The Science Delusion

ladies and gentlemen welcome to the terminus Academy I'm Ian Skelley the chairman of the Academy and I'd like to thank Alan Parker and his staff for their wonderful hospitality here at the Lincoln Center and particularly to Tim and the team for what they do to make these evenings go so well it's a very special venue and rather a special evening tonight it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you dr. Rupert Sheldrake who's been a good friend to terminus and a good supporter of it too for many years although it has been quite a long time since he last spoke to the Academy so it's particularly wonderful to have him here tonight and I can't really think of a better reason for having him here than to talk about his new book so recently published not so much that it is a new book but that it is a in my view a rather important book and frankly that's not my opinion alone I did go to one of the launch parties for the book a couple of weeks ago and Rupert rather happily told me that it had already sold out before the launch so quite clearly there is the demand for what Rupert is having to say on the subject of science the title of course is a typical example of Rupert's steely wit in the it clearly is in part a response to certain other publications that we've seen in recent years it's provocative stuff and particularly so because of course it comes from somebody who is very qualified as a scientist I'm sure Rupert won't mind me saying that he was a star graduate of the Cambridge University who went on to enjoy a very successful academic career at Cambridge where he was the director of studies in biochemistry at Clare College he also held a post at Harvard but it was really the 11 years that he spent in India that I suppose one could say changed his life certainly defined the core that he has taken ever since he was there primarily to work in science he was the principal plant physiologist to the International crops Research Institute in Hyderabad but whilst he was there he spent a year at the Christian ashram run by father bead Griffiths who's a successor by the way brother John Martin who virupa will be speaking at Temenos in July on the question what is truth so it's not unrelated he's going to be here on the 12th of July but he was under be Griffiths guidance that Rupert began to question the assumptions which he'd accepted as the norm because that was what his education had taught him and he was this experience that led him to write his first book a new science of life which set out the principles of his theory of morphic resonance and I think it's fair to say that that book raised quite a large dust cloud within the scientific community the former editor of Nature John Maddox famously called it a book for burning so we have within our midst a heretic and I'm sure Cathleen rain would be terribly pleased well then tonight syrup is going to take you through these assumptions that he's been challenging throughout his career and having known Rupert for a number of years and having always enjoyed and for that matter learned a great deal from my sometimes quite extraordinary encounters with him I have absolutely no doubt that this will be what will happen to you tonight as well I'm sure there'll be plenty of questions to ask he's got a lot to say so I shall shut up and hand you on to someone who is worth listening to would you please welcome well thank you and it's very good to be here again at Temenos the science delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality in principle leaving only the details to be filled in and within modern science there's a conflict between the idea of scientific inquiry which is free inquiry questioning dogmas skepticism empirical evidence and and so on and the so called scientific worldview which is essentially the materialist philosophy which has dominated institutional science since the late 19th century the materialist ideology or worldview or the series of assumptions that it makes up a more or less taken for granted by scientists you're not told about them you're not as in it the world you're being educated as a scientist no one says here are these assumptions here's the evidence for them they're just implicit you absorb them by a kind of intellectual gnosis and so as an extra remove just almost everybody who has a university education or even a sixth or education there the basic assumptions of secular modern secular society and somehow they're assumed ultimately to be the truths about nature guaranteed by science essentially this worldview tells us that all reality is material or physical that the world's a machine made out of inanimate matter nature is purposeless and evolution has no purpose or direction that consciousness is nothing but the activity of the brain and that own God is simply an idea in human minds and hence in human brains and this is the worldview which is simply taken for granted and when I was being educated as a scientist I accepted it completely it was the package deal if you're a scientist this is the default position you adopt it took me a long time to realize that this is based on a whole series of assumptions and that I didn't realize were assumptions to start with I just thought they were the truth and most scientists do think they're the truth what I'm doing in this book the science delusion is to take the ten central dogmas of science and turn them into questions and look at them scientifically to see whether they hold up as scientific questions what I'm doing is taking the ideal of science which is very widely believed in especially by non scientists most scientists know that it's not really like that but there's a kind of naive belief in science which is very widespread among followers of what one could call scientism people have turned science into a belief system or even a religion and here's a clear statement of this ideal it's treated not as an idea but as attacked by Ricky Gervais the comedian who had a column in The Wall Street Journal just before Christmas in 2010 in which he explained his Atheist worldview he contrasted the superstition and dogma tizen of religion with the nature of science and he said science seeks the truth and it does not discriminate for better or worse it finds things out science is humble it knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn't know it bases its collusion conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence evidence that is constantly updated and upgraded it doesn't get offended when new facts come along it embraces the body of knowledge well anyone who's worked in the science lab or argued with a materialist will know that it's not quite as simple as that but I'm going to take this ideal as the operating principle for this question and actually look at the assumptions of science as if they are things that are able to question and evidence the first of them is the dogma that nature is essentially mechanical everything in nature is essentially mechanical and when turned into a question this becomes is nature mechanical now it really helps to see the history of those ideas and I'm just going to give a very brief thumbnail history of this basic proposition because it's the most fundamental proposition in modern science it's the central assumption that dominated modern science from the 17th century and the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century was essentially the revolution that turned our view of nature into machinery before that what they were rebelling against what they were reacting against was the view taught in the medieval universities and universally believed in Europe that nature was organic and alive that we lived in the living universe the living God was the living god of a living world that animals and plants for truly organisms were their own souls the souls of plants shaped the form of the plant the animals had souls that shaped their form and in addition the animal soul that hunted layer instinct sensitivity and movement the word animal of course comes from the word animal meaning soul and humans the human soul was shared with plants the ability to shape the body mold the body as it developed and maintained the health of the body our animal soul gave us our animal nature and instincts which we share with the animals the need for food hunger thirsts for reproduction and so forth but the irrational soul was that part of the human soul which was open to the divine and was to do with thought reason and that which took us beyond our mere animal nature so that was the general belief that we lived in the living world made up of organisms that organised themselves and according to Aristotle ins and Thomas Aquinas that meant that as well as having bought material bodies and depending on energy at what he called the efficient cause acquire and Aristotle the moving cause the that the soul of the animals and plants contained their purpose which grew them towards their developed form if they were in embryo or which underlie their underlay their instincts and also that gave them their form it was the formal cause and the final cause of the animals and plants and of everything in nature what the mechanistic revolution did was said that living organisms and the whole world are not organisms with their own purposes and goals that effort as everyone has assumed they were machines made up of parts but the purposes and goals were external to the machinery you see what makes a machine different from an organism is that an organism has its own goals and purposes a machine doesn't it's made designed and created by human beings to fulfill human purposes machines have no purposes of their own they have no designs of their own they're designed by designers they're made in factories and they have no purpose except what's given to them even the guided-missile doesn't have a purpose of its own where it's going to be guided to that has to be programmed in and you see the difference clearly between a with a car and a horse if you get into a car it'll go wherever you want it to go it has no desire of its own a horse might on the other hand so what in the 17th century scientists thought they were doing was enhancing the arguments for the existence of God all the founding fathers of modern science people like Copernicus Galileo Descartes Newton Robert Boyle and so on or all the founding fathers were Christians and they believed that by saying that the universe was a machine and everything in nature was a machine they gave God more power because God was now that which gave everything its purpose its goal in its design that he was the intelligent designer of everything in nature previously organisms had been seen as spontaneously organizing themselves and reproducing selves so God had this enhanced role and what Descartes did in his the proponent of the mechanistic theory or mechanistic philosophy or mechanical philosophy as it was called at the time was to remove the souls from the whole of nature leaving only the machinery and placing the purposes and designs outside nature in the mind of God in the Angels and in human minds these were spiritual realities separate and distinct from matter matter was unconscious it was organized by designs and purposes that came from outside nature in from the divine and the spiritual realm only humans had purposes and Minds animals became just machines therefore it was time to move a sect and and this way of thinking when extrapolated way beyond anything Descartes could have imagined leads to factory farming and modern agribusiness so this view of nature's mechanical was at first not atheistic in fact it was theistic but it created a new kind of theology and mechanistic theology and an image of God as an engineer and mathematician and in fact a God in the image of human beings at the beginning of what became the Industrial Revolution so God was an engineer and a mathematician but the machines only a metaphor this didn't prove organisms were just machines it assumed it and in many ways as we keep coming back to this in biology it's better to think of organisms as organisms and it is the machine theory of life and the machine theory of nature it's not something you can prove by experimental test by in an experimental test is simply an assumption it's a metaphor and organisms are much better metaphors for living organisms in fact they're not really metaphors it's just saying what they are and even the whole universe is best thought of as an organism rather than machine one of the first people to point this out very clearly was none other than David Hume who's remembered today for his famous skepticism about religion but human was equally skeptical about the mechanistic theory of nature implying as it did the need for a designer and something that gave it purpose outside itself he suggested instead of the world being a machine created by a clockwork making God it was it could have originated from something like a seed or an egg this is what Hume said with dialogues on natural religion there are other parts of the universe besides the machine machines of human invention which bear still a greater resemblance to the fabric of the world and which therefore afford a better conjecture concerning the universal origin of the system these parts are animals and plants the world plainly resembles more in animal or vegetable than it does a watch or a knitting loom and does not a plant or an animal which Springs from vegetation or generation there are stronger resemblance to the world than does any artificial machine which arises from reason and designed well Hume was surprisingly prescient because the idea that the world originates from something like an egg or received as it's generated is exactly what the modern cosmology since the 1960's tells us the big bang theory says the universe started very small and it's been cooling and growing ever since and new structures have appeared within it it's much more like a developing organism than a machine the 19th century view of the universe as a mechanical system that was gradually running out of steam has just simply been superseded entirely by this modern cosmology and in fact the first proponents of the big bang theory father George Lynette Roe remin Catholic priest and cosmologists in the 1920s thought of it as being like the hatching of the cosmic egg and it is a very organic view of nature at first the Big Bang Theory was opposed by most scientists because they thought it was a Christian conspiracy to get back a creation and hence a creator and but the evidence became overwhelming that the universe is expanding and the Big Bang Theory is now totally Orthodox so the idea that nature's mechanical is just an assumption it's just a metaphor and there's no reason that we should think like all our thinking - one metaphor a metaphor that's based on projecting our modern human obsession with machinery onto the whole of nature it makes more sense to think of nature as organic and organisms as organisms another consequence of this view was the second dog neuroscience all matter is unconscious this becomes the question is matter unconscious well for Descartes and the mechanistic founders of science matter was defined as unconscious that was what was unconscious consciousness was separated off from matter so it existed any in human minds angels and God it was the rest of nature was totally unconscious made up of matter that was just pushed around by external forces so this was a dualistic view and that dualistic view dominated science up until the 19th century but increasingly in the 19th century many people hated the idea there were two things two quite different things matter and spirit or matter and mind and lots of people wanted there to be just one they thought two was too many personally I think two is too few but those who thought two were too many went in one of two directions either it's all matter and the mind doesn't really exist it's a kind of illusion that just exists in human brains or it's all consciousness in which case matter just arises somehow from the universal mind now that view is familiar in Eastern philosophy and was of course put forward in in British philosophy by Bishop Berkeley but those two views either idealism or materialism are both inadequate but nevertheless materialism came to dominate sons no one could prove what the human mind was you couldn't wear it you couldn't put it in the test tube and it was simply assumed it didn't exist so all matter became unconscious but then that creates the terrible problem with explaining how is it that we are conscious we've got brains but if our brains are conscious how can they be conscious if matters unconscious and this is what's called in the philosophy of mind the hard problem the very existence of consciousness doesn't fit with materialism and materialists have done all sorts of things to try and explain it away as an illusion an epiphenomenon just a way of talking about brain activity but none of these materialist theories are very convincing even to other materialists which is why there are so many of them so the idea that mass unconscious runs off into a terrible problem in relation to the fact we are conscious we may save the animals are conscious tool we may deny a consciousness to animals but at least humans are conscious undeniably so how do we deal with it just to say it's nothing but the brain is what Francis Crick called the astonishing hypothesis it's a claim that our minds are nothing but the physical activity of our brains that our minds are nothing but genetically programmed computers the software of genetically programmed computers inside our heads we ourselves are lumbering robots in Richard Dawkins vivid phrase and so this and of course we have no free will because free will would imply something that's able to choose the mechanism can't choose now this is a literally incredible point of view and it's amazing how many intelligent educated people are prepared to defend it but of course they always make an exception for themselves because otherwise there any spouting materialist theories because they're genetically or socially account program to do so they have no free choice in the matter according to their own philosophy and so it's a kind of self refuting hypothesis and people argue for it very cleverly and then as soon as they finished argument they revert to the ordinary common sense point of view they do have some measure of freedom that Minds not just their brain and so forth so it's first is literally in and some philosophers in the materialist camp have finally come to the conclusion that this just won't do and the most eminent who put forward this view recently is Galen Strawson and Galen Strawson argues in a recent paper in the journal of consciousness studies called does materialism implied and psychism he argued that you can't really get consciousness from something's intrinsically unconscious like this mechanistic view of matter there has to be some level of consciousness even in the simplest material systems like electrons or atoms well this was greeted with howls of protest from the materialist philosophy world but he stood his ground and this is now surprisingly a big debate in the realms of academic materialist atheistic philosophy but the idea that there's a kind of consciousness in all matter is not a new idea it's what Aristotle believed he believed that NASA was shaped by forms that matter was potentiality that was shaped in all beings by souls in all living beings it's Watson Thomas Aquinas thought - and and after Descartes there was already a reaction in the 17th century against this kind of extreme journalism Leibniz a contemporary of Newton's and who invented the calculus independently of Newton was convinced that matter was made up of what he called monads which had both bodies and minds and each monad reflected the universe from its own point of view each monad mirror whole universe Spinoza had a different way of combining mind and body he thought that mind and body were two aspects of the same reality which in in its largest level he called thought all nature and that there was a material and mental aspect to everything so right back in the 17th century very soon after Descartes we have a kind of pan psychist view the ideas as a psyche or soul in all things and in the 20th century the leading proponent of this was Alfred North Whitehead one of the great prophetic philosophers who in my opinion was years ahead of his time Whitehead realized that the best metaphor for nature's organism's nature's made of organisms there are organisms at all levels of complexity electrons atoms molecules cells tissues organs organisms societies of organisms ecosystems solar systems galaxies and all of these organisms and all of them according to Whitehead have a mental and a physical Pole and what made the mental and the physical pole different was not so much a spatial difference some people think the minds the inside the bodies the outside he didn't use a special metaphor he thought the key difference was in time that all organisms have a kind of memory given by the influence of their own past in the past of similar systems at the town term for this influence he called prehension but they they also have virtual futures they also have goals towards which they're moving purposes there is a teeny ology a goal-directed 'no sinned their behavior what was original about whitehead was that he saw there were two different strands of causation one the familiar kind pushing from the past energy is a kind of cause that works from the past to the present the other the mental pole works as a cause in the opposite direction from virtual futures back through the present towards the past so the influence of mind and matter is not inside and outside its future and past the mind in habit habits a realm of virtual futures and from those goals or attractors in those futures its influence worked backwards in time whereas the energetic movement of regular causation moves forward in time the two meet in our minds in our bodies our minds our realms of possibility our minds hold together many coexisting possibilities as soon as we make a decision I like coming to the terminals meeting this evening then of all the possible things we could have done this evening once we made that decision that's what happens and that's a fact you know we're being we could be photographed and as a measurable observable fact they could be weighed these are the fact we're all in this room is is an objective fact and but the possibilities from which it emerges are not Material they inhabit this other realm and it's fund enough the same is true of electrons in quantum theory an electron as it starts out from a reaction or an atom or something has what's called a wave equation which includes all the possible things that could do an electron has going ahead of it a kind of cloud of possibility and one of the paradoxes of quantum theory is that of all those possible things when it actually interacts with something or when you measure it all those possibilities collapse down to one observable fact it's there and it's there in that particular position at that particular time so mind the realm of mind or possibility or goals is non-material and yet becomes material facts through a relation in time was it where a decision is made and then it becomes an objective observable fact matter is as it were in the past compared with the mental pole of things anyway that's whiteheads theory and this is still being developed by philosophers in the Whitehead tradition and the process philosophy tradition and I think it provides a much better way of looking at the nature of matter and and we then come to the next dogma the total amount of matter and energy is always the same this is something probably all of you learned in school as the law of conservation of matter and energy it seems to me that it seems one of the firmest and most certain facts in science and for me there I've questioned many of the dogmas of science it wasn't until I was writing this book that I questioned this one I'd never seen that I could question it I thought this is so certain such a gold-plated truth that it's unquestionable I only questioned it because it's clearly a dogma it's clearly an assumption and I felt for the sake of completion I should include it in this book and I thought that maybe I'd find that it was in fact completely reliable utterly the truth and this might be the one exception to questionable dogmas on which science is founded but I soon found this was the shakiest of them all it's a house of cards and this is this is a surprise it was a big surprise for me I hadn't expected it when I looked into the history of it you find that the origins of this Dogma are not scientific and empirical but philosophical and Theological when we question it is the total amount of matter and energy always the same we found the reason people think think this is not because they've measured things too many places of decimals it's because they start with this assumption the total amount of matter being the same follows from the materialist assumption dating back to ancient Greece that atoms are unchangeable particles the atomists or materialists in ancient Greece believed that reality was eternal and it was made up of lots of very small particles of matter matter was the eternal reality it was the one reality and it was eternal and the atoms by definition couldn't be changed they couldn't be split up so the total amount of atoms was always the same therefore the total amount of matter was always the same at least implicitly and so when atom materialism were adopted by modern science this sumption was simply carried over the founders of science thought God created everything in the beginning but thereafter the total amount of matter the total number of atoms was the same God also imparted to the universe at its creation certain amount of energy motion because God endowed the universe with motion set it going because the motion was derived from God the total amount of motion remained the same because it was a divine gift that couldn't be altered so the reasons for thinking the total amount of natural energy are always the same we're essentially theological and philosophical these were built into the beginning of science as we know people didn't test them they started off by assuming them now physicists are much less constrained than most of us when it comes to these seemingly and violet principles in the DEA nineteen in the 1990s 80s and 90s it became clear that conventional theories of physics can't explain the way galaxies are the Stars ought to be health hurtling apart the galaxies shouldn't be clumping - as if they're attracting each other there seems to be far more gravity in great galaxies and in clusters of galaxies than there ought to be allowing for the stars and planets and things that are there the whole system holds together far better than it ought to know there was no consideration here maybe that's because they're organisms that have a kind of coherence the assumption is it must all be explained by gravity there's not enough gravity to explain it so we'll invent more and so they hypothesized or invented what's called dark matter to explain the way galaxies are and exactly the amount of dark matter was invented is as needed to balance the equations and make thee the whole system work so then you say what is dark matter the answer is no one knows its nature is literally obscure and there are many lectures and and articles and learner journal papers on this subject and there's no general agreement as to what it is but the general agreement within physics is that there's at least five times as much dark matter as there is matter of the kind we already know well no no one said you can't invent all that extra dark matter justic contouring it out of nowhere because of the law of conservation of matter oh no they just invented that they needed it they invented it no one worried about the conservation of matter and the amount of dark matter changes at will depending on the needs of these equations and the observations of galaxies and indeed they could abolish it because some people say well if we just tweak the laws of gravitation we could get rid of the need for dark matter if that happens then it will all vanish like the morning mist so how seriously can we take the conservation of matter when people can invent and possibly even then abolish all this extra matter the same goes for energy since the earth around 2000 it's been clear the universe is expanding too fast it's expanding faster than it ought to have been when they invented all the dark matter it created a problem there's suddenly all this extra mass in the universe which meant that the universe is expanding but all this extra mass should be slowing it down and that people thought that the universe would slow down and stop expanding and then began to contract until it all accelerated inwards more and more till it ended in the reverse of the Big Bang coordinate raid the Big Crunch and say everything was going to end in an ultimate dark hole but by the end of the 90s that idea began to go out and have the discovery that the universe is actually its expansion is accelerating led to the invention of dark energy which is supposed to be pushing it apart and the equations for dark energy that most physicists use say that the energy density of the universe that is has a particular value or density means amount per unit volume that the universe is expanding so therefore the amount of energy must be expanding as well the universe is creating more energy as it expands it's a perpetual motion machine so now but we've reached the stage where on the current estimate 96 percent of the matter and energy in the universe is dark matter and dark energy the kinds we actually know about our less than 4 percent of reality so how can we be sure that the total amount is conserved do we know whether any of these dark matter and dark energies can be converted to regular matter and energy or vice versa no we don't and when people come along with so-called new energy technologies above unity devices free energy devices and that there are many people who claim to have invented devices like this they're laughed out of court with in science the oldest taboo in science is against perpetual motion machines and so all these people who come up with inventions there are quite a lot of them if you go on the internet and look under above unity devices or free energy devices you'll find as a whole world out there of inventors in garages and so on who claimed to have discovered things that produce energy as it were from thin air and many of them claim they're converting the quantum vacuum energy or the zero-point energy which is part of contemporary physics into usable energy and now these would obviously totally transform the world if if you could produce energy through these devices many of them claim to have working models whenever they approach big investors the big investors immediately ring their scientific advisors and the scientific advisors always say don't touch it with a barge pole you know this is nothing but a perpetual motion machine these people must be cranks you know there's a catch somewhere don't get involved nevertheless there's one of them a chap called Rossi who's got a device that he's marketing at the moment he's already sold several of these reactors to the US Department of Defense at least we usually thought the secret buyer as the US Department of Defense and so these things do work my own approach is that the best I think the best way to do this would be to have a prize a large price and million pounds four above unity devices and simply have a level playing field evaluate them see what works and if any work they get the prize if none work then the materialists will be able to say I told you so but this time they'd actually have some evidence in favor of their position instead of it being an assumption so they ought to welcome this the situation is even more surprising and perhaps shocking when it comes to the energy and living organisms it's been assumed since the 19th century that living organisms are completely covered by the laws of conservation of matter and energy there's no mysterious vital forces vital energies Chi prana or all these kinds of things are just fanciful concepts that have no relation to real energy which is defined and totally quantified by physics that's universally assumed it wasn't assumed in the early 19th century there there was a dispute vitalist argued that living organisms had special access to kinds of energy called vital energy that wasn't just the same as ordinary energy Hermann von Helmholtz who's mostly remembered for his role in physics that made it his life's work as a young medical student in Berlin and later as a doctor in the Prussian army to refute vitalism in biology and to instr and to to make sure that mechanism that living orders was just machines became the only orthodoxy to do this he had to get rid of vital energy at first he tried to prove it by measuring the temperature of frogs legs which you made contract through electrical impulses but he wanted to show that the amount of temperature and work was the same but he couldn't do it it didn't work out it was to the methods were too crude so he then proved it theoretically rather than experimentally assuming that living organisms and machines then they must obey the laws that machines obey of conservation of matter and energy and therefore living organisms and machines so he had a kind of circular argument proving what he set out to or what he'd assumed to start with and since then this became the dogma in biology it wasn't tested in human beings till eighteen 99 and the people who tested it the foundational evidence for this comes from the classic studies of at Portland Benedict in the United States to which if you ask if you question this Dogma you'll say oh whether these calorimeter studies that have proved it in humans at waterand Benedict said this in their paper that the law of conservation of matter applies within the living organism no one would doubt it might seem equally certain that the metabolism of energy within the body takes place in accordance with the law of conservation of energy the quantitative demonstration is however desirable so we know the answer already we're just going to demonstrate it and when they did it they had people in a calorimeter they were sealed in this box sometimes for days on end oxygen carbon dioxide urine feces temperature everything was measured and they came out with the wrong answer so they changed they changed the conversion factors for the calorific value of food to get the right answer and once they got the right answer they did more tests and they found that some people who were fasting and doing exercise were getting more energy than they ought to others who were doing nothing and eating a lot were getting less than they ought to there were serious discrepancies so how did they deal with it well they got just the same number of people too much and too little so when they average it out it came out to the right answer and that's what was in textbooks it was hailed as the ultimate proof of mechanism that last nail in the coffin of vitalism and it was barely examined till the 1970s when an American nutritionist Paul Webb looked into it and found huge discrepancies 25% or so discrepancies in the amount of energy that was taken in or given art especially when people were fasting they seemed to have more energy and they should have done Webb tried to bring this up in the American nutritional society and scientific journals his papers were published he was a well accredited scientist but they weren't paid the slightest of attention because everybody knew that it must be totally conserved within living organisms and when people came along and talked about prana and Chi everyone knew they were talking rubbish because living organisms and machines now if anyone who believes in preneur Chi chooses to question the established dogma and look at the evidence that they'll find it crumbles beneath their fingers and that's the state of play at present well the next Dogma is that the laws and constants of nature are fixed they were fixed at the moment of the Big Bang they've always been the same ever since now there's a lot of debate within science as to why they were the say why they were as they were at the Big Bang because they were all exactly right for life to come about and for humans to emerge and for human minds to operate and for physicists to think about the universe this is called the anthropic cosmological principle one school of thought says well that means there must have been a kind of engineering mathematical God who fine-tuned them all at the moment before the Big Bang and then pressed the start button it's a kind of neo deism the other school is predominant within modern science is that is that and we just happen to be in the universe that's right for us there are billions quadrillions of actual universes and and we just happen to be in the one that's right for us if you say to cosmos over half you possibly postulate all these extra universes for which there's not a shred of evidence they say well this is the most economical hypothesis oh I argued with one of our leading cosmologists and about this and and I said but it's the ultimate violation of Occam's razor the principle you shouldn't multiply entities unnecessarily he said yes but this way we can get rid of God and so he's prepared to have trillions of universes to get rid of God and yet theologians have already pointed out the actually you don't get rid of God because an infinite God could be the god of an infinite number of universes so but nevertheless the multiverse theory is is currently orthodox within science without a shred of evidence for it to avoid and the the question of why were they all fixed in a particular way but they all assumed they were fixed at the Big Bang there's no evidence at all that they were all fixed at the moment of the Big Bang it's just an assumption in an evolutionary universe why shouldn't the laws evolve and I think they do in fact I think they're more like habits there's a kind of memory in nature that's my own theory of morphic resonance but I not here this evening particularly to talk about my own theory so I'll concentrate on something that's less personal namely the constants of nature like the speed of light and the gravitational constant these are all assumed to be fixed if you actually look at the measurements they don't look very constant at all the speed of light dropped by about 20 kilometers per second all over the world in the 90 from 1928 to 1945 it was measured in different labs they all got very small error bars and then after about 1945 it went up again all over the world when I discovered this I went to discuss it with dr. Brantly who was head of the National Physical Laboratory the chief metrologist in Britain and metrologist of the people who measure these kinds of things and I asked him about this I said how come the speed of light dropped all around the world could it really have changed we said oh of course not it's a constant oh so I said well then how do you explain the fact that all over the world these measurements were so much lower where people just fudging their results to get what they thought ought to be the right answer is that well we don't like to use that word so so what we're doing is you said we prefer to call it intellectual phase-locking and well this became he said you've discovered the most embarrassing episode in the history of our science and so he said well anyway it's not going to happen again and the speed of light was defined by an international committee in 1972 and then they defined the metre in terms of the speed of light so if it varies the unit you measuring in would vary to say it's now a closed system but in the case of the gravitational constant there have been rather more variations even in the last few years the gravitational constant of a Newton's gravitational constant big G has varied by 1.5 percent these are in precision measurements this is between 1970 and 2010 in top laboratories the German Institute of Standards standards the National Bureau of Standards in Washington the National Physical Laboratory there's been this wild fluctuation in indeed and if you look at the actual measurement they don't normally publish the exact measurements what they normally do is publish an average over a time and then different labs have different values averages so they average all those to get the final value of G when I went to see dr. petit after discussing these questions he reached down behind his desk and got a cardboard box there he said oh by the way before you go you might like a copy of this and he handed me a pamphlet he said the latest value of the physical constants so they've been fixed and it varies and if you look at the if you look at the data from a given lab this is from the American Bureau of Standards not very clear I'm afraid but this was on different days and it the error bars show you the errors and in different days in 1998-1999 these values were outside the error bar of they varied by 1.5 percent within the same laboratory on different days during the same year now what if G actually varies it might vary according to the time of year the Earth's position in relation to the Sun if dark matter really exists if we go through clouds of dark magic would affect the value of key that could even within existing physics that could be good rethinking it varies but this is an unthinkable thought because it's a constant my proposal is to look at the values of G at different labs around the world on different days and see whether they're correlated do they all go up and down together if they do we'd learn something but if we don't look we won't learn anything and at present no one's done that because they're constants so here's an area fairly trivial area where it's not trivial it's a fundamental constant but where these dogmas inhibit research quite unnecessarily now nature is purposeless becomes the question is nature purposeless this again is just an assumption that was made by removing purposes from nature and putting and divine and human minds if we look at the way animals and plants behave they're clearly purposeful and so are humans I mean if nature's purpose does how come we have purposes so this is again an assumption it's completely untrue of animals and plants and in fact they're modeled in terms of attractors which is a term in dynamics which shows how systems in nature are attracted towards an end state that exists in the future it science has actually reinvented teleology only given it a new name the attractor and within biology people have reinvented purpose in living things by saying that they're genetically programmed to develop to carry out their instincts as spiders genetically programmed to spin its web to catch its food and the program is a man-made computer program for a purpose so it snuggles panthers back into biology richard dawkins selfish genes do it in another way jeans are just molecules they can't be selfish or have desires or mold matter or behave like ruthless Chicago gangsters to use Dawkins phrase and these are all projections quite illegitimate metaphor and the problem with modern biology is not that it's mechanistic that is crypto vitalist it operates in terms of smuggled in purposes while denying them when it comes to the whole of evolution it's just assumed that the whole of evolution was blind chance and completely purposeless just chance and natural selection this is a complete assumption there's no evidence for it it's hard to see how it could ever be proved experimentally it's a completely open question I'm fast-forwarding through some of the evidence from biology or biological inheritance this material it's in the genes or the DNA and this again is turns out to be a tremendous assumption since the about 2000 a new kind of material inheritance is recognized epigenetic inheritance chemical modifications to genes but the human genome project which was supposed to unlock the keys of life and show us exactly what human nature was in in in chemical terms has been terrible damp squib hundreds of billions have been lost in biotechnology investments genes have been grossly overrated we now have within biology a serious crisis not widely known outside the subject called the missing heritability problem it turns out that about 75% of heritability simply can't be explained in terms of genes I described in my book the reasons for that I'm having to accelerate through this because I've got several more delusions to covering and getting down to less than a minute per delusion and but I I can assure you this is this is something one can easily justify in terms of known facts and all the detour data in the book memories are stored as material traces Dogma seven your memories are stored inside your brain they must be where else could they be complete assumption 99.999% of neuroscience is based on this unquestioned assumption yet attempt to find memories in braves have drawn a blank over and over and again some people think they must be stored holographically some people think they must be stored in as yet undetermined regions of the brain we know that the brains active in laying down memories and in retrieving them but in between so-called long-term memory stores have proved elusive very very elusive and I think that's because they're not there a long time ago re Bergson the philosopher based on a tradition that went back to maybe two patinas and argued that memory was a function of the mind that involved direct connections across time not storage in space memories of relation in time not in space and Bergson and many others have argued that memories are not stored in the brain of course that's never even mentioned within regular biology labs my own views that way they work by morphic resonance there's a resonance across time and that the memories and name was stored in the brain then what you watched on TV last night is stored inside your TV set the brain small I can receiver than a video recorder so it turns out that this assumption is extremely questionable and our question our memory is stored as material traces and you look at the evidence it's just I've been a series of frustrations over and over and over again for more than a hundred years they've been elusive over and over and over again and I think that's because they're not there again I'm fast-forwarding through some of the evidence Table eight Minds are inside brains your mental activity is nothing but the activity of your brain therefore all your mental activities inside your head this raises the question of how you see things just take a simple thing like vision looking around you now in this room that keep me the screen and so on and where are those images now the normal view is the lights reflected from things UG from me goes through the electromagnetic field enters your eyes inverted images on retinas changes in cone cells impulses up the optic nerve various regions of the brain become active that's all been described in greater detail than ever before but how do you actually see first of all no explanation for consciousness and secondly and all this is inside the brain and your minds met to be inside the brain so your image of me and of this room ought to be inside your head when you look at the sky at night or in the day at the sky you're seeing should be inside your head a recent paper in the journal behavioral and brain sciences asked the question is your skull beyond the sky and the answer the author and materialists said yes all our experiences inside our head so when you see me here now there's a little Rupert somewhere inside your head you're seeming head is a simple virtual construct but your skull is outside everything you're experiencing that's the official view there's an alternative view so simple it's hard to grasp which is that your images are located where they seem to be outside your head exactly as they seem to be your image of me is located here it's in your mind but it's not in your brain this is now an active question an active discussion within philosophy of mind this is called radical externalism that's one name for this view my own view is simply that there's visions a two-way process we project the images out our minds reach out to touch what we're looking at and I think we can affect things by looking at them which is why when you look at someone from behind they can sometimes feel it there's a sense of being stared at this is a subject that's being totally taboo within science and yet there's good experimental evidence now that this really happens I discuss it in this book and in more detail in my book the sense of being stared at and other aspects of the extended mind so the idea that minds are inside heads when you ask the question our minds confined to heads the evidence is non-existence it's simply an assumption it violates our most immediate experience Dogma 9 follows from Dogma 8 psychic phenomena are illusory all educated people know that they're supposed to deny the existence of telepathy and psychic phenomena because to admit them shows that you're uneducated stupid and superstitious this is a post enlightenment mental attitude it's maintained as a social taboo in our society by the fact that serious programs on the BBC and in serious newspapers that won't treat research on telepathy seriously or if it's reported at all there's always a skeptic there to deny it whereas it is treated seriously in the Daily Mail and the lower part of the tabloid spectrum and that reinforces the prejudice oh these aren't educated people stupid people believe that kind of stuff we're smart enough to know it's all an illusion now people have been doing research on this for over a hundred years and there's no overwhelming evidence that dogs can be telepathic knowing when their owners are coming home I wrote a whole book on that animals can be telepathic with each other and with people many people who keep pets of ledges their pets can pick up their intentions and people can be telepathic with each other the most common form in the modern world is telephone telepathy where you think of someone who then rings it's not just coincidence and you're forgetting there all the people you thought of who didn't ring detailed tests these some of my own research show that most people have had recent surveys showing the frequency of telepathic experiences in surveys telephone telepathy well anyone on the left telephone telepathy and women and men women blue men red it's very very common other kinds of telepathy are still quite common but not quite as common as telephone telepathy in my experiments you the subject has four callers they choose four people they know well they sit at home being filmed with a landline phone caller ID system we pick one of the four callers at random ask them to ring the person the phone rings they have to guess who it is before they pick it up I think it's me pick it up hello Mary they're right or they're wrong by chance they'd be right one time and for 25% that's the chance level on the left the actual value is 45% this is highly significant with hundreds of tests and if two of the callers are strangers on the left or familiar people on the right it works far far better with familiar people telepathy is to do with social bonds between people and people it's an aspect of the field of social groups that's my own theory I'm just going through this extremely fast but essentially there's now been quite a bit of research it's being independently replicated telephone telepathy seems to be real and you can do telephone telepathy test yourself on mobile phones by going to my website to the online experiments portal and have a go try it for yourself hundreds of people are doing these tests now and it escaped from the berkshires into the actual world and there's a lot of interest in this among Google and new media companies finally a mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works we've all come across this it's the basis of the fact that the government Medical Research Council allocates a hundred percent of its research funding to mechanistic medicine and zero percent to any other kind because this is the only kind that really works because it's the only kind of scientific of course all medical systems you know acupuncture homeopathy Chinese traditional medicine and so on all of them claim cures but the official view Werber that's just as impressive a effect or they would have got better anyway the placebo effect itself though has to be acknowledged it's in the heart of medicine at the moment it's part of standard medical testing it shows the mind or the belief in the mind affects the healing in the body that ought not to happen the minds nothing but the brain so the placebo effect in itself undermines this assumption of mechanistic medicine and that is the assumption that has the most consequences in the everyday world not least by making sure that official medicine is very very expensive and my own view is that if we ask this question is mechanistic medicine the only kind that really works we find the answer to that is no other kinds work - and what we should do is find out what works and how well it works for different conditions I think we could have a cheaper and more effective medical system so in conclusion what I'm saying is that the ten dogmas of science of materialistic science are all highly questionable when you question them when you look at the evidence which I've only skated through extremely rapidly this evening and it turns out that new scientific questions arise in every one of these categories new questions new lines of research new possibilities which would still be scientific in fact they'd be more scientific they'd also be cheaper cuz holistic research is cheaper than reductionist research to try and find the Higgs boson you need tens of billions of euros and a Large Hadron Collider but to study the behavior of animals or people at their own level you don't need very much notebooks clipboards and so forth it can be much much cheaper so I think a much better more effective more interesting and more fun kind of science is perfectly possible and what we need to do is dissolve or go beyond or question scientifically and the assumptions on which science itself is based and I think this is in accordance with science and I think science will be much the better for it thank you well the river thank you very much indeed for that very stimulating hour which seems to have slowed and by whenever I hear Rupert talk I always feel as if I've gone down the hall that a lease went down and you know firing this fantastic rabbit through this world which becomes ever more plausible and more sensible as you as you listen to what he's been talking about how fascinating to just look at what is presumed and and realized there are holes in these in these arguments of course we've got a bit of time I'm not going to waste too much time saying too much because you presumably have some questions to ask but we have a microphone here so if you'd like to put your hands up please feel free to ask questions I just wanted to ask if the delusions are so easily questioned why I mean I agree with you but why do you think there's been so little of that questioning happening over the last hundred years I think the reason they've been so little questions is that scientists intimidate everybody else into thinking they can't question it because they be sure showing up as stupid or ignorant and if you look at the put-downs that scientists like to when people do question it it's usually withering contempt and they can make people feel very small and very stupid Richard Dawkins is the master of this technique but he's not alone it's a standard technique and when I first started questioning myself because I'm a qualified scientist and knew the literature and they weren't they people did try that on me they'd say oh well if you think there's anything wrong with the no current theories of inheritance oh you know that just you haven't read the latest paper in nature it came out yesterday I've just seen a preprint and you know that kind of one-upmanship is used by scientists themselves well I read make sure every week and new scientists and lots of journals and I try to keep up and usually they're talking nonsense they are usually claiming far more for these things than they can so I can defend myself that most people can't and when it comes to same where most people are aware of the controversies are in relation to psychic phenomena or medicine if most people say well I've had a telepathic experience the usual response is oh well it's just coincidence or in any case there's no evidence form they've been scientifically tested and there's no evidence it's simply not true the evidence strongly favors them but there's it's the put down and this use of a kind of arrogant dismissal which has being used all these years and it's extremely effective the other thing is that as I say that any educated person wants to seem smart and these things are treated as superstitions so if you believe these things that just shows you haven't been educated enough because ordinary people believe these are the kinds of these things like telepathy and so on educated people do so it's a whole system of sociological forces taboos taboos being maintained by active vigilante groups there are skeptic organizations who are the active vigilantes who sat out heresy and tried to destroy it or discredit it so there's been a concerted endeavor to maintain this worldview and it's been very very effective are you considered a heretic then yes science is based on the idea there's one truth and science knows it and that's why anyone who has dissenting views in science is immediately branded a heretic no I'm an Anglican I go to church on a regular basis and I heard I get an get ever heard the word heretic used in a religious context I hear it all the time in the context of science and because within the realm of religion people are aware there are different religions there are different schools of thought within each religion there are different interpretations of theology there's a pluralism but in science there's no pluralism the ideal of science from the 17th century was religions quarrel with each other science was born at the time of the 30 Years War religion starts of quarrel Protestants Catholics it's all just opinion demagogues and stuff we've risen above it we know the truth the truth is the mathematical laws of nature that are the final ultimate ideas and the mind of God and we're privileged to know them so you don't need two sets of laws of nature there can only be one there's a originally only one God with one lot of laws so built into science is the kind of a culture which is unconsciously modeled itself on the Roman Church before the Reformation and and that means that alternative views are simply not tolerated except within fairly narrow limits and that's why scientists so often use the word heretic aware as in any other sphere different views in politics you know the neighbor aren't heretics just because they're in offers and in a court of law the prosecution or the defense aren't heretics for disagreeing with the other side but in science if the orthodoxy is maintained by the peer-review system the grant-giving system the structure of authority and the fact that textbooks in science are the same all the world over in India China South America Africa is the same and it's the same orthodoxy and any deviation from it is punished by the very least not getting your grant renewed or failing your exams or whatever is there a scientific explanation for the resistance to these new ideas that makes you see as a heretic there's obviously a force hmm it doesn't want your ideas to come to the fore and it's morning if you've if that's part of your scientific thinking - well my own views on morphic resonance is that nature including human nature is largely governed by habits and I think the what are called paradigms and science models of reality are really habits of thinking their collective habits of thinking and so I think what one's up against really is the force of habit but it's a force of habit in this case which is reinforced by a particular worldview people who are materialists are usually atheists or at least agnostics because materialism is elf is atheistic and there's nothing but matter so many of them have rejected religion because they feel that they've risen above it people who believe in religion a feeble-minded stupid deluded they've been they've been priests if somehow God got at them too young and that kind of thing but they've seen through it all and risen above it and so it's associated with an atmosphere of ineffable superiority that science confers and science and say powerful it gives us jet planes Apple computers and so forth must be right and so this whole worldview it is is one that makes challenging this seem almost impossible I mean if you say there's anything wrong with it they say well you know why did you go back to medieval incantations you know computers work so if that kind of rather unthinking an unreflective attitude seems to reinforce this worldview and I think that's why there's such extremely deep resistance to it but among people who are devotees of scientism most people in the population are not and when I did my research on dogs that know when their owners are coming home I found that most people are perfectly happy to accept that dogs and cats have powers that can pick up our thoughts even many scientists I mean many scientists have dogs or cats that they when they're coming home from the lab but the difference between most people in scientism most people don't feel too bad about talking about it with our family and friends the scientists don't feel too bad about talking about it with their family and friends when they get to the lab they'll shut up they won't mention it because they'll be ridiculed or fear they will be scientists full of people who've had who've got psychic pets or have had telepathic experiences or been to alternative therapists but they can't mention it to people at work for fear that they'll be thought art I think what will really change science is something analogous to the gay liberation movement when people come out and sciences science is full of closeted ho lists and people with telepathic experiences and I feel when they feel free to say that and talk to their colleagues they'll find that most of their colleagues the most of them share those interests there's a minority as highly strident minority of militant atheists and dogmatic materialists but they do not speak for the whole scientific community and whenever surveys have been done on scientist actual attitudes very few of them actually really believe in this in this dogmatic they just pretend to when they're at work and I think it's rather similar in science today to Russia under Brezhnev when no people who in public question dialectical materialism and communist principles you know ran a severe risk of having their careers judder to a halt but in private how many actually believed it and I think we have that situation today within science as someone who doesn't know and if it's not off topic it's a significant difference between DNA and human beings and DNA in Apes yes through difference is about 1% chimpanzees as revealed through the chimpanzee genome project are about 99% identical to us and most of their proteins are extremely similar to and when the chimpanzee genome had been fully sequenced it was after the human genome the head of the genome the chimp genome project admitted that we can't see in this why we're so different from chimps so we're the other thing the human genome project was a huge shock because people thought there'd be about a hundred thousand genes and they were going to be able to patent them all and make a fortune we've only got about twenty three thousand genes a sea urchin has about twenty six thousand a fruit fly seventeen thousand rice plants about thirty-eight thousand and there's no obvious correlation between our genes and what we are the person who discusses this most clearly as James letter knew in his book why us it was a huge shock the genome project because it didn't show what people had expected and it's gone which it's things have got worse not better as I mentioned the missing heritability problem is now a huge embarrassment in the heart of science very few scientists talk in public about it because they you know they want everyone to believe that they're on track discover all these new medicines new drugs and stuff by more genetic analysis my question question consents the unknowable in relation to what used to be referred to as the ineffable when your first book came out I was a eighteenth-century mag Gnostic atheist and I'm very grateful the fact that that's and the ones that actually not changed my life but change my attitude with my experience of have been praying in formation dabbled in them but I've increasingly cooked to this conviction to contemporary science would insist the logical route Wilbur in one of his early volumes says if if I asked a scientist to show me a piece of matter or a piece of space or a piece of tiny piece of energy you can actually do so I just impose that with something I noticed in what a considerably or may be the most simpler suit volume that I have and it's the Macmillan Edition estrous science which the principal editor was the late Roy Porter and in there it's revealed that the word scientist having been a coined in Birmingham in 1833 I think it was yes some decades later in the Chinese the group of languages which Chinese is one so in Korean and Japanese they had to come up with the word for science and the word that they they use in those countries if you translate it back literally into English it actually means correlational studies which has struck me is actually far more consistent what science actually entails up to keen technology so that's what your question so so much my question is you your first sense of the sea that was if I recall the delusion characterize the delusion the science understands the the nature of the universe in principle my question is do you consider if you were just said that it'll ever be well no I think they can understand within limited areas for one thing to be a scientist or to just be a human being you have to be conscious so can you understand the nature of human consciousness by studying matter or material or natural systems I don't think so I think you can only stand understand consciousness by experiencing it so I don't think there's any way we'll ever have a kind of external understanding of consciousness we presuppose consciousness to do science so science can't really explain what it presupposes and so and it's clear that in traditions specially Hindu and Buddhist tradition people have explored consciousness over very long periods in very much greater depth than anyone has in the West except perhaps some of the greater Christian mystics and that if we want to understand what consciousness is like and what it's about we have to look they're not it studies on brain activity which would kind of best have a correlation with conscious States so I think there's always things that science can't explain basically it explains regularities it's a system that explains the regularities of nature it can't explain creativity because creativity by its nature isn't regular it's something unpredictable by definition so creativity consciousness why anything's here at all all these kinds of questions are not really within the purview of science and Sciences works in the limited area and this has always been understood that there's science is within the realm of metaphysics which are the assumptions that effect science and metaphysics feels within a larger context of theology or higher realms of philosophy which are to do with ultimate questions science doesn't really address I think we're going to have to draw close there perhaps with that comment about the mysteries of consciousness that's a good place to stop this week and what I can understand is Eric Ripert's has been saying that really is still the taboo of science and maybe that's where science needs to go to properly open its its own mind thank you very much indeed for coming this evening I hope you found it inspiring I'm sure you'll find much more in Rupert's book which I would really encourage you to read it is a book very much for our time Ripple thank you very much you

Channel: RecoveringtheSacred

Views: 16,017

Keywords: The, Science, Delusion

Id: -XcfhGxdZ3Y

Length: 79min 6sec (4746 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 22 2012