Rupert Sheldrake - The Science Delusion

[Music] it's a great pleasure to be in this beautiful city and I've had a chance to look at it some of the old city today it's also a great pleasure to be able to speak to you here in Cracow where I've never been before in English you've gone to all the time and trouble to learn English and it makes it much easier for me and I really appreciate the fact you've done that I can assure you this would not work reciprocally if anyone went from Poland and gave a talk in London no one would understand it except other poles of course the science delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality in principle leaving only the details to be filled in this is a very widespread belief in our society and it's supported it seem it's made more convincing by the tremendous trailer triumphs of technology modern medicine jet planes the internet modern technologies smartphones all these things make it look as if science must be right because it underlies all these completely transformative things that are happening in our world very few people question the underlying doctrines of science and yet what's happened in the sciences is that the method of science inquiry critical discussion hypothesis empirical evidence the scientific method is very powerful and continues to be essential but the sciences have become trapped in a kind of dogmatic belief system or worldview which has been in place since the late 19th century it's not really science it's a set of assumptions which are part of a philosophy of nature the philosophy of materialism the materialist philosophy says that matter is the only reality and that everything's made of matter and that matter is fundamentally unconscious we live in an unconscious machine like universe so that's the basic assumption of materialism there are 10 basic dogmas on which the modern science is based I'm going to list the 10 I won't have time to discuss them all this evening but to start with the first of them is that nature is mechanical nature is like a machine the universe is like a machine our animals are like machines plants are like machines and we're like machines our brains our computers our eyes our cameras our hearts of pumps in the words of Richard Dawkins we are lumbering robots we are just machines that's the first assumption and of course this isn't really a testable theory it's just a metaphor the old metaphor which everyone in Europe believed until the 17th century was that nature was like an organism the home universe was like an organism animals and plants were organisms the earth was a living organism the stars were organisms with a consciousness of their own it was a completely different way of thinking of nature the mechanistic revolution in science replaced the idea of an animate organism with the idea of inanimate machinery the second assumption which I've already mentioned is that everything's made up of matter or physical substance which is unconscious the third assumption is that all of this is governed by eternal laws of nature that were already there at the moment of the Big Bang the mathematical laws of nature are fixed they've always been the same they always will be the same and they were there at the moment at the Big Bang the fourth assumption is the total amount of matter and energy in the universe is always the same at least since the Big Bang when it all suddenly came into being as my friend Terence Mckenna used to say modern science is based on the principle give us one free miracle and we'll explain the rest and the one free miracle is the appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it from nothing in a single instant at the moment of the Big Bang the fifth assumption is that nature's purposeless the universe is a machine it has no purpose evolution has no purpose we're here as a result of blind forces of natural selection and chance transmutations the sixth assumption is that memories are stored inside the brain everything you remember is stored somewhere inside your head no one quite knows how attempts to find these memories have failed but the assumption is that it must all be inside the head if everything's material memory must be material and therefore it must be in your brain and this fits very well with the materialist argument which was essentially atheistic because if all your memories are inside your brain when you die and your brain decays all your memories will be wiped out everything to do with your personal identity will be destroyed so all religious ideas about survival of bodily death must be untrue if you believe this materialist theory the seventh assumption is that biological inheritance is material everything you inherit is inherited materially in your genes or in epigenetic modifications of the genes of course there's also cultural inheritance but biological inheritance is thought to be material the eighth assumption is that minds are nothing but the activity of brains your mind is your brain minds are what brains do as many materials philosophers express it your entire conscious mind is the activity of your brain it's inside your head the next assumption is that psychic phenomena like telepathy are illusory they can't possibly exist because the mind is in the brain therefore your thoughts or intentions can't possibly influence other people many miles away because it's all inside your head and the tenth assumption is that mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works the body's a machine you're a machine the brains a machine therefore the only ways to treat it her physical through surgery or chemical through drugs and of course surgery has made an astonishing improvements there are many amazing drugs and we all depend upon them but this view of Medicine is dealing only with the physical and the chemical is a very limited view but nevertheless from the point of view of the mechanistic medicine assumption that's the only kind that really works all alternative and complimentary therapies all miraculous healings all healings through prayer or through pilgrimage must be illusory or if they happen at all they're nothing but the placebo effect but of course the placebo effect is itself unexplained because what it shows is that our expectations and hopes affect our medical recoveries well these are the ten basic assumptions which are not usually taught as a series of doctrines they're simply absorbed by people as they go through the educational system by a kind of intellectual osmosis if they were spelled out more clearly it would be easier to look at them skeptically but most people don't even realize they're making these assumptions they don't think their assumptions they just think they're the truth and so the the kind of atheistic sceptics that all of us encounter from time to time who say I don't believe in God I believe in science don't think that what they have is a belief system they think they know the truth everyone else has belief systems Catholics processors Hindus Muslims etc but what they know is the truth well what I'm arguing is it's not the truth it's a set of assumptions and what we need to do is apply the spirit of radical skepticism to look at these assumptions on which contemporary science itself is based it's a thoroughly scientific thing to do to look scientifically at assumptions when we do that we find that very few of these assumptions are supported by evidence at all every single one of them turns out to be deeply questionable and when we question these assumptions when we look at the alternatives all sorts of new possibilities open up I think that the these assumptions constrict science and stop it from expanding and growing in a way that it could I'm going to start with the assumption that the total amount of matter and energy is always the same this is something all of us learn at school the principle of conservation of matter and energy it applies to closed systems but the whole universe is supposed to be a closed system and so therefore the total mountain the universe is supposed to be the same now most people never dream of questioning this assumption I didn't question it myself until a few years ago having had a scientific education I questioned most of the others but this is the last one that I thought of questioning but when you actually look at it it turns out that it's not at all as simple as it first seems physicists themselves are much less intimidated by the so called laws of nature than the rest of us they after all of the people who codify the laws of nature only when as soon as galaxies were discovered in the 20th century it became clear that the galaxies the stars in the galaxies were being held together much more than they ought to be if it all just depended on gravitation based on the amount of matter in the stars in perhaps in dark stars in planets in gas clouds the gravity has the galaxy has much more gravitational effect on its stars than it ought to have if you just had the amount of the ordinary matter the galaxies would fall apart the stars would be flung out they didn't cease going round in orbit and more ever different galaxies attract each other in a way that's more than they ought to if it's just a matter of the known amount of matter in them this was a big problem for physicists and it was proposed first in the 1920s and 30s but no one took it that seriously then but we're increasingly often until it became mainstream in the 1980s that there must be an extra kind of matter in galaxies which we couldn't see which we know nothing about but which has to be there to explain the behavior of galaxies the assumption is that the existing scientific theories of gravitation must be correct and if they don't fit the facts then there must be more matter there than we knew about how much more matter well simple you just work out how much more matter you need to balance the equations and titrate in that amount of matter that's the amount of dark matter there is if the equations show the galaxies ought to be behaving differently put in a bit more dark matter add in some here take away Sun there since no one knows what it is and can't observe it it's entirely up to physicists to tell us how much there is and they can adjust the amount at will they've created something like four or five times more matter than ordinary matter at the stroke of a pen having created all this extra dark matter the mass of the universe became much greater than it was thought to be before so much so that there ought to be extra gravitation would topped the universe expanding until it finally stopped expanding and began to contract again and it would all end in the opposite of the Big Bang known as the Big Crunch well around around 1999 it was discovered that the universe is not in fact expanding slower and slower its expanding faster and faster contrary to the expectations of physicists based on the amount of dark matter in the universe so how do we explain that well simple there must be another form of energy called dark energy that pushes the universe apart how much is the just the right amount to explain the facts so we now have a situation where 95% of the universe is made up of dark energy and dark matter and we haven't a clue what they are we don't know what they do apart from the things they're supposed to do to make the equations work we don't know if they can be converted into regular matter and energy or regular matter and energy can turn into dark matter and energy in which case they would not it would just disappear so this is an extraordinary situation physics has shown us that we literally know nothing or next to nothing about 95% of physical reality so how can we be sure that the total amount of dark matter and dark energy is always the same but actually we can't the equations of dark energy say that the amount per unit volume is constant so as the universe expands the amount of dark energy increases the universe is now a perpetual motion machine well these are extraordinary aspects of physics they completely change the old view that we were brought up with that we thought we knew about matter and energy and what they were we don't know and it may be they don't even exist it may be that have we had a different theory of gravitation or a different theory of galactic organization it wouldn't be necessary to suppose that these unobserved materials and actually exist well that's one area where there's a huge amount still unknown and this is relatively uncontroversial this is pretty standard physics nowadays what I want to turn to now is the assumption that matter is unconscious this is one of the most fundamental assumptions of the materialist worldview to understand how we got to our present situation it's helpful to look at the history in the 17th century when the Scientific Revolution took place the view of matter that we now have was first formulated by Rene Descartes the French philosopher who was one of the first people to put forward the idea of the universe is a giant unconscious machine animals and machines plants and machines and we're machines and Descartes made a famous do list except eration between the world of matter matter is unconscious and it's in space and time the whole universe is made of matter but there was another reality spirit which was not in space and time not physical and basically immortal immortal and timeless and this was not part of the realm of science the realm of spirit in Descartes view included three basic components God angels and human minds those were outside space and time and there was this radical dualism between unconscious nature and conscious Minds so this led to an extreme split it meant that humans were totally different from all other animals so it's okay to vivisect the more factory farm them because they're just machines whereas we have this rational spirit it led to a radical split between mind and body because the mind is immaterial the body's material and nobody could explain how this immaterial spirit could influence the body and it led to a radical split between the realms of science and religion religion got God angels and human minds together with human morality science got the entire physical universe including human bodies and brains and God was as it were withdrawn from the universe the universe and I became Auto automatic machinery that worked by itself would no need for God and God's realm was confined just to human minds angels and the spiritual realm this is totally different from the view in the Middle Ages where God was within nature as well as beyond it where all nature was alive the whole universe had a kind of soul the earth was a living organism the philosophy of nature that gave us the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe was could radically different from this mechanistic philosophy that we've grown so used to in the 19th century a lot of people thought we don't want two things matter and spirit two's too many we just want one thing some philosophers said spirits the only reality that's the idealist school of philosophy but many philosophers said no matters the only reality there's no such thing as spirit God and angels simply don't exist and human consciousness is just something to do with the brain so at one stroke they have shifted the philosophy from dualism to materialism mechanistic materialism the current orthodoxy of science it has been since the late 19th century and got rid of God and angels the whole spiritual realm all spirits disappeared but human consciousness remained and the continued existence of human consciousness is what is causing this mechanistic materialist worldview to break up it's happening before our very eyes because for sentiment for decades scientists just ignored consciousness they didn't think I'll talk about it they assumed it was nothing but brain activity so all you need to do is just look at brains and study nervous systems in more detail and finally you'll understand consciousness but in the last 20 or 30 years there's been a growth of an area of science called consciousness studies where scientists have started looking at the nature of consciousness itself not just ordinary psychology but mystical experiences out of the body experiences psychedelic experiences near-death experiences and a whole range of religious and spiritual experiences meanwhile there's been an enormous growth of spiritual practices like meditation in which many people are doing practices which deal with the very basis of consciousness itself so the situation has changed and there's now a debate about consciousness is it just the brain the very and if it is just the brain why should unconscious matter in the brain give rise to conscious minds that's why in the philosophy of mind the very existence of human consciousness is called the hard problem it's the hard problem because you cannot solve this problem within materialist terms some materialists philosophers of mind argue that consciousness doesn't really exist it ought not to exist in a materialist world and in fact it doesn't exist or if it does it doesn't do anything it's just a kind of epiphenomenon of what goes on in our brains like the kind of shadow that doesn't do anything or as some of them suggest that consciousness is an illusion produced by brains the trouble with that of course is it doesn't solve the problem because illusion is a mode of consciousness you can't have an illusion unless you're conscious so it presupposes consciousness so this debate has gone round and round in circles around the hard problem and one of the things that happened has happened is that some materialists philosophers have said okay we've got to get a way out of this and the best way out of it is to abandon old-style materialism and adopt a philosophy called Pan psychism Pan means everywhere psyche means mind or soul or spirit or or my mind or soul and so the idea is that there's some kind of mind even in electrons or atoms that everything in nature has not just bodies but some kind of mind and therefore the emergence of consciousness in humans is not a difference of kind something totally different emerging from inanimate machinery but a difference of degree a more complex form of consciousness emerging from less complex forms of consciousness this philosophy of Penn psychosom is not new it's basically a modern version of what used to be called animism the belief that there are psyches or souls throughout nature philosophy in Christian Europe in the Middle Ages was essentially animist the philosophy of Aristotle modified based on Thomas Aquinas taught that all animals have souls or plants have souls the soul is the form of the body and in fact the word animal in English and in Latin comes from the Latin word animal which means soul so this pant psychism is a rediscovery or a repopulation of a kind of mind throughout nature there were two famous Penn psychos philosophers in the 17th century both of them reacting against Descartes one was Leibniz who suggested that all self-organizing units have bodies and minds that each reflects the universe from its all end point of view he called them monads the other was Spinoza who thought that the whole of nature was essentially the body of God and God was the mind of nature it was a kind of pantheist philosophy the most interesting animist or pan psyches philosopher in the 20th century was Alfred North Whitehead who was writing in the 1920s a British philosopher who talked in terms of the philosophy of organism the universe is not a machine it's an organism Whitehead was a mathematician as well as a philosopher and was one of the first people to appreciate how radical quantum theory was in the 1920s he got it most people took decades to get that what a radical break this was from traditional physics quantum theory says that electrons and atoms and protons are not just little bits of stuff they're not solid bits of matter like small billiard balls they're waves they're waves they're processes in time and a wave cannot exist at an instant because it takes time to wave it can't exist at a point in space could it take space to wave in cannot have an instantaneous wave that's at root the reason for the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics Whitehead realized that if electrons and protons and atoms were waves they were processes in time they were processes not things and if they were processes they had a past and a future there was it gain from the past towards the future he then came up with an extremely interesting idea which still hasn't been fully worked out it's just begun to be discussed again and that is that this nature of matter as time in time the gives us a new way of thinking about the relation of mind and body old views of mind and body relationship are that the mind somehow inside and the body and the outer world are out there we talk about the inner life and the outer world these are spatial metaphors but he thought the relation of mind and body was a relationship in time not space the mind he thought was the future Pole like in a polarity between the past and the future the mind was the future Pole and the body is the past Pole the mind is concerned with possibilities and these possibilities are not actual because they don't become actual until there's a decision and one of them have becomes actual as soon as it becomes actual it's measurable it's a fact but it's in the past for example in the case of an electron if you want to know what an electron will do you work out the Schrodinger equation of quantum mechanics which tells you all the possible things that electron could do it's a description of possibilities that's like the mind of the electron it's got all these possible things when the mind in turn when the electron interacts with a physical measuring instrument or with something a photographic film or an atom or molecule when it interacts with anything these possibilities collapse down and become an actual action this is sometimes called the collapse of the wavefunction these possibilities collapse down and become an observable fact but that's instantly in the past and now a new set of possibilities open up now our minds are like that too our minds are concerned prints our conscious minds arenas of possibility thoughts images plans intentions are possibilities in our minds dreams are account of possibility to a lot of our conscious activity is considering alternative possibilities and choosing among them for example all of us chose to be here tonight the fact we're here now we made that decision and put it into practice means it's an observable objective fact that we're in this room we can be seen measured photographed etc there was a time when we were making up our minds we could have done other things we could have been elsewhere there's evening there were other possibilities for this evening but when we made the decision among all those possibilities to do this well then this is what happens it's an observable fact but it's now in the past and our minds are opening again to new possibilities which after all is what this talk is about so the role of consciousness is about choice and possibility our habits are largely unconscious because we don't need to make choices so this idea of mind-body relations gives us a completely different view of the way nature works the mental causation is a stream of causation working from the future towards the past whereas physical causation of the kind we're familiar with from physics works from the past towards the future again in the Middle Ages in the philosophy of st. Thomas Aquinas and in the philosophy of Aristotle to explain everything you had to have not just the physical cause on the matter of which something's made you also had to have the goal or the intention towards which something was attracted everything in nature was attracted towards a goal according to Aristotle a growing animal or plant is attracted towards the goal of reaching his mature form a hungry dog is attracted towards the goal of eating some meat and finding a bone its goal directed behavior and this purpose of or teleological activity involves a kind of stream of causation from a virtual future towards the present so this way of thinking about the mind fits with a quite sophisticated well developed philosophy which has been rejected in favor of the mechanistic theory of just matter and energy but which makes much more sense of mind and consciousness I want to turn now to the doctrine that the mind is nothing but the activity of the brain because what this doctrine tells us is that our minds are it just inside our heads it's all in the brain instead I think that it makes more sense to think of minds as being like fields which are spread out in space and time we're used to the idea of a magnet being a physical object with an invisible field around it a region of influence the magnetic field we're used to the idea of the earth having a gravitational field inside it and stretching out invisibly far beyond the earth keeping the moon in its orbit we're familiar with mobile phones which have electromagnetic fields inside the material phone but they stretch out invisibly far beyond the telephone so fields are an accepted part of modern physics but they're not exactly matter they're physical but not Material materialists expand they're viewed say ok we'll include fields as well they used to think they were material made of matter the ether now they don't but anyway I'm not discussing that particular point what I'm discussing is that how the best to think of our minds are they just material things like mechanical systems just based on contact or are they field like systems which means they could stretch out far beyond our brains just like many purely physical systems like magnets and mobile phones do well I think they stretch out beyond our brains I think our minds are extended far beyond our brains the easiest way to understand this is to think about the nature of vision what happens when you see me standing here now you all know the standard answered lights reflected from me it goes through the electromagnetic field enters your eyes goes through the lens inverted images on your retinas changes in the cone cells impulses up the optic nerve and activity in various regions of the brain and we now know which regions become active in more detail than ever before thanks to brain scanners but does that explain vision well no it doesn't it just describes what happens in the brain when you're seeing something it doesn't explain why you're conscious of what you see there's nothing in neurophysiology that tells you this is conscious it doesn't tell you that your can't work while you're conscious of what you see and that in fact is an aspect of the hard problem consciousness itself is unexplained but the second question is the one I want to focus on where is this happening when you see me now where is your image of me the official view is that it's inside your brain all your thoughts all your experience is inside your head so somewhere inside your head does a little Rupert looking just like me but it's in your head everything you're seeing in this room is inside your head if you look at the stars at night the Stars you're seeing in the sky the experience of those stars is inside your head your skull is beyond the stars that is the official world view taken to its logical conclusion what I'd like to suggest is something so simple that it's hard to understand and that is that your image of what you see is where it seems to be your image of me is located right here it's in your mind but it's not inside your brain everything you see is being projected out to where it seems to be it's a projection it's a kind of virtual reality projection created by your mind depending on the activity of the brain and on what comes into the eyes but it's not inside the brain you don't have a little three-dimensional virtual reality display inside your head no one's ever seen one there but the official view is that's what's going on what I'm suggesting is this projection three dimensional colored world you're experiencing is projected out to where things are sometimes it's projected to where they are not and then you're having an illusion or a hallucination but fortunately there's a Traer none of us would survive long if we were living entirely in a hallucinatory world it's pretty my your mind reaches out to project a kind of visual field to what you're seeing so every one of you as I look at you they're images in my mind which is projecting out to you where you are now is this just a philosophical view well it's it is a philosophical view it's how Plato thought vision worked it's how you cleared thought that vision worked and in fact you could it was the first person to explain how mirrors work he showed that Weybridge if we project things out just like I'm saying the great Greek geometers said if we project things out when we look in a mirror because these are mental projections they go straight through the glass they're not physical they don't bounce off the mirror they go straight through that's why you see everything behind the mirror what science calls virtual images they're projected every time you look at anything in a mirror you're seeing your own projections that's what you're seeing well it's still the official theory of mirrors though it doesn't fit very well with the minders in the brain theory but can this be tested more radically if I look at you from behind and you don't know that I'm there is it possible that when my mind touches you through reaching out to you you could feel my attention is it possible that people when they're stared out from behind could feel that somebody was looking at them that ought not to happen according to regular science and according to official psychology textbooks it doesn't happen it's impossible but if you actually ask yourself and your friends have you ever felt when you're being looked at from behind you'll find that yes this is a common experience surveys show that more than 95% of the population have had this experience including children and also the great majority of people have had the converse experience staring at somebody from behind and seeing that person turn around and look at them there's a slight sex difference in these results more women than men have experienced being stared at and more men than women have experienced staring at others and making them turn around nevertheless members of both sexes are very familiar with this phenomenon including children what does science have to tell us about this well until recently nothing the subject was such a strong taboo that it was not investigated throughout almost from about 1880 to 1985 there were only four published papers in the scientific literature on the subject two of them were by skeptics saying it's rubbish it shouldn't happen and people ought not to believe it two of them were by people who'd actually done some experiments and said well look yes it does seem to happen so this is an experimental question does it happen I'm a now I'm a biologist and I started looking at the natural history of this I interviewed people whose job it is to watch others surveillance officers private detectives the drug squad at Heathrow the store detectives at Harrods the practical people who are paid to watch other people most of them take it for granted that this is a reality when you're being trained how to follow somebody as a private detective you're trained don't stare at their back because they'll feel you're looking at them they'll turn around catch your eye and your cover's blown so this is just completely taken for granted in the Japanese martial arts people can actually be trained to become more sensitive to being looked at from behind it's useful to know if someone's looking at you from behind they might be trying to attack you and you can sense it you'll escape better well it can also be investigated experimentally and I've developed some extremely simple experiments so simple a child can do them and in fact thousands of children already have done them this research has been done widely in schools in Britain America and Germany people one person sits with a blindfold the others behind them in a random series of trials they look or don't look at the back of their neck and in each trial people have to guess if they're being looked at or not they're right or wrong by pure chance they'd be right 55% of the time the results are not that much above chance in the looking trials they're right about 60% at the time it's a very artificial test but it's been it shows positive significant results over hundreds of thousands of trials an experiment of this kind has been running in the Amsterdam Science Museum for the last 20 years one of the biggest experiments ever conducted and it shows overwhelming statistical evidence that this really happens now for most people it's not surprising it rarely happens because they've experienced it in real life you might think well the experiments need to be done more rigorously well they have been through mirrors through one-way mirrors through windows even through closed-circuit television people's physiology changes measurably when they're stared at on closed-circuit television so there's an influence even of someone seeing your image you don't even have to see someone directly for this to work it turns out this is very common among animals as well they can tell when they're being stared at some people can tell when animals are staring at them and so on I think it probably evolved in the context of predator-prey relationships a prey animal that could tow and a predator was staring at it would have a better chance of surviving the one that couldn't tell I think therefore that our minds reach out every time we look at something through attention and the English word attention from the Latin word ad Tender a which means ad means towards tender a means to stretch I think attention is our mind stretching towards something it's closely related to intention where our minds stretch into something this too can have great effects if I think about you and I want to get in touch with you and I really need to talk to you my intention is to telephone you and I have the intention to call you I go to my telephone i dial your number I try and call you and quite often you might have the experience so you suddenly start thinking about me for no apparent reason and then say as funny I was just thinking about you when you rang this is an extremely common experience more than 80% of people who've had experiences of apparent telephone telepathy thinking of someone who then rings or knowing who it is when the phone rings before looking at the caller ID the standard explanation for this the so-called sceptical explanation is oh well it's just coincidence you think about people all the time if one of the rings you imagine is telepathy and you just forget all the times you're wrong a reasonable hypothesis but evidence-free that science is about testing hypotheses and I've actually tested that one in many experiments in dn't the basic experiment you would say if you're the subject you'd sit at home with a landline phone you know it's an experiment you've set aside time specially you give us the names of four of your close friends or family members who you might be telepathic with we pick one of the four at random bring them out and say please ring your friend after thinking about them for a minute or two ring them very soon they ring your phone rings before you pick it up you're being filmed you have to guess who it is I think it's John hello John you're right or you're wrong there's a one in four chance of getting it right by chance 25% in these tests the hit rate is about 45% is massively significant statistically it's artificial tests people aren't right every time but much much more significantly than chance this research has now been replicated at the University of Freiburg in Germany and in the University of Amsterdam Holland and it's also the same kind of thing happens with text messages and emails P you think about some you get a message from them it shows we're interconnected the commonest forms of telepathy in the modern world are ones that have developed along with technology and I helped to emphasize and they're happening more than they've ever happened before because people spent that so much time using telephones nowadays now these are psychic phenomena to do with the psyche or soul psychic phenomena are common in animals many animals are telepathic with each other and they're telepathic with their owners I wrote a whole book called dogs that know when their owners are coming home about dogs cats and other animals which are telepathic with their owners that many people have found this and I've shown that it's not just chance when people come at random times in unfamiliar vehicles animals can still know we have all this on film you can see films of these experiments on my website so I think psychic phenomena show the mind is extended in space to some extent in time as well because we have precognitive dreams sometimes but these are like horizontal connections their connections to other people and to animals these are not spiritual phenomena they're psychic phenomena there's a distinction between these realms I myself think our minds are also open to spiritual phenomena to the influence of the spiritual realm which comes through spiritual practices through prayer through spontaneous mystical experiences and is what religions and spiritual practices are all about so I think our minds are more extensive than our brains in a spiritual dimension as well as in a psychic and material dimension the idea they're nothing but the brain they're all inside the head is a dogma and it's a dogma that's imprisoned our civilization for a long time there's no reason that we need to go on believing it the scientific evidence for it is very small the evidence for a more extended view of the mind is much greater and it's quite liberating to think of your mind as being much more extensive than your brain it makes much more sense of your own experiences well my times up so I can't go on with any of the other dogmas but I hope I've said enough to show that all these big assumptions that science are based on turn out to be entirely questionable and when you question them new possibilities open up new scientific possibilities open up for inquiry I think science has become much more exciting much more interesting much more fun and probably a lot cheaper if we move in the direction that I'm suggesting here of questioning these fundamental dogmas and trying to go beyond them I think we're on the threshold of an extremely exciting new phase of scientific discovery thank you you

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Length: 46min 42sec (2802 seconds)

Published: Thu May 31 2018