Rupert Sheldrake - Can Emergence Explain Reality?

Rupert I've been obsessed with the nature of reality my whole life and I've really been looking forward to speaking with you because your sense of reality it's a little bit broader than other people's then some people yes how do you how so what are some of your ideas it's hard to know where to begin there's such a general question well let's take a really big view I think that the universe is evolutionary most people think that the entire cosmos is evolutionary and I think that the rules that govern it the laws that govern it our evolutionary - a lot of people think that we have an evolving universe but at the moment of the Big Bang all the laws of nature were they're fully formed like a cosmic Napoleonic Code I don't think it's like that at all I think the laws evolved along with nature and in fact I think the term law is a really bad term for them because law implies a human legal system it's a human metaphor it's very anthropocentric I think a bunch better term is habit so my view is that the universe evolves and with it the habits of nature and the so called laws of nature are really just habits that have become so habitual their behaviors of they're fixed so I think that the world is radically evolutionary evolution permeates the entire fabric of the universe it's not just confined to the biological realm or the early phases of the Big Bang it's the way the world is so it's radically evolutionary it's full of habits and also creative because evolution depends both on repetition which is what habits do and creativity which is where new things come from if you just have just habits nothing and change if you had just creativity you'd have a kind of chaos of innovation with nothing stabilizing so I think the universe is an interplay of habit and creativity and I think this is reflected all through nature what are some of the exemplification zuv there are implications well examples would be if you make a new chemical compound that's never been made before as far as we know that's something new in nature if you crystallize it that's a new form in nature those crystals have never existed existed before this is done all the time thousands of new chemicals have made every year in universities and drug companies so when the crystal fails it forms it hasn't got a habit and it's actually rather hard to get crystals to form for the first time people have to wait months or years and no one quite knows how to get them to form you just have to wait sometimes anyway you've got it you get a crystal sooner or later and then it gets easier around the world to crystallize these things on the whole I chemists have known this for years and I would say this is a new habit getting established more often it's done as a kind of memory of the previous crystals so your vision is is that somehow making that first crystal embodies that form in some super field sense as opposed to just the common human ability to do things because other people have they read about it and they learn how to do it better and better that's right I think that once the new form has become established it's a new fact in nature and you have it it becomes established in nature and through repetition it gets more habitual so what I'm saying is if you make new cake crystals in one place like Oxford then it should get easier to make the same crystals all around the world even if you don't tell the people there how to do it even if you don't take fragments of these crystals to nucleate crystals somewhere else it'll get easier everywhere just because it's happened here there's a kind of memory in nature and how could that possibly happen well my hypothesis is that it happens by process that I call morphic resonance morphic resonance is the influence of similar patterns of activity on subsequent similar patterns of activity so what's important is similarity and this moves across space and time so it's a kind of cumulative memory the first time you make a new crystal there isn't a field for it already but it comes into being the second time it's influenced by the first crystals the third time since by the first and second ones the fourth time those first second and third so it builds up there's in fluence by morphic resonance so each kind of thing each kind of crystal each biological species has a kind of collective memory on which each individual draws and to which it contributes and these fields are universal or they limited to the geographic area where it originally forms now there the hypothesis is that they a universal once they've occurred this influence of morphic resonance can happen anywhere and anywhere in the universe I well I mean obviously we can't test no it happened some distant can look theoretically if theoretically yes and we can test what happens in distant galaxies by measuring the spectra of hydrogen atoms and that kind of thing and they seem the same here so in this case conventional scientists well that's just because we've got universal laws and I'd say it's because morphic resonance is universal can't really tell between them that there's also a time difference when you're looking at back in the universe yes what about time and in these fields is it is it instantaneous or does it propagate the way or every other field propagates at the speed of light well you know it's it's hard to know what speed other fields propagate at I mean obviously most things propagate at or below the speed of light now there is something in physics which is probably the most mysterious aspect of quantum physics quantum entanglement or nonlocality which is instantaneous so the question is is morphic resonance more like quantum phenomena or is it more like regular mechanical phenomena and so I think it's more like quantum phenomena it may be instantaneous but it's impossible at the moment to do any experiments to test that because there's no way of testing it that can give you measurements of the so every sort of fractions of a nanosecond I mean you just can't do that so so these fields would be applied to any objects are they definitely physical objects or could they be ideas well what they apply to is self-organizing systems in other words systems that organize themselves in nature which would include molecules crystals cells organisms societies like bees and ant societies brains and that which organize their own thoughts and including ideas yes and cultures what they don't apply to is things that are organized by external forces like machines the one thing that this doesn't fit with is machines and that's where it differs from conventional science which uses the machine as the primary and energy for everything machines are not self-organizing that's why we have factories and designers and things and they're the one exception everything else in nature organizes itself and I think that each self-organizing pattern of activity has a morphic field and a kind of collective inherent memory so there would be very large numbers of separate morphic fields and resonating in different ways however they do that yes lots of them so it one for each kind of species each kind of cell each kind of cultural form yes there's a huge diversity of organization in the universe and I think that there's a huge diversity of fields that organize it the fields themselves obey certain common principles like morphic resonance and so forth what are some demonstrations of it some ways you can test the validity of this because obviously this is rather unconventional yes science is normally based on the idea that laws of nature are fixed and that every experiment should be repeatable anywhere at any time because the laws of nature of the same at all times and in all places that's an assumption that's a carryover from the pre evolutionary physics I mean the Big Bang Theory came in in the 1960s this idea of the universal laws of nature immutable unchangeable the same everywhere is actually a hangover from 17th century theology when people thought the laws of nature were ideas in the mind of God and God was everywhere and always the same therefore the laws were everywhere and always the same it's an unspoken assumption usually inside so to test what I'm saying the evolutionary view of nature compared with the static view of the laws being fixed that you need to compare new processes if something new happens then I'm saying by repetition it'll get easier everywhere as well so you'd have to look at new processes crystallization is one example crystallize new things they should get easier all around the world even if you filter out dust particles and you don't tell the scientists special tips on how to do it you should just get easier in biology you should just get this word behavior teach a rat a new trick in Oxford or better teach hundreds of rats a new trick in Oxford and rats are the same breed all over the world should be able to learn the same trick quicker there's already evidence from experiments with rats in laboratories that something like this actually happens in the human realm teach people a new trick a new video game and a new sports technique in surfboarding or snowboarding or something and it should get easier for people to learn all around the world in the human realm it's hard to test because we've got videos and improved training methods and so you can only really test it we have completely standardized tests done the same way over years one example of that is IQ tests intelligence tests the same intelligence tests have been done for more than 50 years and I would predict in fact I did predict when I first thought of this theory that people should on average be getting better at intelligence tests not because they're getting smarter but because the tests are getting easier to do because millions of people already have done them and that turns out to be exactly what happens that it was discovered in the 80s and 90s that all around the world IQ tests have been getting easier and easier as scores have been going up a very mysterious phenomenon named after the man who discovered it a psychologist called Flynn it's called the Flynn effect and I think this is the kind of thing you'd expect with morphic resonance that kind of collective memory III think there could be a lot of other explanations for that there could be people knowing the kinds of questions training to experience helping their children to learn the kinds of analogy tests or whatever they can yes well there's other explanations have of course being considered by psychologists has been a tremendous debate in the psychology literature and everyone has come up with an idea like that that could explain the finish and Flynn effect has had it criticized and examined by other psychologists and they all proved inadequate I mean Flynn himself considers it baffling and say all the sort of easy explanations better nutrition better brain bigger brain sizing you know all that kind of thing more exposure to television less exposure to television all these things have been considered and none of them can explain more than a small part of this effect so it's a genuinely mysterious phenomenon that fits perfectly with a morphic resonance view so there's really no difference between a biological phenomena inorganic phenomena or even a cultural phenomena that each each one has its expression in this in this evolution of law yeah I would say that all of nature evolves all of nature has a kind of memory that there's nothing special about biological phenomena that you know in that they have a memory and so on I think all of nature is evolutionary so I think this is actually one of the crucial insights of modern science and until the 1960s people thought that biology evolved and human societies evolved and human thought and technology evolved no can't no controversy about that but they thought physics didn't evolve that physics was always the same the same adores the same kinds of things just going in cycles well now what we've discovered is the entire universe evolves the entire universe is evolutionary and in that sense it's much more biological than anyone thought before and people used to think the universe was a vast machine that just went on and on forever slowly running out of steam according to the second law of thermodynamics no the idea that it starts very small less than the size of the head of a pin very hot and it expands cools down grows and as it grows new forms and strong has appear this is much more like an embryo it's like a developing organism is nothing like a machine no machine does that at all so I think we've moved the whole of physics and the whole of science onto a kind of biological evolutionary developmental basis and that I think is a very exciting a very exciting thing and it completely changes the way we think about the world

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 25,440

Rating: 4.7210774 out of 5

Keywords: Rupert Sheldrake, Closer To Truth, Emergence, Reality, Cosmos, Mind, Brain, Philosophy of mind

Id: 1XwWyxYjtXk

Length: 13min 38sec (818 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 06 2017

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