Rupert Sheldrake on the Influence of A. N. Whitehead

not too long ago the process theologian and philosopher john cobb jr asked me if i would uh join his cobb institute which is a nonprofit trying to advance a process relational world view as well as the philosophy of alfred north whitehead and in particular john wanted me to chair the science advisory committee one of the avenues that the cove institute is hoping to advance whitehead's work is in the natural sciences and one of the ways that i thought i could help to advance this mission would be to record a number of dialogues with scientists who have been influenced by whitehead's work or who have found that there is a correspondence between their approach and whiteheads i have already reached out to a few scientists i'm hoping to record dialogues in the near future with the astrobiologist bruce damer who i've spoken to in the past i'm also going to record a dialogue with the plasma physicist timothy eastman and others but the first scientist who was willing to speak with me about whitehead uh is rupert sheldrake and uh rupert probably needs no introduction but for those of you who are somehow unfamiliar with his work he is a biologist a cambridge trained biologist he is a psychical researcher who has developed in addition to his novel biological ideas he has also developed a number of experiments to test certain parapsychological so-called phenomena and has accumulated a wealth of interesting data that challenges the materialist paradigm that much science still operates within rupert sheldrake is rather controversial from within the scientific establishment i i would be surprised if uh my listeners are not aware of some of the controversies that he has stirred up uh trying to challenge ultimately i would say trying to challenge science and scientists to be more scientific to admit more data into their understanding uh of how the universe works and to then develop better theories to include and elucidate that data so i will leave it at that and i hope you enjoy our conversation i'm really grateful to you for making the time to speak with me i i have already mentioned to our mutual friend uh john cobb that we would be doing this and he was very glad to hear that and uh sends his well wishes to you in hopes that you're doing well and he's excited to hear our dialogue um as you may know john has recently started the cobb institutes to help further a process relational world view one of the areas that he's hoping that the institute can help advance and carry forward is uh whitehead's relevance to the natural sciences and john has asked me to to lead that effort we have a committee made up of some other scientists and one of the first things i wanted to do to help advance the mission of the institute was interview different scientists and um you are the first one uh so i'm very excited about that um i'm also going to be interviewing um the plasma physicist at the goddard space flight institute uh nasa's institute uh timothy eastman he's a plasma physicist and um an astrobiologist named bruce damer who's working on a very interesting hypothesis you know him yeah he was good friends with terence mckenna who you are also good friends with so there's a connection there so um let's talk about whitehead uh just so you know i will introduce you later when i'll record a separate introduction that will lead into this conversation so i won't do that now so i've got a series of questions here um and the first one for you would be when did you first encounter uh whitehead's ideas um you suddenly froze then i don't know but i mean i could hear you all right but you're the visuals froze okay well you heard the question then so yeah yeah um i can't remember actually i think that i may have read when i was doing history of science at harvard in 1963 64 i was in the graduate school i just finished my undergraduate degree at cambridge um i was doing history and philosophy of science and i think i read science in the modern world at that stage um because i was very interested in whiteheads take on you know what was happening the reason i was doing history and philosophy of science at harvard was because when i was an undergraduate at cambridge i'd become very disillusioned with mechanistic materialism um i'd i'd been converted to atheism and materialism when i was at school by my son's teachers but i began to doubt mechanistic materialism because i'd gone into biology because i loved animals and plants and i noticed the first thing we did was to kill them and then grind them up and everything i was most interested in about them disappeared in this process by the time you got sort of dna in a test tube you know the animal i was interested i kept having pigeons as a child and i was interested in how pigeons home of course by the time you killed the pigeon and ground up its liver and extracted its enzymes and centrifuged them and looked at the properties of the enzymes in a test tube or the dna you're an awfully long way from homing behavior um so um and the rest is just sort of filled with hand waving you know well it's genetically programmed you know and so on so i i got very um critical of the whole approach i and i didn't know whether it was inevitable or whether there was an alternative and i read goethe when i was an undergraduate and that gave me the first inklings of a holistic approach to biology so anyway i was at harvard and i think i read whitehead then and then i went back to cambridge i was a graduate student doing a phd in developmental botany um i wanted to work on plants because i couldn't spend the re i didn't want to spend the rest of my career killing animals which is what zoology would have meant and during that period i uh somebody approached me a fellow graduate student and asked me to write an article for a new magazine theoria to theory i don't know if you've come across it theoria as in greek mystical intuition to teo theory and that introduced me to this group in cambridge called the epiphany philosophers who were a group of philosophers and scientists who were interested in mystical um spirituality and philosophy of science the journal of the group theoretic theory was edited by dorothy whitehead uh donati emmett who was a student of whiteheads and the whole group was permeated by whitehead because dorothy was the editor and she was one of the key figures the other key figures in the group were richard braithwaite who is a philosopher of science professor at cambridge and his wife margaret masterman who was a worked on linguistic philosophy she worked with wittgenstein and was in charge of the cambridge language research lab which was doing pioneering work on artificial intelligence and artificial translation this was in the late 50s and early 60s she was doing this so this is way out ahead of you know google translate and stuff we've now take for granted um and we had retreats um every year four week long retreats where we in the mornings the evenings put on robes enchanted the matins and even song prayers from the church of england their morning and evening prayers then we always had a seminar during these retreats with very hard hitting seminar on ideas it was about holistic science margaret mostman and dorothy and richard and the other members of the group took the view that if there was a conflict between science and mystical religion then there must be something wrong with science and that was the exact opposite of all the religion science dialogues at the time where they always assumed if there's a conflict then you've just got to chop religion down more and more on a kind of pro-christian bed of materialism until there's almost nothing left um so i was um at that stage looking for a more holistic way of doing science i met this group in 1966 and in these various seminars and so on whitehead kept coming up all the time and dorothy was always having to try and expand it because no one could really grasp what he was saying and i tried reading process and reality and it couldn't make head no tale of it and so i always had to go and ask dorothy and she'd sort of explain it in in more simple terms and this has been my relationship with whitehead ever since 1966. uh i i can't understand the original sources apart from science and the modern world so i always have to ask whitehead experts the last in that distinguished series is you yeah i'm familiar with this problem yes so anyway um this um i i was part of this group you know for for um all through the time i was a research fellow at claire i was a i was a dong at cambridge and i was fellow of claire college where merlin later went and um the during that time i was wrestling with the homomorphic how you know how morphogenesis happens in 1973 i came up with the idea of morphing morphogenetic fields and morphing resonance morphogenetic fields were already part of biology but the idea of morphic resonance came to me then in a kind of flash provoked not by reading whitehead but by reading bergson i read matter and memory by bergson and that was for me absolutely seminal step and it led to after reflecting on it the idea of a causal memory causation anemic causation as bertrand russell called it over time a kind of form of causation that could work across time and that was that's what the main theme of his book matter in memory um and i also read his creative evolution so i was enormously inspired by bergson and um then when i started talking about this to dorothy and the others at the epiphany philosophers because this was a small group and i could bounce ideas off them and they were we were always bouncing ideas um i managed years of that already and they'd emboldened me to think more broadly because they they had a very radical approach to science and um you know we had quantum theorists and we had acupuncturists and alternative medicine people and people interested in psychokinesis and telepathy and nothing was banned from these discussions except that the discussions were very very hard hitting and most people who went to them were soon at one stage or another reduced to tears because braithwaite was very very aggressive in his critiques of people and i mean he was open-minded but aggressive and couldn't stand nonsense um so anyway um then when i talked about morphe resonance then dorothy said well there are lots of parallels for this in whitehead and began to explain how this could link up with whitehead but the main inspiration came more through bags than whitehead and the then the linking up with whitehead was sort of came a bit later then um um just to fast forward through the story i i then left my job in cambridge and got a job in an agricultural research institute in india i was in india for five years and then for two more years after that on and off um in india i was mainly working on crop improvement in plant physiology but when i was there i got interested in i was thinking about morphic resonance and i continued to develop the ideas and got to the point where i felt i could write it up in a book i did that in an ashram in south india father b griffiths who was a christian benedictine monk in an indian style ashram he wore orange robes and it was a very indian ashram actually more indian than hindu ashrams which were overwhelmed with spiritual terrorists from the west and because this was christian most spiritual terrorists from the west weren't interested in christianity so this one was ironically far more indian than any of the hindu ones um anyway i lived there and wrote my book a new science of life and then when it came out um in 1981 um there was a lot of interest in it in in britain and in america particularly california and stan groff and the trans personal association asked me to speak about it at a conference they were having in india in beginning of which is where i met my wife jill and as a result of that and the fact that people started writing about in california i was invited to california for the launch of the american edition in 82 um published by tarcher in los angeles and so i went to california i'd never been to california before i've been living in india for years so this was a very strange world for me california i you know i was invited to esselyn the ohio foundation i was invited to speak at the union institutes in san francisco in los angeles and the most interesting invitation came from david ray griffin who said i'm at clermont college we're very interested in the relation of your work to whitehead could you give a seminar so i was in la so i gave a seminar at claremont college i walked into the seminar room there are about 12 15 people there and they all had a copy of the english edition of my book which had come out a year before the american one and i said well you know should i give a talk david said no need for a talk he said we've all read your book and they all have these well thumbed and marked copies he said we've already had several seminars discussing it can we start straight in the q a in discussion [Laughter] wow really really ready for you yes that was an extraordinary experience you know because everywhere else i had to start at the beginning and expand it step by step but yeah these people were you know they i could leap straight in and they were all already totally up to speed you know and then i would say on page 27 you say this and they'd read and now how do you interpret that and that parallel something whitehead said and so so um that was my first encountering claim on college and then things went on and you know i met and talked to various whitehead scholars over the years there aren't that many of them but the next encounter big one was really um 2011 when john john cobb organized this two-day seminar about morphic resonance and whitehead a two-day seminar in claremont and people came from all over the us for it you know there were experts on whiteheads philosophy experts on sort of different aspects of whitehead's work whitehead and theology whitehead and this and that um there are transcripts somewhere i don't know if you've seen them but that that so um john would have them and that was a it was very very helpful actually to because again everyone there had actually read my work and and so we could start straight and we didn't have to waste time on the on the kind of she going through the background and miss to see any context this has ever happened to me as a clermont college where had this level of attention and and advanced discussion um and actually that was quite an interesting gathering because it was happening over the feast of all saints of november the 1st it was a two-day seminar and claremont college is a school of theology and so i said to them you know i always observe all saints day because it's one of the main festivals and is there a service here and they said oh no and i looked and i found the nearest service of some catholic church about 10 miles away and i said well i really want to go to it and but it's very hard to get i haven't got a car there's no public transport you know and then i had this idea which i said to john carr i said why didn't we have an all-saint service here there's a chapel and uh we've got an episcopalian priest in um in this group i asked him and he said he'd be happy to take it and i said and since we're all here because we admire whitehead let's promote him to the rank of a saint and um because it's really about the blessed dead and i said john carbon then could you give the homily on the theme of whitehead as we'd have a mass for all saints day and so john's a bit taken aback by all this but he agreed to it and and so we had this hurriedly arranged all saints service at clermont um and then he said well he said well that's all very well but who's going to play the organ and i said well i will i'm an organist and that's wonderful so when it actually came to it they couldn't find the keys to the organs so i had to play the piano but anyway we had we had a full-scale mass with hymns um for whitehead so it that was the that was the beatification of alfred north whitehead i did not realize he had been sainted so yes very well very nice to know uh and that you know you and john cobb collaborated on that yes that's quite wonderful so wow one one more point i want to ask you about which is that one of the people who was at this meeting was called professor wang w-a-n-g and i i talked something about my book the science delusion sunset free which came out the following year and professor wang um we had studied there and had set up institutes of process studies in china and he said well this is very important and i'd like to arrange the translation of this book into chinese and it's very important for process studies and i said well have you got an institute of process studies in china then he said not one institute i said i said how many he said we have 32 institutes the process studies in china yeah it's a popular country amazing right the entire western world is only one where we are right now and i said why is that he said i have friends in the central committee he said they want to make chinese philosophy more chinese they want to rehabilitate chinese philosophy including taoism but especially confucianism he said because if they preach revolution then young people may think why don't we have another revolution they do not want revolution he said they want confusion ethics respect for authority and he said but we cannot justify it with chinese philosophy because in modern china only something that comes from the west will be respected so i have persuaded them whitehead is the key to the rehabilitation of our own philosophy he said now we have many institutes of process philosophy did you know about that oh i did yes uh back in in uh i mean that's been going on for um a number of years now and and john cobb has been very involved in uh networking with uh chinese scholars um to help forward that work and the the uh communist party has written into their constitution this um ideal of moving towards what they call ecological civilization and whitehead's work and ideas play a big part in that and we had a big conference uh back in 2015 in claremont uh called seizing an alternative towards an ecological civilization and it was also the i believe it was the 15th international whitehead conference at the same time and we had probably 1500 people there total a dozen different tracks running simultaneously and there were about 500 scholars from china present amazing yeah truly amazing and you know there's obviously political motives here which which you're hinting at but um it's also quite wonderful to see the way that uh whitehead's work is is living on in contexts that none of us would have imagined um and so i'm fascinated to see how that plays out in china chinese civilization certainly seems to be moving into a new phase of um world power you know so i think we will see um an increasingly important um role for china in the world and hopefully a positive one i mean that remains to be seen but uh i think the more influence whitehead's work can have moving us towards a sense of you know for whitehead persuasion is so much more um um important for the evolution of human beings than coercion right and his view of the way that power works and so hopefully you know the chinese government moves in that direction well they haven't moved in that direction very far with the muslims in so uyghurs yes yes lots of issues there i agree it's an important thing by the way if you're in touch with wang remind him about the translation of the science delusion because um there's a new edition just come out in england so if they do do a translation this is a good time because it's absolutely updated wonderful yeah i was hoping to travel to china um last year and with the trump administration um and the trade war there were some issues with the visas and it just hasn't it wasn't the right time to travel and then the pandemic happened and so obviously it can't happen now but hopefully at some point in the future i'll be able to go inspect these at least a few of these process centers in china so wonderful wow it seems as if you almost followed a similar pathway as whitehead from cambridge to harvard uh you obviously went back to cambridge after harvard which whitehead did not do but um and it's how how wonderful that you got to study uh and learn about whitehead from a student uh dorothy emmett uh directly i've read she has a book i think it's called the philosophy of organism yes um that i have read and enjoyed um so that's that's and and this problem that you express of uh lots of people telling you that there are deep resonances with whitehead's work and but trying to study whitehead yourself and not being able to make heads or tales of a lot of it it's a very common issue he is not easy to understand he's developed his own language and um a few of us are crazy enough to to devote um years of study i've been reading whitehead for about a decade now and eventually when you learn the language it starts to make sense but then you still have the problem of communicating to others about it and so you know one of one of my goals as a white head scholar is to try to do that work of translation and to be in dialogue with as many uh kindred thinkers as possible to draw connections and i don't think there's anyone better at doing that sort of thing then i mean john cobb's been doing it too but david ray griffin has an amazing capacity uh to immerse himself in um the the work of other philosophers and scientists that he thinks might be in some way connected to whitehead and then to engage with them to unpack those connections he's just been doing this for decade after decade with so many different thinkers and so um you know his his work has been absolutely essential to um keeping whitehead alive in in in the contemporary period and i think we seem to have reached a point now where i don't know that it's quite at the level of a whitehead renaissance but um there's a lot of uh academic philosophers and scientists who are now beginning to reference whitehead and to actually engage with his writing and um struggle to to make those interpretations and so i'm excited to see that happening well i have to say that your own books um and articles have been an immense help to me because you do because you've taken so much time and trouble to assimilate it you are able to make it clearer what he's saying and to express it in a way that's um more comprehensible and the for me the complete proof of this was when merlin came to your course at schumacher college and you know i didn't know what five days or however long it was we got something but he came back completely enthused and and merlin is now very much a kind of white hedian and before that he'd never shown much interest in philosophy you know i tried to engage him with philosophy and stuff but he'd always been a little bit skeptical about the kinds of things i'm interested in i mean we're quite close in our interests of course but and and they're very complementary but um suddenly i i found this sort of wave of enthusiasm for whitehead was entirely due to your um your course i mean you must have some interest in the first place or otherwise he wouldn't have come but um it worked so well for the way he was thinking you know ecologically and about high full growth and about biological processes and stuff yeah i mean mycelial networks are a wonderful uh example of an analogy for the sort of networked um ontology that whitehead develops so i think merlin actually if i recall correctly uh said that you convinced him to come to the course uh when when he had mentioned that someone was coming to teach whitehead at schumacher but uh i'm glad to hear i infected him with uh whiteheady and ideas uh yes and more than superficially i mean this is part of his very being now i mean he sort of identifies in with whitehead and that approach very strongly and of course he's shown through his recent book that he has an incredible gift for communication and so you know getting this kind of general approach without necessarily mentioning whitehead very much but it's i mean there's thousands and thousands of people are reading what he's written and obviously being influenced by it yeah it's it was very exciting to uh see his book come out and i've read uh i'm about three quarters of the way through it and it's very well written mycology is a science that i was introduced to by uh terence mckenna actually uh from a different perspective but um yeah it's it's uh what remind me what's the title of um entangled life entangled life right uh yes so um i hope to be able to convince marilyn to to talk to me um to do one of these interviews at some point um but uh so another question i have for you would be um which which aspects of uh whitehead's philosophy do you think are most helpful for or hold the most promise for moving science beyond materialism well um there's one aspect is the kind of memory aspect what i call morphic resonance but i mean i'm i'm obviously biased here i find the idea of morphic resonance much easier to con convey to people and to use than prehension or some of the way or concrete and so these white hedyan terms refer to something similar um and the thing is it's not clear whether what they're referring to is that similar or not you know this is where when i brought this question up at clermont college the seminar room sort of dissolved into different interpretations and different factions and even among the whitehead scholars there was no unanimity as to exactly what he meant and stuff so i don't see that as the most helpful aspect because the i can just talk about morphic resonance without i didn't refer to whitehead in coming up with the idea um you know in a sense the connection with whitehead came after the idea but the bit that i personally wrestle with and think about and find most stimulating and talk about in my lectures where it really grips people is the idea that the relation of mind and body or mental and the mental and physical pole is a process in time that the mental poles the future pole and the physical poles the past pole now as a way of interpreting mind-body relationships i think that's extraordinarily stimulating interesting exciting undeveloped um and and full of possibilities um and i'm never sure whether my own interpretations of it are going way beyond what whitehead um intended or whether it would fit or but um the the idea you see that i mean i read things like journal of consciousness studies i go to conferences on consciousness and because i talk about it in various contexts like the sense of being stared at and morphic resonance and memory and so on and i haven't seen any coherent approaches you know the quantum theory ones seem to me not illuminating at all they are fuss gating and stuff but by far the most illuminating to me is the idea that mental causation works from virtual futures towards the past whereas physical causation works from the past towards the future and these two streams of causation sort of overlap in the present and um because the mental causations about possibilities and choosing among them i also find it very helpful because when people say what do you mean by consciousness as opposed to i first make the distinction that the mind can be conscious or unconscious the unconscious mind is still mental but not conscious and most of our habits are unconscious but they're still mental so if we come to consciousness per se then i starting from whitehead my answer is that it's about choosing among possible actions and the role of consciousness is to choose among possibilities and therefore consciousness is an arena of possibilities and possibilities are always things that haven't happened yet so as soon as you've chosen among possible actions you the the causal chain works as it were from that choice which is about a future state back through times from a virtual future back through time and you see within the in the world i live in um there are a lot of people discussing things like precognition pre-cognitive dreams of course libits experiments that show that the conscious choice happens after the mental change um after the physical change brain changes the brain change um so the the brain change happens first and that happens afterwards um so um the the thing is that there's a lot here where this could be relevant to phenomena that certainly occur i i mean i do research on precognition and pre-sentiment myself and pre-sentiment feeling the future um i think it's an established fact of course it's not part of established in the main academic world because they say it's impossible it's parapsychological it's impossible and so on but actually it would requires the idea that consciousness is somehow working from the future um and there of course it's not a virtual future it's an actual future but the this is a whole area where my idea is not fully clear on this but my starting point for thinking about these knotty problems uh is whitehead and i don't know any other starting point other than whitehead for these questions that makes sense to me yeah i i like that this is this polarity between mind and matter or past causality out of the past versus causality into the future this this does seem to me to be a very fruitful avenue for opening up science to a different understanding of the way that nature operates because there's so much what i would call residual cartesianism or cartesian dualism in even materialist science because the mind doing the observing and all the theorizing and stuff is sort of bracketed out uh and forgotten about whereas nature is just thought of as a machine where only efficient or mechanical causality is operative which would be the push from the past there's no pool or as whitehead would call it lures from the future in the materialist picture and clearly um to understand it's almost it's it's almost inescapable and and stares you in the face in the biological realm that there's some uh need to invoke um a lure or a future pool or a purpose a telos of some kind but even in physics when we understand the evolution of the universe through supposedly billions of years of different stages of development there seems to be a tendency towards organization uh into stars and galaxies and these are sources of profound order that we wouldn't expect to emerge if there wasn't some sort of allure or tendency if there weren't some future possibilities that seem to want to manifest and i think whitehead provides a very rigorous coherent and scientifically applicable way of understanding this interplay between mental and physical causation so i completely agree that might be the most fruitful avenue to draw on whitehead to sort of fertilize the scientific worldview and then yeah what you're saying about precognition i've had this discussion with many people you know very interested in your work and who have had experiences themselves of something like a vision of the future they have a dream and then something happens that confirms what the dream was suggesting and it seems that you know and david ray griffin has written about this i think specifically in reference to your ideas and it seems that in whitehead there's some room for uh offering an explanation of this but certainly for whitehead he would reject the idea that the future is already determined and so for him maybe there are certain possibilities that are more probable than others but that even if i think whitehead would say if someone has a vision of the future you know something that's going to happen next year or even a few days from now whitehead would say that's not yet determined it could be otherwise and maybe in that moment when that precognitive experience happens that particular future that was envisioned is the most likely but it could still change and so i wonder what you think about that wiggle room that whitehead would insist upon that well i understood on it too because i i think that the um i totally reject the idea of the future is determined and the sort of einstein block universe view um and one of the things that comes out of psychical research is that the when you have a pre-sentiment or a precognition then the precognition is not necessarily of something it's not something in the objective outer world it's a future state of your own experience so some people in this area say we should call it pre-call as opposed to recall that it recall is recalling something that happened to you in your experience in the past and pre-call is linking to your experience in the future so it's your experience you're linking to not the outer world and jw dunn was you know who wrote that famous book and experiment with time you know in the 1920s um still i think the best book on pre-cognitive dreaming um j.w dunn pointed out that he had this dream of a volcanic eruption in martinique um leading to 20 000 deaths and he wrote it down because he recalled his dreams and then he read in the daily telegraph a couple of days later been this eruption in martinique with 20 000 deaths and for him this was a pre-call of this reading this a few days later however the twist on this is very interesting that that um what he'd done he'd misread it it wasn't twenty thousand it was two thousand and when he later checked up he found that actually when he looked at the paper it didn't say twenty thousand he thought it was said twenty thousand so it wasn't what the paper actually said or what had actually happened it was what he thought it had said or what that mattered so um so that's that's one thing you see and then there's there's pre-sentiment this is a short-term thing that dean radiance worked on i don't know if you've read about pre-sentiment yeah i'm familiar with some of braden's work yeah it's over a few seconds you know you respond it might so something is emotionally arousing so you see one way of dealing with that would be again taking a lead from whitehead that we normally think of the present as defined in terms of you know instantaneous microsecond or something but actually i mean his word the species present is is about spreading out of the present i suppose but which he gets from william james yeah yes that you could you could actually say that the present in relation to dreams our present may be extended over several days or our present may be extended over you know several 10 seconds or something and if you i mean it's obvious the present is with the fact that the cinema works shows that we actually um ten you know tenth of a second we blur them all together our concept is spread out in time but in some circumstances it may be spread out more and others less and and if it's spread out in time the usual assumption is that the present instant is here and if it's spread out it's ten seconds into the past but if it's spread out in time it could be five seconds into the future and five seconds into the past and and in which case something happens five seconds in the future is part of the present and would cause reactions emotional responses to erotic pictures in dean radiance experiments um i'm actually parapsychology is very hard to get people to accept but i'm working at the moment with somebody developing a day trading market app and i've discovered by interviewing people on trading floors in the city of london um you know people are doing this day trading they're they're making they're predicting the market within the next three or four seconds you know they're sort of saying it's going to go up and this can't be based on any rational analysis of trends or reading wall street journal or anything and when uh when i've talked to people on the training floor flaws i you know i've asked to speak to the best trader i'm friendly with the chap who runs one of the best companies in london he's the kind of fan of mine so he let me into the trading floor and i was able to speak to these people and i asked to speak to his best trader and he said you know this guy's a phenomenal he just seems to know when news is going to flash up on the screen just seems to feel which of the 10 screens he's working at where the action's going to be just seems to know where it's going here and i talked to this chat and i said do you know do you know how you know he said no he said i read the papers and i just think you know i'm sort of tuned in and stuff but when i say has it occurred you might be pre-central you said what's that you know yeah i think this is actually happening all the time so i'm trying to develop an app people use on their mobile phones where you can we'd start with monopoly money you know sort of you'd give people five hundred thousand dollars to start with and they trade um and doing it just on feelings and if one could show that you could make millions um by developing this intuitive skill um the question that does pre-sentiment exist or not would cease to be a question people would be clamoring to go on training courses yeah and no computer would be able to compete yeah that's very interesting i i i've uh i'm friends with uh tom stettle who i believe worked with uh he wrote an app about phone calls that's right yes and it's it's really wonderful to accumulate data on this and my understanding you know as a sort of general takeaway from a lot of this parapsychological research is that there is a higher than significantly higher than random uh correlation between even the average person their ability to predict the future is is more than random uh and then there are some people who seem to have a special capacity for this and it's significantly higher than random but the data is is there waiting to be uh integrated into our understanding of what's possible but so many scientists locked in the materialist paradigm just refused to look at the data and this has been a problem for you for many decades i think yes they just refuse to look at it it doesn't matter how good it is they just refuse to look at it you know i had argument daniel dennett two three years ago we were at a conference and and i said you know what about a public debate i know i said you're a member of the committee for skeptical inquiry or implacably opposed to psychic phenomena i said what about doing a public debate and then we could find out why it is he also opposed and he said no i didn't want to do that he said why not he said if i did a public debate but i don't have to read up the literature and he's i just want to waste time on something that's so obviously false i said well you know if you haven't read the literature and how can you be sure it so far he got terribly angry he was just really angry that you know when i pressed him um it's a denial movement um and whereas you see most some people try within the paris i'm on the parapsychology discussion list which is an email discussion written that dean rayden's on it and you know julia mosbridge most people in the field are on it and most of the discussions about precognition are about possible retro causation and quantum theory which i don't think is very fruitful line i mean it might be but they've been on this for decades now and it hasn't got anywhere i mean in the epiphany philosophers we were discussing this in the 1960s so there's a tremendous sense of deja vu with a lot of these discussions whereas whiteheads you know if we have the idea of conscious causation and mental causation working from virtual futures to the past then sometimes from actual futures you know this could be a starting point it's the most promising one i can think of as well as being the most promising starting point for thinking about what makes consciousness different from unconsciousness and also um as we were saying you know what uh how to understand the mind-body relationship yeah i mean i the way i often look at it is that if we were to adopt the white hedian paradigm if we were to fully inhabit the white hedian cosmos then all of this parapsychological phenomena just becomes psychology it's just it's a feature of our experience and we have to um incorporate it into our normal understanding of how human consciousness uh the place that it has in in relationship to the rest of the universe and so it's not paranormal anymore it's just perfectly normal whitehead even says this in in the uh the fourth part towards the end of process in reality he's just finished this really elaborate reconstruction of how we understand space uh he calls it the extensive continuum it's the hardest part of the hardest book that white had wrote and at the end of it he's like one of the implications of this new understanding of space and energy vectors is that telepathy is likely a real phenomenon he just drops that in one sentence doesn't say much more about it but he his cosmology normalizes what for the materialist paradigm is woo-woo and spooky and strange but it's not strange in whitehead's universe no well i completely agree i mean for me it has to be normal not paranormal in fact i don't like the word parapsychology i prefer psychic research and so yes i think there's an area there where whitehead's ideas could be relevant to science in yet another way in a much more mainstream area which is that in developmental biology um more and more people at least some people use the concept of morphogenetic fields um not in my sense because that would be too provocative um but more in waddington's sense of the word and as you know waddington was very influenced by whitehead i don't know if you've tracked that yeah yeah yeah but you know in his famous diagram of the creode with the candlelight pathway of change um you're familiar with that are you yes [Music] well basically when rene tom the french mathematician worked out you know the founder of catastro theory um worked out models for creods in morphogenetic fields the endpoint of the create he called the attractor using the concept the attractor which is in dynamics you know well-known concept in mathematical dynamics yeah and they're basically the this leads to the idea that development is goal directed and it's a way in which teleology has been smuggled back in to science and the mathematicians who developed the dynamical attractor didn't know tediology was banned in science and you know they were they they just made models and this was a good way of making a model and and in these models interestingly the the ball rolling down the groove or the basin of attraction which is the principal metaphor in dynamics is basically a pudding base and you throw little marbles in and they all roll and end up at the bottom the source of the attraction in all these models is gravitation and personally i think gravitation is an attractive force in other words i think gravitation is a lure from the future it's usually treated as simply you know something in newton's equations or something but if you think about it what gravitation would do left to its own devices would pull the entire universe into a ultimate black hole into a final unity now it's opposed by the dark energy the expansive force that's making the universe expand but if you took away dark energy and left it to gravitation the whole universe would begin collapsing inwards and stars and galaxies would amalgamate and everything would finally implode in the opposite of the big bang the big crunch and they'd been the ultimate attractor of gravity would be a final unity that mirrored the initial unity at the moment of the big bang and so i think gravitation is much much more mysterious than most people assume you know you're just thinking oh we've got the equations of gravitation no products the masses inverse square of the distance gravitational constant um whitehead was of course very interested in this because his mathematical theory of general relativity made somewhat different predictions from einsteins and were allowed for variability in the gravitational constant which actually happens so um i think that attractive forces including gravitation and teleological processes modeled by attractors in developmental biology girl directed development are something which mechanistic science has nothing to say about because teleology was amputated in the 17th century and it's been smuggled back in by these mathematical models but not fully explicitly and so teleology is the elephant in the room of modern science and you need to have it to explain why we have purposes and why organisms are purpose even when i was studying biology at school i was told the very last thing you were allowed to say was to say what is a wing for or an eye for because that implies it's got a purpose you could say why is it that natural selection worked on uh random variants uh which gave an increased ability to see that could finally result through long period festive render and selection in an eye that was what you had to say you couldn't say what's an eye for and and of course the dishonesty in that is that living organisms already exist and they already have their ultimate purposes of survival and reproduction they're already purposive and these structures serve their purposes so they're within an already teleological system so personally i've always found aristotle much more helpful than any other philosopher in this respect you know with fight causes yeah and in a sense you get a hint of that in whitehead but um i i've for when i'm thinking about that i i go back to aristotle and saint thomas aquinas more than whitehead because it's clearer uh to me um but i think that in the context of modern science that people like michael levin at tufts i don't know if you're familiar with his work but uh i don't think so what what is he what's his research he's by far the best and most interesting developmental biologist operating at the moment in my view ellievin um and he wrote a paper on morphogenetic fields and um he's done fascinating work on morphogenesis you see almost everyone in developmental biology is still obsessed with the bottom-up explanation in terms of genes and molecular biology and so he's very well and i think he's aware of like whitehead's work and um and he might be somebody that you could bring into your survey um but emerson's levin too um and he's raised very very prolific but let me give you an example of the kinds of experiments he's doing in one experiment he trained flatworms you know which are very simple with high regenerative capacity he trained them to avoid particular things on a standard learning moving around learning protocol avoid colored light of a particular kind so you can train them they learn this conditioned reflex type thing he then cut off their heads where what little brain they have is located and within a few days they regenerate ahead and when they've regenerated the head they remember everything they'd learned fascinating fascinating so you see when when he i i emailed him about that experiment and i said well in his paper he said well that suggests the memory must be stored distributed throughout the whole body not just in the central ganglion and perhaps the environment as well and perhaps the environment but he's got a motive behind all this which is to move biology on to a much more holistic approach and for example um he's been studying the development of african claude frog xenopus development and he's shown if you look at the embryos as they develop he's got a electrically sensitive dye which reveals electrical potential differences so with living samples under the microscope you can actually see the electric field around the embryo now of course molecular biologists and genetic engineering people don't see electric fields because all they do is grind things up and analyze the genes and they don't look for electric fields they're invisible to them and then what you see is in in the area that's going to become a face two areas sort of light up and and then another area the eyes and the mouth sort of light up you can actually see them under the microscope and as he points out they've done all the genetic analysis this is not because the mouth and the eye genes have been activated and giving signals that cause the change in electrical potential this electrical change occurs before the genes are activated and in fact seems to trigger the activation of the appropriate genes in other words there's literally a field in this case an electrical field patterning the developing system um then of course the next question is what patterns the electrical field now he doesn't address that question because i think the answer would have to be a morphogenetic field which i think works through electric fields but he's pushing up against the very limits of where you can go in contemporary biology you know he's sticking to electricity he doesn't mention me or morph genetic fields and what levin is doing is is it and this stuff gets on the cover of science and on nature and stuff and everyone says what fascinating research and stuff and he always his papers are always full of molecular biology data where he proves about the genes and claims the genes and that sort of thing so they people say well this is good science you know because it's familiar to them so he's the person who's i would say today at the very frontier of where things are going and leading away that's so wonderful thank you for sharing his research um it's it's quite astonishing and i it makes me uh i'm profoundly grateful to the scientists who do the the slow difficult detailed laboratory work of establishing these things and i understand why he wants to be so careful not to speculate about its larger implications and maybe that's the role for philosophers to step in and you know look at his scientific work and say well this is what it might mean for the larger field of biology and the place of life in the universe but it almost seems as though i mean from a white hedian or a bergsonian point of view uh the the part of the living organism that we can see and weigh uh and and that we call material is it's almost like the um it's the the wake left um behind a creative process that unfolds in a way that's invisible to our normal capacities to to sense and measure uh it's the morphic field perhaps but it's it's as if there's a creative unfolding occurring at a subtler level and what science materialistic science has been studying is the is is the um material left in the wake of this creative process that's unfolding and trying to just it's as if we're trying to understand what makes the boat go by just studying the wake behind it right uh and these thinkers like whitehead or burksen allow us to understand that uh we need to go deeper to understand the causal influences at play here yes and while steering the boat and why it goes in one direction rather than another i agree it's a very good metaphor we're looking at the wake um yes i yeah i think that's very good metaphor um so we've reached the end of our hour and i don't want to take too much more of your time but if you'd like uh if you can hang out for another 10 minutes i have another i'm happy to hang out longer yes this is i mean these are things very close to my heart and um yeah so um sort of a very different topic now um that i'd like to ask you about uh in terms of um the relationship between science and religion um whitehead seems to me to offer a rather unique and promising approach to reintegrating them not to collapse them they're very different but they can be in a different kind of dialogue with one another that is perhaps mutually enhancing and enriching and i think whitehead offers us one way of understanding the role that science plays in human civilization and human life and the role that religion plays you know whitehead had a whole understanding of the evolution of religion in his small little book religion the making i'm not sure if you're familiar with that i've not read i'm just gonna put on the light because it's getting dark oh sure yeah and so i i wonder um you know if let me let me briefly in a sentence or two summarize what whitehead says about the evolution of religion where i'm putting on another right yeah perfect i'm sorry i didn't send my lighting crew out to uh to give you a makeup and proper lighting and everything but very low budget here unfortunately so uh in in his book religion in the making whitehead uh describes this evolution of humanity from a sort of primal tribal context where through certain play behaviors that are very common among all mammals but especially among human beings where we have this prolonged period of childhood uh where the parents are doing finding the food and protecting uh the young from predators and whatnot it produces uh a relaxed field where the normal pressures of the environment are subdued and and through this play behavior as it gets elaborated in the evolution of our species early human beings began to recognize the way in which certain [Music] movements dance song would reliably produce certain states of consciousness certain emotions certain experiences of the numinous or transcendent and that gradually these um these performances of dance and music became ritual and then they were symbolically elaborated and then eventually myth and and narrative uh began to be developed and then eventually uh we entered the stage of what whitehead calls rational religion where you get theology and whole elaborate cosmologies but for whitehead it's all rooted in ritual play and ceremony and feasts and and the the the practical dimension of religious life uh you know um gathering together and participating in a dimension of reality uh and then that would be the source of religion for whitehead and the ground of of the religious feeling religious emotion and religious insight rather than the way i think modern people typically understand religion as a set of beliefs in something and as long as you believe in whatever the dogma is or the teaching is then you are a member of that religion whitehead's saying religion is not about believing in a certain set of information it's about practices of transformation um and that most of these practices are very embodied or they involve um eating feasting or communion of some kind you're really participating in a bodily way um in these transcendent uh dimensions and so um i i wonder if if given your um exposure to whitehead if you think that his approach allows us to have a new kind of dialogue um to to avoid this culture war that continues between science and religion um and what ways do you see white has view being helpful and and um what is your own view of how science and religion can come into a more harmonious relationship well it's very similar to his actually um i didn't know that aspect of his work but um i don't have you seen my two recent books science and spiritual practices and i haven't read it yet though yes and ways to go beyond and why they work these are two books each book i deal with seven different spiritual practices and what i say is more or less what you just said that um religion's not primarily about beliefs i mean atheists like to frame it as being a set of absurd beliefs that are rationally and untenable in which they've refuted um that's not the way it actually is for most religious people um and you know i'm i'm a regular church-going anglican christian and when i go to church i'm pretty sure that if you asked most people there what they actually believed after saying the creed you'd come up with a whole set of different answers and in fact somebody actually did a survey of this kind recently and they found almost everyone had a different interpretation or understanding of it or misunderstanding um so it's not i mean the creeds is a statement i believe it's the one bit of the service which actually is about beliefs and um and it's by no means uniform so no my science and spiritual practices the the the first book science spiritual practices i have a chapter on meditation connecting with nature gratitude um singing and chanting pilgrimage rituals and what's the other one um there's another one it'll come to me and then ways to go beyond i have chaps on sports which i think is the main way in the modern world people enter altered states of consciousness learning from animals which bring us into the present um prayer um holy days and festivals um spiritual openings through psychedelics um and morality basically being kind um you know a kind of ethical dimension um so um and what i show in in these books is that these practices are common to practically all religions you know they all have fast oh fasting that's the other one and there's fasting means jewish people fast at yom kippur muslims in ramadan christians in lent hindus have lots of fasting days shamanic cultures fast before rites of passage and so on and yet and you can study physio you all these are things you can study all of these practices have measurable effects and um the general's conclusion from thousands of papers that have now been uh written on the effects of spiritual and religious practices shows that people who have these practices are healthier happier and live longer than those that don't on average um conversely those that don't have them are unhealthier unhappier and live shorter than those that do that's why i think militant atheism should come with a health warning so um the um so i completely agree with that approach whiteheads and i think what i'd add to that though is that um one of the things that is absolutely key to many uh religious traditions is mystical experience and mystical experience can come through practices can also come spontaneously you know some people have near-death experiences they don't go out saying i want to be in an accident so i can nearly die um they have an accident and then as part of the accident they nearly die and then they find those floating out of the body going into the light their lives are changed and these have happened it's in plato the myth of er um you know these people have had people have had these for millennia and um they give this sense of being part of a much greater consciousness than our own they happened spontaneously they happen as a result of spiritual practices they can happen as a result of psychedelics and some traditional cultures have taken psychedelics you know the eleusinian mystery is soma we don't know what they were but they were clearly taking something um so i would say in addition to whitehead uh his list of things which i completely agree with that approach that mr experience is probably the most key thing i mean the buddha didn't get enlightened through doing a phd he got enlightened through sitting under trees meditating for many years and exploring consciousness from within and so in mystical experiences direct exploration of consciousness is one thing and then i think dreams uh is another because i think a lot of the figures in visionary experience and indeed psychedelic visionary experience are akin to the dream world i mean you could say that there are different ways of accessing that same world of the imagination which we all have access to every night in our dreams and i would say that's another major ingredient so i think singing together chanting together dancing together all those things that whitehead says are a key part and rituals and rites of passage we know that early cultures had burials and stuff i mean early very early in human history so there must have been rights of passage and those rights of passage are related to the idea there's a life after this and life after this the evidence for that would come from near-death experiences from shamanic trans mediumship and communication of the departed which is common in many shamanic cultures and also encountering the departed in your dreams um which most of us have done right so i would say that that that that is a an approach and of course it's not totally different from william james the seven types of religious experience is is not about belief it's about experience certainly and i don't think there is safe plato another philosopher that was more influential influential on whitehead than william james and certainly his huge study varieties of religious experience um was in the background you know whitehead quotes james in his little book religion in the making uh and i think james was uh james's view of the experiential dimension of religion um is really what's motivating whitehead's view and so the way whitehead would put it is that um you know he has this critique of what he calls the bifurcation of nature uh where the idea would be human consciousness is on one side and then the mechanical world of nature is on the other side and nature is just mute matter in motion and then human consciousness has sense and sounds and poetry and value and all of this and whitehead says no no it's it's continuous human beings are part of the universe and in the context of religion the history of human spiritual and religious experience is a part it's part of the data that we need to include if we want to understand this universe because we are beings emergent from this cosmological evolutionary process and so of course part of that process includes the history of religious experience that's all data that needs to be part of what we include in our interpretation of the universe um and so that's that's what follows from eliminating this bifurcation of nature uh in whitehead's view that religion is if you want i mean i know dennett daniel dennett would say this but i mean it in a different way a white hedian way religion is a natural phenomenon it's part of what the universe does in its human form right and so i completely agree you know i'm and i think that um you know it's one of the most interesting thinking at the moment about these things is in the leading edges of theology i don't know if you follow the theological literature at all but my favorite theologians david bentley heart i don't know if you've come across his book yes uh he writes about uh imagination a lot doesn't he he does do but the one i like most is book called the experience of god being consciousness bliss and what he shows is that um there's a kind of trinitarian understanding which many religions explicitly or implicitly have in common and that what unites them is much much closer than what separates them it's much more in common and basically the the um being consciousness bliss obviously is from chittananda and the hindu but the ground of being um conscious being is the ground of all things then chet is that which is known names and forms or forms and ideas i mean a bit like the platonic realm in the sense and and then um ananda this his ultimate consciousness is joyful which is why mystical experiences are usually blissful because we link into that experience and um but another aspect you see is the dynamical principle in in the christian version god the father is his conscious being in the present i am that i am his first revelation to moses then the logos the second person the trinity god the son logos is not just jesus of nazareth it's it's the you know the principle through which all things were made as it says in the creed you know this is the the word of god through which all things were made it's the name and form principle or the platonic idea principle which saint augustine and other early theologians were platonists and or neoclationists and that sort of got built in um and then the spirit the holy spirit is the dynamical principle of movement and change the energy flow light flight of the bird flames of fire all the images of the spirit and breath a movement and so you have the created world grounded in the being of god the father who sustains all things from moment to moment and without whose being everything would vanish and disappear um is expressed through these two principles the formative principle the word or lagos which i think of as fields and the moving principle which i think of as energy and then you look at modern science what's nature consist of is fields and energy um sustained by some kind of ground of being that keeps them in operation from moment to moment fields of what give form energy is what gives player change movement um and the so-called laws of nature are there to govern fields and energy there but the they're not part of nature they're sort of our instruction from it but um anyway david bentley hart's uh view on this is it's i don't know if he mentions whitehead but he's he's um it's a wonderful work of synthesis he's a highly intelligent and really interesting writer and i'd recommend taking a look at his his work because i think i don't think he brings it into process he doesn't bring processed theology explicitly into his synthesis but um and i mean process theology is a kind of niche not very well known subdivision of theology i mean it's big in claremont obviously but in in you know when i talked to other i went to a wonderful conference in cambridge last year which was one of the biggest theological conferences for a long time my biggest in the sense big ideas may not have been the most numerous but all the big hitters were there including david bentley hart rowan williams and so on and there were jewish theologians muslim theologians hindu anyway it was called new trinitarian ontologies and so really what they what's so interesting you see is that we're seeing this as a fundamental ontology through which we can understand nature and um and god is not in that view supernatural the the expression of the divine being is through nature and god it's sort of pan-enthusiastic god's in nature and nature's in god and i would say the leading edge of serious theology that's where they're going all the most interesting theological thinkers at the moment um whereas we've had decades of sort of word analysis and biblical criticism and did jesus really say that and and so we had lots and lots of that kind of theology this is much much more interesting and much deeper and much more compatible with the kind of things you're interested in that i'm interested in right right there's a a chapter um in one of whitehead's books um adventures of ideas which he published in 1933 it's called the new reformation um i'm not sure if you've read this book but in this chapter i haven't read it it's always dipped in well what you're saying about the importance of the trinitarian understanding um reminds me of what whitehead says in this chapter um where he he describes these three different culminating phases in the history of of western theology and and philosophy beginning with the night the plato's idea of participation and then jesus is in whitehead's terms exemplification of this idea and then the elaboration uh of the trinity by the early christian fathers um whitehead thinks that uh this these three phases of theological development of this this important not only idea but you know as exemplified by jesus and as elaborated theologically um by the the early christian theologians that we need to return to that that matrix of ideas to rejuvenate the importance of of trinitarian thinking not only for our religious life today but for our scientific understanding of nature as well uh it's a very interesting chapter that i think was really um seminal for the elaboration of process theology particularly in a christian context so i recommend that to you i'll take a look at that and the chapter's name again i'm going to write it down the new reformation new yeah very good i mean that's um yes that's that's exactly the kind of thing i'm i'm so interested in and and and the in my book ways to go beyond and why they work um in the last chapter i try and integrate why it is that all these different spiritual practices that are so different can all be spiritual practices and again i relate that to the trinity you know if insofar as sports can be a spiritual practice or dancing these are about movement um and those i think and singing and those align with the spirit which is the principle of movement insofar as contemplating the beauty of a flower can be a spiritual practice or a beautiful building like a cathedral or a temple um then that's more like the logos you're relating to the sort of name and form aspect of the ultimate and insofar as through meditation you reach a state about a stillness and the sense of ground of being you're relating to the sight you know the the ground being so i think these different spiritual practices have different emphases and relate to this trinitarian model and incidentally um although it's elaborated by christian theologians you know there's been many elaborations the seeds of it are all present in you know the first few verses of the book of genesis you know the world was out of form and in the beginning the world was in that form and void and darkness was over the face of the deep the spirit of god moved over the face of the deep the spirit is wind i mean ruach in hebrew and what happens when wind moves over the face of the deep or the ocean or the primal chaos is waves i mean that's what you get so the first thing is waves of presence of waves which is one reason as i understand it whitehead thought quantum theory revealed as processing because waves can't be localized as an instant you can't have a wave as an instant so the first thing is sort of chapter two genesis is waves a process and and god said let there be light then you have the creative logos the word obviously the spoken word um and the spoken word is about form structure and indeed the primary metaphor in the jewish and the christian model of the trinity is speaking because like i'm speaking no unless there was an outflow of breath the words in my mind would be silent just inside my mind if i adjust the breath it's a kind of white noise no structure but speaking is you have the breath we've already got the breath in verse two or verse one which in the spirit of god moved over to face the knee and god said then there's the the first word let there be light it creates structure form it separates light from darkness it differentiates it's it's chit it's the contents of consciousness as in satchit nandi it's not the conscience itself it's that which is known as opposed to the never and um and of course they're all unified so i would say this model is absolutely fundamental to the whole judeo-christian tradition yes yes uh and it strikes me that um when we're talking about something as profound as the creation of the world um you know we can turn to genesis or many other creation stories um that the the world's various religious traditions have articulated um to get at this mystery uh and that when when physical cosmologists try to talk about the beginning of the universe they try to do it as if they could be purely empirical and rational and scientific but almost always inevitably um i hear them doing theology and as far as i can tell the best kind of theology that one can do would be conscious deliberate theology in dialogue with uh the history of this tradition of trying to think about or maybe think with the divine we better do that consciously rather than pretending we're not doing it because then we're liable to do bad theology absolutely i mean what's that chap who wrote the universe from nothing that american lawrence krauss lawrence krauss yeah yes i was in a debate at a philosophy festival last year where somebody was defending lawrence krauss's view of the universe from nothing and i said that you know what struck me about it was so theologically conservative you know it he has the principle of logos they're the laws of nature they're there at the very beginning the universe comes in because the laws of nature already there before the universe and then he has the primal energy the quantum fluctuation that gives rise to the whole universe he has the spirit the the dynamical principle that gives rise to the universe um and so he's got these two elements of a trinitarian model um and the laws of nature imply a mind in which they exist as the the only difference is that conventional theology the ultimate being that gives rise to it all is conscious and joyful whereas lawrence krauss's model it's unconscious and joyless otherwise the models are the same yeah i've had a number of conversations with physicists who say look we don't need god to explain the universe we know the laws we can understand how it all works together to produce the world that we see and you know i just asked the simple question well where did the laws come from and they they all of a sudden get all uncomfortable and say oh well that's a philosophical issue and maybe we'll understand it one day but i don't have anything to say about that but it's like well that's the very foundation of what you're arguing is laws all the way down yes so one final question for you and then uh i'll let you go i'm sure you want to go eat dinner and i really appreciate your time rupert um i know this is fun i just i'm really enjoying this yes so the final question i think is in a very white hedian spirit whitehead was a very humble man um it was said that he he actually his his will asked for his um all of his papers to be destroyed because he didn't want graduate students to be pouring through them searching for the secret to his philosophy his family his family did not follow his wishes his papers were recently everyone thought they were all destroyed but they were recently discovered that there's a whole group uh i think out of edinburgh university that the the white head research project that's uh scanning all of this material and publishing some of it and making it available um but in any event you know whitehead was very humble um he wouldn't have wanted people to consider processing reality as some sort of a revealed uh you know new new religion that people have to just learn and stick to he would want the research and philosophy and science to continue maybe draw on his ideas but don't be afraid to tinker with them and expand them so in that spirit i wonder if there's something um in whitehead's work that you've come across that you feel like no i don't think he got that quite right or maybe there's another approach to this and uh you know whitehead went down the wrong track on that issue i wonder if if there's anything like that that you've encountered in his work i can't say that there is exactly i mean i could what i could say is i wish he'd written more clearly or i wish he made his views less obscure um i mean i certainly think that um i don't i haven't started his theology well enough to to um know exactly i mean i think he did what bits i have looked at it doesn't seem that he was very up to speed with theology and the theological tradition maybe he was but um i think that that i think he could have paid more attention to the mystical side of religion and you know mystical insight um it's rather rationalistic you know he started as a mathematician and sort of very mind-based so i think more of a kind of mystical dimension but i mean that comes in i suppose via william james into his approach to religion um um i don't think there's anything there that and again for me the philosopher who's influenced me more than white has i said is bergson because bergson writes very clearly and he's a pleasure to read whereas whitehead is is not clear and a lot of it um and it's not a pleasure to read um that's what whitehead says about bergson actually is uh in a lecture uh one of his early lectures at harvard he says that you know basically i'm summarizing that bergson is such a pleasure and a joy to read but whitehead the mathematician and logician actually thought he said that you know but it's never quite clear what bergson's trying to say which is interesting because when i read him like like you're saying it's pretty clear but whitehead the logician wants to know in more with more precise mathematical rigor exactly what's implied by the literary beauty of bergson's writing so so no i don't think there's anything where i've sort of come across something in whitehead i think that's just wrong or i there's lots of places i think it's unclear or perhaps inadequate or could be developed further and that sort of thing um but i don't know there's anything i've come across i feel no that's wrong and you see i think that where he's read one final point about his relevance today is that with this pan psychist turn that's going on at the moment in philosophy of mind you know people like philip gough and um i'll be talking to him soon too oh good well well you see i think that y10 is so much more interesting because basically uh the the current theme of of these pen sites is to solve the hard problem by endowing matter with an extra quality consciousness awareness or experience um but basically that's they just think they solve the hard problem that way they don't the reason where this has come out in in in a debate was on the parapsychology discussion list there was a discussion recently about you know here all these parent pan psychists um does it help in understanding psy phenomena parapsychological phenomena and i actually asked philip gough you know and he said no um you know because basically everything stays the same we just interpret it differently yeah and i i don't even think he thinks that consciousness has any causal influence on the behavior of matter it's just sort of the witness that's going along for the ride parallel phenomenon yes well that's it so that's why you see i think that since that kind of pan psychism is becoming more and more predominant and actually respectable and academically if not orthodox at least respectable um that's another area where i think the whitehead approach to penn psychism is so much more interesting it's got something to tell us over and above just getting rid of the hard problem by a few armchair speculations or a flurry of words it's it's actually can deliver something and that's why when i was writing my paper on is the sun conscious um the white hedian approach is actually you know treating consciousness as considering possible actions the sun's mind deciding where to send out a solar flare or a coronal mass ejection it's not just parallel to the activity of the sun it's something does something and that's why i think that the white hedian approach that's probably the thing which has most to offer today as together with um a deeper understanding of teleology and biology and indeed picture as a whole yes exactly um i think when i i wrote this journal article which i shared with you um about whitehead's uh relevance to this um emerging pan psychist paradigm in analytic philosophy of mind because it seems to me that yes whitehead is uh a kind of pan psychist but unlike philip gough and other analytic philosophers who are toying with pan psychism um whitehead has a process relational ontology that grounds his pan psychism whereas for the most part what i've seen is in analytic philosophy it's still working within a what whitehead would call a substance property ontology which goes back to aristotle and in so many ways i think whitehead is very aristotelian um and i think of aristotle as a neoplatonist right you know but whitehead's taking aristotle's organic philosophy and putting it on a perceptual uh ground instead of a substance ground and you know we can still think of i think aristotle's understanding of substance was very dynamic you know these weren't static substances about becoming about becoming in final causes and and that's very process oriented i would have thought i think whitehead wants to open it up a little bit more to make room for evolutionary uh emergence in a way that maybe in in aristotle's sense of of a more stable cosmos uh whitehead sort of pushes the great chain of being over on its side so that it unrolls into the future but uh but yes this i think whitehead's pan psychism on this process-oriented ontological basis is as different from the substance-oriented pan-psychisms like goth as it is for materialism so there's a real difference here in the way that whitehead is approaching uh pan psychism that i'm hoping to to get into when i when i speak to philip gough uh at next month so stay tuned for that well i liked your paper i thought you brought this out very well in fact it helped clarify for me the difference between that jews okay so um i very much hope that you're able to sort of express possibly express whitehead's ideas in non-white hedian language that's what you're trying to do you know to to bring this into this debate because it's not just looking back at the history of philosophy it's something very relevant in these areas which is obviously why you're doing this yes yes um definitely well thank you so much rupert this has been such an enjoyable uh conversation um and i think that um others will enjoy it i know john cobb will be thrilled uh to listen to our to our dialogue here and um keep up the good work uh i think the efforts that you've been making over decades to push the scientific establishment to be more scientific are paying off slowly but surely and so thank you for your work and thank you for this conversation today well thank you matt i'm so glad you're doing what you're doing i mean i couldn't think of in philosophy i think it's one of the most important things to be doing right now so i'm very much appreciated and i'm thrilled that you and malin have linked up in this way because you know there's a lot more mileage in this in biology and in philosophy and hopefully by interacting over years to come you'll both be able to carry it further forward a lot further yes oh i hope so uh you know i'm not a scientist and i i love to make friends with scientists so that uh i can learn more from them and and try to integrate it into a philosophical uh speculative philosophical paradigm that then influences future scientists to ask certain questions that maybe they wouldn't have asked so i definitely look forward to remaining in conversation with merlin and and with you and i also enjoy uh cosmo's music uh i was listening that on my drive uh so um very talented family well very good well hopefully to be continued sooner or later i would love that i would love that good all right rupert well you have a good night and uh let's stay in touch bye bye for now bye

Channel: Footnotes2Plato

Views: 8,916

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Keywords: philosophy

Id: Ok7n4baI6KA

Length: 99min 35sec (5975 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 26 2020