PBS Interview, 1993

rounded with a sleep i mean the idea that our life is like a dream um i suppose so yes i mean actually i think it's the other way around i think that when we die or before we're born it's probably more like a dream and that uh it's as if our lives are rounded with a dream and of course dreams are part of sleep so that still fits with what shakespeare says dream before dream after what in between well waking life with more dreams and fantasies as well um but i think that the the dream well i suppose it depends what you mean by dream but dream is entering into a realm of possibility of fantasy of imagination um and there's a sense in which all our lives are an interface between that and the life of embodied existence in the physical world and i suppose part of the business of science is to explore that interface because you could say scientific theories come from the dream realm in fact some of them come to people in dreams but then there are many theories when you test them against reality you have to do experiments and experiments are not quite so much like dreams they're more like oracles and i think the experimental method is best seen as a modern form of divination you know in the roman times people cut open animals and examined their entrails nowadays scientists cut open animals and examine their physiology and or whatever you do an experiment you look at some feature of the the world and you ask for an answer this is just what diviners did and what the purpose of oracles was so i think that the experiment serves the role of the oracle and somehow these experiments modulate what are scientific dreams at any rate they're subject to some kind of check whereas the ordinary idea of a dream is that it's free independent and has nothing much to do except with one's memories and possibly one's future one's desires but is somehow unlimited by reality well science is limited by reality through the experimental method what did they say about voltaire if voltaire had not existed somebody would have to have invented him i think maybe the same is true of sheldrick i think there's a there's a niche uh in the in our culture for for rupert sheldrik uh uh extremely clever uh i think completely wrong but in such an ingenious way that uh it's fun to think about trying to prove what's wrong with it i don't know as well okay again rupert rupert sheldrake is he's from the uk a biologist the presence of the past the new signs of life he wrote you don't know him i'm sorry i love him as a human being i and but he has a biological theory that i'm just convinced is close to totally wrong but he's thought it through he understands the philosophical basis of it where friendly adversaries i once gave him a whole lecture of mine to express his views to my class it was one most interesting classes we ever had but i don't think he's right rupert schaldreck and so there again i plead total ignorance he is the one with the holistic approach of reality so to say yes no but i hate isms of any kind the things i've heard people report of his general position are things that i don't find congenial but i don't know them well enough to be able to say why i didn't find them congenial i shall find out i have no doubt he's not you know one one has to make certain investment choices and his was one of the you know he's one of the people who i've never just invested the time in he lives in hampstead the wonderful wooded hilly part of london where oliver sex once grew up rupert sheldrake cytologist and biochemist is to have a hard time on the occasion of the meeting with the five others as yet i have no idea if and how he is going to survive that battle he wrote i'll show you how my hypothesis of formative causation leads towards a new and radically different evolutionary view on ourselves and the world we live in no meeting around the bush there and it is true too if sheldrake's ideas about marvel genetic fields are ever proved he'll be the new darwin and einstein rolled into one the sting and the fascination are in that little word if later that afternoon we'll speak of sheldrake's strange experiments but we start off with circumventory movements the fascinations of his childhood for instance i was on the family willow farm my grandmother's family grew willow trees for making baskets and i was staying at the family farmhouse and i was outside with an uncle and i saw a row of willow trees with rusty wire hanging between them so i said to my uncle why is that rusty wire hanging between those trees and he said um well we made a fence out of willow stakes and the fence came to life and i looked and of course then i could see that each of these was like you could see how each had been a fence post and these wooden posts had formed shoots and roots and it wasn't a fence anymore it was a row of living trees and this made you know really a tremendous impression on them because this sense of the dead things coming to life in such a vivid way that you could directly see the whole thing lasting only maybe 10 20 50 seconds i don't know how long the sensible that lasted but when i remembered it this particularly vivid incident um i then saw both to my surprise and delight and also to some extent horror that in this childhood memory was summarized much of my subsequent scientific career i spent years working on plant development on the behavior of isolated stem cuttings and a lot of what i did subsequently was foreshadowed in this particular memory ever fantasized about being invisible about getting to know it all and being able to change the world no says children about being able to read other people's thoughts no sir shelby that our universe was an atom in the eye of someone in another universe and that the atoms in our universe contained other solar systems i did yes i did actually i don't know how many people have this but i vividly remember when i was a child maybe six years old i didn't know my age i was lying in bed it was in the summer in my bedroom and i saw the dust in the sunlight as it came through the window you know when you watch dust particles move and i was watching these dust particles and then the idea came to me quite spontaneously that each of those particles might be a whole world like our world and in those worlds there might be people lying in bedrooms looking at dust particles and each of those would be a world and and so this idea of infinite um like chinese boxes worlds within worlds stretching infinitely in both directions large and small suddenly struck me i mean this was probably the biggest idea i'd had in my life by that time it's suddenly an idea of such immensity and it was quite out of keeping with all the other things i thought about but suddenly this idea took hold of me and i was very fascinated by it and now because you were not unique i had the same information so i'm sorry but this picture of universes within universes like chinese boxes [Music] is there any development or is this the amazement the same and the conclusion the same and we are grown up well i wouldn't put it in quite the same way but what i would say is that the but essentially essentially the um since i believe in that the right approach to nature for science and in general is the holistic approach the holistic approach is to see that everything is nested within something else like the earth is a is a unit but the earth is within the solar system the solar system is a unit but that's within the galaxy in the galaxy as a unit but it's within a cluster of galaxies and then all these are together within the whole universe which is the ultimate physical unit and then if we come from the earth we have ecosystems that are units and then societies and then within those organisms that are units within them organs and within those tissues within those cells and within those molecules within those atoms and then subatomic particles and then complexes of subatomic particles going disappearing into the realm of the very small until they disappear from our ability to detect them because the smaller they get the bigger the apparatus you need to find them and the ultimate limit is not set by nature herself but rather by the willingness of the us congress to go on funding ever larger accelerators so um so at least in the from the small to the large i would see that indeed as the structure of the universe in this sense that at every level there's a wholeness which contains parts which are themselves holes which contain parts is i would say the very basis of the holistic world view and the view of nature which is the background to all my own scientific thinkings why is the grass green why does the moon have faces why is the sky blue children's questions are your children asking you the same questions you asked your father well i can't remember what i asked my father but i i imagine they must be the same kind of questions i mean these are very fundamental questions and my children are very fascinated by death for example they ask about what happens when you die why do things die they're very interested by stories of witches and giants that eat out children they're very concerned with the whole question of being eaten and and eating and killing and dying these preoccupy them tremendously all the stories they like have to involve elements of wicked riches or wicked giants why is that who eat little children i don't know i think children the whole question of eating and the nature of eating and the nature of death and destruction and killing fascinates them partly because we don't eat meat you see so they think about animals and and killing animals and why do people kill animals and um why do animals kill other animals what do you say in reply well i explained that in nature things have to eat something and animals either eat other animals or they eat plants and even if you eat plants you kill them but there's all this eating and killing going on as part of the structure of nature but if you look at the fairy tales that young children read grimm's fairy tales for example it's amazing how many of them involve stories of killing eating or life-threatening situations of various kinds and then it became clear to me why young children may be so obsessed with this because i don't know about holland but in england a very common phrase we have a two you saw two-year-old our two-year-old um very often adults will come and they'll pick him up and they say you're so gorgeous i could eat you up what must a two-year-old child think when an adult picks him up and smiles and says you're so gorgeous i could eat you up especially when he hears stories about wicked witches and giants that eat little children every day and it must be very confusing and i don't know why i don't say it but this is a big issue for young children certainly we want to talk about sheldrick's controversial ideas and seemingly bizarre experiments but the circumventory movements continue the view behind sheldrake's back is beautiful a beautiful murder machine people who seek comfort in nature have no idea what goes on there wrote stephen jay gould sheldrake's later table companion nature is one big violent amoral contraption cruel wasteful and indifferent to suffering i put these words of ghouls to sheldrake not knowing there is such a polite but sharp collision in store evolution serves no purpose it leads to change not necessarily to improvement of that blind evolutionary process man is the glorious and bizarre probably unintentional byproduct the idea that man is the elevated end product of evolution is a perversity i think there's an urge to reproduce and survive inherent in organisms it's obvious it's a basic truth of life and um i suppose the real question is is there more to life than that i mean um i think the the the problem with usual theories of purpose in evolution is most people who think there's a purpose in evolution think that the purpose is to produce modern scientists or modern europeans or something like that and i personally find it hard to believe that the purpose of the entire cosmos culminates in president bush or something like that i i just don't find it a very plausible theory so ones that are too human-centered seem to me inadequate theories of the purpose of evolution um so the trouble is on the one hand theories of cosmic purpose usually end up with what seems to be a rather banal sense of that purpose namely the appearance of human beings on one small planet in a vast cosmos and so i find a problem in in saying well if there is a purpose well what is it perhaps the purpose is greater complexity consciousness self-consciousness i mean one could give answers like that um the the strength of the darwinian view seems to me that it um emphasizes the importance of diversity and it's very difficult to see if you have a purposive view of evolution why it should require so much diversity unless diversity is in itself a purpose yes you see that for if we think the purpose of evolution is the evolution of human consciousness or the evolution of self-reflective intelligence or something like that then how why do we need five million species of beetles and butterflies in the amazon alone i mean what is the purpose of this incredible diversity of life that we find here on earth not just now but in the past darwin wrote uh once in a letter what a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy wasteful blundering low and horribly cruel works of nature talking about purpose yes well darwin was very keen to expel purpose from nature because he became increasingly atheistic and he wanted to keep god out of it um so he had a hidden agenda which was the expulsion of god from nature he started by reacting against the theology of paley the blind watchmaker well the watchmaker god of paley that richard dawkins has described as the blind watchmaker um he was reacting against a theological view that um treated animals and plants as machines made by an engineering god this image of god as a kind of mechanical engineer um was what darwin rejected and in rejecting this image of god he wanted to reject purpose from nature and any sense of sudden jumps or any surprising creativity in nature um well he didn't know any better than anyone else doubts about what's really going on but he had a hidden theological motive for saying what he did and i think that we can see in the world what we want to see one of the features of the universe is that it's reflexive if we think everything in the universe is organized in polarities we see polarity wherever we look if we think it's all organized in threes we see patterns of threes and trinities wherever we look or fours and if we want to see destruction waste and cruelty everywhere we look we can see it in the human world and in the biological world if we want to see cooperation symbiosis and mutual help then again we can see it wherever we look in the human realm and in the natural realm as well and i think that darwin particularly emphasized the destructive aspects of nature um partly because of personal psychological motives and partly because he made destruction the primary creative power how deep-rooted is this myth of uh striving upwards evolution leading towards man and consciousness because if i talk to people and i say what is darwinism all about they a survival of the best finally human beings are the best on top of the ladder how deep-rooted is this this myth of trade is straight jacket linear progress well i think it's terribly deep rooted because i think the evolutionary idea in biology started from the evolutionary idea in human affairs the idea of human progress came first and it was generalized to biology and then now to the cosmos but the idea of human progress which was part of the ideology of the late 18th century the enlightenment the rationalists was the idea that through the reason particularly through scientific reason modern man has risen above the superstitions of the middle ages the catholic religion or indeed any religion and that that in turn has risen above the primitive ignorant superstition of animistic tribes and societies barbaric savages and so this idea of human progress culminating in the 18th century gentleman is the ultimate peak of the human development from savagery or barbarism to civilization and then from civilization to scientific civilization and the enlightenment intellectual being the peak of the whole thing this is so deeply built into the ideology of intellectuals and and and of the whole enlightenment and rationalist view even now even now even now yes because it's what sustains the enlightenment view that our civilization is superior to the civilization of our grandfathers and our great grandfathers um and certainly to that of the middle ages and also to that of all other tribes around the world who have to be educated into our way of seeing things because our way's the best so this is still the standard ideology of the whole mainstream of western thought and given the fact that that kind of ideology came first and then evolutionary the evolutionary picture of life was added on so you then saw the progression from the primeval slime as animals then crawled out onto land and then monkeys swung in trees and finally it ends up with civilized man and nowadays of course people would say civilized woman as well um the um this evolutionary progression is seen in it is is so deep rooted in our ideology that it's extraordinarily difficult how dangerous is it well i don't think it's um it depends how you take it if you take it that our civilization has the right to exterminate all other cultures not through force any longer because we think of ourselves as civilized but by exporting our technological industrial system our educational system and our scientific world view which we've now done to the rest of the world i mean as soon as anyone discovers a backward tribe living anywhere if there are any left then they want to move in build roads have development agencies unesco will set up schools and so on so they can be turned into people just like everyone else within 10 years they'll have television that's what's happening in the world today and it shows an extraordinary um intellectual and cultural imperialism on the part of the technological advanced societies the very word advanced or developed you see implies that they're higher and better and when extrapolated to the whole of nature it means we're the most evolved things in nature because we're more conscious more purposive and so on in fact all other animals and plants are supposed to be totally unconscious or only the most rudimentary kind of awareness only we have this magical self-reflective consciousness and then if that's taken to give us the right to exploit the rest of nature use it as we like we then have the roots of the ecological crisis so i would say that this particular way of thinking is extremely deep-seated it underlies the thinking of a great many evolutionary theorists including darwin and is one of the things that's caused the great problems of the prayer of the modern world will anyone challenge these words of shell drake's at the reunion so far i have no idea all i know is that there's bound to be a terrific collision with stephen jay gould gold who doesn't believe for one minute in morphogenetic fields we are still in the stage of circumventory movements quiet neighborhood hamster friendly people but what goes on in their mind a mystery that makes and obeys its own laws invisible to us one huge panoptic of continual innovation as all of a sec says or a gigantic computer or which we only need to discover the basic program the hardware and the software as daniel dennis suggests whatever the reunion brings the quarrel between sheldrake and dennett is inevitable a reconciliation seems out of the questions i think dennett's approach is uh it shares this mechanistic obsession of the uh the idea of the machine is the central paradigm you see i think the problem with the last 300 years of mechanistic science has to take to assume that the only valid form of thinking about nature is to use machine metaphors previously previously you see people had always used organic metaphors you use the metaphor of organisms of animals of plants of trees of people of families these are the kinds of metaphor that permeate all traditional thinking they're the stuff of myth and of poetry since the 17th century there's been an attempt to substitute in rational scientific thinking a single source of metaphor namely man-made machinery as the only valid source of thinking about nature i think it's an intensely anthropocentric uh thing to do it takes a particular one aspect of human activity a very recent one also and projects this human obsession with machinery onto the whole of nature so then the ultimate then the question is are we ourselves machines and that people were machines but with this rational mind a god-given rational mind somewhere inside the head that controlled the machinery well this cartesian dualism has been the dominant model in the west ever since the 17th century and the main way that people try to deal with it is by denying that there is anything autonomous about the rational mind the materialist wants to say well we're machines just like everything else in nature so then you have to explain the thinking conscious mind so then you have to say well we're intelligent thinking conscious machines but there aren't any intelligent thinking conscious machines so then you have to say well well then we will invent them just to prove that we're intelligent thinking conscious machines and so this is the striving for artificial intelligence to make intelligent thinking conscious machines the ultimate purpose of which is to prove that we're nothing but machines well since machines are made by people in the first place it seems to me such a futile and it's like a dog chasing its tail it seems to me an entirely futile exercise and i can't get very engaged with this entire quest to try and prove through enormous intellectual convolutions through frightfully clever arguments that we're nothing but machines by imagining that our brains are some kind of self-programming programming computer the type that doesn't actually exist but of which we're promised there will be examples at some time in the future the problem you see with materialists is that we're not thinking machines and there are no thinking machines and so they have to keep pretending that they will exist they can have computers can play chess and so on at some time in the future there will be this amazing thinking machine um fully conscious like we are well then of course the question is how do we decide whether it's fully conscious or not and this of course gives philosophers uh i mean you can write many tons of books on the subject because it's hard to prove that even another person is conscious let alone a machine so there's so many philosophical problems here there's enough mileage in this for philosophers to go on for centuries more arguing about these particular questions but i just don't think it's a very fruitful or fertile debate and i think the problem is you see that if you say that we're like computers um we're self-programming computers um you've still got the the bit that does the programming there's the the computer model is inherently dualistic the software is like the mind the hardware is like the brain or the body and um it it keeps landing on back in the same old cartesian dualism in one way or another i don't see that it takes us beyond it and of course the idea of thinking of the brain as a computer is just a way of trying to update the machine metaphor to use the latest technology well darren wrote for instance the idea that the self or the soul is really just an abstraction strikes many people as simply as a simple and negative id a denial rather than anything positive but in fact it has a lot going for it including a somewhat more robustly conceived version of potential immortality than anything to be found in the traditional ideas of the soul abstractions uh well curiously enough a lot of this computer thinking was started by alan turing the the british mathematician during the war he began to develop these ideas about computing systems and he was laid the foundations of modern computing theory now it's very interesting that turing was motivated by a desire to prove the immortality of the soul cheering was homosexual his dearest friend when he was at school died at the age of about 18 and he was obsessed with in what sense his friend could be said to survive the death of the body and he came to the idea that if the self was nothing but a kind of logical structure of abstractions of the kind that you can put as a program in a computer then you can take this program from one computer to another and this you can have a kind of immortality of this system of abstractions that's independent of the physical base in which it's realized in the form of computers so there's a sense in which this dualism of body and soul or program and machine which uh is present in the computer metaphor and which then it may be alluding to was built in right at the very beginning by alan turing and one could even say that this was part of his motivation for doing it it was to find a way of proving a kind of immortality without having god or anything to do with traditional religion it was trying to kind of abstract mathematical basis for a sort of abstract immortality all the people we film in friendly hampstead in london will be dead in a hundred years time but in north and over in the usa daniel dennett explains patiently that this may not always necessarily be the case the illusion of immortality which all religion has always proclaimed can in principle be replaced by true immortality i have no idea what the confrontation of sheldrick and dennett will bring this lady 150 yards away from sheldrake's house what exactly is she painting is she painting what is there or what should have been there again i quote stephen jay gould to sheldrake ruled who writes that nature is non-moral that nature offers no ethic to support us if we need morality we have to seek for it inside ourselves well i i haven't spent a lot of time thinking about questions of morality and um so it's not but you're dealing with it every day yes making every day's choices about morality oh yes i mean i'm interested in the whole subject but i mean i haven't spent a lot of time thinking about how it relates to the uniquely human you see that the thing is a lot of secular humanists are very much into this speciesist thing they have to prove that human beings are radically different from everything else in nature and the usual things they use are consciousness and morality these are all tool-making machine making well these are the standard arguments and they're used of course to justify the fact that it's wrong to kill people but it's all right to kill cars to make hamburgers or battery chickens to to have kentucky fried chicken you've got to have some kind of justification for the way we behave um so i would say though that if you look at the natural world that most of the things we think of as moral uh features are things that we can find pre-shadowed in many ways in in the natural world for example parental care and affection which are a basic aspect of responsibility moral responsibility towards children is a key part of all human societies and when you look at the behaviour of birds looking after their young and animals in general the way they care for their young and raise them you could say that here we see maybe an unconscious or instinctive but we certainly see the principles of parental care and responsibility at work but when you're looking at counterpills eating their own parents then you can say well here we are back again with darwin in this cruel horribly cruel world well it's where you're looking at well i mean i don't know whether more caterpillars eat their parents than people kill other people i mean if you look at human wars it's not a very impressive record for human beings being distinctly better than other animals in terms of not killing each other in fact i'd say we're probably worse than most in terms of our record in killing members of our own species i think the problem you see is to take the moral as the distinctively human is to take a theoretical argument it's to form into fall into a kind of narcissism where we look at an idealized reflection of ourselves if you look at the reality of human behavior then you find brutal massacre and killing of members of our own species is part of what people have done for a long time and the so-called modern civilized world has done more of it than most and the recent iraq war showed you know it was considered perfectly all right to massacre with weapons of mass destruction tens of thousands of retreating soldiers things that in the past would have been considered in inconceivably brutal and now considered perfectly normal and so there's no growth of morality it seems to me with the advance of technological civilization and if you look at the actual practice of human beings and you look do human beings on average kill each other more or less than the members of other species the answer is i think they kill each other more than the members of most other species do look for instances in the wolves yes and or look at any it's very rare to find animals killing other members of their own species but it's quite common to find humans beings doing it and modern civilized societies like our own are still in britain still building weapons of mass destruction enormous increase going on at present in british nuclear armaments why i mean the capacity to destroy hundreds of millions of people considered perfectly normal in fact it's being expanded so um i find the morality argument as as a kind of species badge of honor um not a very strong one um i mean it's certainly the case that human beings morality would make us unique well the true person morality as conceived by enlightenment philosophers seems to me a kind of abstraction if you look at morality as practiced in traditional societies it's not usually elevated into some enormous moral code it's more in the question of custom or habit and and that i think is the natural state of human morality and it's closer to the kind of implicit behavioral norms that we find in animal societies bees wasps ants flocks of birds all of them have ways of cooperating together that means that the individual members of the society work together usually fairly harmoniously in a way that's mutually beneficial and this we find in human societies we're social animals and as such we find that our societies are influenced by social bonds and social norms like any other social animal we make it conscious and we elevate it into the name of morality but the word morality is quite a recent invention i mean in traditional human societies the word morality isn't exactly used in in our modern sense there are certain norms of behavior you don't do certain kinds of things you can do other kinds of things and if you do things that are prohibited you're ultimately expelled from the society in one way or another but i think this abstract notion of morality is is not very helpful that's my own feeling the purpose of an individual in the traditional society is to live in accordance with the myths of the ant and the way the ancestors have lived innovation is not particularly relevant in fact it's a way of deviating from an established path that's been followed many times before it's dangerous um whereas our society has put a great emphasis on innovation and has correspondingly weakened the sense of following ancestral paths and customs and therefore gives the sense that each new generation is somehow better wiser cleverer than the last so our societies are full of problems of adolescent rebellion you don't get this in traditional societies because each generation now has to prove itself better cleverer more advanced than the last and so this lack of rooting in tradition creates condition conditions where innovation can happen more readily and that in turn weakens the influence of the past and so our societies are evolving with a dissolution of the old social structures hurtling into the future in a way that nobody can foresee where it's leading the dissolution of traditional morality in traditional social and family patterns is something that's happening far faster than i think anyone imagined in the past and will leave us with a kind of society that no one can really envisage in the future i mean um if families fragment if more and more children grow up outside the normal socializing influence of the family now in in britain 25 of children are now being raised by single parents mostly single mothers in northern england over 50 percent of children are now being born to parents who are not married to mothers who are not married and so the traditional family system is breaking down and nobody has any idea it's never happened before what happens to society if the principle socializing influences on children are no longer present and yet this is a logical outcome of the dissolution of all traditional forms of social order and i don't think it's leading anywhere that most people would welcome or look forward to what do you expect well i don't know i think that the the um it's very hard to envisage how a society can be changed when many people within it lack the basic elements of socialization of being brought within social forms constraints and customs and i think this is the problem of inner cities in the united states where there's now large areas which are full of what they talk of as a kind of unmanageable underclass that may not may not be possible to incorporate within the kind of consensus pattern of liberal democracy depends on individuals being strongly motivated morally through traditions but if those traditions that sustain um the individuals dissolve the state the liberal state itself tries to be neutral it's based on the model of science it's based on a kind of scientific norm the state is a technocratic structure to bring about services in a morally neutral manner following the idea that in science you can separate values and facts and so promoting the idea of tolerance of different social groups but the state can itself give no cultural norms to people within it and therefore liberal states live on the capital of the past in terms of the religious teachings of the jewish and the christian and other religious traditions as those break down then there's nothing to take their place and it's very doubtful that this kind of society can survive for very long in my opinion i think if we just have an extrapolation of present trends dissolution of the social order rising population in the third world exhaustion of resources pollution of the planet destruction of long-term reserves of everything in terms of short-term consumption then we'll see a collapse at least of our civilization and the present political and social order massive famine appalling disasters in fact a kind of apocalyptic scenario of destruction and it may not be uniformly spread i mean there may be places in the world where you hardly know what's going on just read about it in the newspapers as it is indeed at present there are terrible things happening in africa with famines and civil wars they hardly touch us so it may be that things will start falling apart in africa and in other parts of the world while people in western europe may go on quite comfortably for a bit longer but i don't think we can be insulated forever from these things um and so i think the present order is doomed but what will take its place is not at all clear to me whether we'll have whether the present kind of system present kind of state has the ability to reform itself or is uh delivered to chaos well chaos doesn't usually last long i mean what people don't like chaos like in russia they don't like chaos and they've got chaos now so it's only a matter of time before you have kind of neo-fascist dictatorships springing out i suppose in one of your books you had a quotation from jacques mono i'll read it man must uh at last wake out of his millenary dream and discover his total solitude his fundamental isolation he must realize that like a gypsy he lives on the boundaries of an alien world a world that is deaf to his music and as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his sufferings and his crimes why did you quote him well because mono represents very clearly and puts very explicitly the natural outcome of a kind of mechanistic materialistic view of nature and of humanity this is the natural outcome most people don't think it through to its logical conclusion but if you do this is the logical conclusion this is the development of the movement started by galileo and descartes which has now worked itself out in our society and indeed has been exported to the rest of the world as a view of reality those are its consequences and mono just makes them very clear and very explicit i quoted it because he does so in with such clarity we have to wake up from our thousand years dream and come to terms with our existential loneliness the world is as death to our music and as indifferent to our illusions as it is to our suffering and our crimes pleasant neighborhood hampstead the people are friendly and polite the best anticipation machines daniel dennett calls them the best denial machines rupert sheldrake calls them every day we can see that we are preparing for disaster but we back away and turn a blind eye what we've got now is obviously more important than what we'll be missing tomorrow a bizarre invention is what stephen jay gould calls people we mustn't think that our consciousness was an intentional creation only because it's so powerful our tape does not follow the paths of logic sheldrake has spoken his epilogue the present order is doomed before we've even touched upon his ideas his revolutionary ideas about evolution and consciousness how we our society possibly end up is painfully obvious but how did we get here in that question lies the essence of sheldrick's controversial theory as if we are starting all over again we return to that get up question dance get up and dance [Music] come on and dance dance dance on let the world be a stage dance in the rhythm of life [Music] [Music] genetically and physically we are all more or less the same said oliver sex in new york but as a narrator each of us is unique we are nothing else but storytellers daniel dennett will say in nord and delver narratives form our consciousness not our consciousness the narratives sheldrake's approach is different we are built up of memories of our own life but also of the life long before we were born those memories form our narratives and finally our consciousness and this is all very well and fine with me but what does sheldrick mean by memories what memories do we consist of what stories did we know even before we came from the boom or according to sheldrick from before we were even conceived that question is at the basis of all his theories as a start i ask him where our memories are stored well i think that where's the wrong question memory is a phenomenon of relation in time and when we see that memory is principally to do with the interrelation of events in time um it's not immediately obvious that the question where plays much part in this you see where is memory stored immediately traps us in a whole set of spatial metaphors and and the problem is that we think of time in terms of spatial metaphors the near future the distant past and so people think well there must be a memory store so where is the memory store is it in the brain is it in the akashic records as the theospheres would say in some kind of ethereal realm beyond the normal realm but all of these are ways of trying to find a place for memory well i don't think it is in a place i think it's a relation in time i don't think it's stored in the brain you see i think we tune into our memories that we directly tune into them involving a kind of transmission in time this is a key part of my particular theory of morphic resonance so um memories are not exactly in places i think that the past is potentially present everywhere and that through similarity or whatever we then tune into or access aspects of past experience but it's not in the meantime stored anywhere in particular penfield did some experiments you wrote about it what did his experiments prove penfield did some experiments where he stimulated the lobes the the temporal lobes of the brain of epidemic patients and he found that when he stimulated them electrically in certain places they had vivid flashes of memory now we don't know they were actual memories they may have been hallucinations but they seemed like memories and he assumed they really were let's assume they were um but his first conclusion was that this proves the memories are stored in the part of the brain he'd stimulated which he called the memory cortex in his last book called the mystery of the mind penfield discarded his own earlier interpretation he gave up the idea that memories were stored in the temporal lobes or indeed anywhere else in the brain in particular places and came round to the view that memories were curiously diffuse you couldn't localize them in particular places and in fact in his last book penfield became a dualist where a kind of cartesian dualist so he saw the mind interacting with the brain and he no longer felt the need to have a brain location for every kind of mental function um so my own view you see would be that the brain is more like a tv receiver than a video recorder that you tune into yourself in the past as a kind of transmission through time by what i call morphic resonance from the past to the present before entering morphic resonance and your hypothesis of formative causation just remembering freud stated where is it prehistoric times have found a psychic rapper repercussions any heritage that in each generation only needs to be revived not acquired children in many ways do not react according to their own experiences but according to instinct comparable to animals in a way that can only be explained by assuming that they have phylogenetic knowledge at their disposal when i talk with oliver sex and he also writes about this he is talking about pre-human memories that go back to the darkest corners of existence and that provides his uh providing his patience with images from the prehistoric and pre-human landscape how familiar does that sound to you this phylogenetic memory the pre-human landscape we are living in and although we are living now well and it sounds entirely familiar to me i think that we inherit a great deal of collective memories from our ancestors and you know i think it goes back a long long way some kinds of things go back further than others but for example the experience of a child on its mother's breast very fundamental experience very early in life is in i would say in resonance with the experience of young mammals sucking from breasts you know for 60 maybe 100 million years of mammalian history that there's not much difference between a human baby sucking at a breast and a piglet sucking into breast or any other mammal psychiatric breast and this has been the defining characteristic of mammals ever since the mammals first evolved so there's something in this which um many of us have had or those who haven't sucked bottles which are breast substitutes that involves utterly fundamental experience which is so similar to that of phylogenetic memory going back many many millions of years that um i think it would almost inevitably in invoke or be related to this long long series of memories but but sex is talking about pre-human landscapes the mammals are pre-human they get different landscapes even pre-dinosaur landscape you understand what i mean well yes i'm not quite sure what kind of experience he might be referring to i i think that for many people i mean psychedelic visions for example people who have take psychedelics and see astonishing visionary states um often describe things that could be regarded as pre-human the psychologist stan groff who's studied the effects of lsd on many many people has collected the stories they've told and he's been driven to the conclusion that this is a particularly effective way of evoking a kind of pre-human memories which normally would be suppressed most of us would spend a lot of time suppressing these archaic memories they wouldn't come out in ordinary everyday life they might come out in dreams but we might then forget them but in certain unusual and altered states of consciousness they may become clearer the vast majority of that memory is unconscious just as the great majority of our own memory is unconscious most of us can't remember how we developed inside our mother's womb most of us can't remember almost anything that happened in the first few years of our lives and if we can't remember even our own ordinary perspective we're not likely to have very vivid memories of life as a trilobite many millions of years ago or as a cell in the primeval slime so i think that the the kind of memory that's implicit through this evolutionary history is essentially a memory of unconscious habits and you could say that the cells in our bodies participate in the unconscious habits of cells right back to the first cell including the way that cells divide and many features of cellular organization and behavior but that these memories are not expressed as conscious reminiscences in any sense they're uh more like the kinds of memories expressed through our own habits like when you ride a bicycle you can't really talk about it you can't say why you do it but it's certainly a memory you have to learn it you get on the bicycle you can just do it so that's a kind of memory but it's not a kind of conscious reflection at all and so i would say the kind of memory we inherit from our forebears and way back from pre-human ancestors is much more of that general kind to do with habits in the behavioral realm these are expressed in animals as instincts which are quite unconscious patterns of behaving um i'll quote you very short i show how the hypothesis of formative causation points towards new and radically evolutionary understanding of ourselves and the world we live in we're there this is something uh and it's quite a promise could you try to convince everybody who's looking what is formative causation what are you heading for if you say that it points towards a new and radically evolutionary understanding of ourselves and the world we live in we leave memory behind it will return but what is it well i i have to start with a historical description um in terms of evolution we've recognized since the time of darwin that there's a general evolution in the biological realm before darwin it was generally accepted there was an evolution in the human realm that had been an evolution of human consciousness hegel talked about this at the beginning of the 19th century and in the 18th century the progressive philosophers the rationalists and so on were obsessed with the idea of human progress the idea of a progress of society from barbarism to civilization and then to science and so on and so familiar story of human evolution but they didn't think then that evolution occurred in the biological realm then darwin showed you could have a scientific theory of biological evolution so now human evolution was embedded in a much bigger evolutionary story the evolution of life but the physicists um resisted the idea that physics or chemistry evolved they were locked into a a view of the universe as eternal a great machine that went on forever but gradually running down running out of steam running down thermodynamically so they had a great machine that was gradually devolving governed by eternal laws of nature that never changed and by particles of matter and a quantity of motion that never changed forever conserved the same life evolves but the laws of physically do not that's right physics itself doesn't evolve and according to that view the basic principles of physics are totally non-evolutionary so that was the idea until the 1960s then the big bang revolution occurred in cosmology and we now have a view that the whole cosmos evolves um the whole of the whole of physics and chemistry has evolved that at one time even the fields of nature the electromagnetic gravitational field were not separate and distinct in the way they are now they were part of a primal field according to super string theory and then in the chemical realm once there were no atoms and certainly at one time there were no zinc atoms or iron atoms or aluminium atoms these have all evolved historically in time as the cosmos has developed and then molecules and crystals once there were none of them now there are many kinds so the whole of physics and chemistry has also undergone an evolutionary development so we now have a radically evolutionary cosmology but the a relic of the old thinking um is still there in that most people think that the universe is governed by eternal laws of nature the laws don't evolve now what i'm suggesting is the so-called laws of nature are not fixed if we live in a radically evolutionary cosmos which since the 1960s it's been recognized and even in physics that this is the case then uh why shouldn't the laws of evolution evolve the laws of nature evolve as well and my view is that they're not really so much laws as more like habits that what happens in nature it depends on what's happened before there's a kind of memory in nature rather than a kind of eternal mathematical mind and sustaining eternal laws it's not mechanistic it's living first of all paraphrase yes i would say that the universe is not a machine it's more like an organism and the big bang theory is like the traditional myths of the cracking of the cosmic egg it tells us the universe began small that ever since that beginning it's been growing and as it's grown new structures and patterns have developed within it this is like an embryo no machine starts small and grows and forms new structures but a tree does as it grows from a seed or an embryo does as it grows from a fertilized egg and so effectively our modern cosmology has given us a view of the whole universe as a developing organism everything is developing and evolving so i would argue the old idea of eternal laws which fix it fitted so well with an eternal universe the universe physicists liked to believe in and spent a hundred years after darwin they resisted the evolutionary idea tooth and nail because it's so alien to the traditions of physics which is radically non-evolutionary but now they've finally gone over to an evolutionary view of the world but still does this residue of the old thinking the idea of eternal laws and that's what i'm questioning that's what i'm challenging and so i'm arguing that the idea of formative causation um gives us a sense of memory in nature in all kinds of nature in all aspects of nature so we can think of the evolution of nature being accompanied by the evolution of the habits of nature rather than the whole thing being governed by fixed laws that were all there at the moment of the big bang so when i say this hypothesis gives us a radically evolutionary understanding of ourselves and the universe what i'm doing is trying to extend the evolutionary model to its limit because you see what we've seen is a series of extensions first it was confined to the human realm then to the biological realm now to the realm of physical phenomena but still the idea that the laws of nature are eternal is the last residue of this old paradigm this old way of thinking and i think that's the next frontier that we have to extend the evolutionary model too um but formative causation what does it really mean what is a morphogenetic field or what is morphic resonance what do you mean by that well the the question is the question of form order pattern structure that's the question i'm dealing with and um you see science has been quite good at telling us what things are made out of um it's rather like trying to understand a city like amsterdam by going and analyzing the bricks say they're made of a particular kind of mud and play and they has a particular composition we'll tell you something about the weathering of the buildings the nature of the city the potentialities of building in that material but it won't tell you anything about the architecture or the layout of the streets and so there's a formative it's like the architectural principle as opposed to the building materials this is the aspect of nature which has been largely ignored by science spent a lot of time breaking things down and analyzing what they're made out of and of course everything's made out of something or other um at least every body is made out of bits and materials and so you can always find answers that way but when you break things down to look at the bits you lose the form the structure if you knock a house down to analyze the materials it's made of then you've lost the form the plan the structure of the house in this very active analysis and in nature the question especially in biology a form of pattern of structure and just also in chemistry because chemistry is a science of forms molecules have particular forms and so do atoms and so do crystals all these forms require an understanding of the formative principles that give rise to them and that's what that's what i'm talking about informative causation [Music] i think that formative causation is the kind of causation responsible for form structure or pattern and i think that the causal influence on this is what i call the morphogenetic field or more shortly the morphic field from the greek word morphe meaning form so i think each kind of thing has a field which gives it its form pattern structure or order and that this field which is like the plan or the shaping influence on it um has the form it does because of a kind of memory there's a kind of memory inherent in this field so if we take an animal like a giraffe and we consider how it grows or develops then we would say it's shaped as it grows as an embryo and as it grows up after birth um by the fields of its species the morphogenetic fields of its species but then how do those fields get the form they do i would say they get them from previous giraffes by the process i call morphic resonance an influence of similar things on subsequent similar things so the fields that organize things have a kind of inherent memory within them they are non-material they're non-material but they're physical to explain that i have to say that gravity is physical yes and non-existent it's itself yes the gravitational field is physical it has physical effects it's part of nature fuses in aristotle's word was nature the greek word nature is the basis of our word physical it's part of nature the gravitational field but it's not material in the sense that it's made of matter um you see when newton first thought of gravitational force the question arose well what what's it made of how do how does the moon affect the tides on the earth what's in between and some people said well if it's something that happens it must be made of matter so there must be subtle matter the ether they invented a special kind of subtle matter to be the basis of the field but what einstein showed was that we don't need the ether as the basis of electromagnetic or gravitational fields um they're themselves made of space or space-time fields of patterns in space or space-time and matter is made of fields and energy rather than fields being made of matter so i would say the morphogenetic fields and morphic fields in general are physical they're part of nature they have physical effects but they're not made of matter any more than gravitational fields are made of matter can you give some examples of what for instance uh the fruit flies or the blue tits or the rats or the nursery rhymes or the puzzles or whatever experiments have been done can you give some experiments that have been done to prove the hypothesis of informative causation and well first describe them well the theory makes a lot of predictions it's every kind of thing even crystals have a kind of memory of previous similar ones so take the example of rats learning new tricks this is the easiest example to understand um the animals within a given species draw on a collective memory and in turn contribute to it through morphic resonance so if you train rats to learn a new trick in london then what i'm saying is that rats in holland and germany and america in australia in russia all around the world rats should learn this same trick more quickly just because the rats have learned it here and this should happen just because they're rats learning the same thing it doesn't depend on telephoning people and telling them how to do it or taking rats to teach the other ones or letting the rats squeak over the telephone to rat somewhere else it should happen anyway and the more rats that learn it here the easier it should get everywhere else so that's the basic um prediction in the realm of animal behavior and prediction that's a prediction and then in terms of what happens um first of all there's quite a lot of circumstantial evidence from studies of rats and other animals that um as people have studied them in laboratories over the years they're in they've shown quite dramatic improvements in learning rates in standard laboratory tasks and these improvements have been found all over the world in a way that's both puzzling and mysterious and because there's no theory in science that could explain this until morphic resonance came along these results have simply been ignored they're lying around in the archives of science so one of the things i've done is dusted off a whole lot of existing experimental data which provide quite good circumstantial evidence for morphic resonance what about the blue tits it's well the bluetooth is the bluetits another example and and the brute example is one of the few cases we have of a new pattern of animal behavior spreading and the rate of its spread being carefully monitored normally people don't study these things in any detail in this case thanks to the efforts of hundreds of amateur bird watchers all over europe this was studied what happened was that blue tips of these little blue birds blue-headed birds discovered in about 1920 that when milk was delivered to doorsteps in england that they could tear the top off the milk bottle and drink the cream and when this had first been discovered about 20 years after milk deliveries began in england nothing happened for 20 years then a bluetooth in southampton in southern england discovered this and it spread locally the other bluetooth copied until lots of them were doing it and then they have it turned up somewhere else far away far further than blue tricks could have flown so because they don't usually move very far from their home so they couldn't have told each other they couldn't have told each other that it was discovered independently in another city and then somewhere else and the rate of independent discovery which was carefully documented accelerated the more and more of them were learning to do it until by the late 30s and 40s this was happening practically everywhere in britain and the rate of discovery accelerated in such a striking way that the professor of zoology at oxford sir alistair hardy came to the conclusion that something like telepathy might be involved it seemed mysterious to many people at the time but the most interesting results of the dutch ones because um once british blue tits had started doing this then continental ones started in holland in sweden in denmark and other countries and the habits spread in holland as it did in britain similar pattern but the difference is that in holland when the germans invaded uh the delivery of milk bottles stopped so there was no more milk for the blue tits to steal um didn't begin again till 1948 blue tits don't live more than about three years so after eight or nine years um there were no blue tits left that could remember the golden age of free cream before the war and yet when bloom when milk deliveries began again in the netherlands then within two or three years all over holland blue tits were stealing milk what about the humans what kind of experiments have been done and to what extent do they prove your hypothesis or formativisation can you give me some examples yes well first i should say that this hypothesis applies to human learning as well as rat learning obviously it's a general principle and so it means that it should be getting easier for example for children to learn to program computers just because many have learned to do it or to play video games because many have learned them already or to solve the rubik cube these predictions in the human realm are supported by a certain amount of well a lot of circumstantial evidence but we need to control for all the other variables so you have to do quite specific experiments and a lot of experiments have been done on morphic resonance in human psychology two or three have given inconclusive results where the but the great majority in something like 90 percent of the experiments that have been done have shown um quite clear effects in the direction of morphic resonance to give a few examples the easiest to understand although not the best experiment is one that was done with crossword puzzles here in england two years ago um this was done at nottingham university and the person who did it a young woman called monica england reasoned as follows if morphic resonance is happening it should be easier to solve today's crossword puzzle tomorrow than it would have been yesterday because so many people have done it today now hundreds of thousands of people do newspaper crosswords so to do this experiment all you need is to persuade a newspaper to supply their crossword in advance so you can test people before it's published and after and we persuaded the london evening standard newspaper to supply their crossword in advance for this experiment the day before it was published in london um students in nottingham were tested with this crossword and with a control crossword that was not published during this period ten minutes on each crossword um to solve as many of the clues as they could and then you mark it to see how many they've got right and that gives you a score and then other students were tested after it had been published in london and this newspaper is not circulated in nottingham so none of them would have done the crossword um and it turned out that the score on the test crossword increased quite substantially by about 20 percent whereas the control crossword didn't change at all this shows that the test crossword became easier to do after people had done it in london now the control was controlling for individual variations in crossword solving skills that didn't change you see you look at the test results relative to the control anyway this experiment um is something which i've subsequently found from people who do cross words habitually is quite a well-known fact a lot of people have written to me saying that they they do the times crosswind puzzle which is a very difficult one in england regularly and they've often found that they do better if they do it in the evening of the day that it's published or even the next day rather than if they do it straight away in the morning because because so many people have already solved it well the people who found this by experience have no explanation they just have found this by experience and when the results of this crossword experiment were published then suddenly they found an explanation for something they discovered by themselves who is sitting across from me is he the new darwin and einstein combined as many people think or someone who as many of his future table companions think has developed a brilliant theory which is hopelessly wrong whatever one thinks of the theory the experiments are baffling people will learn the old maus alphabet more easily than the new one which is thought to be simpler and more logical nursery rhymes from japan i've done some experiments with japanese nursery rhymes um the reasoning there was that if you take a nursery rhyme that's been known to millions of children over the centuries and they've all learned it to sing it um it should be in japan it should be easier for english or american people or dutch people or german people to learn that nursery rhyme than some other rhyme similar rhyme now the problem with this experiment it's a problem that can't easily be cemented is to find another rhyme that's equally intrinsically easy or difficult um to do this i had the help of a japanese poet shantario tanikawa who's one of the leading poets in japan who wrote some other rhymes with the similar rhythm and word pattern to a common japanese nursery rhyme and i then got groups of people and individuals to memorize he gave two false rhymes and there was one real rhyme i didn't know which was the real one myself and got groups of people to memorize these rhymes by chanting them in the way that children do and then later they were tested to see how much they could remember of each of the rhymes and and uh sure enough they remembered they were able to remember more of the genuine nursery rhyme of the other two much more or oh yes and well they were able to yeah so they remembered it about twice as well as the others it was quite a big effect um so this is the kind of effect one would expect this however was one of the first experiments i did and one of the problems with it is that you can never be sure that the new rhyme is equally difficult to the old one so it's not as convincing an experiment as it could be nevertheless i would have been worried if it hadn't worked yes you wrote when people learn something new such as windsurfing then as more people learn to do it it should tend to become progressively easier to learn just because so many other people have learned to do it already that is windsurfing when i'm talking about the industrial revolution for instance it occurs in the western hemisphere yes for two centuries why did it not show up or why was it not imitated at the same time in for instance africa india indonesia south latin america is this a stupid question from us no no it's not a stupid question but um i mean the question is the general question is one of parallel inventions and discoveries there are many examples of cultural patterns that have evolved independently in different parts of the world and archaeologists are often very puzzled by them and in fact that's why you get theories of people floating around the world on little rafts carrying cultures with them well in a world with morphic resonance there's no need to have all these hypothetical rafts floating around the world because people could pick it up anyway now you see the key feature of morphic resonance is similarity if people are confronting a similar problem that other people have already solved somewhere else they'll be more likely to find the same solution but if they're not confronting that problem then they won't come up with a solution they won't resonate with the other people so if you have two lots of people trying to solve the same kind of scientific or mathematical or technological or economic problem you'd have ideal conditions for morphic resonance and one of them may pick up what the others have a solution the others have found but if you have a tribe of people in africa pursuing hunting or gathering like pygmies in the in the congo rainforest and you have entrepreneurs in victoria and manchester in england trying to find ways of spinning cloth more cheaply using industrial looms there's such a difference between the problems that they're confronting that you wouldn't expect any resonance in that situation any more than you'd expect the pygmies to start speaking english but at the moment the culture is faced with for instance aspects of industrial revolution really faced we bring it there they can see it you can experience what is happening at that moment as you think they will take over if you follow the hypothesis of formative causation i don't agree i think that as soon as people are confronted with the um the kind of industrial mentality in the industrial um artifacts and start thinking in that kind of way and the remarkable thing is that the industrial revolution has spread to all parts of the world and you've got factories all over africa south america the remarkable thing is that precisely this way of doing things has spread phenomenally fast as soon as the links of trade and exports of industrial goods and and techniques of capital and investment and so on now part of this is of course ordinary communication i would never claim this as an example for morphic resonance because a lot of it depends on perfectly normal means of human communication but i would say that the remarkable thing is that as soon as these things are introduced to other cultures and people are introduced to these ways of doing things they get it so fast in new guinea for example there are new guineans driving lorries and operating machines when their fathers were living in a stone age culture in a single generation people have jumped about twenty thousand years of human history um and that that's what's so remarkable about the whole process of world development that these things do spread so fast i mean i think it's a disaster myself in many ways but the fact is that there's an enormously fast spread um however you choose to explain it i am wondering because it's one of the problems concerning more of the genetic fields um little question uh how big are marvel genetic fields light years are they reaching the ends of the universe every organism that's organized by a field and a crystal a cell a giraffe a cow a person the is organized by a field within and around it so just like a magnetic field is within and around the magnet so the morphic field of an organism is within within and around the organism it's quite local now what is non-local what involves moving over great distances is morphic resonance morphic resonance is the influence of one organism on another through or across space and time and this resonance is i think independent of distance in the sense that it doesn't fall off with distance in space or time now if that's the case then people learning something in one part of the world should influence people all around the world as long as they're in similar conditions without showing any diminution due to distance and more generally if this is the case it means that events on one planet or in one star could influence those in other stars or planets even in other galaxies there could be uh morphic resonance effects uh working over huge distances in the universe yes you wrote uh there is the possibility that most if not all no patterns of activity that appear on earth have already appeared frequently frequently elsewhere in the universe or previous universes morphic resonance from these systems may swamp the predicted effects elsewhere in the universe or previous universes i told my children tales like this for you it's simply a possibility it's a possibility not arabian nights no i think it's a possibility i mean it's a possibility that i don't think everything that's happened here has happened everywhere else and the reason i think that is for the empirical uh fact that apparent morphic resonance effects do seem to be detectable you see if morphic resonance effects are not detectable if there's no improvement with time there are theoretically three other possibilities and one is that morphic resonance is wrong as a theory which i'm sure most people would think probably i would too if the experiments didn't work the second is that morphic resonance from that everything that happens here has happened on other worlds somewhere else so often that there's nothing truly new happening on earth so you wouldn't see these effects because everything would already be governed by established habits the third possibility is that morphic resonance works from the future as well as the past in which case everything that's going to happen will also influence what's happening now and since we don't know what's going to happen this makes the theory virtually untestable but it's a theoretical possibility so what i'm concerned with here is the the way that um the novelty of things on earth if morphic resonance experiments yield positive results in other words if things get easier and easier if we can see habits building up in nature then either this shows that morphic resonance doesn't work over astronomical distances or it shows that what's happening on earth these events that we're studying are truly original in the cosmos and so therefore this opens up a theoretical possibility an institute of cosmic novelty that could be set up on quite a low budget where you could find out what's happened over the whole of the rest of the cosmos by testing for morphic resonance with the crystallization of thousands of different chemicals for example now if some of these chemicals turn out not to show a morphic resonance effect if the crystals form the same way at the beginning and go on forming the same way showing no habit no tendency to crystallize better or faster then we can infer these compounds have existed in a crystalline form elsewhere in the universe if we find ones that do show this learning experience that show this buildup of habit we can infer that these have occurred for the first time here on earth so we can actually map what's happened elsewhere in the universe on a low budget terrestrial laboratory without any need for expensive space probes space shuttles or other space technology costing many billions would have thought you could send pictures sound and music through space and fast distances if television radio and telephone had not been invented [Music] would have thought that a brainless thing with plastic sites could do calculations in seconds that would take us weeks if the computer hadn't been invented to illustrate the point take a person from the 14th century tell him that he'll be able in the future to see an area of london where a certain mr sheldrake lives without being in london himself and that he'd be seeing the street as it was a few months earlier tell him he could preserve time in a tin can on a narrow strip such is the distance between us and sheldrake's theories unless they are translated into practical applications they remain scientific heresy to be burned at the stake what changes things fast is if you find a way in which a scientific discovery can be applied if it then becomes a matter of business commerce everyday activity then it doesn't matter about the theory my primary aim is not applications of morphic resonance i'm simply saying that when it reaches the point where it's applied which may not be very far off then um it will take on a kind of reality in our present cultural context that it won't have until there are actual applications what kind of applications do you think of as far as formative causation is concerned what could be a technological application well there are several people suddenly i convinced well of course sheltering is right well two possibilities um the first would be an educational application if morphic resonance is involved in learning then we may be able to find ways of enhancing morphic resonance so that we can greatly increase the efficiency of learning or training procedures already some of the experiments on morphic resonance have shown that people learning tasks on computers can learn them quicker after other people have learned the same thing and if we can improve the conditions for learning or training this would be something that could be applied within a few years at least within commerce probably not within schools and universities they'd be the last but within commerce and industry people are not interested in theories they're interest in what works another area would be there's a possibility um it's a technical thing that a it's it's on the borderline of what's possible but it's possible that this that morphic resonances at work in certain laser um the pathways lasers make when going through certain kinds of crystals if this is the case then it might be possible to develop a new kind of memory based morphic resonance technology which would fit into modern optical computers the new generation of computers will be optical and if one had a computer that worked on morphic resonance paradoxically one might come far closer to something that dennet and people dream of namely an organic machine which would be capable of thought memory and indeed communication with other similar machines because they'd resonate with each other around the world no need for telephone lines satellites or normal means of transmission it's possible paradoxically that morphic resonance could give the very kind of technology of a kind of organic technology that denet and many others dream of um but in doing so it would mean that we have to accept a basically organic way of thinking about the whole of nature the old kind of machine metaphors would have to go or be superseded now that kind of application which i'm discussing and present with one of the leading japanese electronic companies who are actually now doing research on this um could come true and i don't know i mean it may not have said well they and i both think it's an outside chance you know one in ten one in a hundred i don't know but if this happened the world would be changed quite fast it is nearly six in the evening in hampstead the world will change at lightning speed if a certain japanese electronics firm is successful but just now sheldrick's wife is ill the builders want to discuss the alterations to the basement and there's little cosmo his son who also deserves his attention a disorganized farewell though extremely gentleman-like hours and hours after we started with childrek's discovery on his grandparents willow farm hours after we talked about what fascinated his children their fascination with death for instance he says what happens when you die see and say part of it is that of course your body decays we he likes playing in the local when we go to the church on sundays he likes playing in the graveyard of hampstead parish church um there are old tombs and they're all overgrown with ivy and there are ew trees and so on it's a very old and romantic beautiful graveyard so he loves hiding behind these tombs and he's very interested in whether they've all got skeletons in them which they have and so he's he knows that bodies decay that you bury them in graveyards and the body decays um so the question is do do you have any sense of life so my best explanation to him is that it's like dreaming since i believe there is some kind of conscious survival of death um the best way i can conceive of it is is that our life is as i said at the beginning rounded with a dream in the sense that we when we die maybe rather like dreaming and if you have a very bad dream a kind of nightmare then that may be rather like hell you can't wake up the point is that after you're dead you can't wake up anymore so you're like trapped in dreams permanently and when we dream normally of course our physical body is lying in bed but when we dream we have the sensation of going to other places talking to other people seeing things walking around even flying now none of these things we're actually doing in our physical body so we all have every night even if we don't remember it the experience of living in another kind of body doing other kinds of things which our physical body is not doing so we're familiar through years and years of dreaming most of which we forget most of which is comes from our unconscious in ways that we're not aware of most of us don't pay much attention to dreams yet we all have a dream life which is a kind of parallel life to our ordinary life not in our ordinary body but in what we could call our dream body because we have an implicit body in our dreams even if we're not aware of it um and this dream body then comes back into our physical body and when we wake up there we are there we've woken up we forget about the dream but at the moment we are dying well at the moment we're dying maybe the um one way of thinking about the way we survive bodily death would be in a kind of dream body because now i leave aside the obvious question of what's the physical basis of the dream body i'm just now talking about what we experience well i mean we can leave the brain out of it for the time being i'm just talking about our actual experience our actual experience is of having another body in our dreams and of traveling to other places and seeing other things and most people in most cultures for most of human history have believed that in our dreams we do in some sense travel outside our body and sorcerers and shame ons and witches have um perfected the techniques of traveling consciously in dreams in in so-called lucid dreams uh there's the ability when you know you're dreaming you can take control of the dream and use it to go and visit people in distant places see what they're doing and there are reports that people can really find out things they didn't otherwise know through this kind of dream travel anyway this is something we find in all shamanic traditions and in all psychic traditions so just sticking to the evidence as we experience it leaving out out of it theories about the brain um we could then see that when we die there's the sense of continuation in the dream state and you can then see there could be different kinds of dreams and we all have our own kinds of dreams depending on who we are what our personalities like what our interests and desires are so the postmortal dream state that we're in would very much depend on the kinds of people we are and the kinds of memories and experience we've had and i think that the traditional doctrines of life after death fit quite well with the kind of dream state the nightmare would be like hell ordinary dreams which are neither completely good nor completely bad would be like the catholic idea of purgatory where there's a continued development you continue after death to have some kind of psychic life but it's not the psychic life of the ordinary waking state i think it may be more like the psychic life of the dream state and then there may be within that the possibility of sometimes there are totally blissful dreams when there's a kind of liberation from the ordinary limitations of dreaming and that may be the kind of final liberation from that intermediate state a kind of mystical experience within the dream which is possible which some people have i've had some myself so anyway this is this is the analogy this is my starting point and you asked me how i talk about it to my four-year-old son and that's the answer that's how i talk about it now if i were talking about it to somebody like daniel dennett i'd obviously have to be talking about in a completely different way because he'd immediately bring in the brain and his theories about the brain and and so on which would be a different kind of discussion there's an illusion with that an illusionist like he calls a dream yes they do he call it an illusion well it is this army of dumb idiots forming our brain experiences exactly well i would say all that's just as much a theory as the other one you see that these are different theories but um one can start with experience we all have experience of dreams we are such staffers dreams are made on in our little lives around it with asleep rounded with asleep i mean the idea that our life is like a dream um i suppose so yes i mean actually i think it's the other way around i think that when we die or before we're born it's probably more like a dream and that uh it's as if our lives are rounded with a dream and of course dreams are part of sleep so it still fits with what shakespeare says

Channel: Rupert Sheldrake

Views: 2,868

Rating: 4.9824562 out of 5

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Id: z5Z4sI3gxZc

Length: 99min 23sec (5963 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 18 2021