Rupert Sheldrake - The Science Delusion

welcome and Rupert is here to give three days of teaching on our course at Schumacher called mind in nature it's his nature totally mechanical or his mind it's a fuse throughout nature and I think you problem probably gets the answer at least our answer and Rupert has been coming to the College from the very beginning we were just talking about when his first visit was with his young family in May 1991 and he's been supporting the college ever since coming to teach on short courses and then on our MSC and holistic science we have many of our MSC students on his course and also our ma students so it's wonderful to welcome Rupert again I'll just say a little bit about him he'd probably know about him but I think he's one of the most important scientists of our time he's a great intellect and hugely intuitive and incredibly courageous he's taking on the mainstream showing convincingly I think using good experiment and scientific data that telepathy really exists that there are morphic fields that there's mined in nature and many many more things he started his scientific life at Cambridge where he was a he was a biologist Clare College and spent a lot of time connected with Cambridge University he's written about 80 technical papers ten books and he's a fantastic speaker so thank you for coming to this event and you're going to have a wonderful time as Rupert Thanks and it's very good to be here again the science delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality in principle leaving any of the details to be filled in basically we've got it all figured out and I think this is a terrible delusion I think it's inhibiting scientific inquiry it's causing the sciences to undergo a law of diminishing return it ever increasingly expensive research is yielding fewer and fewer true discoveries and breakthroughs it's something that's worrying a lot of people within the science establishment and I think that part of the Arusha vs. is this dogmatic belief system which has taken over science in the heart of science as a conflict between science as a method of inquiry open-minded investigation of nature and hypothesis experimental evidence open debate self-correcting all that kind of thing which many people think of as the way of science is it's actually a kind of ideal of the way science should be or ought to be and it's an idea which I share but in reality things are very different and one of the reasons they're different is that for many people science has become not just a method of inquiry but a worldview the kind of people who say I don't believe in God I believe in science are people who've adopted the so-called scientific worldview and made that their basis of belief and understanding reality and science is not meant to be a worldview what actually happened is that these Sciences have been taken over by the materialist philosophy of nature's this takeover occurred in the 19th century towards the end of the 19th century and other sciences are wholly owned subsidiaries of materialism which is a philosophy of nature now you can defend it as a philosophy but it's not science it's an overarching framework within which science is currently done it's apparent I'm a model of reality it consists of ten distinct dogmas and these dogmas are usually taken for granted by people who believe them without realizing they're actually believing something most people who believe these dogmas simply think they're the truth and this makes them different from religious beliefs people who have religious beliefs know they have a belief people who have scientific beliefs don't know they have a belief they just think they know the truth and this underlies some of this strident fundamentalism that we've been had a lot of a scientific fundamentalism that's become coupled to militant atheism in recent years what I do in my book the science delusion is take the ten dollars of sons and I turn them into questions and look at them scientifically see how well they stack up if you examine them in the light of the evidence and think about them rationally instead of taking them for granted most scientists take them for granted not because they've thought about them but because they haven't and that's why it's important to bring them out into the light so you can actually see what these assumptions are and see how valid they are it turns out that they're not valid that every one of them when it's turned into a question opens up completely new ways of looking at the world which i think could lead to a renaissance in science I'm very Pro science not anti science but I think science is not realizing anything like its full potential under its present system start afire by dogma imprisoned within rigid institutional frameworks and dominated by fear most scientists think much more freely and private than they will do in public because basically they're afraid of stepping out of line well what are these 10 dogmas I'll just run through them briefly and then I'll examine two or three of them in more detail I time to look at all ten this evening first and foremost is the dogma that nature's mechanical or machine like and this became the dominant theme in science right at the beginning of modern science in the 17th century it put all of science on the basis of a machine metaphor the reason this is important is that before that in the Middle Ages in all the European universities including our English universities of Oxford and Cambridge the view of nature was that that was taught everywhere was that nature is organic the earth is of life animals and plants are truly alive they're living beings animals are beings with souls that's why the word animal from the mat in anima that's where the word comes from and they have their own internal purposes their own goals and their self-organizing now by contrast a machine has no purposes of its own it doesn't organize itself that's why it has to be designed by an external designer a human designer and made in a factory so machines are not self-organizing and don't have their own purposes and that's what makes them different and in the 17th century people thought well gods the machine maker and designer like an engineer a mathematical engineer and creates everything in nature but nothing has its own purpose nothing in nature has any purpose that was why this was a radical break with the view of nature that when before which was an animistic view of nature there was a living god of a living world then there was a kind of after the 17th century mechanical god of a mechanical world the second dog where is that matters unconscious this world machinery is made out of totally unconscious matter the entire universe the Stars the planets everything is unconscious matter everything's that's made out of made no matter it is unconscious and the only exception our human minds and I'll come to that in a moment third the laws of nature are fixed the laws and the constants of me have been the same ever since the Big Bang and they will be the same forever fourth the total amount of matter and energy is always the same all the math from the energy in the universe came into being suddenly in the Big Bang and it's remained the same in quantity ever since governed by the same laws as my friend Terence Mckenna used to say a modern science is based on the principle of 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 fifth nature is purposeless though no purposes in nature teleology the subject of the study of purpose is the ultimate taboo within science evolution has no purpose or direction we got here just by blind chance and the laws of nature there's no purpose there's no overriding goal in anything our lives are dead in a purposeless universe that's going nowhere 6th biological inheritance is material everything that we inherit everything that any organism inherits is inherited materially as genes the DNA of the genes as epigenetic modifications chemical modifications of the genes and a cytoplasmic inheritance so it's all inherited materially 7 memories are stored as material traces inside your brain everything that you or any other animal remembers is stored physically materially inside your head everything you remember about your childhood where he went on holiday last year what you had for breakfast this morning all the skills you've acquired like riding bicycles driving cars and so forth bowling in cricket or whatever all these skills everything every kind of memory is encased inside the brain in some kind of material trace a memory trace either through phosphorylated proteins or modified nerve endings but it's material all memorias material is taken for granted within the neurosciences and indeed by most people outside science most people have bought into this assumption without realizing it most people assume memory must be in the brain where else would it be Dogma 8 is the mind is inside the brain mental activity is brain activity your mind is inside your head all your subjective experience is going on inside your skull Dogma 9 follows from Dogma 8 and it's the belief that psychic phenomena are illusory they can't really happen because thoughts and intentions can't have an effect at a distance because they're all inside the head therefore any evidence for psychic phenomena has to be dismissed denied or of trashed in some way just brushed aside as being flawed or fraudulent or illusory because they can't these things can't really happen and people who believe this are extremely impatient with any evidence for psychic phenomena they don't want to waste time looking this because they know in advance it's all false because it can't possibly be true and finally the dogma 10 is that mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works alternative and complementary medicines may appear to work but that's only because people would have got better anyway or because of the placebo effect the only kind that really works is mechanistic medicine and that's why the Medical Research Council spends its budget of hundreds of millions of pounds a year taxpayers money exclusively on mechanistic medical research it's why health services and mainstream insurance companies around the world only fund conventional medicine because it's the only kind that really works so these are the ten basic dogmas and they taken together this this constitutes the kind of default intellectual position of educated people in the world today most educated people have been educated to think this is the modern scientific worldview and the successes of science appear to make it unquestionable these successes of jet planes the internet mobile phones and so forth seem to show that the whole of this worldview must be true it works in this most incredible way but of course the successes of these technologies don't prove that this underlying philosophy of nature is true but most people assume it is and this worldview is now the default worldview of all educated people in the West but we've now exported this view of nature so that all young Chinese Indians South Americans Africans Arabs are all being brought up with this worldview this is what we're teaching them in schools that what education is all about converting people to this view of the world nature is essentially dead and inanimate and the role of human activity and economies is to create create increasing wealth expanding economies through science and technology this is the default position of every government in the world I would say but the possible exception is Bhutan but even they are really into engineering and hydroelectric schemes and a fairly benign way okay so I'm just going to take two or three of these dogmas I'll start with matter and energy this is the one I questioned least myself I had always taken this one for granted and there I questioned all the other dogmas over the years this is the only one I hadn't actually thought about until I came to write this book I thought I should include it because it's definitely one of the primary assumptions and I rather hope that I find it held up to critical scrutiny I too have a book where all ten dogmas of false I thought magnet turn seemed a bit biased so I actually quite wanted the conservation of matter and energy to be valid but as soon as I got at it the whole thing fell apart and it's actually one of the most questionable of them all first of all you have to look at the history how did people come to believe this was it because they had unbelievably accurate it's very very careful research well no that's not how it came about at all in ancient Greece the roots of this worldview of materialism were put forward by the atomist philosophers and in ancient Greece the different schools of philosophy were grappling with an assumption that they all made which is that reality is eternal the ultimate reality has changed as timeless and eternal that was the starting point for most Greek philosophy they probably arrived at the cider from mystical experience because many mystics then and now have the experience of going to ultimately real realm where there is no time but they tried to turn it into a philosophy the pythagorean's thought the eternal reality was mathematical and that was the underlying basis of everything beyond space and time eternal maths Plato influenced by that pythagorean's had the idea of an eternal world of forms or ideas the archetypes of everything in nature exists beyond nature in an archetypal transcendent world the atomists were against Plato and the pythagorean's and they said no eternal reality is matter and matters made of lots of little bits the atoms which by definition can't be broken up or split and therefore the total amount persists indefinitely forever in other words the total amount of matter is always the same the atoms can't be destroyed by definition in the 17th century the foundations of modern science were established by reviving atomism and platonism or pythagoreanism pythagoreanism the assumption was that the laws of nature are eternal mathematical ideas and the mind of a mathematical God so when Newton discovered his law of gravitation it wasn't just a temporary hypothesis it was an insight into the divine mind that's why science advanced such huge prestige it became a new priesthood because scientists could rise above the conflicts of religion and in the 17th century Protestants Catholics were killing each other all over Europe thirty years war and the idea was that science would rise above this sectarian conflict to absolute truth the absolute knowledge of God's most intimate inner nature which was mathematical and so these eternal mathematical ideas of laws of nature eternal ideas and the mind of God and these laws governed eternal atoms of matter that were created by God in the first place of the creation of the world machine but which remained the same thereafter and when God started the world machine in motion at the beginning he impelled it with with a certain amount of movement or energy or force and that amount remained the same forever because it was god-given now that's the root of the present principle of conservation of matter and energy a kind of theological interpretation of Platonism and pythagoreanism and materialism in the 17th century in the 19th century these so-called laws were codified more rigorously in the principles of conservation of matter and energy the principle of conservation of energy was the first law of thermodynamics 1851 so they became they took on a more definite and better defined form in the nineteenth century but the assumption that they're true was already taken for granted they wanted experiments to find out are they true could they be false no this was already taken for granted now most of us think this is so true so unquestionable that there's nothing we can do about it and we just have to accept it physicists much freer there in a sense above the laws of nature because they make them and so they they have never felt the same constraint in the 1980's this became clear with the discovery that within the galaxies stars were moving too fast around the galactic center and galaxies were attracting each other too much to be explained by the amount of matter within them people added up the amount of matter in gas cards and stars assuming there were planets and black holes as well and all that up and there's not enough matter in the galaxies to explain the way they attract each other all the way the stars behave within them so either this understanding of galaxies is false or there must be a lot more matter than we can account for we can see so rather than revised the whole theory of galaxies they took the easier option which is to say well there must be a whole lot of matter there that we don't know about in any normal way and this is called dark matter because you can't see it now how much dark matter is there well that's simple you just work out the equations how much do you need to explain the phenomena you titrate in exactly that amount of dark matter and that's how much there is since it can't be observed in any other way and there's no other evidence for its existence you can have as much or as little as you like and you can adjust the equations continually as they are doing if the galaxy has an unusual bulge if not or not have you had in dark matter to explain the Bulge it's perfect theory from the point of view of physics it explains all the facts and you can adjust as it will daily trouble is there's no independent evidence for dark matter and there's no observations no one has a clue what it is there are endless debates within physics about it but there's a rather academic debate since there are no observational data except for the fact that galaxies and things don't behave as they ought to if there was just ordinary matter so this saying created a further problem there's about five times more Dark Matter than regular matter according to these theories so having added all this extra matter into the universe it meant its gravitational pull should be greater than people previously thought as the universe expands is being pulled back in by gravitation and if you suddenly have a lot more gravitational in the universe it should be slowing down the universal expansion until it stops expanding and then begins to contract in the 1980's people thought this is what would happen they thought that the universe would stop expanding and then begin to contract would contract faster and faster until it entered in the reverse of the Big Bang known in the trade as the Big Crunch then some people said well if there's a big crunch it could be the Big Bang of the next universe and so then it created the bouncing universe model well so that soup that was the dominant theory for quite a while but then in the late 1990s people discovered that the outermost galaxies and quasars in the universe are not slowing down the expansion of the universe seems to be speeding up things are moving apart faster and faster the exact opposite of what the theory had predicted so how can you explain that well quite simple there must be another kind of energy no one knew about before dark energy which it explains the expansion of the universe and counteracts the effects of dark matter how much is the well just the right amount to explain the observed phenomena and as amount changes as people adjust the equations from year to year you can sliding scale of this at just as much or as little as you like the total amount of dark matter and energy is currently estimated to be more than 96 percent of reality the kind of matter Nancy you learned about in school is less than 4% of what's actually there and the laws of conservation of matter and energy you learned about apply to that 4% do they apply to the rest well no one has a clue in fact current theories of dark matter say that the total amount of dark matter in the universe that's our dark energy is actually increasing as the universe expands it makes more dark energy so the universe is now a perpetual motion machine so how seriously can we take these laws then within quantum physics there's another mysterious kind of energy called zero-point energy it's in what's called the quantum vacuum field physics explains the quantum vacuum field as being necessary to explain all interactions between light and matter and something that's necessary to explain all electromagnetic forces as well that does this see you energy called the quantum vacuum field which is full not empty the matter we know about are like waves on an ocean a deep ocean of energy there's enough energy in the quantum vacuum field and as teaspoon to power Britain for decades there's too much energy in this quantum vacuum field according to the theories of physics according to the theories of physics as you sit on your seat right now the reason you don't go through it is because your bottom is repelled by the seat through an electro magnetic effect it's so basically an electrical repulsion that stops you going through the seat and that is mediated by virtual photons generated from the quantum vacuum field underneath every one of your bottoms there's a vast glistening ocean of virtual photons that stops you falling through the seat and as soon as you stand up they stop being generated and now you get many more underneath your feet whereas more weight and more repulsion involved in stopping again through the floor this is standard physics today and the the quantum vacuum field is has all this energy in it so not surprisingly some people say well could we tap it there are people who claim to have made machines that do have it they're usually called above unity devices or free energy machines because they give up more energy than you put in now as soon as anyone comes up with these machines that immediately subject to the oldest taboo in science started by Galileo a prayer against perpetual motion machines and the law of conservation of matter and energy and the laws of thermodynamics prohibit such machines so people have invented them you can read about them on the internet they have them in some of them people have them in garages some have small companies where they make them but as soon as they go to any of the major investors or governments the government's offering up their physics advisor and say we've got a trap here who's got this machine it seems to go out more energy and you put in can this be jolly useful and and and so they ring up the physics advice on the physics advisor system absolute rubbish these people of cranks it's impossible it can't exist it's a perpetual motion machine don't touch it with a barge pole so they don't but what if some of these machines actually work they would completely transform the world economy obviously if there were sources of energy vastly greater than anything we can get through shale gas or or tar sands or coal or even wind and and this at least these could be completely transformative technologies so do these machines work their proponents say they do sometimes they give demonstrations they have them tested and they seem some of them stand up to fairly rigorous testing but do they work don't they well no one knows at least I don't know I'd love to know my solution here would be to set up a 1 million dollar prize for the best above unity device and have an international contest and see if any of them really work under fair testing conditions there are laboratories in America that are equipped to do this kind of testing probably some here as well and we they could be tested fairly by qualified engineers and physicists I'm not trying to debunk it but to see if any from the real if any of them are real they'd win the prize if not several of them are real then the one that produces the most energy would win the prize if none of them are real none of them will win the prize if I were setting this up I would not only have the prize I persuade bookmakers like little Woods to open a book on this and so that people who say it's totally impossible it can't ever happen say okay we put your money where your mouth is how much you prepared to bet that no one will win this prize and then people who think it might happen how much you prepared to bet it might happen I'd be prepared to best part a thousand pounds it might happen so I think this would be actually really exciting science that would be a book on this there'd be people making bets that'd be a prize the finals could be on television I think it could this whole subject out of the shadows where it's been stuck for decades because of this taboo and we'll find out if something really happens if none of these devices really work then the people who've been saying it's all rubbish all this time would have the sweet pleasure of saying I told you so also winning their bets and they ought to be grateful because this will actually move the cause of science forward whereas denial ridicule and rejection of these phenomena of these devices doesn't move science forward it's just an expression of dogma and taboo well this is one area where I think things could change and they could have huge effects I just want to turn now to the idea of the laws and constants of nature affixed this is another of these dogmatic assumptions now this is one I personally been questioning for years I think the idea of ficks laws of nature doesn't really make much sense in a radically evolutionary universe in the 17th century the idea was that that nature is eternal once God's created in the first place and it has eternal laws an eternal matter in the 18th century at the end of the 18th century french rationalist physicists like laplace i thought they could get rid of god or any need for god by saying the universe was eternal eternal matter and energy governed by eternal laws with no beginning well that made sense in his own terms but then along comes the big bang theory which became orthodox in physics in 1966 which says the universe began about fourteen billion years ago very small and very hot less than the size of the head of a pin and it's been expanding and cooling ever since now where were where all the law where the laws of nature all there at the moment of the Big Bang did they suddenly spring from nowhere like a Napoleonic Code for the new universe or were they there before the universe were they truly eternal well piece of metaphysical questions you couldn't possibly test them experimentally but most scientists assumed they were all there at the moment of the Big Bang so the universe evolves but the laws are fixed why they fixed well because people always used to think they were fixed and it's a habit of thinking but in an evolving universe why shouldn't the laws evolve in fact why should they be laws at all as soon as you begin to think about it the whole concept falls apart laws are occurred only in human society is only in civilized human societies they don't occur in nature it's an anthropocentric metaphor projected onto the whole of nature which is actually quite inappropriate as CS Lewis once said say that a stone falls to earth because it's obeying a law makes it a man not even a citizen so it's a very inappropriate metaphor and I think a better one is habit I think that the universe involves and as it evolves habits develop and through repetition become more habitual and I think the regularities of nature essentially habits this idea was first put forward in the late 19th century one of the philosophers who put it forward with CS purse the American philosopher my own development of the habit theory is based on my theory of morphic resonance which says that there's a memory in every kind of thing in nature given by a resonance across time and space between similar things it means that each kind of thing has a collective memory giraffes have a collective giraffe memory as a giraffe embryo grows it's influenced by the shape of previous giraffe embryos by morphic resonance as it starts behaving it inherits the instincts the habits of the species by morphic resonance they're not really feelings most of the genes in fact don't code for behavior and form they code for the structure of proteins that's what we know they do this theory makes predictions for example if you train rats to learn a new trick in one place rats all over the world will learn the same thing quicker just because the rats have landed in the first place without any other known means of connection there's already evidence that actually happens but I'm not here this evening to talk about my own particular theory of morphic resonance I'm only mentioning it in passing I'm going to be talking about it tomorrow so those who are on the MSC core on the workshop the mind and nature program so that's not my main focus this evening if you want to read more about it then it's explained in detail and my book the presence of the past morphic resonance and the habits of nature it's also summarized in the Science Division but what I do now is turn because I don't want to focus just on my own ideas now turn to the constants of nature because this is again something that is assumed to be constant not just laws but constants the so called fundamental constants are measured quantities which are supposed to regulate the way nature works the two best known are the universal gravitational constant or Newton's constant constant often known as big G because it's written with a capital G and the speed of light see both of these are among the seven or eight fundamental constants that are believed to be utterly constant utterly fundamental well do they vary is this just an assumption well the answer is it is just an assumption it's part of the laws and constants being the same forever assumption but what are the data when I got interested in this I actually looked to see if the data have changed there are books you find in science libraries called handbooks of physical constants and I think the main one the the CRC Handbook of physical constants is known about the 43rd edition so they have many numerous editions and what I did is I got out the old editions from the Patent Office library in London and I got them retrieved from the reserve stockroom they wheeled on a dust-covered trolley of dust colored volumes I was able to look at the constants over the years when I did that I found to my astonishment that the speed of light had dropped between 1928 and 1945 by 20 kilometers per second it's defined to science how many kilometres per second two and then three or four decimal places so if you drop by 20 kilometres per second this is huge a huge change and I looked up the primary literature of the period and I found during that prayer period all around the world people were getting this low value then it went up again and they all started getting a new value and I thought that's really really interesting and that would have huge implications maybe the speed of light is cyclic maybe this would affect the whole the way the universe develops and works but I couldn't find any physicist who explained it and want to discuss it they didn't best them didn't know about it because they just look at the latest value and assume that's true or as true as it could be so I went to see the head of metrology the science of measuring constants at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington I asked him if I could visit him to discuss changes in the constants and he was kind enough to see me in he was very friendly and I said to him look I found that there's this the speed of light seems to drop by 20 kilometres per second all over the world during this period and I'd like to ask you about it and he said oh dear he said you've discovered the most embarrassing and say incident in the history of our science and I said well don't you think it's rather exciting I mean what if the speed of life really changed in that thing oh Sid couldn't have really change and I said well why not you said because it's a constant so I said well then how do you explain it people all over the world getting this value that was much lower than the values before and afterwards I mean I said I can't think there if it's not a real change what could it be it must be some kind of collective delusion and I said this must have been brought about by people correcting their results and fudging their results till they got what they thought everyone else was getting all around the world and he said well he said we don't like to use the word fudge and so I said well what do you prefer he said we prefer the phrase intellectual phase-locking so I said you mean to say that all around the world people were correcting their values to this wildly different value just because other people were coming up with values that were all in the very same brackets and then the fashion changed and they intellectually phase-locked into a different value I said how do we know that's not going on today he said oh we can be very sure of that and I said why he said well we fixed the speed of light by definition in 1972 listen it can never happen again so I said well what if it really did change I mean he's oh he never knows and I said why not he said we defined the metre in terms of the speed of light he said better change too he said the whole thing's completely watertight now and so I think that's impressive they've managed to fix that problem but then I said well what about the gravitational constant the universal gravitational constant he there was a bit trickier he said that has been varying rather a lot and in fact even in the last 10 years it's varied by more than 1.3 percent that's a lot if something's defined too many places of decimals in fact recent variations have been about hundred 200 times more than the supposed error limits that the plus or minus the error thing that they give the standard deviation huge changes in the gravitational constant in different labs around the world what happens at the moment is that they labs measure it it comes out with different values of different days and they average it then the British National physical lab the American Bureau of Standards the French central laboratory of physics they all send in their values to the International Committee on metrology and they then average the ones from different labs and come up with the latest best value of the gravitational constant so I said to dr. Penney well what if say there was as the earth moves the solar system moves through the galaxy what if there are actual fluctuations in G because of the Earth's environment you know clouds of dark matter that the earth goes through changes in relation to the rest of the galaxy what if these errors are correlated what if they're all high on one day in one lab and low in another there might be a reason for these big variations if they're oh no no they're constant he said no point looking for fluctuations they're just errors so for the last ten years I've been trying to persuade metrologist put their raw data online with the dates and the values and then have an exercise in open science anyone could look for patterns do they go up and go down together do they fluctuate there's already some evidence they fluctuate on a daily and annual basis but they may fluctuate on another basis as well that no one's yet discovered if we looked at their data we'd find out something new something really interesting that would make the University much more alive instead of just having these fixed flat value of the constants but the metrologist will not look at the data because they know it's a constant and here's there are the trivial exam it's a big subject but it mean it's an example where Dogma is leading scientific research this research would cost him is nothing I'm trying to persuade them at the moment to put them online now having another go at this and I did meet her metrologist earlier this month who was got got very interest in this and and said he try and talk to his colleagues and say there's some hope this could happen anyway when I left the head of metrology at the National Physical Therapy reached down to a cardboard box beside his desk he said oh by the way you might want one of these they've just come from the printers he pulled out a pamphlet and he handed it to me said the latest values of the physical constants well I think it's quite feasible that the constants fluctuate they may fluctuate within narrow limits I think the day may come when in scientific journals like Nature a bit like newspaper stock market reports there's you know this week's value of the constants gee held firm this week the charge on the electron was up that there was a fall under fine structure constant and if the constants actually fluctuated then you know there'll be different qualities of time different things could happen at different times nature would be kind of pulsing with these different fluctuations which wouldn't necessarily all be in phase with each other and why not I think that's quite likely to happen what's topping is finding that out at the moment is this dogmatic assumption no let me turn finally to the assumption that matters unconscious this assumption dates back to the 17th century when Rene Descartes the philosopher of the world machine he's the person who most clearly formulated the machine theory of nature when he formulated his view he made a sharp distinction between matter which he defined as unconscious and mind which is consciousness and Descartes said that all of the matter in the universe is unconscious it's just stuff that's pushed around by external forces animals are just machines plants are just machines human bodies are just machines there's one exception in all of nature to everything being unconscious matter and that's conscious human minds which are totally different from unconscious matter they're not in space and time and they're immaterial we alone have them in the natural world and the only other beings with immaterial minds are angels and God so humans human minds angels and God are immaterial everything else's material now he couldn't explain how these Minds interacted with the brain he thought it happened in the pineal gland and modern dualistic theories are similar except the supposed seat of interaction has shifted a couple of inches into the cerebral hemispheres but this was Descartes theory and it created a sharp dualism between mind and body between humans and other animals and the rest of the age because we're not we have conscious minds and purposes and they don't therefore we can use them in factory farms vivisection do what we like because they're just in sentient automata and it also created a split between science and religion religion got human minds angels and God science got the entire physical universe and by having this division of labor it avoided conflicts for much of the history of science they were these two separate compartments of activity kept apart and out of conflict now this is called Cartesian dualism and many people have found it unsatisfactory most people who find it unsatisfactory think that two is too many should have ultimately just one explanatory principle I myself from a Trinitarian I think twos too few I think we need three basic explanatory principles but I went going to my own theory this evening I'll just deal with the history of trying to get rid of two and get down to one if you start with a Cartesian dualism you can get to one basic principle in what in two ways either you can say everything is mind that's idealism the philosophy of idealism consciousness is the only reality matters a kind of dull done repetitive consciousness or you can go in the other direction materialism and the only reality is matter mind has no independent existence the only reality of the world is matter and that materialist philosophy is what came to dominate science by the late 19th century it started with de cartes assumption that matter is unconscious then it rubbed out consciousness in human brains everything else in nature remained the same and so it didn't there wasn't an attempt to find out if animals are conscious or to investigate whether nature's conscious it was assumed from the Arts Center as a matter of definition by a French philosopher in the 17th century and and that's what lies behind modern materialism not experiments not evidence not serious discussion simply a definition and a habit of thinking no one of the first problems that this philosophy creates is the explanation of human consciousness how come we are conscious if matters unconscious and our brains are nothing but matter well the answer is there is an explanation we ought not to be conscious and a lot of effort in 20th century philosophy of mind and indeed psychology was devoted to trying to prove that we're not conscious that consciousness is a kind of illusion the dominant school of psychology in academic circles in the 20th century was behaviorism which says that the only scientific thing to study is muscular contractions and glandular secretions so behaviorist says study behavior and not get involved with speculations about meaningless concepts like consciousness so consciousness was driven out of mainstream psychology in the West for decades philosophers of mind in the West had mainly tried to prove that consciousness either doesn't exist it's just folk psychology to pretend it does but really the only reality as neurophysiology the behavior of nerves or else that is an illusion produced by the brain and that it does nothing the problem with the illusion theory which is probably the dominant one at the moment in academic circles is that it doesn't explain consciousness it presupposes it because either illusion is a mode of consciousness these theories are so unsatisfied that materialist philosophers spend their time shooting down their rivals theories putting up their own which then gets shot down and all these theories seem terribly unconvincing and the reason they seem unconvincing is because they are unconvincing and they've just gone round and round in circles this is the basis of a huge industry most philosophers in the english-speaking world and almost all Meera scientists are materialists who deny consciousness or ignore it however interestingly a few philosophers have recently broken ranks the British materialist philosopher Galen Strawson wrote a key paper a few years ago called does materialism imply pants and prison pen psychism is the doctrine that there's a kind of element of psyche or mind in all matter that is not unconscious there's a kind of proto mind even in electrons and he answered that question by saying yes he said the only way that we can explain consciousness in brains is by saying that the capacity for mind or consciousness even in electrons and atoms and and so on more interestingly and more persuasively one of the leading American philosophers of man Thomas Nagel came up with the book three months ago which i think is a very very important milestone it's called mind and cosmos the subtitle is why the materialist neo-darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false and Nagel stirred up a firestorm and in the American philosophical world he's being denounced by angry materialists he himself as an atheist is not as not as if he's somebody who's coming at this because he's a kind of creationist or something he's an atheist philosopher who in all honesty just simply can't get along with this any longer he thinks it's just ridiculous to pretend consciousness doesn't exist and that it just magically springs into being in human brains so this has triggered off a big debate is going on today and materialism is weakening its hold over academic consciousness studies as we speak but of course pan psychism is not a new theory in the 17th century soon after de cartes theory philosophers were trying to put forward better theories to avoid this extreme journalism one of them was Leibniz who said that every self-organizing system in nature or monad has both a body and mind and it rich men and reflects the whole universe from its own point of view it was a universe of interconnected minds all reflecting the universe from their own unique point of view as a fascinating Theory Spinoza the Jewish philosopher in in Amsterdam in Holland said that the whole of nature is like the body of God and it's there's a mind the case with the whole of nature nests the mind of God but if pants.i chasms had many supporters over the years but my in my view the most important and interesting was the 20th century British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead Whitehead was a physicist and a mathematician he wrote principia mathematica with Bertrand Russell who was his student at Cambridge and he was one of the first philosophers to understand quantum physics when it came about in the 1920s what he realized was that quantum physics tells us that electrons wave waves that the quant matter is made of waves lights made of waves anything that's made of waves can't exist at an instant a wave has to take time to wave and it takes space to wave as well this is the ultimate reason why they in quantum theory does the uncertainty principle you can't localize a wave at a particular point in time and space because it's a wave it takes time matter is not stuff that persists matter is a process that's what white had told us it's ongoing process of wave-like activity because it's wave-like and because it's a process it has a future pole in a past pole a wave has a bit that's the leading edge and the trailing edge in time spread out in time and whiteheads fascinating take on the relation of mind and body was that the mental pole of all things including electrons and humans the mental pole is the future pole the physical pole is the past so the relation of mind and body is a relation in time not space we normally think of the mind-body relationship as through spatial metaphors the inner world the outer world at the inner life the external world that sort of thing as if the minds inside and the worlds outside he was saying it's not like that at all it's a relation in time Minds the mental aspect of us and of electrons are concerned with possibilities the mind is a realm of possibility and mental activity it consists in choosing among those possibilities as soon as you made a choice among the many possibilities it becomes a fact I decide to raise my arm as soon as I've decided to do that out of all the possible things I could have done I've done that it's an objective fact you can photograph it measure it detect it it's a physical fact which is in the past so the relation of mind and body is fascinating an idea of that the mind is concerned with virtual futures things that haven't yet happened with possibilities and even in quantum theory the electron the wave equation of the electron of the Schrodinger wave equation is called describes all the possible things and the electron can do and the elect this gives you and physics tells you possibilities or probabilities when you measure the electron or when it interacts with something all those possibilities collapse down to one observer effect sometimes called the collapse of the wavefunction and it's as if even electrons are surrounded by a realm of possibility which can't be physical possibilities are not yet physical as soon as one's chosen or happens by chance over and above the others then it becomes a physical fact but possibilities are not physical and the mind is in this realm of possibility well I think that's a very fascinating aspect of whiteheads philosophy and the think gets more fascinating if you actually think it's through most of the discussions by Nagle and strossen and white had been about electrons the electrons are not very easy for us to imagine but the same principle should apply to self-organizing physical systems that are large as well as ones that are small and the one that I myself like thinking about most is the Sun the Sun is a self-organizing system it has complex electromagnetic patterns of activity at which we know more about now than ever before but this raises the question of the sun's mind could the Sun think could the Sun have a mind as well as a body could it be thinking about future possibilities and making decisions among them where to send out a solar flare which direction a coronal mass ejection should go in if they put if the Sun points them towards the earth will be massive power outages and total chaos and these things affect the climate as well and the Northern Lights and so on say what is the Sun thinks well you may say that's a ridiculous idea and every one of you will know that that's a prohibited thought in the modern world in the materialist world where metacenter countries you cannot ask does the Sun think that's a taboo subject because it's off-limits that matters unconscious only stupid people would ask that primitive people around the world think the Sun thinks they think it's a God or has a spirit in it the Greeks thought Apollo that the Sun God where there was a can god of the Sun the Indians think there's a God was the Sun Syria and the children take the Sun that leads to his thinks on the Easter's of life when children under the age of about 10 draw the Sun they have a smiley face the fact that children and primitive and traditional people's think the son thinks is for many people in the modern world sufficient evidence that this is a rubbish thought it can't possibly think these people didn't know about modern science but has modern science persuade done experiments to find the sun's unconscious no it simply assumed that from the outset it's simply an assumption it's not something that's been thought out argued about discussed it's just a taboo assumption and dogmatic prohibition on thinking about it now you may say to me you can't prove the sun's conscious and I can't but if you say that to me I'll say to you well you can't prove it's unconscious this is an open question and one which in my mind is a valid part of scientific discovery it so happens that almost the only attempt I've ever come across to discuss the thought of the Sun happened not very far from here in Devon at Hazelwood I think must have been about 12 years ago Satish was there and I think some of our friends from Hazelwood were there who are here this evening and I hope we had a weekend over the summer solstice we had a small Invitational conference which we were discussing is the Sun conscious and we got up at dawn on the summer solstice to see the Sun Rise over Dartmoor and the grain clouds cleared just as the Sun rose there was a full moon and there was a rainbow in the sky it was a most wonderful event the first day we discussed whether we could know what it would mean for the Sun to be conscious and could it have it be established the second day we moved on to it if the Sun is conscious what does it think about and one thing of course would be his body the whole solar system and and and then the other thing would be its peer group the other stars and so we we had this conference right here in Devon but as far as I know this is the only time has ever really been discussed inconclusive of course but it's a thought that I think it pretty occupied me I think about it quite a lot because if the sun's conscious the other stars would be conscious and if they're conscious what about entire galaxies this is a level of organization above the Stars maybe there's a vast galactic mind and each galaxy there are huge pulses of electric moving through the arms of the galaxies they the it's like a living organism the galaxy the idea is just propelled by gravity and dark matter is I think a very limited view of galaxies these are like celestial living organisms and the stars within them are like cells and the body of the galaxies and I think the whole galaxies might have thoughts and plasters of galaxies might have thoughts and then what about the entire cosmos what about the Universal cosmic fields of gravity electromagnetism does the whole cosmos have around but of course this is something which traditional peoples have always believed and indeed in medieval Europe this was pretty well taken for granted there's a kind of cosmic mind but in materialist sounds it's an unthinkable thought it's just dead matter now I don't think there's any reason why we have to stick to these dogmas of materialism it's a worldview which was being useful for science it's been focused a question it focused attention on material systems it's given us at modern engineering and technology but it's basically outlived its usefulness it's hopeless when it comes to understanding nature and the life of nature it's hopeless when it comes to understanding minds and consciousness it's not as if regular science has a brilliant theory about Minds or human nature or how to live in this planet it doesn't it's a disastrous failure in many respects it's very successful technologically if you have a machine theory of nature it's very good for building machines but it's not very good for understanding the very nature of nature including our n nature and indeed those aspects of Medicine which depend not just on cells and molecules but on minds so these are just some of the ways in which the dogmas of science limit inquiry and research in every area when you look at these dogmas and you question them whole new possibilities open up the whole world could be quite different and I think that as this process happens will undergo a kind of to thick renaissance Santa's stuck I was at a conference recently where some top American scientists were really worried about this they said it's somehow it's stuck there been very few real breakthroughs for decades now some same admits and there's a wonderful book by James Levin who called the rise and fall of modern medicine almost all the great discoveries in penicillin heart transplants and so on were made up until the 1980s the last really major one was the discovery that stomach ulcers are caused by a bacterium but for 20 years or so there's been no real breakthroughs genomics was supposed to revolutionize medicine and it hasn't the genome project has fizzled out in a whole series of embarrassing failures and the drug companies are falling off what's called the patents cliff as the patients on the old drugs run up they've got very few new ones in the pipeline the whole systems in crisis it's increasingly expensive is not working and it's based on a model of human nature which is extremely confined and constricted to this mechanistic model in every in every place we look we see the possibility for real new breakthroughs in science moving out of this old model into a new paradigm and that paradigm in a nutshell is of the world is alive organic and with a mind or a mental aspect to it so I think we stand on the threshold of a new scientific Renaissance but it's going to involve just a not just a revolution in ideas but a revolution in institutional arrangements in science funding and so on and there's a tremendous institutional inertia what makes me optimistic as my final remark on this is that many scientists are aware of this and wanted to change I've had since my book came out I had approaches from many leading quite influential scientists who've wanted to talk to me about this and because I am dangerous to know they we have these clandestine meetings and discuss some of these bigger questions there's plenty of people in science who wanted to change but they don't dare say so in public science is full of the closet ho lists and animists and people who've had psychedelic experiences and people who go to alternative practitioners and people who have dogs that know when they're coming home through the laboratory and people who have telepathic experiences and I think they're probably the majority of working scientists and yet they're all live in the closet or nearly all of them they don't dare come out and tell their colleagues so one thing would really change it to something like the gay liberation movement where scientists come out of the closet and speak freely and it would look completely different when they do that and the final point is that Western scientists are now a small minority last year India graduated two and a half million scientific and engineering graduates China one and a half million the u.s. 500,000 Britain one hundred thousand and in Britain America at the graduate level a third of those students which were a Chinese Korean or Indian so the majority of young scientists Adoration they're not European or North American and they've bought into this whole culture of science that we've imposed upon them but it has no relation to their kind of cultural roots their cultural traditions when they're confident enough they'll break free and I hope they do that sooner rather than later but this is something we have to take into account we're looking at the big picture of science today so I think it will change how soon is anyone's guess but I certainly hope it will happen within the next few years it's already beginning to happen thank you you you

Channel: Dartington Trust

Views: 24,018

Rating: 4.8107257 out of 5

Keywords: Rupert Sheldrake, schumacher college, holistic science, Science (Literary Genre)

Id: UaFtQwF-Ans

Length: 63min 44sec (3824 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 31 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/Straw-man-Jenkins]

Wasn’t this the talk that was banned from ted? After he gave it? That’s pretty rough. Seems like a nice guy though, he’s got some pretty whack ideas, I think he’s mentioned some form of telekinesis. Personally I want science to discover dragons, I wish someone would give a ted talk about how science hides the dragons, but it’s more likely that they’ve all been too fixated on convincing us that god doesn’t exist to even ever bother to go look. It’s a waste of the hard earned tax dollar.