Rupert Sheldrake — On Scientism, Morphic Resonance and the Extended Mind | Episode 204

most real scientific discoveries come from intuitive imaginative leaps the entire incentive system within institutional science is not based on changing the world for the better or coming up with useful inventions it's based on the number of papers you get published in high Prestige journals basically what I'm trying to do is to move the Sciences on beyond the materialist dogmatism let's apply the scientific method and see whether they hold up if they think it's impossible then all the evidence must be flawed and there's no point wasting time looking at it if you count the number of independent scientists in the world is vanishingly small part of the revolution in science would be a bit like the Gay Liberation movement people coming out of the closet because there's already plenty of holistically minded scientists welcome Dr rert sheld Drake I have been fascinated by you and your career uh for quite some time you took double first class honors at Cambridge you were awarded the botney prize and many others you were the Frank Knox fellow at Harvard you got your ma and PhD at Cambridge author of innumerable books and papers and yet everyone from the Citadel of rationality wants to Brand you a heretic in fact last night I watched a BBC presentation that was reported in 1981 and its uh its title was essentially that uh you were a basically the title was Rupert sheldrake is the most heretical scientist of our time and then we get a quote from Sir John Maddox who was the editor of nature at the time saying that your book was a book for burning and then he went on to say that can be condemned with exactly the same language that the Pope used to condemn Galileo it's heresy it's pure heresy that blew my mind because when did science adopt the principles of the Christian Church well exactly I it's very unfortunate parallel that he chose isn't it especially since Galileo turned out to be right um so um no it's it's it it for some reason I provoke irrational responses in some people luckily not in everybody but um uh the there's um I think the reason for this is that basically what I'm trying to do is to move the Sciences on together with lots of other people who are trying to do this beyond the materialist dogmatism um because I think it will liberate science open things up and be good for Science and some people have made it into a kind of belief system scientism and they find what I'm doing deeply offensive so basically the people I'm up against are the scientific fundamentalists absolutely and and the parallels as you note uh that he chose Galileo just blew my yes because he was right I know it's incredible isn't it and he the video when you see the video he's not joking it wasn't a joke he was really angry I agree and one one of my theories is that you bring out these sort of vitriolic and unhinged responses precisely because you come from the same exact background with the same credentials as many people who sit in the Citadel of Science and so I wonder if they see you not only as a heretic but as an apostate one of us going outside of our dogmatic belief systems well they do see me as an aposta in fact none other than Sir John Maddox in another of his articles that was just one of his diet tribes he wrote quite a number of diet tribes against me but another one is was one in which he compared me to a lapsed Jesuit attacking the Church of Rome so you know he can't get away from these Roman Catholic metaphors um and the laps Jesuit thing you see was was very much that apostate point that you just made there's a wonderful book I don't know if you've read it by Robert anthon Wilson called the new Inquisition irrational rationalism and the Citadel of science yes I have read it yes I mean it's a it was a very good account of this thing I mean it's not just me and it's not just Maddox it's a a much bigger issue really as it Wilson out and it seems to me that it's continuing recently you had a TED Talk basically ban uh I watched it you were incredibly reasonable you were suggesting the dogmatic principles of science let's turn them into questions and then let's apply the scientific method and see whether they hold up and in your talk you you point out quite well that most of them don't uh which you cover in your book The Science delusion the one that seems to really get people worked up is this idea of morphic residence um essentially didn't you also sort of learn of that from tests that were done at Harvard in the 1920s with rats trying to navigate a water Maze and their theory was they wanted to see how many generations it took intelligence to be expressed in the genetic pattern of The Offspring of the rats but what they did was they bred the spart rats together yes but they also bred the spart rats with the dimmer Wit It rats that didn't really excel at the Maze and then they found to their astonishment and this was replicated in Scotland and Australia from my reading that the at the end of these experiments rats all over the world were doing these mazes I mean to me that's something you would really want to dig into and question deeply as you did yes but you see you're clearly not like I'm not someone who's a complete devot of that materialist worldview you see the materialist worldview they think the mind's nothing but the brain that all heredi is in the genes from their point of view this is simply impossible so it doesn't matter how much evidence there is um as I found in some of my other areas of research you can pile up the evidence it doesn't make the slightest difference because if they think it's impossible then all the evidence must be flawed and there's no point wasting time looking at it and actually a couple of years ago um the rationalist Steven Pinker wrote a book called rationality in which he actually said there's no point looking at the evidence because we know it's flawed it's impossible so I challenged him to uh a public debate on the subject um uh public I publicly challenged him through an organization in England where both he and I had done interviews um and um he TR didn't reply but then he had to reply and and uh he just said he hadn't got the bandwidth for the debate meaning uh I said what do that mean he said basically um if I took part in a debate I'd have to spend time looking at the actual evidence and I just haven't time to do that so and basically admitted well he'd already admitted he wasn't interested in the evidence so um you know we're dealing here with a dogmatic frame of mind which unfortunately is being still being inculcated into school and University students all over the world because this stuff goes pretty unchallenged within academic science what's interesting is that Pinker also goes uh on at length in his book The Blank Slate that we are in fact not BL slates at all that we come out with uh dare I say the learnings perhaps from the morphic resident uh that that you advocate for so the disconnects just really blows my mind is it is it because of the growth of scientism I.E science has been morphed into a religion of sorts where where people where there are the holy texts and you dare not challenge the holy texts but the whole history of science I I think of toy right so tmy had his ideas about the universe and of course he noted a lot of inconsistencies and so he just drew more and more circles until it collapsed under the weight of its own uh errors and led to cernus right and and and this is also the the long history of science when did this change over occur in your opinion well I think that the there's always been a tendency for science to be dogmatic and I think it's partly because in the 17th century um the the the ideology of science then which would I mean it was persuasive at the time was that in the 17th century in Europe Protestants and Catholics were killing each other in the 30 Years War there was and what the early scientists said was well we found a better way not arguing over sort of texts and Priests interpretations of texts but looking straight at nature and through the mathematical laws of nature going straight to the mind of God so they thought that the laws of nature were in the mind of God like Eternal laws they were all believers in God um and so they thought science was a higher form of Truth um and superseded religion and of course at the enlightenment this became the ideology of progressive thinkers all over Europe and um what happened is that it any challenge to science was then seen as a challenge to reason um and so I think that this dogmatism has always been there but it's got much worse in the 20th century because far fewer scientists work independently you know in the 19th century a lot of scientists were independent Charles Darwin for example never had a government job never had an academic post never had a grant um he was independently wealthy partly because he did very well speculating in Railway stocks and got out just before the railway bubble burst in the 1860s and partly because he married an ays the the daughter of the owner of the Wedgewood Pottery Josiah wedgewood's daughter um so Darwin could work independently he didn't have to tow the line um and you know then Faraday who was another great innovator was working at an independent institution not a university he was working at the Royal Institution in London Lon and was extraordinarily independent so and so was James Clarks Maxwell who came up with the laws of electromagnetism and found out that lights and electromagnetic radiation now he was a Scottish L who did most of the most of this work in his castle in Scotland um so um Faraday wasn't a rich man but he was supported by the Royal Institution so there were various ways in which people could work independently but now if you count the number of independent scientists in the world it's vanishingly small I mean uh I've been forced to be one because of being proclaimed a heretic and being excommunicated um so I you know I've been worked independently for years but most scientists can't do that they have to they're on short leashes you know they have threee grants and they have to write ground proposals after 3 years their promotion the entire incentive system system within institutional science is not based on changing the world for the better or coming up with useful inventions it's based on the number of papers you get published in high Prestige journals it's a bibliometric system and if you want to get papers published in high Prestige beer peer review journals then you better stick to the conventional lines because then you'll get lots of citations you'll get through the peer review system challenge anything and you're in serious trouble you won't get the grants you know you won't your career will be in Ruins Etc so most people have a kind of straight jacket nowadays that was not the case in the 19th century when a lot of scientists could work independently if you look at the 20th century I mean the number of independent scientists is vanishingly small I mean there's um one example is Mitchell who was a Peter Mitchell was a biochemist who came up with the idea that energy in cells is not made by enzymic reactions but by a a a pH or ionic gradient across mitochondrial membranes when I was a student of biochemistry at Cambridge in the 1960s Mitchell was treated as a complete eccentric and ridiculed in the lectures and he was doing this he was a wealthy man he was doing a private laboratory at the end of his garden in Cornwall um and uh and now Mitchell was Prov right after a number of years and now it's the standard Theory but that was an example of an independently minded scientist um James Lovelock of the guia hypothesis is another example but there's very very few uh in in uh in the world today um because the the system has grown up to to have a huge inertia I found by whenever I give talks in scientific institutions um I find that you know there's usually a fairly polite silence after the talk and then a few technical questions but in the tea break afterwards or in the drinks reception you know one after another people come up and they say you know I'm really interested in your work you know can't discuss it with my colleagues here they're all so straight you know and Stu and then one after another from the same institution comes up and tells me the same thing and I say well actually they're not all quite as straight as you think they said well how do you know and I said because they've just told me so him and her and him you know they why don't you talk to each other after hours and so I think what within after hours after outside the lab context many scientists are much more open-minded than you might otherwise think it's just that they don't dare say so at work so part of the revolution in science would be a bit like the Gay Liberation movement people coming out of the closet because there's already plenty of holistically minded scientists within science um but they just you know they've got mortgages they've got kids to educate you know kids to get through college and stuff most of them don't want to rock the boat um for obvious very understandable reasons but it's not because they're all fanatically committed to ideological materialism there are some who really are Steven Pinker Richard Dawkins Daniel Dennett there are a number of people for whom this is a kind of lifelong Crusade but um a lot of scientists luk warm at best about this ideology uh it's just they go along with it because they don't want to get into trouble which is Such a Pity given the fact that I think Pastor Nick once said something living under the uh rule of these Communists in the Soviet Union having to uh falsify your preferences say things you know that are untrue uh has a profoundly bad effect effect on one's basic Constitution one's Outlook one's health and do do you anticipate a time when there will be a uh enough of these scientists who you've mentioned who are willing like you uh like the Gay Liberation movement which led to all sorts of great changes do you think that a phase change is possible here well I think it is I mean I've spent my whole career working to in the belief that it's possible to change the Sciences it may be you know one may have to start in one particular branch of science at a time but there are some areas which are opening up one of them is consciousness studies uh you know in the 19 in the 20th century the dominant Theory Of Consciousness was the behavior of school which basically said it doesn't exist and the only thing that you can study is you know the rats pressing levers for p of food as rewards it's all just conditioned reflexes and stuff um um well that was the dominant school and then by the end of the 20th century it was repace replaced in most universities by cognitive Neuroscience the brains a computer and the job of psychology is to start study the algorithms that do the computations um but really though only in the last 20 years has Consciousness studies become important and people saying well look why do if we want to understand Consciousness why not actually understand Consciousness itself and study it so now there are people studying near-death experiences um you know lucid dreaming uh mystical experiences psychedelic experiences um unusual you know people who hear voices who are not schizophrenic what's going on now whole way shamanic cultures there's a whole range of studies now um Altered States Of Consciousness in General um where Consciousness studies really is expanding Beyond those narrow limits and near death experiences you know now there's whole field of Investigation afterdeath contacts and you know end of life experiences um all of these um are are going on in universities and that's that's opening the field up um there are some areas that are more hardcore than others I mean molecular biology is one of the most hardcore areas um where it has a higher concentration of committed materialists than most most partly because of the ethos set in place by people like Francis Crick who was a very I knew him at Cambridge and he was extremely hardcore materialist he was extremely bright guy I liked him and we got on well but he was a completely committed crusading materialist as well um you know and very very um atheistic militant atheist um so that that that culture influenced molecular biology um but I think a phase change should be possible and you know I think what would really change things fastest is if there was some new invention that had commercial applications and then entrepreneurs started investing in it and then Silicon Valley billionaires invested so you had billion doll company um you know in giving grants to people in universities furthering research that would create a bandwagon effect but I think it has to come I think that the revolution is going to have to be triggered by people outside institutional science rather than from inside um because um within the the conflicts would be too great but if somebody suddenly appeared and said you know there's $1 billion fund for unconventional scientific research quite a lot of people would apply for it but right now um you know the main funding Agency for say psychical research is the BL foundation in Portugal which is doing a great job but I think they give away about a million dollars a year and they fund almost everyone in the field on on Peanut budgets whereas the Large Hadron Collider a new version of it is just being announced for 20 billion EUR um you know the the the the it's part so it's partly a question of funding um it's partly a question of ideas and thinking and but it's surprising to me that in countries like India where there's no cultural preference for dogmatic materialism on the contrary most Indian scientists are Hindus or Muslims they're religious they're certainly not I worked in India as a scientist and I hardly ever met any hardcore material IST atheist types um but they do exactly the same kind of science as people in the west not because they think it's the deepest approach to truth they don't but that's the way you earn your living that's the way you get your grants they just it's totally pragmatic in their case not ideological uh but if someone changed the rules and you got the you could get a salary for doing something different they they' quickly move over to something different so it's a big revolution because in the past scientific revolutions involved convincing a handful of people whereas now you've got you know NIH alone spends $32 billion a year on biomed research and that's just one it worldwide is over 100 billion dollars a year and that's millions of jobs and huge institutions and lots of journals huge vested interests and enormous numbers of textbooks and stuff it it takes Wilds change something like that around so we must keep Plank's idea that science advances one funeral at a time to Art here I guess well I'm not sure I mean a lot of young scientists um are well aware of the limitations but it it's it's become more and more competitive for young scientists so now because only about a quarter of PhD graduates end up with permanent jobs in institutional science and most of them then have to spend years as post dos low paid post dos in someone else's lab basically doing the donkey work for some highflying scientist um and U low pay with no no security and they and then when that comes to an end they've got incredibly specialized skills for which there's vir no market and only one in four will get a permanent academic post um so they're extremely competitive uh with the each other and that makes them very conservative um rather than bold and daring because you know they're desperately Keen to um get a job and not to ruin their career so that is a problem it's all a problem I mean it's partly a problem of these institutional structures so I wouldn't say that when I look among young scientists I know in their private life many of them are open-minded and curious but in their actual career moves they very conventional because that's the way to get ahead we've got a system that rewards incremental improvements along existing lines and is a strong disincentive to anything radically Innovative in a sense it's different from the entrepreneurial world of business where you know there's an incentive to do something new maybe not too new but there's an incentive to innovate and do something new whereas in science there isn't really and in this Pres full I like your idea very much uh our Venture division of my companio Shi Ventures has an investment in a company called prophetic and they are developing apparatus that will assist in lucid dreaming um and uh I I think you're absolutely correct about that field being far more open far more experimental uh we also are contemplating investments in many funds that are dedicated to Frontier science so uh that aspect of it I think is encouraging and uh I I agree that the follow of the money Works another way as well because if if uh if prophetic for example has a big hit and it actually works people are literally going to have to take notice and yet I have a good friend who I've had on the podcast who actually is a PhD uh and actually was a Consciousness researcher and he left the field he left the field because essentially he said it was so locked down and unwilling to go down any path that he now this is Sim speaking uh that was even slightly not part of Canon and yet we don't know anything about Consciousness really no that's what's so ironic it's it's it's the least understood thing of all and from a materialist point of view there's no explanation possible because basically they say it doesn't exist or at least it doesn't do anything um so now I think I'm glad to know that you've got this um project because I think I mean I've been thinking along somewhat similar lines with some of my own research um not I'm not an entrepreneur but um one of the things I've been doing in recent Years is as you probably know I've been studying telepathy in the sense of being stared at which are taboo topics within regular institutional science but they're not difficult to do research on and the the experiments are quite cheap I mean I have a minuscule budget so I work very inexpensively um and you can do I was brought up on the British string and ceiling wax tradition you know sort of minimal cost experiments um so telepathy tests um I've been doing these online telepathy tests on mobile phones um I've just got an app about to be released for the sense of being stared at uh where you can train yourself to get better at it the key thing here is to let people train themselves to get better and I think that if there were a company that um had an intuition training app um where there's lots of people who'd like to improve their intuition they're not going to go taught that you won't get intuition 101 at Harvard or anything like that um so you um but there are lots of people who see the point of training intuition including in business I mean I'm convinced that a lot of successful business people are successful because they're intuitive not because they're just doing nothing but calculating things from spreadsheets I mean there making decisions you always have to make a decision on the basis of incomplete information and intuition plays a major role so I think an intuition training app um which for example um a telepathy training app um my well the te first of all I'll back up a bit the telephone telepathy tests that I've been running automated on mobile phones um you may know about them but for those who are watching I I'll explain it to say you were the subject Jim you would then pick two people you might be telepathic with usually people you know well family members or close friends and when you uh you register on the phone um you put in their names what happens in the tests we've actually got is that a randomized time would call one of the two people and say this is Jim's telephone telepathy test think about Jim and when you're ready press one and and when they're ready the the system then Rings you your phone rings the caller ID says telephone telepathy test it doesn't give the name of the person calling and when you pick it up and say hi Jim this is your telephone telepathy test um uh one of your two callers is on the line press one for Andrew press two for Helen and then you have to guess which one you think it is out of the two people you Chosen and as soon as you pressed it the Line opens up and um you get to talk to them so you get instant feedback if you're right or you're wrong 50% chance of being right by chance um and then after the present version of the test it cuts off after a minute because I'm paying for the call um and um and then and then there's a there's a you know it goes they just resume their normal lives and after a random time infl it does it again and if people you know one of the things the skeptic say is if if these things are so good if people who have these skills are so good why aren't they millionaires I think the answer to that is that they are that I think the world's full of millionaires who or billionaires who who use their intuitive skills and and then they say well why don't they you know break the bank at the casino well some people do and if they do they're soon escorted out and um you know we in Britain have had online gambling for years now I mean in the US It's relatively new or just starting I gather but um these online gambling firms have algorithms to spot people who consistently win um and they then either ban them from their site or reduce them so they have a maximum stake of one pound and so the the fact is that they've got algorithms so uh you see as soon as one looks at it through this lens of then it's not something totally weird a tiny Fringe number of theosophists or something think that might happen it's it's going on all the time hiding in plain sight and I think an intuition training app could help flush all this out as well as probably make a profit I'm fascinated by the idea of morphic residents I I think uh in many respects the fir when I talk about it with people like one of the first things they'll say is oh that's pan psychism and and and I say yeah it actually is and and and they seem so incredibly reluctant to even have a conversation about it and yet when we look at the field of quantum physics for example um the idea that particles are non-locally entangled is quite broadly accepted by many Quantum physicists wh why the disconnect why why are be by the way non-locality entanglement seems to be very uh congruent with your morphic resonance Theory why why the disconnect that you'll have the quantum folks saying yeah of course and you'll have the group of biologists and evolutionists saying absolutely not well it comes back I think to this whole thing we talking about earlier the the the um ideology of scientism and materialism Sir John Maddox who condem as we started off by discussing who condemned my work as a heretic Sir John Maddox was a prominent member of the rationalist press Association uh a secular humanist a militant secular humanist a me a fellow of the committee for the scientific investigation of claims of the Paranormal psychop and um um um and his whole life was committed to this kind like Francis Crick Like Richard Dawkins this you there aren't so many of these old style militant atheists around anymore it was a kind of generation that's fading away fortunately but Maddox was deeply committed to that world view and the reason he condemned my book was because he thought I was bringing magic into science and and you know pan psychism from his point of view is a kind of magic and so it was ideological and the the hardcore the opposition I've had most strongly is from people in my own field biology um I've had much less opposition from people in in Psychotherapy for example yian followers of CG Yung love morphic resonance and when my first book came out a new science of life I was inundated with speaking invitations for yungi and conventions you know in Europe and North America um uh because it's the only way you can explain the collective conscious or at least the most plausible way of explaining the collective unconscious so um so they like it um the you know some ecologists like it um but the the So within biology there's this you know the idea we can explain everything with genes and molecules was the dominant philosophy in the 20th century and you know the Human Genome Project was supposed to sort of reveal the whole details of human nature at the molecular level and of course it didn't work as I show in my chapter in the science delusion on inheritance um it didn't work and now epigenetics have come along um the old heresy lamaran heresy is now back after being rebranded epigenetics and it's now a major thing in biology um and so this actually has provided an opening I wonder to what length you you know when when when a ideological Ferber is cornered right it it often becomes quite nasty and quite um vicious I think of David Bal who was a brilliant physicist who presented a paper on hidden variables and then his mentor Oppenheimer suppressed it because he was worried about the Red Scare and apparently bomb had been brief a member of the Communist party and oppen heider was quoted as saying that if we cannot disprove bom we shall ignore him and there's a lovely film about him in which some of the top Minds in physics are saying the most vicious things about bomb and yet they have no empirical evidence or object objectivity to refute his idea of the explicit and imp order which went on to become a quite famous Theory I just wonder would you have to brace yourself for these uh potential discoveries against that kind of OD side well I mean I've already had that kind of attack for years so it's not as if it would be something new um and actually incidentally I knew bone quite well he and I had many d dialogues and partly with Krishna merty and partly just between ourselves cuz I live in North London he lived fairly nearby so you know we used to meet um I knew him and his wife my wife knew bone uh so it was like we used to just go around for tea and things um so um and then B and I had a dialogue about morphic resonance and the implicate order which is reprinted in the new edition of my book a new science of Life called morphic resonance in the US um so yes bur was sort of persu was driven out of the US he went to Brazil and then he came ended up in England um well in terms of my own thing I mean there's not much else they can do they haven't already done I mean uh um so I don't feel that you know I slightly my attitude for years has been might as well be hung for sheep as for a lamb you know um I I'm I I I don't feel the sort sort of caution or inhibition that most scientists do because within in terms of institutional science I haven't got anything to lose so um you know I published papers in peerreview journals and luckily I have to say that most journals I've written I've been doing a lot recently I have about seven in the last year is you know it's probably my most productive phase for a long time um and I have to say that the journals I used to get very hostile rejections uh from journals who reject my posts without refereeing but in the last 2 3 years um I've managed to you know I've been fairly refereed I mean peer review is actually can be constructive it is often constructive because critics point out flaws and then you can put them right before you publish the paper and all things you've missed out you ought to put in or references you didn't know about and stuff so for example uh um my paper in the Journal of Consciousness studies two years ago called is the sun conscious pan psychist paper um I've been talking about this for years I used to discuss it with my friend Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham and Matthew Fox and I you know sort of talked about this for a long time um but then my son melon who's a scientist who wrote a book on fungi called entangled life which was a bestseller still is um he said you know why don't you write this up for a mainstream journal and I thought well it wouldn't have been possible a few years ago but I thought well okay maybe man's right times have changed a bit and I'll try this and so I wrote to the editor of the Journal of Consciousness studies and said would they consider a paper on this subject and he wrote back saying um well um yes but of course it would have to be subject to the normal peer review process and he pointed out the subtitle of the journal is controversies in science of the humanities so he said well it is in our subtitle he said so I can't really say no on the grounds it's controversial um so I wrote the paper and I brought in you know modern ideas on psychism from philosophy and philosophy of mind and it's now become within philosophy there are now quite a number of pan psychist it's now become quite respectable as a position that's what's changed the situation integrated information Theory and other forms of pan psychism u in a pro opened a door you see say basically in my paper on the sun I say well look lots of people are discussing pan psychism but they discussed you know could electrons have a little bit of Consciousness and molecules bit more and so when you get to the brain there's quite a lot um um but they stop when they get to the human brain and then why not go further you know what about the sun um and then of course once I've got open the door for the Sun what about other stars what about the whole galaxy indeed the entire Cosmos so um anyway I I um the peer reviewers one of them um said that my treatment of integrated information theory was inadequate and it has a quantity called fi that where you can calculate the consciousness of things so um it said unless I could calculate five for the sun I couldn't have a scientific argument for it being real and so the consciousness of the Sun so I have a friend who's a expert on intern integrated information Theory so I asked him to give me you know brief me on the more advanced parts of the theory it turns out to calculate five because they try and calculate it from Individual neurons and bits anything you start from the bottom you end up with a combinatorial explosion you know the number of possible combinations becomes huge so to calculate five someone had worked out to calculate five for a nematode worm in fact no other than none other than senior Abdus elegans with 302 neurons uh to calculate five for such a worm would take a standard powerful computer uh 10 to the 29 years is longer than the age of the universe and and so in my response to the peer reviewer I said well since we can't really do it through nematode worm you know and since the the sun's vastly more complex than its electromagnetic patterns it would take you know multiverses of calculation time to work out five for the Sun and so I don't think it's feasible for me to include it in this paper um which um the referee and the editor of course had to accept so but you know I had to jump through all these hoops um nevertheless um I had a paper in the procedings of the Royal Society a couple of years ago um and you know I've had a good run with scientific journals and I have to say that I've been quite fairly treated in the last few years I've had a lot of unfair treatment in the past no of course if I submitted a paper on morphe resonance to Nature I I doubt if I'd get quite such fair treatment but you know I might be able to submit a paper on morphic resonance to some other biology Journal um and and a mainstream one and it might be possible I things are changing in that sense there and um and I think the extreme fanatical atheist materialist reductionist types of the madx um uh Richard Dawkins type there are very few of them in the younger generation there is there there are a handful I mean but even the commant atheist the new generation are much more sort of fuzzy at the edges I mean Sam Harris for example who is one of the four new atheists you know from the end of Fai and so on all his books Sam Harris is now giving online meditation courses um and uh because he realizes that spiritual practices are actually beneficial um whereas old school atheists would have been against any kind of spiritual practice so um and so even the Sam Harris is probably the most far brand of the newer generation of materialists and atheist but his wife's a practicing Buddhist meditator um he himself teaches meditation online um he in one of his recent podcasts he talked about the amazing experience of a magic mushroom trip that he'd had um and in after the tri in his talk he said you know well he said this was such an amazing experience of connection with all things mystical Unity I can easily see how Mystics would think the way they do because they've had this experience and I felt like that myself but after a few days he said I realized it must all just be due to molecular changes inside the brain and uh you know all inside the head so he sort of but this is a far cry from the kind of milant uh dogmatism of of the Dawkins generation definitely and I think that um everything you've just mentioned I have done uh deep Dives down those rabbit holes I I think that we actually are in a potential phase change environment right now I call it the great reshuffle um and I definitely think that people are more open to the ideas that you are expressing um by the way there's a lovely book called The Fifth science written by a fellow Britt uh but he goes he's very mysterious he lives in Bulgaria and he goes under um a pseudonym for his book but the the the it's actually a collection of short stories but sons being conscious is one of the main elements of the book so I think you might enjoy that I look at it Jim thanks for telling me I've written it down yes yes his his name uh is uh his n Plum is exurbia um and he's quite clever um and I think it's one of the best science fiction books that I've read in years I wonder again back to we there seems to be both in culture and in what many laymen perceive as the far more disciplined scientific method there there seems to be remnants of like going all the way back to Aristotle right where deterministic yes no Z1 100 and you know the scientific method is powerfully effective I I'm not don't even want to debate that but there's two elements of it that have already been falsified first it it relies on our sense data and as you well know our sense data is not great and it also relies on pure reason and you know even uh Charles Dodson AKA Lewis Carroll in his paper what the tortois said to Achilles made a very compelling argument for the idea that as you go down the logic tree and you get to the bottom of it what you find is a human being asserting without proof that something was true and and so it it does does seem to me that that okay it works and it and it's great but what why this why this still hostility to much more probabilistic uh methodology so I I I often say that we are deterministic thinkers living in a probabilistic universe and hilarity or tragedy often ensue and and I just wonder is why why are they having this big or very hard time updating their thinking I mean again based just on real evidence in terms of sense data in terms of pure reason well I think in fact most real scientific discoveries come from intuitive imagin imaginative leaps you know as Carl poer the philosopher of science said you know that hypotheses and testing of hypothesis but the hypothesis is basically a guess uh about the way things might be and there's many examples of scientific hypotheses that come in a Flash to people it's not logically arrived at it's an intuition so that is actually part of the scientific process and philosophers of science would agree about that I don't think that was controversial when it comes to the probabilistic nature of things I think there are some branches of science where that's absolutely standard I everything to do with medical research or agricultural research is statistical and parasal research and most psychology research is statistical you know if you're doing a drug trial it's you know from mainstream drug from a mainstream Drug Company it's all based on statistics and if you're testing out new varieties of crops it's all statistical so in prac practice large areas of science are statistical everything to do with sociology predicting the outcomes of Elections opinion polls all this stuff is is is not hardcore determinism and I think that one of the things that's loosening up well the one of the big movements that loosened up thinking and science from since the 1980s was the chaos Revolution you know everyone knew there was quantum probability but then the chaos Revolution made us realize that actually most things are probabilistic including the weather I mean the weather forecasters get it wrong not because they're stupid or because they haven't got big enough computers but because it really is unpredictable more than you know a week or two in advance and even that's not terribly predictable so um I think in the large areas of science this is now pretty well taken for granted um so and statistical methodology is is absolutely necessary and the other thing which I think is changing it is the growth of quantum Computing because Quantum Computing is now has billions of dollars being invested in it by all these major companies and lots of startups as well and Quantum processes are inherently probabilistic and normally um in ordinary machines like a computer you want to iron out all that probabilism I press a on my computer keyboard I want an a to appear on the screen I don't want t or J or something some random uh letter to appear so we've actually designed our computers and all our machines to be as predictable as possible and to iron out all these Quantum fluctuations which in large numbers they sort of average out so um we've designed our machines to avoid these these problems but Quantum Computing is a technology where the the superposition of possibilities the fact that many different things things could happen um is an essence of the entire process and that's why it works and it's not terribly impressive what they can do with quantum computers yet but if it does become impressive um then it's precisely this indeterminacy and possibility realm which is going to be the basis of it so I think that's an area where there's a you know changing thinking it's that's likely to cause have KnockOn effects so I think that these the simplistic deterministic ideas um I I mean I think the problem is that people at the Leading Edge of science know what the problems are and they know that there's a lot that's not known they wouldn't be doing research if they thought all the answers were known because you just look it up in a book so anyone who's doing research knows that there's a lot that isn't known the problem comes from people who've done some kind of physics 101 when they were 19 or something and identified as a scientifically minded modern rational person and then the rest of their life go on with sort of undergraduate attitudes of of a kind of dor Insight type I I think the problems I have are actually quite often with non-scientists who think they know that science is all about determinism that everything that they don't believe in has been refuted Etc very ill-informed people on the whole but they put their faith in science so they're the same kind of people who say they're against religion because they think religions based on Blind Faith and dogma and ironically I think that kind of scientism is based on much more Blind Faith than religion I anyone who's religious knows that there are lots of different religions I mean even if you're a Christian you know there's Roman Catholics episcopalians methodists Quakers pentecostalists Etc and and you know lots of Muslim sects and so on there in religion there's a wide Choice there isn't a single thing in science there isn't a wide Choice there is no pluralism in that same way and so it's actually more dogmatic um and um in terms of Blind Faith you know if you went along and questioned somebody about the existence of the higs bosen or said you didn't believe in electric charge or something they're not going to say oh we welcome questioning Minds wonderful you're doing critical thinking they're going to say no that's wrong you know just look it out do an elementary Physics course you'll soon learn you're just ignorant so anyone who tries to question it is instantly put down Robert perig had a lovely passage in San in the Arab Motorcycle Maintenance in which he says that people who feel fairly certain about something don't go around proclaiming it all day long he goes do do you often hear somebody running around with with just complete uh you know maniacal energy saying the sun is gonna come up tomorrow the sun is gonna come up tomorrow and and he makes the point point that uh they they they are trying to asso their own feelings uh of maybe I need to be more open-minded about this in terms of chaotic mathematics that's also a really interesting uh topic that mandal brought brought to we Market types in his book The misbehavior of markets um and uh so it gained a it gained a currency outside of just pure science uh that was very very valuable I'm I'm really impressed by your this idea of moving things from Pure science your ideas to to uh something like the intuition contest all of those ideas I think are brilliant because the the more you can make them cross pooll cross pollenization then you're going to have people like me thinking oh that might be a good company Let's uh let's let's give that a go i w i i wonder what would you let's say you have a young scient you mentioned your son is a scientist and published and is doing very well what what advice would you have for younger scientists today what books would you point them towards uh what type of uh research Etc well is it I think um when I mean this may s by self prom but I I definitely Point towards my book The Science delusion science set free I the English edition the 20 2020 Edition the US edition of science set free hasn't been updated my us Publishers didn't publish the new edition but so anyone who's interested should get the British uh Second Edition the science delusion where I go through all the Sciences looking at the 10 fundamental dogmas and showing how all of them can be questioned and how science open up I think that would be a a a start um I think then it's if realistically if anyone's wants to be part of this new wave of this kind of revolutionary science that's going to happen they're going to have to do a fairly conventional PhD and get the necessary skills and credibility because right now you can't do a PhD on morphic resonance or on you can just about do in two or three universities in Britain you could do one on telepathy I mean that's relatively new that I don't know there may be one or two universities in the US maybe the CIS in San Francisco possibly Virginia um university um but um so there's a psychic research you can probably do in a handful of universities um but these more revolutionary ideas like morphit residents you can't yet do but when things start changing um there'll have to be people who've got the necessary skills who know the language of science who know how to publish papers in peer- reviewed journals and so on and for that you're going to have to have a a sort of Fairly conventional training the the main thing to do though is that once you get sucked into the culture the subculture of you know the PHD program the laboratory t- room the stuff um mean as Thomas showed in his book the structure of scientific revolutions paradigms aren't just ideas they're communities of people with shared beliefs and it's when you're a part of a community with shared beliefs if you start challenging that belief basically it puts you outside the community so you know you're expelled from the community um so um I think anyone young scientist who wants to play a part in the forthcoming revolution in science needs to be aware of of the fact that they'll be immersed in a social world and and therefore it's probably important to have a group of friends or Associates or belong to an organization like The Institute of ntic Sciences or the scientific and medical Network um where there's another peer group who don't share those standard materialist beliefs otherwise you could be very isolated which is a difficult position to be in um so uh I think at the moment though as I say that probably iring the necessary experimental skills expertise and the ability to speak the language of science as a professional isn't important will continue to be an important ingredient in in bringing about a change I'm invested I'm actually the chairman of uh one of the largest uh open source AI companies that's British uh stability AI um and one of the things I constantly hear from researchers there is is boy we really could get a lot more done if we didn't have to get our PhD but it is absolutely required and so we even uh we also through my company give fellowships of $100,000 a year to brilliant people uh one by the way the first one we gave was to a fellow named William Zang for Quantum Computing and then we uh gave another to a phte candidate in AI simp because he was such a tinkerer that his Patron in one of the uh companies that we're invested in uh had to keep getting after him to like complete his PhD and so uh I I think that that is that is wonderful advice uh and in terms of the uh the the standard issue person is going to need those credentials even though know some of the most Brilliant Minds that I've seen in uh the Deep science uh entrepreneurial part um are are mostly tinkerers and mostly uh the the types that go oh isn't that strange through through doing their uh research well Dr sheld this has been such an honor for me I admire your work enormously um and uh I think would love if you're agreeable uh to do a round two because I I didn't even get to half the things that I wanted to chat with you about because you're so fascinating um at the end of our podcast we uh ask our guests uh the the following and it's a hypothetical uh idea and and that is we are going to make you the emperor of the entire world for one day you can't kill anyone you can't kill any sparrows you can't put anyone in a re-education camp but you can we'll hand you a magical microphone and you can incept two ideas into the entire population of the Earth whatever their next morning is they're going to wake up and they're going to think I have just had two of the most incredible ideas and I'm going to act on them what are you going to incept in the world's population well I suppose that the the to the ideas that I've been working on for years in a sense I've been trying to do this without the magic microphone and without the one day and without the sort of popping into everyone's mind so in a sense it would be for me business as usual but sort of supercharged um one idea is that our minds are not just our brains that our minds are much more extensive than our brains and this is not just some kind of abstract argument um it's very practical when we look at anything like I'm looking at you now Jim on the screen my image of you is on the screen where you are it's not inside my head um so there's I think our minds are extended in Every Act of perception you know you look at a distant star our mind is reaching out to touch that star where literally over astronomical distances if I think of somebody who I know well who I want to call because I've got something I really want to say to them uh my mind reaches out my intention to call them reaches out to them they may start thinking about me and when I call they may say it's funny I was just thinking about you and I think that's the basis of telepan telepathy that they pick up these intentions because the mind is extended and I think extended Minds link together members of social groups not just in human societies but they work with pets as well I as you know I wrote a book called dogs that know when their owners are coming home about telepathic encounters with dogs cats and all sorts of other animals um also about animal premonitions like forecasting earthquakes which has been totally neglected that would be a viable app we could perhaps talk about that on another occasion um earthquake predicting out would wouldn't cost much and could save hundreds of thousands of lives um so the extended mind mind's extended in space and time is idea number one um and the the big idea that I've you know been working on for so many years now more than four 50 years actually is of course morphic resonance the idea there a memory in nature the laws of nature are more like habits our own memories are not stored inside our brains we tune into them and we also tune into lots of other people's Memories the collective memory like y called it the collective unconscious um individual memory and Collective memory um differ in degree but not in kind uh we more specifically tune into to ourselves because we're more similar to ourselves in the past um so the idea of morphic resonance habits of nature memory in nature Collective memory in each species and our in memories not being inside our brains um so that and the extended mind are are the two ideas that I'd want to put put across when I had this magic microphone you wouldn't have to incept me on either one as you can see I'm a big fan of Dr Young oh there you are yes and and and and the collective unconscious and by the way if you think about some of the greatest uh inventors of all time Tesla comes to mind he was quite open that he thought that he got all of his ideas you know by like tuning to the right frequency in the in the world mind Addison many of the most famous investors when you investigate that that that's kind of like they'll they'd look at you like well of course of course yes exactly I mean these were not marginal figures I mean te Tesla was marginalized in his later life but quite unjustly but I mean genius figures admit that it's not all just coming from random changes and ner endings you know they're channeling this in some sense um and um yeah well um anyway I haven't got the magic microphone yet but perhaps your podcast is a kind of um uh you know play pen for this moment that's one of the best descriptions of my intentions with this podcast I've ever heard well this has been absolutely fantastic real pleasure talking to you it was a real pleasure to meet some of these well-informed is interested and in a position to change things

Channel: Infinite Loops

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Id: 2ivka-X9RfI

Length: 67min 18sec (4038 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 22 2024