that in the computer world one would have to start afresh with analog computers where because they're inherently holistic and because they can have a lot of indeterminism within them a much more promising and Quantum Computing which involves a lot of probabilistic processes is in a sense Reinventing analog Computing so I would say if anything of this is going to happen is much more likely to emerge from Quantum or analog Computing than from existing digital Computing systems there's a there's a really interesting project out of Australia called cortical Labs where what they've done is they have designed a biological computer interface and so they print an electrode that has a sensing area and a stimulating area and then they grow neurons on top of it and then they connect those neurons to a computer program and they can teach them to do stuff and so they were able to I think in like three or four passes of an experiment they were able to teach them how to play Pong simply by do you know Carl friston's free energy principle yes so they work with Kyle friston and they harnessed his idea that what uh cells want to do is they want to minimize uncertainty and so when they perform incorrectly they give them an uncertain condition when they perform correctly they give them a predictable stimulus and using that principle they're able to train them to do stuff and what's really interesting is that the human neurons in a dish outperform Mouse neurons at this computer game task and that to me is amorphic phenomenon because you take these cells out of the context of a brain out of the context of historical knowledge of what it means to play Pong and yet you're taking them from a brain that has grown up in a world where it knows how to play Pong by the way unpublished result the editors made them take that statement out of their discussion even though they found it to be true which is fascinating well they made them take out the statement that human neurons are better than Mouse neurons learning because the uh the question is open and we we had the guy who who's the lead scientist on the project on the show The question is open whether or not you can design an experiment where you train the neurons on something that mice are really good at like a smell-based game that is fascinating um it'd be very interesting to know quite how the neurons are doing it because obviously if there's a pattern emerging they must be working holistically it's not just a single nerve cell with on off switches they're working together and typically patterns of neurons or even heart cells uh culturation dishes have rhythmic processes you know a lot of neuronal cultures will have a rhythmic firing pattern waves of activity and like if you grow heart muscle cells in tissue culture when they form clumps they'll start pulsing like a heart those inherent rhythmic nature to these holistic assemblies and um I think morphic resonance works on systems that are literally resonant I.E that they're rhythmic it's so it's possible that these systems that they've got in Australia that you just describe um would even undergo morphic resonance learning effects it's possible you could train one lot to learn it and it may be the second time you do it they'd learn it quicker um so I I don't they probably won't be looking for morphic resonance effects because it's already a fairly radical and I'm sure that they're um they don't want to get into extra unnecessary trouble by saying there might be morphe resonance going on here but it would be very interesting if they tracked their experiments if they do the same thing over and over again to compare the results to see where there's a change in the speed or the efficiency at which it happens as time goes on well their goal is to make it a platform that is cheap enough for any laboratory to use they want to be able to make this as a tool for studying systems they're also outside of the academy too which is kind of cool they they are you know they I think their last paper was in nature but they're they're just an institution on their own which is pretty I think Forward Thinking well it's almost necessary if they're doing something really radical properly I mean they might not be able to do it within a standard lab but if they do indeed intend to make this widely accessible and and if they succeed then this could easily become a platform for morphe resonance experiments you know and there would be a case where you could buy a system that had been pre-trained in their lab to do these things much quicker than it might otherwise do because it's already a sort of morphic resonance conditioned um so um that would be very fascinating have you had the chance to sit down with any scientists that are working within the institutions at present like have have you had a conversation with Michael Levin or uh with anybody who's you know squarely seated within the institution about these things publicly or well yes I mean Michael Levin and I have been in touch with we corresponded and you know I visited him at Tufts University and you know we no we he's read some of my books and so on yes um Evan we're in contact I don't know I wouldn't say very regular basis but you know I think last time was a few weeks ago um and I had a long Zoom call last night with a scientist in Oxford who's working on epigenetic effects in nematode worms and um we were discussing potential experiments um I do um I've done um a series of some podcasts with a Spanish neuroscientists young neuroscientist Dr Alex Gomez Marin in fact one of ours is on YouTube on my YouTube channel called our memories stored in brains um and he's working in a mainstream Neuroscience Institute and and we're exploring together um you know the question of how memory works I think it works by morphic resonance I don't think it's stalled in brains um and of course the majority conventional opinion is yes of course it's stored in brains where else could it be um anyway so Alex Gomez Marin and I um you know have a ongoing series of discussions and we're working together on some scientific papers um one of them is going to appear in a journal fairly soon um so yes I I mean I interact quite a lot with people within institutional zones um that's the this is usually on a private level you know I'm I'm I have plenty of friends within the scientific World um and [Music] but I don't ask them to come out in public and support what I'm doing because I know it would damage their position because I'm dangerous to know um but you know privately we have all sorts of you know very agreeable conversations quite wide-ranging and so on does it's not as if everyone in the scientific World actually believes in mechanistic materialism I would say it's a minority we did surveys here in Britain of practicing scientists engineers and medical professionals in Britain France and Germany um and it turned out the number who are actual sort of Hardcore atheistic materials is fairly high it's about 25 percent and then another 20 percent were sort of less committed but would say they were agnostic or non-religious or generally speaking went along with the sort of mechanistic approach but that's 45 another 45 percent described themselves as spiritual and or religious um and so the the number of sort of Hardcore mechanistic materialistic atheists is probably about 25 and that's what the survey showed and it's what my own experience shows because whenever I give talks inside big institutions afterwards I always heard people coming up to me who look one way or the other to see if anyone's listening and then say you know I've had these kinds of experiences or my dog knows when I'm coming home from the lab or I've had these telepathic things I can't understand or I'm really interested in morphic resonance but I can't tell my colleagues they always say that and sometimes when four or five people in the same institution have told me the same thing I said well actually I happen to know that four or five of your colleagues share this kind of Interest they say how do you know no because they just told me and I sometimes introduce them to each other and so they're in the closet it's a bit like gays in the 1950s you know they're pretending to be straight um and so I don't think the whole scientific world is full of people who are totally committed to that world view I think they pretend to believe in it during working hours because it's good for their career and I know this I've worked for seven years in India I worked in an international agricultural Institute and many of my colleagues there were Indian and among my Indian colleagues there were no atheists I didn't I met anyone it wasn't in my Institute she was in another Institute he'd done a PhD in Cambridge but of the ones I worked was a new best um at work they went along with the mechanistic worldview plant breeding it's just genes and you know molecular biology and so on but in the evenings when an invited miss their homes you know if they were Hindus they'd have their shrines and Ganesh and their wives would be Lighting in josticks and doing pujos and things and if they were Muslims they'd fastened Ramadan and do their daily prayers and so forth um if they were Christians they you know quite most and quite devout Christians and so they didn't have an atheistic mechanistic worldview as soon as they left the lab it was like an Emulsion their lives like an Emulsion of sort of Western mechanistic signs at work but what really mattered in their private lives wasn't like that at all and that's true of many scientists too and I mean lots of scientists practicing scientists are interested in more holistic World Views many of them take psychedelics and have mind-blowing experiences uh many uh you know meditate or have other spiritual practices quite a lot of religious um so I think that the present state of mechanistic science is rather like communism in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev when you know if you're a dissident from the Communist materialist world view you got locked up in the psychiatric institution so and some people were brave enough to be publicly dissident and they were locked up in psychiatric institutions better than understanding where they would have just been shot or sent to Siberia it was a more Humane approach um but most people didn't want to be locked up in psychiatric institutions so they in public pretended to go along with this world view you know when the at the party Congress people made speeches in favor of Marxism leninism Etc they'd clap dutifully and so on but when the Soviet Union collapsed when communism was no longer the official ideology um how many people really believed in it there were some but it certainly wasn't everyone but before the collapse of the Soviet Union most people were pretending to believe in it and I think it's like that within science I think that it's it isn't as if most scientists have this dogmatically mechanism materialist worldview or deeply committed to it it's just the way you keep your job and the way you keep in with your colleagues and it's the shared world view that's important for the community to believe in ETC or appear to believe in but it doesn't go that deep in in many people because they're minimum experiences which go beyond it well it's kind of your your career is kind of remarkable and that you have actually managed to reach a lot of minds and you've really been successful as a heretic actually and that seems kind of uncommon like we meet people all the time on the fringes of science with ideas and they seem utterly incapable of bringing those ideas into a public discussion and and that often leads to an incredible amount of bitterness and that's something that I was about that I was going to ask about because you don't see me just want to know what your secret to success has been because you're I mean success what I mean by success is your ability to really make these ideas live in the world despite how utterly heretical they are and all of the institutional scientists or not not all of them but many uh large institutions taking shots at your work and it's just kind of incredible that you've prevailed through that is is there some secret to your success because I would love to learn it well I think partly is not taking it personally um the thing is that this is a world view and I'm putting forward a different way of looking at things um which causes this immune response and so I don't think it's me personally that I mean I many people find me irritating and annoying and stuff for doing what I do but it's it's primarily um the most people who attack me genuinely believe that they're fighting for the truth and that they genuinely believe in this mechanistic worldview that's the militant atheists and mechanists most people don't attack me like that the ones who attack me and nearly all these Millicent types um you know Evangelical atheists pz Myers um Jerry Coyne Richard Dawkins you know people like that um many regular scientists don't have this extremist view as I said earlier um so first of all not take it too personally and secondly um not feel resentful I mean this is I'm a practicing Christian I'm an Anglican and Episcopalian in American terms and you know every day I pray and um I pray why I always start with the Lord's Prayer and when I get to the forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us um if somebody's made some unfair attack on my work that's definitely a trespass um and um I try to I pray for the grace to let go of it not to be bitter and resentful and angry because that's as part of it for self-protection if I became better angry and resentful is these things are emotions are corrosive to one's own psyche I don't want to be corroded by bitterness anger and resentment so I prefer to try and through with the help of prayer and I would put it in the help of divine grace as well but you know the the forgiving power that comes through prayer that I I try and go to bed every night without feeling angry about anything I mean I do feel angry about all sorts of things in the world but not a kind of personal resentful nagging level and this has got easier over years it wasn't very easy to start with when I was attacked really viciously who in people who wanted to destroy me I mean destroy my career but actually really wanted to destroy me as well um and uh but you know I saw that they were by their lights fighting for what they thought of as truth and they saw me as a uh as a as a heretic who was undermining the entire scientific Enterprise and if allowed to persist unchecked would unleash what Freud called the black mud of superstition that would overwhelm science and civilization as we know them and that's how these organized groups of Skeptics see themselves to this day but you know they're they're on the kind of crusade but um realizing that's what they're doing and why they're doing it makes it easier not to feel tremendously resentful or angry or better that's so inspirational I really personally could learn a lot of that I I suffer so much from people's uh you know other personal attacks you know especially when you introduce a new idea to someone it's just it really gets at my lizard amygdala brain and I just feel very defensive but I think just cultivating a sense of empathy for people really wanting to do the right thing is man that's that's really something to Aspire to yeah do you think that there's utility in engaging the harshest critics or is there much more utility in turning to the people who are already supportive of the ideas I think there's certain utility in engaging with people who are moderately open-minded but who've been education in a conventional way if you're dealing with the harshest critics people like Richard Dawkins and stuff then there's not much Point I've had encounters with almost all the top Skeptics and militant atheists um and the most extreme ones like Dawkins simply aren't interested in the evidence they know they're right they're on a crusade and there's there's simply no they won't engage um except their only response is dismissive you know that's rubbish it's stupid it's ignorant it's foolish or something like that and I mean for example last year Stephen Pinker who's one of these militant materialists um wrote a book called rationality in which he argues that psychic phenomena and other unexplained phenomena don't exist because they're impossible and therefore there's no need it's it's rational not to pay any attention to the evidence because you know in advance that all the evidence is false fraudulent foolish or whatever it's invalid um so I challenged him to a debate about telepathy through a British blog called unheard which has a fairly wide following and if I just emailed him privately I'm sure he would have ignored it but a public challenge would be much harder for him to deal with um and he tried to ignore it but in the end he was forced to respond and then he said he hadn't got as he put it the bandwidth to do this uh debate um and on further questioning it turned out by that he meant that if he were to enter a debate about these things he'd actually have to spend some time looking at the evidence and he hadn't about time to do that and didn't want to waste time doing that so I mean it's an impermeable position you see it's evidence free based on pure Dogma um and when you're dealing it's it's like trying to argue with a creationist about Evolution if you meet somebody who's completely committed to an ideological point of view they're very defended or you know arguing with a conspiracy theorist who's totally committed to their particular conspiracy theory it's like that and I find it's a I mean I do it when it when I'm asked to do it if I'm invited to do a debates with people like that I do it um but most of them would rather avoid having to enter into these debates um but with more open-minded scientists you know people who have been education in a conventional way who haven't thought about these other Alternatives then it's a it's more fruitful to have a discussion and to you know raise points that might open new possibilities in in their thinking or in thinking together um so yes I do do that as much as I can in fact it's fascinating how there's just no component of socialization in Science Education like when you come through grad school it's just you know crushing ideas and you know consuming knowledge and there's just no pause to consider how dialogue should actually unfold and I would love to see science 2.0 exhibit some features of that in its education pipelines yeah if you if you could have a dream debate who would you debate you haven't spoken to I think probably um if if it's going to be with someone who's has quite opposing views I think the only Millicent atheist I haven't yet had a debate with is Sam Harris and Sam Harris is quite interesting because he has a deeply committed atheist you know he's sort of a fire breathing anti-religious atheist on the other hand he meditates and um in fact gives online meditation courses and his wife um is you know is is a Buddhist meditator and is interested in pan psychism so Sam Harris is someone who's part of him is in that kind of Hardcore mechanistic material as well and part of him isn't and um I dare say confronted with me he'd flip back into defensively into his hardcore persona but there's parts of him which are opening I mean I watched a podcast of his fairly recently where he was talking about a mushroom trip he'd done as psilocybin trip and he said where he had this incredible Unity of experience he felt he was part of a Consciousness far greater than his own self and he could understand if he'd been a Christian Mystic how he would have identified this with God and how it would have seem to completely persuasive and that was his own experience but after a few days of reflection he realized that this was nothing but changes inside the brain caused by the chemicals of the cyanocybin ETC so he's he sort of I mean my point is that science is meant to be empirical empirical means about experience if you have an experience like that the experience itself is self-validating experience but then he interpreted the experience in terms of an ideology or a theory the mechanistic theory the mind's name but the brain and then devalue his own experience because he prioritized a theory over experience and I think that the whole point of science is should try to prioritize experience over Theory That's the basis of the empirical method um so you know I'd be quite interested if he was open to discussing it but he might not be I just don't that's that's something I would love to work towards making happen that would probably be pretty incredible start working on that he's a hard one to reach but you never know like I just I really wonder with super militant atheists if you couldn't offer a new definition of God that would allow them to soften their positions because they're allergic to the Superstition right they're allergic to the Superstition and yet we have a sense that there's an emergent property of all things together and I'm not sure why that can't be God like Shiloh and I would have these conversations where I was very I was very adamant about the fact that I didn't believe in God I grew up in a Soviet family there was we were Jewish like we went to high holidays to Temple maybe I don't know like three or four times over the course of my entire life we would like the Hanukkah candles my dad would say the prayer but I I was very against the idea of an external being and then we over the course of many years over many discussions I would I would lay out my vision of of Nature and the interconnectedness of everything and the way that we are shaped by the things around us and we shape them and there's this pressure upon us where there is indeterminism and yet there is there is some fadedness and Shiloh would very quietly be like I think that's God and I was very against that for a long time and then we had Don Hoffman on the show and Don Hoffman kind of has this conscious agent story of God where you have everything as it sums together producing progressively larger and larger conscious agents until everything sums into the final ultimate conscious agent and his father was I think he was a Lutheran minister and when I found that out all of a sudden everything clicked into place and I was able to conceptualize the the universe which is all things in existence as God therefore all of us are a part of something and it just it made a lot of sense and I wonder when I speak to atheists if that isn't if that isn't something that they themselves already feel but they just don't have the right words for it and the word God is is something that they're allergic to yeah I think it's largely analogy um and many of them after all believed that there's some unifying principle of everything they have the universe and the laws of nature and the whole of nature they think of as a kind of unity um which has a coherence and an order within it um they usually think of it as unconscious but that's um that's really a product of mechanistic materialist ideology since the 17th century and I mean it's a deep habit but I think what opens up many people who are materialist is is direct experiences of mystical type experiences and in the modern world that's usually through psychedelics um in the past it would have been through you know spiritual practices like fasting and so on but no many millions of people experience these Altered States Of Consciousness through psychedelics and I think there's a twofold problem I think one is that um the their Prejudice and allergy to God is based usually on a very peculiar one-sided view of God they think of God as being someone who creationists in the Deep science worship and and part of the religious right or something and there's all sorts of reasons to be against that kind of God or belief system for many people um but um I think it's also the case that religious people um since the 17th century have retreated into a view of God that sort of separates God from nature because science has got nature and they've just got God and so it's not really related to Nature and for Many religious practitioners in the Middle Ages you see people would go to Holy Springs holy Wells holy mountains we have pilgrimages through the fields it was very nature related and Gothic Cathedrals are full of carve a foliage and green men and you know vegetation spirits and so forth it was very animistic but when Nature and religion was separated in the 17th century all of those experiences were shifted away from God and into science and then in science they were devalued because conscious experiences of no value in the materialist world is Just an Illusion or Epi phenomenon of the brain so I think that also has to be a recovery within the religious traditions of a much richer view of God than the one they've been used to for the last few centuries and there are theologians and Matthew Fox is one who's a friend of mine and we've done a couple of books together um an American Theologian who has very much you know gone pervaded view of nature another one is David Bentley Hart who's an American Theologian whose book the experience of God being Consciousness Bliss is I think a book that shows her theology correctly understood understood in terms of his long tradition of reflection on the nature of consciousness has something to tell us about the very nature of Consciousness itself because God is primarily Consciousness and um so experienced directly through mystical experiences um and the idea that there's a Consciousness within and Beyond the universe underlying and permeating all things is the traditional view of God not to some separate external being out there um and so David Bentley heart makes it very clear that not only in the Christian tradition but also in aspects of Judaism Sufism in Islam Hinduism and and the and in parts of the Buddhist tradition there's much more in common than separates them and what they have in common is a threefold version of the understanding of ultimate Consciousness there's a ground of being which Hindus call sat then there's the contents of Consciousness which Hindu is called chit the never and the known um and then there's a principle of energy power movement change which is the holy spirit um and those are all there even in the Jewish tradition right in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis the spirit of God moved on the face of the deep verse two um the spirit of God's like the wind Numa or ruach in in Hebrews is wind power breath and the spirit of God moving on the face of the deep the ocean or the Primal ocean creates waves so you have a kind of vibratory picture of God's action and then God said let there be light so you have the spoken word the the the um which has formed substance meaning connection um which in the Christian Holy Trinity the spirit and and the word are the two aspects through which God is works and is revealed in the world and and it's right there I mean Jewish people don't believe in the Holy Trinity because they think it's three gods and not one God and so on but um actually um when one sees that the word and the spirit of God are aspects of the Divine or attributes or ways in which the Divine acts in the world and in nature and through nature one can see it even there in in the Jewish Old Testament so what David Bentley heart shows in his book the experience of God being in Consciousness Bliss is that a deep theology common to the world's major Traditions actually gives one a much deeper and richer understanding of Nature and indeed of our own Consciousness because it's part of that greater consciousness and with that I'm afraid I'm going to have to leave you because it's dinner time and I'm already late for um dinner so I mean we could have a minute or two more but I'm going to have to go I'm afraid yeah absolutely I thank you for giving us so much for your time I've learned so much and I'm very inspired yeah I'm inspired to do better to you and just uh you know approach these subjects uh and approach my enemies uh in a better light with a more productive mindset and empathetic and yeah thank you so much for coming by it was really wonderful my pleasure and keep up your good work I'm so glad you're doing this [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: The DemystifySci Podcast

Views: 13,472

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Id: hxOs8pDjnqk

Length: 97min 40sec (5860 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 12 2023