An immediate consequence of been able to model the neutral neutrino and by natural inference the suite of elementary particles and from there to actually model the content of atoms is that we become conscious of the information universe produced by the unbounded curvature thus produced.
It is also empirically apparrent that such unbounded curvature
existing in our universe as two dimensional objects independent of
time is capable of coherence although that is not clear through the
mathematics which clearly defines them. It could well be the
intersecting strips then adopt the geometry of the whole and that can
modify. It sounds like a problem in graph theory.
Whatever it is it produces photons easily enough.
What it also means is that the information content of the universe is
massive by many orders of magnitudes as compared to the information
content of our physical universe. For that reason alone our Spirit
Soul complex happens to contain massively more information than our
physical reality. Think about that for a moment.
We perceive the universe through a narrow sprectrum slit. Our
spiritual self surely perceives the whole spectrum which covers many
orders of magnitude more information. It is like waking up to
realize that you represent a giant in the spiritual world of
perception and having to put on blinkers to see the material world.
All this makes the idea of a morphic field inevitable because it
means that our understanding is absorbed by the higher spiritual
levels who share mind to mind. Thus we have the impression of a
morphic field.
July 14, 2014
The views expressed
are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific
American.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2014/07/14/scientific-heretic-rupert-sheldrake-on-morphic-fields-psychic-dogs-and-other-mysteries/
For decades, I’ve
been only dimly aware of Rupert Sheldrake as a renegade British
biologist who argues that telepathy and other paranormal phenomena
(sometimes lumped under the term psi) should be taken more
seriously by the scientific establishment. Since I’m one of those
fuddy-duddy establishment doubters of psi, I never bothered to
examine Sheldrake’s work closely. But I was intrigued, and amused,
by the vehemence of his critics, notably John Maddox, the long-time
editor ofNature, who once called Sheldrake’s views “heresy”
that deserved to be “condemned.”
Sheldrake probably
provokes such strong reactions in part because he is a product of the
scientific establishment—more specifically, of Cambridge
University. He earned his doctorate in biochemistry there in 1967 and
became a fellow and director of studies in biochemistry and cell
biology. He gradually became dissatisfied with current theories of
biology. He presented an alternative framework—involving his theory
of morphic resonance (explained below)–in his 1981 bookA New
Science of Life, which Maddox, in a now-famous Natureeditorial,
called “the best candidate for burning there has been for many
years.”
Sheldrake, undaunted,
went on to write more popular books, including Dogs That Know
When Their Owners Are Coming Home (1999), The Sense of
Being Stared At(2003), Seven Experiments That Could Change the
World (1994) and, most recently,Science Set Free (2013).
The latter calls on modern science to shed its restrictive
materialism and reductionism, advancing some of the same arguments
that philosopher Thomas Nagel does in his recent book Mind and
Cosmos (which I reviewed here).
The reason I’m
telling you about Sheldrake is that less than two months ago, we were
both speakers at a festival in Hay-on-Wye, England, and were put up
in the same boarding house. (I participated in several sessions at
the festival, including one about Big Data that I reported on
here.) I spent lots of time talking to Sheldrake during the festival
and after it, when we spent an afternoon tramping around a heath near
his home. (I also met Sheldrake in 1997 at a scientific reception in
London, but we only spoke briefly.)
Sheldrake is terrific
company. He is smart, articulate and funny. He does a hilarious
imitation of the late psychedelic scholar Terence McKenna, his friend
and co-author,whom I met in 1999 and profiled here. There is an
appealing reasonableness and gentleness in Sheldrake’s manner, even
when he is complaining about the unfairness of his many critics.
He possesses,
moreover, a deep knowledge of science, including its history and
philosophy (which he studied at Harvard in the 1960s). This
knowledge—along with his ability to cite detailed experimental
evidence for his claims–make Sheldrake a formidable defender of his
outlook. (For more on Sheldrake’s career and views, see his
website, http://www.sheldrake.org.)
At one point
Sheldrake, alluding to my 1996 book The End of Science, said
that his science begins where mine ends. When I asked him to
elaborate he said, “We both agree that science is at present
limited by assumptions that restrict enquiry, and we agree that there
are major unsolved problems about consciousness, cosmology and other
areas of science… I am proposing testable hypotheses that could
take us forward and open up new frontiers of scientific enquiry.”
I remain a psi
doubter; my doubt was reinforced by psychologist Susan Blackmore, a
psi believer-turned-skeptic whom I interviewed for my 2003 book
Rational Mysticism. But now and then I still doubt my doubt. In
a post here two years ago, I point out that many brilliant
scientists—from William James and Alan Turing to Freeman Dyson—have
been open-minded about psi.
I conclude, “I’m a
psi skeptic, because I think if psi was real, someone would surely
have provided irrefutable proof of it by now. But how I wish that
someone would find such proof!… The discovery of telepathy or
telekinesis would blow centuries of accumulated scientific dogma sky
high. What could be more thrilling!”
Sheldrake—I think
even his most adamant critics will agree–is a fascinating
scientific figure. I was thus delighted when he agreed to the
following email interview.
Horgan: I admit that
I’m still not sure what morphic resonance is. Can you give me a
brief definition?
Sheldrake:
Morphic resonance is the influence of previous structures of activity
on subsequent similar structures of activity organized by morphic
fields. It enables memories to pass across both space and time
from the past. The greater the similarity, the
greater the influence of morphic resonance. What this means is
that all self-organizing systems, such as molecules, crystals, cells,
plants, animals and animal societies, have a collective memory on
which each individual draws and to which it contributes. In its
most general sense this hypothesis implies that the so-called laws of
nature are more like habits.
Horgan: Did the idea
of morphic resonance come to you in an epiphany, or was it a gradual
process?
Sheldrake: The idea of
morphic resonance came to me when I was doing research at Cambridge
on the development of plants. I was interested in the concept
of morphogenetic, or form-shaping, fields, but realized they could
not be inherited through genes. They had to be inherited in
some other way. The idea of morphic resonance came as a sudden
insight. This happened in 1973, but it was a radical idea, and I
spent years thinking about it before I published it in my first
book, A New Science of Life, in 1981.
Horgan: What is the
single most powerful piece of evidence for morphic resonance?
Sheldrake: There is a
lot of circumstantial evidence for morphic resonance. The most
striking experiment involved a long series of tests on rat learning
that started in Harvard in the 1920s and continued over several
decades. Rats learned to escape from a water-maze and
subsequent generations learned faster and faster. At the time
this looked like an example of Lamarckian inheritance, which was
taboo. The interesting thing is that after the rats had learned
to escape more than 10 times quicker at Harvard, when rats were
tested in Edinburgh, Scotland and in Melbourne, Australia they
started more or less where the Harvard rats left off. In
Melbourne the rats continued to improve after repeated testing, and
this effect was not confined to the descendants of trained rats,
suggesting a morphic resonance rather than epigenetic effect. I
discuss this evidence in A New Science of Life, now in its
third edition, called Morphic Resonance in the US.
Horgan: Is animal
telepathy a necessary consequence of morphic resonance?
Sheldrake: Animal
telepathy is a consequence of the way that animal groups are
organized by what I call morphic fields. Morphic resonance is
primarily to do with an influence from the past, whereas telepathy
occurs in the present and depends on the bonds between members of the
group. For example, when a dog is strongly bonded to
its owner, this bond persists even when the owner is far away and is,
I think, the basis of telepathic communication. I see telepathy
as a normal, not paranormal, means of communication between members
of animal groups. For example many dogs know when their owners
are coming home and start waiting for them by a door or window.
My experiments on the subject are described in my book Dogs That
Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. Dogs still know even
when people set off at times randomly chosen by the
experimenter, and travel in unfamiliar vehicles. One of these
experiments can be seen here:
http://www.sheldrake.org/videos/jaytee-a-dog-who-knew-when-his-owner-was-coming-home-the-orf-experiment
Horgan: Do you think
morphic resonance theory will ever yield practical applications?
Sheldrake: Morphic
resonance involves the transfer of information across space and
time. It might be possible to develop information-transfer
systems, with a global memory, which would work without all the
normal paraphernalia of satellites, wires, booster stations etc.
I have already designed experiments in which a pin code could be
transmitted from London to New York without any conventional means of
communication.
Horgan: Does your
scientific outlook make you doubt whether
artificial-intelligence researchers can replicate human minds on
computers?
Sheldrake: Morphic
fields take place in self-organizing systems. Machines are not
self-organizing – they are made in factories – and I would not
expect them to have morphic fields. Therefore I expect
artificial intelligence on digital computers will remain rather
limited in scope, and those who have high hopes for it will be
disappointed. However if analogue computers with genuine
quantum randomness were constructed, perhaps they could be organized
by morphic fields and show much more intelligent behavior. It’s
possible that quantum computing will lead in this direction.
Horgan: Do you ever
have doubts about morphic resonance, and think maybe the materialists
are right?
Sheldrake: I would
like there to be much more research on morphic resonance and I would
like to see a lot more evidence for it. If there were, it would
not necessarily refute materialism, but could expand the materialist
worldview, which has become excessively dogmatic, as I show in my
recent book Science Set Free (called The Science
Delusion in the UK). I think something like morphic
resonance is necessary to make sense of inheritance, memory, the
evolutionary nature of nature, and many other phenomena. Lee
Smolin, the theoretical physicist, recently put forward a similar
idea, which he calls “the principle of precedence,” and perhaps
his hypothesis might mesh in better with established science, since
it is formulated in the context of quantum physics. The main
question is whether or not the effects predicted by the hypothesis of
morphic resonance – or the principle of precedence – actually
happen.
Horgan: Why do you
think your ideas are so vehemently rejected by the scientific
mainstream, while multiverses, string theory, panpsychism (as defined
by neuroscientist Christof Koch) and other highly speculative ideas
are taken seriously?
Sheldrake: Within
physics, since the quantum revolution and the Big Bang cosmology,
there has been a pluralism of ideas with many unexpected
possibilities entertained seriously by mainstream
physicists. However in the 20th century, biology moved in an
opposite direction, towards to a more dogmatically materialist
position. When I first put forward the hypothesis of morphic
resonance in the 1980s, most biologists were convinced that all the
problems of biology would soon be solved in molecular terms, and this
enthusiasm gave a great impetus to human genome project. But
this confidence is now waning as developmental biology continues to
defy any simple explanation in terms of molecules. The assumption
that genes code for the characteristics of organisms is thrown into
question by the “missing heritability problem.” And it turns out
that the inheritance of acquired characteristics, now called
epigenetic inheritance, is common in both animals and plants.
The implications of this revolutionary acceptance of epigenetic
effects are still being worked out, but I think that biology will
become more open as a result.
Horgan: Do you believe
in God? Does your faith influence your scientific outlook in any way,
or vice versa?
Sheldrake: Yes, I
believe in God. I am a practicing Christian, specifically an Anglican
(in the US, an Episcopalian). I went through a long atheist
phase, and began to question the materialist orthodoxy of science
while I was still an atheist. I later came to the conclusion that
there are more inclusive forms of consciousness in the universe than
human minds. But my ideas about morphic resonance and telepathy
are not part of orthodox religious belief, any more than they are
part of orthodox science.
Horgan: If you were
appointed King of Science, in charge of prioritizing research and
funding, what would your first decision be?
Sheldrake: I would
leave most research funding as it is for the time being because it
would be highly disruptive to the scientific community if there were
a sudden change in direction. But I would allocate about 5% of
the available funds to innovative research that could lead to
breakthroughs. In most branches of science, there are dissident
minority groups who have been marginalized by the mainstream, but
which contain well-qualified scientists and promising unorthodox
results. These are the low-hanging fruits that are most likely
to lead to breakthroughs, and I would make sure that such areas were
adequately funded.
Horgan: If you had the
skeptic Michael Shermer (who critiqued morphic resonance in 2005) in
front of you right now, what would you say to him?
Sheldrake: I
would invite him to have a debate about the existence of telepathy
and other psychic phenomena. In 2003, in relation to my
research on the sense of being stared at and on telepathy, he
asserted in USA Today that “The events Sheldrake
describes don’t require a theory, and are perfectly explicable by
normal means.” I emailed him to ask what his normal explanations
were. He was unable to provide them, and confessed that he had
not actually read the evidence. I challenged him to a debate. He
accepted, but unfortunately he was so busy being a professional
skeptic that he could not find time to look at the data. He has
often claimed that “Skepticism is a method not a position.”
Taking part in this long-delayed debate would provide an opportunity
to put his principles into practice.
Addendum: See also my
recent conversation about Sheldrake on Bloggingheads.tv,
About the Author: Every week, hockey-playing science writer
John Horgan takes a puckish, provocative look at breaking science. A
teacher at Stevens Institute of Technology, Horgan is the author of
four books, including The End of Science (Addison Wesley, 1996) and
The End of War (McSweeney's, 2012). Follow on Twitter @Horganism.
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