The Conscious Universe with Rupert Sheldrake Ph.D. | Waking Cosmos

hey guys welcome back to waking cosmos philosophy podcasts exploring questions about consciousness and its place in reality Adriene here today I'm talking to the biologist Rupert Sheldrake which is a conversation I've really been looking forward to as many of you I'm sure will know Rupert is a biologist who is known for his controversial theory that Nature has a kind of memory which shapes the evolution of both life and the entire universe Rupa also believes that consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality and he shares today some of the reasons he holds this view with me today Rupa is also known for his experiments which seem to demonstrate that Minds may not be as confined to brains as we might generally think and we talk about some of his research on telepathy in both humans and animals so over the last couple of months I've been reading Rupert's last three books and I've been really excited about this conversation and looking forward to talking with him about some of his ideas the last thing that I need to mention before we get started is that waking cosmos is entirely funded by subscribers on patreon I don't do any adverts so if you would like to help me keep the lights on here at waking cosmos and support my work please consider going over to patreon.com slash waking cosmos and becoming a patreon subscriber as well as helping me to continue to do this work patreon subscribers also get early access to every episode as well as other perks and ways to participate at least I'll have quite a way to go before I reach my goal on patreon where this becomes something that makes sense for me to do financially on a full-time basis which is really my hope to eventually get to so if you do have disposable income and you do find some value in these conversations patreon is the best way to support this project and my work and my sincere gratitude to those of you who are already doing that ok thank you for bearing with me without further delay I give you dr. Rupert Sheldrake hi Rupert great to be talking with you how you doing I'm fine tank surgeon good to be with you so I thought is your work for a long time and I really do think that your main theory of morphic resonance is really interesting and compelling this idea that there's a kind of memory behind nature and I've really got to ask you about morphic resonance today but I'd like to start this conversation talking about science in general because I really also appreciate a lot of what you said about science and a need to expand science beyond a strictly mechanistic or a materialist way of seeing nature and in particular you've done some really interesting work bringing to light some of the common assumptions that science sometimes operates on and a number of them which might have that be wrong and could be holding us back in essentially narrowing what science could be so Rupert maybe we could start here could you perhaps give an example of one of these assumptions yes one of the ten assumptions I discussed in my book the science solution is the assumption that the mind is the brain mental activity is brain activity or as materialist sometimes say Minds are what brains do in other words all our consciousness is inside our heads everything we see feel touch even our body image it's all inside our heads so when I look at something I look out the window no to tree the image of the trees I'm seeing is somehow a representation are of the tree inside my brain now that's one of the assumptions I discuss and I think it's an assumption that has almost no experimental basis no evidential basis and is a purely dogmatic assumption that flows from the materialist philosophy what I mean by that is that when I see the image of the tree the image doesn't seem to be inside my brain it seems to be outside my brain where the tree actually is my primary experience is of images being located in the world around me as I look at them and I take seriously idea that they really are there that light comes into the eyes changes happen in the brain and we project out the images to where they seem to be so the mind is extended beyond the brain rather than being all inside the brain so that's the subject of one of the chapters in that book for example yeah and another assumption that jumped out to me whilst you were saying that that you've you wrote about in that book is the idea that there are laws of nature which is an idea which is you've pointed out actually comes directly from religion and the idea of God's laws and so maybe this only examined assumption is preventing us from considering other possibilities for example as you've suggested that what we call laws of nature might in fact be more like trends which evolved over billions of years maybe you've talked about some of the evidence that that might actually be true could you talk about that a bit yes the assumption that all the laws of nature were there at the moment at the Big Bang that they returned on and changeless is definitely a hangover from 17th century theology when the laws of nature were thought to be ideas in the mind of a law giving God God was seen as a kind of cosmic Emperor and also a cosmic law enforcement agency who made everything a Bay the laws it's tremendously anthropocentric imagery and there's not a shred of evidence that all the laws were there at the moment of the big bang I mean how could one prove that one would have to go back to the moment of the Big Bang and test to see if all the laws were there is just an assumption and in a radically evolutionary universe I think it makes much more sense to think of the laws as evolving or better still as habits and that means instead of there being a kind of mind outside the universe in which these laws exist in a kind of internal eternal transcendent mode which is the implicit assumption of conventional science strangely it may seem instead I think that they're habits that build up within nature and as a kind of memory so for example if you make a new kind of crystal for the first time synthesizing new chemical crystallize it it may take quite a long time for the crystal to form because there is no habit for that crystal forming but once it's formed then the next time you make it there should be influenced from the first time by the process I call morphic resonance and the more often you do it the more influence from the past there'll be the habit will build up and the result will be that the compound will crystallize more quickly and more easily and there's already a lot of evidence that actually happens so this view of nature shows nature is evolving through natural selection the habits that are repeated often become more habitual new patterns of activity that don't work don't get repeated and don't become habits so the kind of natural selection giving rise to the habits of nature it's radically evolutionary rather than the conventional view that all these laws are fixed and known to the Big Bang it makes quite a big difference in the way we think about evolution and think about nature and I think fits the fact better right let's stay with this really extraordinary example about crystals synthesizing more quickly the more that chemists crystallized them and presumably this is with rare crystals which we don't often see in nature and apparently this is happening no matter where in the world we're crystallizing these is that right yes the chemists have found they've known for a long time that if you make new compounds and crystallize them over and over again they seem to get easier to crystallize all over the world now though chemists know that and it's part of the sort of folklore of chemistry they don't of course explain it in terms of morphic resonance they have other explanations that are not usually rigorously tested but basically a way of explaining it away either they assume that fragments of crystals from previous crystallization have been carried from lab to that on the clothing or beards of migrant chemists or they assume that they're invisible dust particles with bits of previous crystals have wafted around the world in the atmosphere and have settled in labs all over the world what I'm suggesting instead is that even if you stop migrant chemists with contaminated clothing entering the lab and a filter out dust particles from the air this should still happen this greater speed of crystallization and this also predicts that compounds that have been around for a very long time crystallize in nature would crystallize more easily than newly synthesized compounds new theory also predicts that the crystals would be more stable and as compounds become more stable as crystals become more stable it's harder to break them up and that leads to the very surprising prediction that newly formed compounds will have melting points that rise because they get more stable so it's harder to break them up you need more heat to break them up so the melting point should go up and as I show in my book a new science of life which is in its third edition retitled morphic resonance in the United States still called a new science of life in Britain I show that there is actually evidence that melting points of new compounds do go up whereas ones that have been around for millions of years in crystallizing in nature pretty stable they've reached a sort of steady groove of habit where you don't notice any further change so again I think there's good empirical evidence for morphic resonance from crystals yeah it's a really an extraordinary idea to say them crystals potentially synthesizing more quickly would occur not just here or on the other side of the world but on the other side of the galaxy or just anywhere in the universe is that really what you say suggesting is this an entirely non-local effect I'm assuming it is of course I can't prove it because I don't have access to laboratories on the other side of the galaxy but that's my assumption you know the philosopher of science Karl Popper said that the the best kind of scientific hypothesis is one makes bold predictions which can be tested experimentally and I prefer to have the boldest possible prediction which is that this doesn't fall off with distance and that would mean that habits of nature that grew up anywhere in the universe would spread I know in those how fast but they'd spread throughout the whole universe I think that's why the atoms and molecules on distant galaxies behave the same way as they do here because they have the same habits rather than following the same universal laws which is the conventional assumption I think that the spread of these crystal forms yes I think it would extend across the galaxy and this leads to the idea that if you make hundreds of new compounds and you then in lamps on earth find out which ones crystallize quicker and quicker the more often you make them you might find that some of them don't do that and if they've never existed on earth this might imply that they've existed somewhere else in the universe and we'd actually be able to map what is new on earth compared with the rest of the universe a kind of space probe into the rest of the universe just eletric in a terrestrial laboratory by looking at crystal forms which would be a far cheaper way and probably more effective way of exploring what's happening elsewhere in the universe than sending heavy rockets up into space so I think this has testable implications and ones that could actually shed light on other parts of the universe yeah to me it's it's quite amazing to imagine that maybe a single group of chemists synthesizing crystals in a laboratory could be having such you know cosmic ramifications to molecular chemistry all throughout the universe and you know certainly could be possible that we've hugely hugely underappreciated the level of our participation with the rest of the universe but while that admittedly does strain my intuition of course it's not to say that it isn't true and yeah like you said this could be testable or at least we might be able to look at the ways in which different chemical compounds do speed up and perhaps that could be an indicator of what's happening out there in the universe and maybe the propensity of life if we were looking at rail ganic compounds yes I think I think all those things are possible and I mean obviously it's a mind-boggling idea but after all when you think about conventional science it's pretty mind-boggling to think that just by studying natural phenomena in Laboratories on earth or through earthbound radio telescopes or observatories or even the Hubble stasis Space Telescope orbiting around the earth that we can probe the rest of the universe and come to some kind of understanding of it it's only since the 1920s that we've recognized there are galaxies outside our own so it's already very remarkable that we can from this planet form this kind of vast picture of the universe and I think the idea that we're somehow related to it and that we are interacting with it makes this much more interesting that if we're just observing it passively as it were from a distant planet and in the suburbs of the Milky Way yeah we have got this very dramatic expansion of our cosmic picture are still relatively fresh in in recent memory and so you've talked about this sort of more evolutionary universe with respect to nature's laws evolving rather than being fixed how do you think that this could relate to biological evolution certainly life evolved but how does this larger idea of it like an evolving memory play into for example what we know about genes because I do think that your theory seems to to frame evolution as less of a blind process and potentially even purple in a way would you agree with that yes I mean the gene-centred view the neo-darwinian gene-centred view assumes that all heredity is essentially genetic or now it's been modified to include epigenetics this is one of the 10 assumptions I discuss it in my book the science delusion the idea that all biological inheritance is material now we actually know what genes do they code for the sequence of amino acids in proteins and some genes are involved in the regulation of the activity of other genes in other words they affect protein synthesis now there's a huge gap between making proteins and building an organism such as a cuckoo you know the shape of the cuckoo and its migratory behavior from Britain to Africa for example young cuckoos know where to go they fly there the first year after they're born raised by birds of other species without learning from their parents without meeting their parents they just know what to do now how you would get all that out of just making the right genes is completely unknown and geneticists just assumed that somehow there are complex interactions between proteins that will give rise to all this the right nervous system the right shape of the bird the right migratory instincts knowing where to go but all that's a massive assumption I don't think he read it he works like that I think the majority of inheritance and form and behavior works by morphic resonance through a kind of collective memory each species has a kind of collective memory the genes play an important part of course they enable organisms to make the right proteins but they don't shape the form of the organism or program the instincts that's not what genes do they're about protein synthesis and controlling protein synthesis and so the neo-darwinian theory of evolution is really based on the idea that genes mutate randomly by trans and then natural selection filters out genes that confer some kind of survival advantage well that's a the idea that the whole of evolution is basically driven by chance it also gives this enormous role to genes and assumes that anything that organisms animals or plants learn by adapting to their environment can't be passed on there was in the 20th century a tremendous taboo against the so called inheritance of acquired characteristics or Lamarckian inheritance it was the you immense sort of hiss like in a pantomime when someone mentioned the word Lamarck or lysenko the main Russian proponents of this point of view but now the inheritance of acquired characteristics has become mainstream it's been rebranded epigenetic inheritance and it's now generally accepted that not only jeans but epigenetic changes which switch ON or switch off genes can be inherited but even genetics plus epigenetics is still all about genes and proteins and controlling protein synthesis it still leaves out the inheritance of form and behavior and that I think is where morphic resonance plays such an important part it means that in evolution it increases the role of learning and adaptation because if animals learn a new pattern of behavior then it can be passed on to other animals of that species by morphic resonance without needing to have changes in the gene or waiting for random mutations or natural selection to work over hundreds of generations it gives a much greater evolutionary capacity to organisms and that allows eeveelution to happen more adaptively and more quickly now whether or not there's an overall purpose in evolution is another question why organisms have practices they developed towards ends or girls which are represented in the mathematical language of dynamics by attractors a developing old organism is attractive to Ward's particular end forms or patterns instincts have attractors animals move towards goals I mean a hungry dog for example which Caesar bone strains at the leash to get at the bone it's goal-directed behavior now whether the entire evolutionary process has goals is very much a debatable point I don't think it has any single overall goal I mean a lot of people would like to think it's all about us but if it's all about us then it's hard to explain there need to be a million species of beetles in the South America for example most of which we are driving to extinction it's hard to see why the such a great diversity of life in fact I think if there is a purpose in evolution one of the purposes must be the exploration of possibility the production of diversity because there seems to be an inherent creativity in the evolutionary process that seems to promote diversity for its own sake and we see that of course in human realm as well through artistic creativity and and cultural creativity and inventiveness of every kind there seems to be an urge towards novelty and creativity at all levels in nature yeah this introduction of a kind of a TV ology or a purpose of a purpose behind evolution I think you know for something to be drawn to the future there seems to be like a requirement that it is sensitive in some way to the value of future events or the value of future States or processes and of course to be sensitive to the value of a future event arguably requires subjectivity it requires consciousness you know the vehicle of value in the universe is consciousness so to me at least if there is a Telos or a purpose to a revolution or multiple purposes in some cosmic sense perhaps then you could imagine that it would require mice to evolve at some level yes I think so I mean this is a big point of debate at present for example Thomas Nagel the America in philosopher of mind in his book mind and cosmos which came out a few years ago argues for teleology or purpose in evolution but he's an atheist and so he's trying to find a way of having purpose without intention now like you I think that's going to be a that's a hard argument to make but he does try to make it I mean that basically we have a series of different views we've got the standard materialist view there's no purpose in evolution there's no purpose in nature there's just mechanical forces governed by eternal laws of nature with a sprinting of Trance thrown into the system to allow for novelty and creativity but there's no purpose in anything living organisms appear to have purposes but that's just appeared by natural selection through blind chance then as the modified materialist view or atheist view that there's some kind of purpose in evolution which is to do with the emergence of consciousness and the diversification of life but there's no ultimate goal or underlying intention or consciousness behind that that's the view that Thomas Nagel is trying to put forward a kind of naturalistic atheistic view of purpose in nature and that's an unusual position because most people who see purpose in nature take the view you've just suggested that the Sun consciousness underlying nature underlying the entire cosmos and at the evolution of our consciousness and consciousness throughout the cosmos is somehow related that they ultimate mind or consciousness which includes all things and in many traditions of course that ultimate mind is called God or ultimate reality or the absolute and I think what makes all religions different from materialistic atheism is the idea that there is a form of consciousness beyond our own from materialistic atheist the only kinds of consciousness in the universe in brains mainly in our brains perhaps in other animals to lesser degrees and in their animals perhaps to a slight degree but basically the whole of the rest of the universe is unconscious non conscious all the styles the galaxies and less there are other humanoids or biological beings a bit like ass with brains that the entire universe is non conscious and there's no level of consciousness beyond our own where as all religions and all shamanic systems and forms of animism have assumed there are many kinds of minds in nature and often that there's an ultimate mind from which they're all derived and that we do make contact with those through spiritual experiences mystical experiences and that these this ultimate consciousness is somehow affecting the way that nature develops of course traditional religious views Hindu Buddhist Christian Jewish Islamic were not evolutionary in the modern sense there was a progressive as tendency in all the Abrahamic religions they all see a developmental process in history most traditional cosmologists have been psychical though they've had the idea of recurring cycles even old universes that come and go so the idea of developmental or the evolutionary processes is relatively new and it requires new kind of thinking about how they're related to forms of consciousness beyond our own that's very interesting and I'd like to come back to mystical experiences in particular but just to comment on my reading of Thomas Nagle's mind in cosmos was that he had a view of consciousness in which consciousness was fundamental in some way to the world but it was in US and in other life approaching a kind of rarefied State but the fundamental of consciousness was in some sense intrinsic to the world or in theory or 'ti in some sense and that his view was that perhaps over a very long time the universe would event we satisfied the metaphysical conditions of its own existence by becoming by waking up in in some way and Paul Davies is a physicist he's also said something along those lines that perhaps the universe requires to be completely self known in some way and that that maybe occurs over billions of years but that completion is in some sense necessary and it reminds me a bit of another philosopher Taylor de Chardin who had a Christian view of cosmic evolution involving consciousness which ultimately led to an Omega point well yours is a very interesting reading of Nagel and he is a fan psychist because as you say one of the things he's saying is that consciousness is not just in brains it's throughout nature and so this idea that is the whole universe is on the way just sort of waking up I hadn't actually got that from reading him it wasn't there's obvious to me now said I can see that his arguments more interesting than I credited it with I think for me the the thing is that part of Nagle's rhetoric is steeped in the kind of is the kind of materialist background and his commitment to an atheist worldview I mean he says several times in his book that he's an atheist now that I find rather confusing because if one says that the whole universe is pervaded by consciousness that it's working towards a self-realization and waking up into a kind of cosmic awareness or consciousness which includes the whole universe well that's pretty close to what most people would call God so it's a peculiar kind of atheism and it might be confusing to call it atheistic which he does and in fact we come here to the very borderline cases of you know what one means by God or the divine or by atheism which is a denial of God I think actually the debate as you framed it is is much more interesting than old debates that does God exist or not it's about consciousness in the universe the nature of that consciousness and whether or not the universe as a whole can be conscious of itself and whether the consciousness of human beings is an important part in that process of cosmic evolution which I think Nagel suggests and which tiles certainly suggests and that would relate to a point we were discussing earlier that human consciousness then would become something much more cosmically relevant than simply the consciousness of biological beings on one remote planet in a relatively obscure solar system in an outlying part of the galaxy it would have a much greater relevance to this whole process of cosmic evolution and the evolution of cosmic consciousness yeah you suggested that there's this evolving memory behind nature but that it also involves minds and our minds and the minds of other species and it connects them in ways that the standard view of minds that we have doesn't seem to be able to to make sense of and I know that you've done various experiments looking at the possibility for example that real telepathic connections in some description do exist between people and between animals as well and you seem to have come across quite a bit of evidence that that actually exists yes well I think the reason I'm interested in these telepathic phenomena is because what they share is that minds can be interconnected at a distance there's a kind of non-local or entanglement between minds at a distance and I come to this not because I'm primarily interested in weird phenomena but because I'm a biologist and when I started thinking about the possibility of telepathy I thought if this really exists and it's not something supernatural or paranormal it's likely to be something natural and normal that a form of communication rooted in our animal heritage our biological heritage so I started looking for telepathy in animals before I looked at people and I thought I'd start with the animals we know best dogs cats horses parrots and so on domesticated animals and I started looking around at what they do and asking people who have a lot of experience with animals if they'd ever notice that these animals could pick up their thoughts or intentions when I did that I found that not only my own experience but many other people's experience that suggests that animals do indeed respond dogs are particularly sensitive to our thoughts and intentions were Sara cats and horses then the standard argument is yes of course they can pick these up they're sensitive to subtle cues they pick up body language and so forth that's all true but they also respond to thoughts and intentions at a distance and the easiest to investigate experimentally is the ability of dogs and cats to know in their energy coming home about fifty percent of households with dogs and about thirty percent of households with cats according to a randomized surveys in Britain and America people in those households say that their dog or cat anticipates the arrival of a member of the family and sometimes this is 10-15 minutes even half an hour in advance the skeptics say oh well they're just coming into routine time so or they're just the longer the person that's been away the more they start waiting all they hear the sound of a car engine from miles away because they've got sensitive hearing all those kinds of arguments but without any evidence these are speculations so I tested them and in experiments where we film the place the dog waits we have people come home from at least five miles away at random times that not known to them in a drums and in vehicles they've never been in before the dogs still no they seem to pick up people's intentions from a distance and in the human realm the Communists kind of telepathy is between people in relation to telephone calls more than 80% of the population have had the experience of thinking of someone who then calls on the phone then then saying something like that's funny I was just thinking about you again the sceptical way of dismissing this is to say well you think about people all the time one of them then rings and you've falsely imagine it's telepathy you just forget the millions of times you're wrong well again that's a reasonable hypothesis but in science we need evidence not just hypotheses and when I looked into this I found none of these skeptics had ever done a single experiment to look at this it was just a armchair argument I've done experiments on telephone telepathy many of them all this is published in peer-reviewed journals where the subject has names for people they might be telepathic growth they sit at home being filmed on a video camera with a landline phone with no caller ID my research assistant picks one of the callers at random using random number tables or random event generator or throwing a die it rings up that person and asked them to call their friend so think about them for a moment or two and then call them and then the phone rings the person has to guess before they pick it up which of those four callers is calling and if they were just guessing it was if it was just coincidence they'd be right roughly one time in for 25% in fact in these experiments the hit rate was 45% with hundreds of trials massively significant statistically so I think the evidence is pretty good for the existence of telepathy not just from my own experiments but many other people's as well but the very mention of telepathy creates a kind of strong emotional reaction in committed materialists because they believe it can't possibly happen because the minds nothing but the brain and couldn't work at a distance therefore all the evidence for it must be flawed or fraudulent they get incredibly angry sometimes about this because it violates a taboo that the materialist world view creates against psychic phenomena but most people in the population don't have a problem with it in fact lots of people just take it for granted and sometimes people say to me why do you waste your time trying to prove things that everyone already knows well there's a sense in which most people do know these things but if they haven't got a university degree they often feel they ought to pretend that they don't believe in them or they're impossible so yes I think there's a lot of evidence the interesting thing there is if you look at the natural history telepathy occurs between bonded members of groups it doesn't happen with random people at least not very much typically it happens between dogs and their owners the people who are strongly bonded with their dogs or their cats or their horses it occurs between humans telephone telepathy between members of families mothers of children lovers husbands and wives close friends close colleagues and I think that these are it's to do with social bonds between members of bonded social groups and I think in the wild among wild animals it's an essential means of communication when the group splits up for example when Wolf Cubs are left in the den and the adult wolves guard hunting ranging over tens or even hundreds of miles the social bonds between the adults and the young in the den are not broken they stretch and they can be sensitive to what's happening to the others especially the things to do with emotions and needs through these emotional bonds which own aspects of what I call morphic fields but these are only occur between bonded members of social groups in a sense this is the analogy in physics that's closest to this is quantum entanglement in a quantum system if electrons or photons leave atom or molecule they remain entangled with it but part of their store apart at the same system and these non-local connections or entanglements stretch over enormous distances miles and miles they don't fall off with distance but what they depend on contrib entanglement depends on having been part of the same system to start with and I think that's very much the case in telepathy with animals and with people they're part of the same social group and even at a distance this linkage remains so anyway I think that telepathy is part it reveals something about the way that social bonds work and where the minds work and as far as most people are concerned in Britain and everywhere else in the world this is simply a fact as part of everyday life most people have had experiences of it it's only when you enter the kind of educated academic materialist intellectual world that it becomes intensely controversial and where there's a whole culture of denial it's remarkable actually the denialism around something which is not only part of everyday life for lots of people and for lots of animals but also something for which there's not very good scientific evidence yeah it's really a very interesting subject and there does seem to be a lot of evidence that these SCI connections do occur and I just wanted to mention because it relates to your work that my dad is actually an identical twin and he and his brother have had quite a number of experiences that are fairly suggestive of this kind of connection which is really quite difficult to explain within a kind of materialist view to just give an example which you'll be very familiar with is that there's been quite a number of times where they've called each other on the phone at exactly the same time such that the line becomes engaged and you know what makes it a bit more interesting is that they don't necessarily speak all that regularly and they don't have a schedule time to call but apparently this has just happened a surprising number of times and it's just one of several strange apparent connections that they believe that they've had with each other over the years no I just um say I'm identical twins are particularly interesting in this because they're often even more connected than other kinds of people and I think the fact that they've you know shared the same womb when they're developing and even come from the same egg is just one of those things that establishes this kind of entanglement or connection more strongly than with most other people yeah why do you think it is that twins seem to be significantly more prone to these psy experiences is there a significance of their being quite similar both physically and mentally perhaps as well from a kind of morphic resonance view of they're tuning into the same information in some way yes I think so I mean morphic resonance occurs most strongly between organisms that are similar and you know the maximum similarity you can have earliest with identical twins so there'd be the most morphic a resonant of all people actually I think this helps to shed light on some of the puzzles of genetics a lot of genetical research is based on identical trends the idea is that if you have identical twins separated soon after birth then any similarities that show up between them in later life must be genetic must be part of nature rather than nurture they've had different environments different education different families different upbringing because they've been adopted by different families so if it's all about the environment they ought to be very different if they're very similar in spite of the environment the normal argument is this proves it's just genetic and a lot of the evidence for genetic determinism on which sociobiology and Selfish Gene theory is based it comes from these identical twin studies but while they haven't taken into account because they've either not thought about it or simply dismissed it out of hand is the possibility that these similarities might be due to morphic resonance the twins separated soon after birth are very similar they've shared the same womb they've shared that say they have the same genes they have the same cytoplasmic source they come from the same egg monozygotic twins they're in extraordinarily strong resonance with each other even if separated even if growing up in different families and many of these twin studies have shown extraordinary similarities between trends that even geneticists would not have expected things like calling their kids by the same name having similar hobbies choosing furniture that's the same color and so forth even extreme genetic determinists wouldn't have expected that so I think that in fact morphic resonance can account for many of these phenomena with identical trends and because people have just assumed that these similarities must be genetic it's one reason that genes have been grossly overrated for decades and in fact there's now a crisis in genetics called the missing heritability problem where it turns out that genes just don't account for most of what they were supposed to account for because they got a wild over estimate of their importance from these identical twins studies by neglecting the possible role of morphic resonance yeah to me I get the impression of the existence of these telepathic connections points in the direction of thinking that mind or consciousness is more fundamental to reality would you say that that's what the extended mind phenomena like telepathy are suggesting do they point toward pan psychism I don't think in themselves they point towards pan psychism because for example some people in psychical research released in the 19th century were Cartesian duelists who thought that mind and body were completely separate character characteristics and that mind was present in human beings but not in animals or other aspects of nature so it's possible to have a except telepathy and accept a non-local aspect to mind without being a pen cyclist by being a kind of Cartesian duelist following de cartes view that humans have non-material minds other animals don't and these non material minds are not localized in space and time so that world view does allow for telepathy without being pen psychist I'm not a Cartesian duelist I'm much more sympathetic to the pen cyclist view but I didn't telepathy is a decisive evidence for one of those views all the other it is decisively against the mechanistic materialist view that the mind is nothing but the activity of the brain and confined to the inside of the head which is why dogmatic materialists are so violently opposed to psychic phenomena and go to enormous lengths to deny their very possibility duelists accept them on the whole but without accepting pound psychism and I suppose there are sometimes psychos who may not accept telepathy I don't know most plants like is generally speaking more open-minded I know it's in your your recent book that you've talked about the rise of pan psychism and views of nature in which consciousness is more fundamental and that these are are increasingly being taken seriously by philosophers and scientists why do you think things are moving in this direction what's changed but what's changing do you think I think there are several reasons for this move towards pan psychism the idea that some kind of level of mind or psyche in all things even electrons and atoms I think the main reason within philosophy of mind for people adopting this is to share difficulty of explaining human consciousness the so called hard problem is a hard problem for materialists because they have a worldview that says the universe is made of unconscious matter or physical stuff physicalism is very similar to materialism except it says it's physical rather than material in effect they mean the same but they assume that the physical reality of which the universe is made is non conscious then is the problem if you start with totally non conscious matter and physical stuff then evolution happens and minds and brains appear and so on as the problem as to why non conscious matter however complex its arrangement should become conscious how does consciousness spring out of a totally non conscious world and seem to be completely different from non conscious matter that is the hard problem for materialists the existence of human consciousness some of them try to say well consciousness doesn't really exist or if it exists it doesn't do anything it's just an epiphenomenon of the activity of the brain or some of them say it's an illusion it doesn't do anything we have no free will everything would go and just the same as if we weren't conscious if we were zombies but the trouble with these explanations is they're pretty unconvincing and for example to say that consciousness is an illusion doesn't explain consciousness because illusion is a mode of consciousness it presupposes consciousness you can't have an unconscious illusion so all these attempts to explain away consciousness look increasingly implausible and that's why some materialists philosophers like Galen Strawson and I think Thomas Nagel was propelled by this line of argument to the idea is that the consciousness if it's present throughout all nature even in electrons atoms and so forth then it's a difference of degree and the emergence of human consciousness is not something just appears out of nowhere but it appears out of a less conscious forms of matter so we've talked a little bit about consciousness beyond the brain and I'm really curious to get into some of these other types of minds that you've talked to beyond human minds and even other animals and the one that I found really curious that I've heard you talk about on several occasions is this suggestion that stars might be conscious it's a ripple what is it that makes this idea compelling or plausible to you well there are several lines of argument first of all if you take a pen psychist view which increasing numbers of people do even former materialists like Galen Strawson and and Thomas Nagel for example if you take a pen psychist view which is becoming increasingly taken seriously as you mentioned within the academic and philosophical worlds then what you're saying is that the reminds or some kind of conscious or mental activity at all levels of nature in self-organizing systems what pen cyclists are saying is that self-organizing systems have some kind of mental or experiential aspect and self-organizing systems include atoms molecules crystal cells animals plants flocks of birds planets solar systems galaxies they don't include chairs tables rocks that have rolled down mountains computers cars and machines those are not systems that organize themselves the tables chairs computers and things are made in factories they're put together and a rock that rules the rails down a mountain and splits as it randomly bounces into other things it's subject to external forces rather than growing or forming itself whereas a plant forms itself a crystal forms itself our solar system forms itself a Sun forms itself so on that general argument then just as atoms and molecules have some kind of mind so with stars and galaxies and you can't really have a form of pen psychism which means psyche everywhere pan means everywhere and say oh well this only applies to atoms and molecules and up to the level of brains and then it's back to business as usual with cosmology and astronomy to be consistent you have to take pants psychism seriously so you have to consider that stars might be conscious beings and secondly all traditions throughout the world who have assumed that the Sun is a conscious being it's it's usually a god or a goddess in Japan the Sun is a goddess in India Surya the Sun is a God for the Greeks Apollo was the Sun God of the Egyptians Horus so most traditional cultures have thought of the Sun as a conscious being gods are conscious beings are not unconscious beings and even in our own culture children until the age of 10 or 11 think of the Sun is a conscious sort of being they draw it with a smiley face and so this idea of the Sun as the conscious being is found all over the world it's part of traditional culture everywhere it follows from the pen psychist point of view and also if you then say well how would it work most people even materialists would assume that the interface between our own minds and brains is through the electromagnetic activity the alpha waves the nerve impulses and so on it's the electromagnetic activity which is the interface between the physical brain and the mental activity associated with it well the Sun has incredibly complex patterns of electromagnetic activity all the time we're learning more and more about them and therefore I think the idea that there could be a mind interacting with the body of the sun's through these electromagnetic fields is fairly plausible by analogy with our brains so those are all reasons for taking seriously idea the Sun and other stars might be conscious and then if you look at the counter-argument the materialist world view which says the Sun is unconscious where what are their arguments all they've got is the general assumption that all that unconscious therefore the sons unconscious but this is not an argument not based on any kind of evidence at all it's simply an a priori assumption so I think that to put it as mildly as possible it's an open question and I think it's something that's absolutely up for discussion and debate right and you know I think it might sound pretty outlandish to some people to consider that a star could be conscious but I think it's maybe less controversial than people might think especially when we consider that one quite popular theory about consciousness at the moment which is integrated information theory which we've talked about several times on this podcast previously but essentially it's a form of Pan psychism and it's got quite a few supporters in the mainstream and sort of just to describe it very simply integrated information theory says that integrated information is what is consciousness and I don't know whether or not that's true but one of the implications is that there could be a lot of integrated information and therefore consciousness associated with other things other than life including potentially cosmological phenomena like black holes and one of my previous guests Mike Johnson from the qualia Research Institute whose t-shirt I'm wearing right now incidentally but he pointed out that a huge amount of integrated information could be associated with a black hole and like I said perhaps or the cosmological phenomena as well and you know maybe even the Big Bang was a hugely conscious event in some sense in that there could have been potentially a huge amount of integrated information so you know this seemingly extraordinary claim that the Sun has consciousness or has a mind in some sense that we don't fully understand it might eventually be what comes out of this theory which seems to be quite popular right now yes I now agree I think integrated information theory attempt to define consciousness in terms of its ability to integrate and I think that's the right approach in the sense that consciousness is has this integrative function that's what it does and I think the idea the Sun would have a kind of integrative information all the entire galaxy would make sense to me and then indeed the entire universe if the whole Big Bang had this then no doubt the entire universe has integrated information after all the gravitational field which is the universal field has everything within it and responds to everything happening in the universe in that sense the gravitational field is sensitive to everything that happens and knows everything that happens in the universe and in some sense integrates it so even if we think just in terms of the known fields of physics the gravitational fields like a kind of sense organs for the whole universe which we'll know and feel wherever the ears and I think when we smooth into this way of thinking it doesn't deny what we know from regular science it makes it much more interesting and really pleased that these discussions are moving in this direction yeah I'm encouraged by as well I just read your latest book ways to go beyond and why they work so in this book you talked about various practices which exist that can potentially help us to connect with a larger reality and to enter into a deeper relationship with the world and you talked about several different practices including meditation fasting there's a chapter about psychedelics which is very interesting so Rupert if you had to summarize what was the message that you set out to put across in this book I discussed seven different spiritual practices in the book including some that aren't normally thought of as spiritual practices like sports or learning from animals and that these practices enable our minds consciously to connect with forms of consciousness beyond our own with greater realities now all religious and shamanic practices are about connecting consciously with other forms of consciousness non-human forms of consciousness and that's why people do spiritual practices that's why their spiritual as opposed to purely physical they're about forming connections and even sports which most people don't think of as spiritual practice has several things that relate it to other spiritual practices one is being in the present a lot of spiritual practices are about getting out of the ruminative mind the kind of internal dialogue that the chatter inside our minds that goes on much of the time many spiritual practices about being here now being in the present because you can any experience conscious presence of a consciousness grace in your own or any consciousness in the present you have to be present and meditation works by shutting down the default mode Network the network of brain activities concerned with rumination internal dialogue and through meditation people can experience being in the present and this is often enormously liberating it give you feeling that you're in a presence greater than a conscious presence greater than your own now people also get that through sports if you're in sort of halfway up a rock face and you know you you if you miss your a handhold or a foothold you'd fall off and you might be dangling on the end of a rope or if you're climbing without a rope you crash to your death then you're totally in the present a from the middle of a football game and someone's passing a ball and you have to be aware of where everyone is you're not worrying about whether you paid the gas bill or what your girlfriend said yesterday that upset you or that kind of thing I mean you have to be totally in the present so sports one way of doing this fasting can lead to a change in the way the mind is working and and the degree of attention one can play to other spiritual practices like meditation psychedelics often open up people's minds to the sense that they're part of a greater conscious reality than their own I think it's particularly interesting that in the recent book on psychedelics by Michael Pollan to change your mind he himself starts as materialists and an atheist then he has several psychedelic experiences and ends the book by saying that it's completely changed his view of consciousness he now sees it more much more widely distributed in nature and not just confined as a kind of bubble of inside human brains I think incidentally relating to our previous bit of our conversation about pants psychism that one reason people are drawn to it is not just through the intellectual arguments but because many people have taken psychedelics and psychedelics often give that sense that we're connected with mental reality as greater than our own so I think that these are all reasons why spiritual practices can help us and when we form these connections we usually feel happier what makes people unhappy is the feeling of disconnection pointlessness meaninglessness separation and so on generally speaking what makes people happy is the feeling connection being part of something greater than themselves it's why being in love is happy making much of the time and why most religions think that joy is an inherent part of ultimate consciousness when we contact that ultimate consciousness whether we call it God or not then there's often a feeling of bliss or joy associated with that which is why mystical experiences usually uplifting and inspiring and change people's lives even if they only last a few minutes so in my book ways to go beyond and why they work I'm talking about seven different practices very different ones I mean like sports psychedelics fasting celebrating heavy days and festivals these kinds of practices are all different ways of connecting with forms of consciousness beyond our own most people who do them find them helpful they give their life more meaning or greater sense of connection and there's now a lot of scientific research that shows that people who have regular religious and spiritual practices to put it simply happier healthier and live longer than those that don't so I feel that rediscovering spiritual practices is very important personally at certainly as for me but also as part of this change in worldview that we're talking about because the idea of consciousness being more than just inside human heads is something you actually experience through spiritual experiences that can come through spiritual practices it's not just a theory it's an experience and experiences are much more persuasive than theories yeah I just wanted to connect back to what you were talking about with psychedelic experiences as ways to connect with a more than human range of consciousness and you know one of the points that you raised which as to that to me about the psychedelic experience is that you know different psychedelics do seem to invoke similar motifs and experiences and the people that take them so for example when people take ayahuasca there's often these very common motifs like snakes and a steak are and a lot of imagery that we might typically associate with the region and presumably the the historical users of these substances so I wanted to get your view about this because in your book you connect it with your theory of morphic resonance in a very interesting way so why do you think it is that psychedelics can connect people with very similar experiences well I think as you say this in my own view depends on the morphic resonance idea morphic resonance depends on similarity if things are similar to what's happened before then there's a resonance across time and across space so there's a kind of memory transfer now if you take our WASC er then it affects your nerve endings and your cells and your brain in a similar way to the way that it affects other people not just the brain the rest of the body I mean often associated with nausea and bodily sensations as well as changes in the brain if you take ayahuasca your body and brain come into a similar stage to people who've taken it before you therefore there's a kind of morphic resonance from those who've taken it in the past and those who taking it over the longest period in the past people in shamanic cultures in the Amazon that's where this mixture of plants comes from and it's only really been widely popularized in the last sort of you decades in in the West but its source and origin are in these Amazonian cultures many of which have mythologies about Jaguars and snakes and so on and then when people take ayahuasca in urban settings knowing nothing of Amazonian mythologies they often have similar imagery now I think this is because by morphic resonance they're drawing on a kind of collective memory of ayahuasca experiences and I think the same would go for other drugs only people take mushrooms of the kind that have been taken traditionally in Mexico magic mushrooms then they may have more kind of Mexican type imagery and indeed some seem to so this is really an interpretation in terms of morphic resonance of a kind of collective experience that builds up through psychedelics and different psychedelics have different backgrounds another way of putting it is to say that they draw upon as there are archetypes in the collective unconscious that are associated with those particular drugs and the determined collective unconscious from Jung the psychologist is in in many ways a different way of talking about morphic resonance archetypes and the collective unconscious or rather like memories in the collective memory through morphic resonance yeah so in your idea potentially in people's experiences of these psychedelics they're tuning into ancient thought forms in a in a kind of collective consciousness sense which is preserved in this deep memory that you described in residents and I think albert hofmann the the chemists who first synthesized LSD was also quite open to an explanation along these lines is that right I don't know I mean so it certainly Hoffman found that when he was asked by Gordon Watson owned by shelters to find out the active principle of magic mushrooms which he did and he tried out psilocybin on people in Switzerland who had no knowledge of Mexican culture or the shamanic use and they had sort of Mexican visual imagery so I think Hoffman was driven to the idea that was a kind of tapping into a collective sort of memory not on theoretical grounds but on the basis of his own observations of people taking these substances yes so I think he was definitely open to that he was a wonderfully open-minded scientist and really a kind of inspirational figure and the fact he lived to over a hundred with a clear mind and in remarkably good health is actually quite a good testimony yeah so we're coming up towards the end of our time today the last thing that I really wanted to get your thoughts about Rupa is the observation that you've made in several places and it's this idea that the more that we learn about physics and the universe at large the more that the universe seems to be more evocatively described as an organism especially in contrast to a machine which has been as you talked about sort of lens through which science is used to think about the universe for a very long time so what would you say that we've learned about the universe which is now leading us toward this more organism it view potentially well I think first of all there's the Big Bang Theory itself it's like a myth of the origin of all things from the cosmic egg and there are various cultures that have had a origin myths of hatching of the cosmic egg and the universe then grows like a gigantic organism from the eggh well the Big Bang is much more like that than the image of a machine the 17th century model of the cosmos which is the foundation of the mechanistic world view that's when the idea of the universes and machine was first established as the foundation of modern science their view of the universe was that God created a machine and he was like a gigantic engineer and then pressed the start button started it in motion and it went on automatically thereafter and I suppose this seemed fairly plausible to some people because they're already since the Middle Ages these astronomical clocks that worked on clockwork that modeled the movements of the moon and the planets and so they're actually clockwork models of the cosmos pretty crude models but nevertheless models and they were machines and so you could think of the universe as a machine and God as a machine maker well the Big Bang is nothing like that no machine starts very small and very hot and then expands and cools down and forms new structures within it the growth and formation of new structures as it gets bigger is much more like an embryo or a plant seed germinating and giving rise to a whole tree much more structure appears than was there in the first place so this is implicitly own organic organismic model of the universe and then machines have parts that react with each other by pushing and pulling or in modern machines like computers through electric currents well the universe isn't really like that it has an integrative quality all organisms have an integrative quality that integrates the different parts of the organism together and the universe has presently conceived in terms of Einstein's theory of general relativity is within the gravitational field the gravitational field is not in space-time gravitational fields according to Einstein is space-time it provides the framework within which everything happens and integrates and unifies everything together at the gravitational field links everything in the universe there's nothing outside the gravitational field of the universe it's like the soul of the universe in fact in the Middle Ages people talked about the anima Mundi the soul of the universe which held everything together within which everything was situated and what we have know the idea of the gravitational field the universal gravitational field again is like at this rediscovery of the soul of the universe and it's not just the gravitational field the electromagnetic field is also universal and links everything together the fact we can see distant galaxies and stars billions of light-years away and we can't see with our naked eye but we can detect them with radio telescopes and other detection apparatus and we detect them because the light from them or radio waves from them have traveled over billions of light-years and we can detect them here on earth again that's because the whole universe is permeated by the electromagnetic field which is a medium for all the light that moves through and through which we know of the existence of other parts of the universe so again that's another unifying field which includes all things and links all things together so I think all of these make the universe much more like an organism than like a machine and in fact that's how most traditional cultures of thought of the universe is being like a giant organism not like a machine and in fact when you think about it the mechanistic world view is deeply anthropocentric I mean only humans make machines and in fact any modern humans make machines so it's kind of projection of one of our particular human activities onto the whole of nature whereas everywhere we look we see organisms and animals and plants and other people organisms are much more common in nature and in our experience than the machines are and provide a much better source of metaphors I mean it's metaphorical whichever way you look at it but I think it's a more illuminating metaphor to think of the universe as an organism and as the galaxy as those kind of organisms within it and solar systems as organisms and Suns and planets as organisms like our end planet Gaia which is often thought of as a living organism both in modern science and in traditional mythologies yeah I think it's is a very transported way of thinking about essentially the same scientifically revealed universe and yet looking at it through this way we do indeed seem to see further and with greater understanding and even more of a place for ourselves through this more organism ik frame and as you pointed out you know them a machine is really something that humans create and a lot of what determines what a machine does exists in you know the minds of the engineers or the designers that created him and you know in the in the modern cosmology the idea of that kind of a God at least seems naive and so in that sense the metaphor for the universe as being a machine has lost its designing Authority I suppose the way that I think about the universe as having comparisons with an organism it's not so much it having these sort of distinct features of organisms like you might find in a scientific textbook but it's more that it seems to share in the archetypal idea of an organism as being live self-realizing self-perpetuating it's evolving and you know it's essentially a meaningful hole in a deep sense but also you know quite significantly the universe has these mysterious capacities for consciousness and intelligence which are expressed certainly in life and perhaps beyond it as well so yeah Rupa what do you think is the significance of this paradigm shift you see a form of scientific animism approaching on the horizon well pants psychism is a form of scientific animism yes I mean I thought that this is the fundamental shift for quite a while in 1990 I published a book called the rebirth of nature which is really about this shift which I thought even then was beginning to happen that's been happening with an accelerating pace in more recent years yes I think that what we're heading for is a much more scientific animism and that will also lead to shifts in theology you see in the Middle Ages people had an animistic worldview in in Europe the standard view taught in universities like Oxford Cambridge in Paris and Bologna was that the earth is alive the universe is alive the stars are intelligent beings all animals and plants have souls that's why the word animal comes from the latin word anima meaning so it was an animistic worldview and with that christianity was a kind of animistic religion and God was the Living God of the living world then with the 17th century revolution in science the universe became an automatic machine there was no souls in animals or plants they were just mechanisms unconscious inanimate literally inanimate mechanisms and then God became a kind of external machine maker a kind of super engineer and mathematician who designed the machinery and started again in the first place and then sort of retired leaving it to run automatically occasionally intervening through miracles well that view of God is the God which atheists don't believe in and I'm not an atheist I don't believe in that view of God either I think that what we're coming back to is the idea of nature is at a hold of universe as a kind of living organism a kind of scientific animism and overview of consciousness that's emerging from the whole cosmos and in underlying all nature as well so it can be a kind of pantheistic animism that God is nature nature is God or it can be something that's in theological terms called Pan and theism where God is both everywhere and in everything so the idea is that God is in nature there's a living conscious being expressed through all nature and in nature and that all nature the entire cosmos is within this divine mind so nature is in God and God is in nature as opposed to an automatic machine that's inanimate and unconscious and an external guard who's not part of nature is supernatural which is a very incredible view of God for most people and rightly so so I think this is leading to a shift not only of our understanding of nature but our understanding of consciousness forms of consciousness beyond our own level and forms of ultimate consciousness and meaning Rupa that's really wonderfully put I'd love to continue talking with you but I want to thank you for spending some time with me today and talking about these ideas of yours and I've really enjoyed it where should people go to find out more about your work and stead to date with what you're up to well the books we've been talking about today the science delusion called science set free in America is the overview of these dogmas of science and how we can go beyond them then science and spiritual practices and my most recent book ways to go beyond and why they work are about spiritual practices scientific studies of them and how we can actually in our in lives do things that enable us directly to experience forms of consciousness beyond our own and then there's my website WWE which has a lot of information about my books there are many podcasts there I also have a youtube channel linked to from my website with many of my talks and dialogues including dozens of dialogues with my friend Terence Mckenna we had many many conversations some of them are on video and are available online on my website many of them were simply audio taped and there's more than 30 different dialogues with Terence Mckenna and Abraham trial logs three-way conversations available on my website on the trial log section plus a whole series of podcasts and dialogues with Mark Vernon with Matthew Fox and with other people so there's a wealth of information now all free for anyone who's interested and then again this list of books which the last three of them the science tradition science and spiritual practices and ways to go beyond are all available in audiobooks as well as printed books and ebooks I'll definitely make sure that there are links to those things in the description of this episode so if people want to check out your website or your other books they'll be able to just go to the description of this podcast and go straight there well thanks again Rupert really a pleasure and an honor to speak with you and perhaps we can do this again sometime in the future yes Adrian and ro pleasure to speak to you as well thank you hey everyone I hope you enjoyed today's conversation as always I'm really interested to hear your ideas and reflections about the subjects we discussed in the podcast and I look forward to chatting with you in the comments wherever you may be listening to this podcast cooking like or giving us a nice rating or a nice review really does help us out algorithmically and of course I encourage you to share the conversation with anyone that you think might be interested finally please also keep in mind that we can cosmos is supported entirely by our community on patreon so if you do find some value in these conversations and you'd like to help me keep putting them out you can subscribe over at patreon.com slash waking cosmos where for as little as a dollar a month you can get early access to every episode and for those of you who are already supporting the podcast thank you so much for your kindness and your generosity do you join us next time when I'll be talking with the pan psychist philosopher Philip Goff to explore his theory of cosmos psychism but that is about it from me today I'm Adrian Nelson until next time

Channel: metaRising

Views: 152,933

Keywords: consciousness, panpsychism, mystical experiences, psychedelics, Rupert Sheldrake, Psychic abilities, telepathy, the sense of being stared at, collective consciousness, unexplained mysteries, scientific mysteries, hard problem of consciousness, gaia, closer to truth, podcast, Morphic resonance, banned tedtalk, science set free, extended mind, omega point, science and spirituality, Ways to go beyond, philosophy, collective unconscious, ESP, Extrasensory perception

Id: ukESPRqu1a0

Length: 82min 1sec (4921 seconds)

Published: Thu May 09 2019