Sheldrake's recent morphic resonance talk (2013)

A Heretic for Our Times (2006)

...What so infuriated Maddox was Sheldrake's theory of "morphic resonance" -- a complicated framework of ideas proposing that nature relies upon its own set of memories, which are transmitted through time and space via "morphic fields". The theory holds that these fields, which operate much like electrical or magnetic fields, shape our entire world. A panda bear is a panda bear because it naturally tunes into morphic fields containing storehouses of information that define and govern panda bears. The same with pigeons, platinum atoms, and the oak trees on Hampstead Heath, not to mention human beings. This theory, if widely accepted, would turn our understanding of the universe inside out -- which is why Sheldrake has so often felt the wrath of orthodox scientists.

For the past 20 years, he has pursued further research on morphic fields even though no university or scientific institute would dare hire him...
His experimentation has been underwritten by freethinking funders like the late Lawrence Rockefeller and the Institute of Noetic Sciences, founded by Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell. Through the years Sheldrake has supported his family largely through lecture tours, which draw curious crowds around the world, and a series of books exploring various aspects of what is often called "New Science." He's written on ecological, spiritual, and philosophical themes, as well as a manifesto on how science could be democratized (Seven Experiments that Could Change the World) and a bestseller on animal behavior (Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home). His current research involves thousands of rigorously empirical tests probing the existence of telepathy. John Maddox nonetheless has continued to accuse him of "heresy," saying he should be "condemned in exactly the same language that the Pope used to condemn Galileo."...
 
Rupert Sheldrake: the Evolution of Telepathy

The Perrott-Warrick Lecture by Dr. Rupert Sheldrake (February 9th. 2011), in which were described phenomena indicative of the existence of telepathy in both animals and human beings. Abstract: Field observations have suggested that wolves and other wild animals may communicate telepathically over many miles, and surveys have shown that about 50% of dog owners and about 30% of cat owners believe that their pets may respond to their thoughts or silent commands. Among humans, apparent telepathy is most commonly reported between members of families and between close friends and colleagues. Experimental investigations of telepathy in animals and people suggest that telepathy may be a natural means of communication between members of animal and human groups. Human telepathy is still evolving in the context of modern technologies, including the internet, emails, SMS messages and telephones. Dr. Sheldrake will show how anyone can explore their own abilities in automated telepathy tests using mobile phones.

A 720p version of this video, and an audio-only version, are available at http://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1097239, and higher resolution slides are available from http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/handle/18....
 
....So I'm not offended by Johann using the term gobbeldygook or magical - especially when taken in context - but I am offended when it is used by a bigot from the other camp.

One rule for you and another for the bigots. That's bigotism.
 
One rule for you and another for the bigots. That's bigotism.

That post of mine was a while ago so I had to re-read it. I don't see your point at all, other than you being your contrarian self. The comparison goes like this: a gay person is probably not offended by another gay using the word, queen. But a gay person would be offended by a homophobe (bigot) using the word, queen. Do you really disagree with that?
 
Radical Provincialism in the Life Sciences: A Review of Rupert Sheldrake's A New Science of Life.

Braude, oddly enough, thought Sheldrake's Morphic Resonance was too mechanistic:
"We must be prepared to describe many organic phenomena only in ways regarded as nonscientific or prescientific."

Ted Dace relates morphic resonance to ideas of immaterial memory and unorthodox views of time that inspired Sheldrake.


The job of the brain, according to Bergson, is to calculate possible actions in response to sensory data.7Inputs are converted in the most efficient possible way to outputs. That’s all there is to it. Within those cerebral folds you will find no representations of the world, no emotions, no thoughts, no desires, no psyche. For Bergson, locating the qualities of mind in the brain amounts to a kind of neural mysticism. Is the brain so special that it can simultaneously be a part of the physical world and yet step outside it to represent it?8

Rather than constructing images of the world, says Bergson, our brains simply facilitate our perception of it. Because the brain does its job, we directly perceive what is around us. But how does Bergson grapple with memory? In this case, the images we perceive are no longer physically given. Surely here we must rely on cerebral storage of images.

Just as he maintains that we actually apprehend what is around us, Bergson argues that in memory we literally perceive the past. Far from merely representing the past, a memory is the resuscitation of a perception.9 To explain how this can be, Bergson must reinvent time itself.
http://www.skepticalinvestigations.org/Examskeptics/Dace_analysis.html
A half century after Russell’s investigation, the task of synthesizing Semon and Bergson fell to a young biologist-in-training at Cambridge University, a theoretical nonconformist who took a year off from his laboratory work to study philosophy at Harvard. Unlike Russell, whose reading of Bergson was colored by professional rivalry, Rupert Sheldrake was captivated by Bergson’s radical take on time and its implications for memory. By coupling Bergson’s time-as-duration with Semon’s mnemic homophony, Sheldrake obtained the basis for a scientific theory of mind, the very thing Russell had sought with his Analysis of Mind.

Flabbergasted by Sheldrake’s audacious proposal, neuroscientist Steven Rose designed an experiment that would surely dispose of it once and for all. The experiment involved day-old chicks divided into two groups. Test chicks could peck at yellow diodes, while control chicks could peck at chrome beads. After pecking, the test chicks were injected with lithium chloride, a toxic substance that made them mildly nauseous, while control chicks were injected with a harmless saline solution. The same procedure was followed for 37 days with a new batch of chicks each day. The data indicated that successive batches of test chicks became gradually more hesitant to peck relative to control chicks. While this finding indicated that test chicks were influenced by previous test chicks, the most clear-cut result concerned control chicks that were allowed to peck at either the yellow diodes or the chrome beads three hours following their injection of saline solution. Over the course of the experiment, successive batches of control chicks became increasingly reluctant to peck at the yellow diodes, indicating that they were influenced by the cumulative experience of chicks that had pecked at the yellow diodes and then been injected with lithium chloride. After stalling for months, Rose reneged on his agreement to write up the results with Sheldrake for publication.35

Perhaps Braude was too hasty in his criticism?
 
The Rupert Sheldrake Interview [Archaic Drum Podcast]

Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author of more than 80 scientific papers and ten books. He was among the 100 top Global Thought Leaders for 2013, as ranked by the Duttweiler Institute, Zurich, Switzerland’s leading think tank. He studied natural sciences at Cambridge University, where he was a Scholar of Clare College, took a double first class honours degree and was awarded the University Botany Prize (1963).

In his most recent book (2012), called The Science Delusion in the UK, and Science Set Free in the US, he examines the ten dogmas of modern science, and shows how they can be turned into questions that open up new vistas of scientific possibility. This book received the Book of the Year Award from the British Scientific and Medical Network.

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Also, Formal Dining Room Set posted this link in another thread:

 
Went through the above video last night, but need to finish the last twenty minutes or so. I was surprised to see there was actually more evidence suggestive of morphic resonance than I'd first believed. What interests me most is how the idea was born from a particular conception of time (see above) - something I wish Sheldrake would talk about more about.

Made me think of two possibly interrelated subjects:

The Mathematical Forms being in this reality, as argued in "The Mathematical World".

Aristotelian realism stands in a difficult relationship with naturalism, the project of showing that all of the world and human knowledge can be explained in terms of physics, biology and neuroscience. If mathematical properties are realised in the physical world and capable of being perceived, then mathematics can seem no more inexplicable than colour perception, which surely can be explained in naturalist terms. On the other hand, Aristotelians agree with Platonists that the mathematical grasp of necessities is mysterious. What is necessary is true in all possible worlds, but how can perception see into other possible worlds? The scholastics, the Aristotelian Catholic philosophers of the Middle Ages, were so impressed with the mind’s grasp of necessary truths as to conclude that the intellect was immaterial and immortal.

Feser's conception of the soul as Form of the body, as described in his discussion of materialism's problem of intentionality.

Now, for the Thomistic or hylemorphic dualist, the soul is to be understood, not as pure thought, but rather as the substantial form of the living human body. And qua form, it is not a complete substance in the first place, much less a material or quasi-material one. (Talk of the soul as an “immaterial substance” is thus for the Thomist at least misleading, though he does hold that the soul subsists beyond the death of the body as an incomplete substance.) Here too, though, talk of interrelated quasi-material parts, “causal pathways,” and the like is completely out of place. But for the Thomist, the Cartesian’s talk of inner “representations” is out of place too; as I have discussed elsewhere (e.g. here and here) the “representationalist” conception of the mind is an essentially modern one that the ancients and medievals generally would have rejected. As a consequence, the ancients and medievals would reject too the essentially modern way of framing the issue of intentionality that I have, for the sake of argument, been following up to now in this post.
 
F.David Peat makes mention of Morphic Resonance in his essay on active information, meaning, and form:

Form is a key concept in biology. The function of everything from the activity of an enzyme to a cell or organ is related to its physical form. Growth from the fertilized cell to the adult is a process of differentiation and transformation of form; hence biologists from Aristotle to Waddington, Sheldrake and Goodwin have postulated notions of "morphic fields".

Note the similarity to Bohm's ideas of social groups and Sheldrake's thoughts on cultural aspects of the morphic field:

In the context of Dialogue groups Bohm spoke of a "field of meaning" shared by all participants. He also stressed that the way to bring about effective social change is through an overall change of meaning. Meaning, which could be thought of as a field of form, Bohm associated this with the Immune system. The Immune system is what keeps the body whole, it processes coordinated and is another manifestation of meaning. if meaning is degraded the body becomes sick. Bohm stressed that his maxim "a change of meaning is a change of being" was to be taken literally. That assailant seen on a dark night turns out to be the shadow of a tree trunk. Immediately a flurry of electrochemical changes takes place in mind and body. Laboratory research suggests that shifts in "meaning" bring about subtle restructuring of nerve pathways and the sensitivities of connections. Meaning, which is normally taken to be subjective turns out to have an objective, physical consequence.

Meaning can act on matter and, presumably, matter on meaning. (The significance of what we see or think is affected by the electrochemical environment of our bodies.) Does the idea extend from consciousness into the physical world? I believe it does. Information is, in some way, encoded in the wave function, or some sort of a field of form, or some set of prequantum algebraic relationships. Yet what information is encoded? One solution is that all information, about the entire universe is encoded, or enfolded, within the global form. (Or as Bohm may have said, within the Implicate Order.) Yet only that which has meaning, or significance, for the electron is "active". Consciousness becomes a certain dynamical aspects of this underlying field or order. Mind is fundamentally distributed throughout the material world.

Information by itself is nothing more than an abstract set of binary digits (Shannon and Weaver's Information Theory) but if it is to act, if it is to affect the motion of the electron, coordinate the dance of a plasma, and the global movement of electrical activity within the brain, then it must have a particular significance within a given context. Meaning comes down to the way the information acts within different contexts.


Also, as a bit of housekeeping I think this was mentioned on one of the deleted threads:

Bernando's Idealist Philosophy and Sheldrake's Morphic Fields

In the short video above, Sheldrake summarizes the concept of morphic resonance. Basically, he postulates the existence of a non-physical field of memory called 'morphic field.' The shape of our bodies, and those of all organisms and even crystals, is determined by a form of resonance between the DNA-transcribed proteins in our bodies and this invisible, non-material morphic field. The information in the field itself is determined by habit: Animals today look the way they look largely because they looked the way they looked in the past. (Except, of course, for changes in the patterns encoded in the field caused by the current activity of organisms, which tentatively accounts for evolution in a somewhat Lamarckian way.) Similarly, Sheldrake also postulates that our memories are not stored as material traces in the brain, but are themselves encoded in the morphic fields in a way that transcends time. Morphic fields are, thus, not only fields of forms, but fields of qualia. When we recall a past event, "resonant patterns of activity" (The Science Delusion, page 197) in our brains tune into the corresponding segments of the morphic field, giving us access to qualia across time. This is, in a nutshell, the thrust of Sheldrake's hypothesis. Personally, I find the hypothesis quite intriguing and coherent, even though there is no theoretical articulation (i.e. a formal, perhaps mathematical model) for the morphic fields themselves, nor for the process of resonance by means of which the fields causally affect the physical world.

Sheldrake's metaphors suggest that the morphic fields are objective, autonomous realities. As such, they are supposed to be like electromagnetic fields, but of a different nature.
 
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Thanks for the link to Bernardo's take on morphic fields, Sciborg. I hadn't read that before. One commenter to Bernardo's post says:

Another possible reason to prefer an Idealist approach over morphic fields (alone) is related to the qustion of novelty. Sheldrake's fields don't seem to have any good explanation for novelty. how do new biological entities come into existence? If everything is based on habits from the past, how does anything new come into existence for that matter? Sheldrake alludes to a purposefulness to nature but again it's unclear how morphic resonance could drive it. If once assumes that consciousnes is inherently creative (which it seems to be), and if consciousness is everything, then the problem seems to go away.

I think it's a good point that Sheldrake accounts well for the "laws of nature" as habits, but not so much for innovation and evolution. I suspect there's a balance between a tendency for things to stay the same and for them to change. If things stayed the same all the time, there would of course be complete stability; and if they constantly changed, complete instability. There seems to be a backdrop of high stability in what we may think of as natural laws or cosmic habits, but on the other hand, and most readily demonstrated in organic evolution, the system does allow for change in the direction of decreased entropy and thereby increased complexity.

Physicists, of course, think that negentropy is merely local, and that on the whole, the universe is slowly running down. This idea is built into the laws of thermodynamics; I'm not saying that those laws don't work for certain purposes, but I doubt they're the final answer. If the universe is slowly running down, then in the past, at the moment of the putative Big Bang, it seems to me that the universe would logically have been at its most ordered, and since then, to have gone downhill. But we do see increased complexity and order, as is evident in the fossil record, for example, or, in the sphere of the evolution of human societies.

To marginalise this, to cast it as merely a local manifestation of negentropy--in the overall scheme of things an anomalous blip--has long seemed unduly pessimistic to me. In the end, materialism is a counsel of despair and for the life of me I can't see why anyone would find that attractive. That doesn't in and of itself offer any proof that materialism is wrong, of course; but it's an interesting reflection, I think.
 
Tiny bit of housekeeping -> In a thread related to his excellent essay, John McGuire mentioned a conversation between David Bohm and Rupert Sheldrake:

A New Science of Life

Now on with the show!

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@Michael Larkin

Interesting thoughts Michael - though it's been a few weeks since I read it your criticism of morphic resonance recalls the one above by Braude. On the subject of negentropy check out the admittedly controversial notion of syntropy - while much of it seems very speculative if not outright wild guessing I do have to admit a weird intuitive draw towards the notion...maybe it's just my affinity for anything in science fiction or fantasy to do with Time...

Definitely check out Max_B's and EthanT's criticisms on the idea in that thread.

I know Vlatko Vedral, as well as Addy Pross, have examined the idea of life as negentropy from a physics perspective in Aeon Magazine (great publication by the way). Might be of interest to you.

To marginalise this, to cast it as merely a local manifestation of negentropy--in the overall scheme of things an anomalous blip--has long seemed unduly pessimistic to me.

I wonder about this as well, especially given the idea of a few persons - Sheldrake, Nancy Cartwright, Stuart Kauffman, Feser, Nagel, Stephen Braude, N. David Mermin, Chomsky, and even Bertrand Russel in his later years - that the laws of physics are either inconstant or only apply to that part of reality amenable to mathematical modeling.

I do think a lot of the Big Questions, or at least our ability to make sense of them (if only to accept our eternal ignorance), comes down to the nature of Time which would naturally include the Arrow entropy seems to suggest. Nagel has suggested an atheist's version of teleology that I ascribe to - that there are final causes (along with moral values) woven into the firmament. Not saying it's definitely true, but it's a "reality gamble" I'm willing to make.

I'd be curious to see the skeptic Massimo's opinion on this matter, as he's asserted that "naive determinism" is false.

But we do see increased complexity and order, as is evident in the fossil record, for example, or, in the sphere of the evolution of human societies.

I feel like you've mentioned Teilhard De Chardin in the past? I do find his ideas about the Omega Point to be rather beautiful, even if I can't quite get myself to accept them.

In case you haven't read much of his stuff here's a starting point..
.

In the end, materialism is a counsel of despair and for the life of me I can't see why anyone would find that attractive. That doesn't in and of itself offer any proof that materialism is wrong, of course; but it's an interesting reflection, I think.

Definitely not alone in these sentiments, of that I can assure you. :)
 
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Earth Talk: Science and Spiritual Practices - Dr Rupert Sheldrake

In this lecture at Schumacher College, Rupert Sheldrake shows how the "scientific worldview" is moribund; the sciences are being constricted by assumptions that have hardened into dogmas. But science itself is now transcending the materialist philosophy, and pointing toward a new sense of a living world. The cosmos is no longer like a machine running down; it is more like a developing organism with an inherent memory, and so is our planet, Gaia. These new paradigm shifts in the sciences shed a new light on spiritual practices like pilgrimage, ritual, prayer and meditation.

We had a good thread with some board physicists discussing pros & cons of Sheldrake's mind-as-field concept...but it seems to have been gobbled up in the Forumpocalypse.
 
Paranthropology Vol 4 Issue 2 has a few articles on Sheldrake's Morphic Resonance and his ideas in The Science Delusion

The next four articles provide a variety of perspectives on the work of Rupert Sheldrake—a timely endeavor needing clarity in light of the
recent TED talks re-evaluation of Sheldrake's work. We begin with a general overview of Sheldrake's recent book The Science Delusion (titled Science Set Free in the USA) by John R. DeLorez. Additionally DeLorez compares Sheldrake's work to Oriental Occultism writers of second generation Theosophy.

DeLorez's article prepares us for Mark A. Schroll's assessment of Sheldrake titled, “Scientific Controversies Shaping the Worldview of the 21st Century: Sheldrake's Theory of Non-local Memory Revisited.” Schroll's article is both theoretical and biographical, reflecting his
29 year inquiry into Sheldrake's work, and its relationship to David Bohm's implicate order theory, and transpersonal psychology. Additionally Schroll summarizes the laboratory experiments conducted in the early 20th century testing Lamarckian inheritance and its unexpected results inviting alternative hypotheses to explain them, as Sheldrake proposes.

Following Schroll, Zelda Hall contributes a thought-provoking examination of Sheldrake's clash with current scientific theory, as well as offering us a psychotherapeutic assessment of Schroll's article—and the difficult road ahead toward our acceptance of a new paradigm.

Rounding out these articles on Sheldrake is Margaret Gouin's article “Science Betrayed?: Rupert Sheldrake and The Science Delusion.” Science argues that it is objective and value free, but is it really? Gouin offers a sociology of knowledge perspective inviting us to apply the same critical analysis of Sheldrake's work to our existing scientific theories.

Kaitlyn Kane's article “Critical Analysis of Culturally Intrusive Interpretations of Phenomenological and Parapsychological Scientific Studies” continues to hone this selfreflective lens of assessment through a meta-analysis of science and culture—resembling the methodological tool Alvin W. Gouldner called a “reflexive sociology” in The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1970).
 
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The Gnosis of Dr. Rupert Sheldrake

I read a book by the author Peter J Carroll, he mentioned you, one thing he talked about is that he himself is an Atheist, however, he believes in things like telepathy and morphic fields. So going along secondary to the last question, does one require a belief in God per se to believe that morphic fields are a real thing or is it something that can be separately applied as some people do?



Oh Yes, it can be separately applied. In my first book A New Science of Life, I give four different theories of creativity, one of which is an expanded version of naturalism, or materialism. Morphic fields and morphic resonance are a part of science and scientific investigation and don’t require a spiritual or religious belief, but they leave open the question of spirituality and I think that the kind of world view I’m putting forward is compatible with a spiritual world view but it doesn’t necessitate it. I think its important to have in science something which doesn’t require a particular world view or require atheism. Right now science is inherently atheistic, the materialist world view. So it sort of marginalizes spirituality. I think the new kind of science I’m keen on would allow for both spirituality and an expanded liberal naturalism.


 
Undoing the Dogmas of Science: A Talk with Rupert Sheldrake

What kind of reaction have you received to the things you're bringing up? In your book, you lay out what the problems are, how science had turned into dogma, and you offer some solutions. What are the main scientific presumptions that have been turned into dogmas?

In my book I deal with ten different dogmas. One is that the total amount of matter and energy is always the same. Another is that nature is mechanical, or machine-like. Another is that heredity is all carried in the genes. These are three of the ten dogmas I address.

I said something just now about heredity and the genes, but take matter and energy, that the total amount is always the same, except at the moment of the Big Bang, when it all appeared from nowhere — that's the usual assumption. Well, it turns out that physicists have discovered that there is a huge amount of so-called dark matter and dark energy. We don't have a clue what they are, but they now make up 96 percent of reality, and they've been added over the last 30 years. Now if the total amount of matter and energy is always the same, is the total amount of dark matter and dark energy always the same? No one has a clue. Actually, the total amount of dark energy seems to be increasing as the universe expands.

You know, the whole thing is in shambles, really. What we all learned at school and thought of as fixed laws turns out to relate to only to 4% of the matter and energy in the universe. And we don't know the relationship between that 4% with the rest.
 
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