Nature's Hidden Intelligence: Morphic Fields | Rupert Sheldrake PhD

The missing heritability problem it was a huge shock for molecular biologists because they thought genes would explain everything and they don't proness to breast cancer or liability to become schizophrenia or things like that on the basis of genomes the predicted power was very low The genome could only predict 5% or 10% I I think that a lot of what is not explained by genes is in fact explained by morphic resonance each species has a collective memory of form and Instinct and behavior the whole of Nature has an inherent memory uh the so-called laws of nature

are more like habits the normal view in biology is to focus almost all attention on genes and molecular biology and then is simply assumed that by complex interactions they'll self assemble it's like saying the house will just build itself if you just shake up the building materials that's not how it works a house has an architectural plan so I think that's the role that the morphic field plays shaping form The behavior what is the role of the brain in the context of morphic field Theory I think our minds stretch out like Fields far beyond our

brains how does it work do we really know or it's a hunch still it's a postulate a hypothesis there have been various people who attempted to explain it for example David bone the well-known Quantum physicist uh thought that morphic resonance could work through what he called the implicate order which is a hidden order that underlies Quantum processes what I'm arguing you see is that the mechanistic materialism the current paradigm is inadequate uh what we need is a view of nature as alive nature is more like an an organism than a machine hello rert welcome and

thank you very much for taking the time for this interview before we dive into main topics I wanted to ask you uh from a piano player like myself to you who is also a piano player and an organ player there um would you agree that God's creation of the world was to The Sound of bak's Music well I wasn't there to see it so I I couldn't tell I couldn't be sure about that but I love B's music and indeed I've been playing some of Bar's music this morning So um that's mainly what I play

on the piano excellent me too so I would say that your favorite composer is the same as mine which is b or would did you say Mozart or purel oh they definitely b b we are B people all right um well in my humble opinion you need no introduction but perhaps for people who are new on the blog you could just say a few words about your background and your main research interest well I've started out my um scientific work as a biologist I studied biology now Sciences at Cambridge I did history and philosophy of

science at Harvard uh before I went back to Cambridge to do a PhD which was on plant development I was then a research fellow of the Royal Society and a fellow of Cl College Cambridge where I did research on the plant hormone oxin aux i n oxin which is chemically indol latic acid um I worked out how it's made in Plants it's made by dying cells it's released as cells break down and how it's transported in Plants the the mechanism of the Polar oxen transport system oxen moves from the choots towards the root tips um

and it's a polar transport system it only goes in One Direction then I worked in India in Agricultural Research Institute called IET where I was working on the physiology of tropical leg human crops particularly chickpea and pigeon pea um then all that time I was thinking about the nature of biological development and the nature of morphogenetic fields fields which shape form um and then in in I wrote a book on on this in India I left my job for a while and lived in small ashram in a Christian ashram in Tamil Nadu with song called

father be Griffith um English Benedictine uh Mark and then I I the book was published in 1981 called a new science of Life putting forward my ideas on morphic resonance and then um I've been working on morphic resonance ever since then but also on other areas of science that are relatively controversial like telepathy um and the feeling of being stared at really uh topics which are to do with the extended mind the mind being more extensive than the brain so I would say that most of my work for the last 40 years or so has

been on Minds being extended Beyond brains both in space through vision for example and in time through memory um which is where morphic resonance Comes in so I basically do research in areas of biology and psychology uh experimental research uh which are neglected by many scientists but which I think are very important for pointing towards a better understanding of Consciousness interesting I have a book of yours which is one of the early editions and if you permit me I'll just uh quote something yes so the book is entitled the presence of the past morphic resonance

and the habits of Nature and here you're right that living organisms inherit genes from their ancestors according to the hypothesis of formative causation they also inherit morphic Fields heredity depends both on genes and on morphic resonance so what is morphic resonance and what is morphic Fields Theory and most importantly what does this theory explain that genes evolution by natural selection and epigenetics do not all right well those are a lot of questions um basically morphic resonance is the idea that there's a memory in nature the whole of Nature has an inherent memory uh the so-called

laws of nature are more like habits um each species has a collective memory of form and Instinct and Behavior and so how morphic resonance works I think is on the basis of similarity similar vibratory patterns in self-organizing systems um lead to Resonance across time and space so that a present system Tunes in bimorphic resonance to similar systems in the past which convey a memory to it so the in the in the um animal species each species would thus have a collective memory um every young Antelope for example would be tuning into the U Behavior and

the form of previous antelopes of the same species uh tuning into a kind of collective memory humans do the same um and and I think I think what y called the collective unconscious uh is best understood in ter terms of morphic resonance and Collective memory because morphic resonance depends on similarity U it leads to a number of surprising predictions and one of them is if we think about our own memory uh if we ask the question who is most similar to me in the past then the answer is me I'm more similar to myself in

the past than to anyone else and the most specific resonance working on me from the past is from my own past and I think that U normal memory when I remember what happened yesterday or when I was a child um as well as habit memory remembering how to ride a bicycle or drive a car or play tennis or play the piano um I think all these forms of memory depend on morphic resonance I don't think they're stored as material traces in the brain now most scientists just take it for granted that me must be stored

inside the brain as material tracers uh even though these tracers haven't actually been found despite a century or more of looking for them um because they think that's the only possible way memory could work well actually there is another way and there's morphic resonance and I think it makes more sense of the phenomena of memory now when we come to biological form the idea of morphogenetic fields or form shaping Fields was first put forward in the 1920s by developmental biologists and since then uh it's been a minority view within biology but it's been a very

important view uh because it gives a holistic approach to understanding the development of form of an animal embryo or of a plant as it develops um the probably the leading proponent of morphogenetic Fields who's working in contemporary biology is the American biologist Michael Levin uh who speaks very well on the subject of morphogenetic fields these fields are top- down causal systemes as a leaf develops for example I think there's as it were an invisible mold or patent for the leaf that shapes the developing Leaf uh and as Fields they're intrinsically holistic a magnetic field for

examp example is completely holistic uh you can't take a slice out of a magnetic field like you take a slice out of a cake um and if you cut a magnet a bar Magnus in half you don't get half a magnet two halves of a magnet you get two small but complete magnets each with its own field and so I think morphogenetic fields are like that and they shape developing organisms form but the inheritance of morphogenetic fields um doesn't depend on genes now this was the problem I was wrestling with in Cambridge when I first

thought of the idea of morphic resonance how might these fields be inherited um genes can't explain the holistic development of form because genes are all about coding for the sequence of amino acids and proteins uh they give us the Right proteins they give every organism the right proteins and some genes are involved in switching on or switching off other genes uh which mean that they either make or don't make particular protein some epigenetic uh forms of inheritance involve uh switching on or switching off genes which are inherited so an organism can inherit a pattern of

genes being switched on or off from their ancestors depending on what's happened to the ancestors how they've adapted to their environment or how they've learned a particular U new skill or form of behavior so morphogenetic fields are one kind of what I call morphic Fields morphic field is like a genus of which morphic morphogenetic fields are a species morphogenetic fields are the morphic fields concerned with the development and form in animals and plants and microbes um behavioral fields are the fields concerned with the organization of behavior and the activity of the nervous system um which

underly animal behavior mental fields are the fields that underly mental activity social fields are the fields that underly social behavior like flocks of birds or schools of fish or termite colonies um all these Kinds are field are kind all different kinds of morphic field and morphic Fields have the common property of being shaped by morphic resonance having an inherent memory from the past so now coming to the point about genes and how they're in adequate for explaining inheritance what genes do as I've already pointed out is code for the sequence of amino acids in proteins

and some code for switching on or switching off other genes and some code for RNA which is involved in ribosomes and other structures in the cell and of course messenger RNA which is for making proteins so genes are all about protein synthesis and the control of protein synthesis now making the right proteins is very important for an organism but it's not enough it's like if you're building a house you need the right building materials cement mortar Timber tiles for the roof and so forth um but having the right building materials doesn't give you a house

just having those delivered to a building site uh doesn't create the house and the normal view in biology is to focus almost all the attention on genes and molecular biology how you get the right molecules and then it's simply Assumed that by complex interactions they'll self assemble into a cell or into a tissue or an organ ISM but that's simply an assumption and nobody knows how it works and they just say Well it happens by mechanisms not yet fully understood well it's like saying the house will just build itself if you just shake up the

building materials um enough that's not how it works a house has an architectural plan which is more like an idea than the thing um I mean you normally it's written down on paper um but it could just be an idea in the mind of the Builder not a physical observable thing at all and yet that's what shapes the structure of the house and with the same building materials you can build houses of different plants and different forms so I think that's the role that the morphic field plays shaping form the behavior and in the 1980s

when I first proposed the idea of morphic resonance and when I wrote about its role in inheritance like in my the presence of the past as you just quoted um there was tremendous opposition to this idea because everyone was convinced that genes would explain everything the Human Genome Project was Launched in 1987 um and the idea was that by coding by decoding the Genome of humans we'd understand human nature in molecular detail uh we'd know everything we needed to know about hereditary human nature in fact when the Human Genome Project was accomplished in the year

2000 um it turned out to be a tremendous disappointment first of all there were far fewer genes than anyone expected they expected about 100 thousands in fact they're only about 20,000 and we have fewer genes than a sein or and about less than half as many as a rice plant so uh it wasn't at all what people expected and then when people tried to predict uh human characteristics like proness to bre breast cancer or liability to become schizophrenic or things like that on the basis of genomes the predicted power was very low The genome could

only predict 5% or 10% of the inheritance of of these and other characteristics whereas it was known that 80 or 90% could be inherited but the dreams could only explain 5 to 10% and the rest of what was inherited came to be called The Missing heritability problem it was a huge shock for molecular biologist because They thought genes would explain everything and they don't um so I I think that a lot of what is not explained by genes is in fact explained by morphic resonance in the 198 80s people thought I was being outrageous when

I said that genes were grossly overrated and couldn't possibly explain most aspects of inheritance um and that's one reason Mor resonance was such a controversial idea at the time it's still controversial of course uh but the idea that there could be another form of inheritance over and above genes seem to most people impossible whereas now um we desperately need an understanding inheritance that goes beyond genes some people think that this can be explained by epigenetic inheritance it's now known that characteristics acquired by plants or animals as they adapt to their environment um can actually be

inherited this is the so-called inheritance of acquired characteristics and in 20th century biology in the west this was considered the ultimate heresy lamaran inheritance uh as proposed by Lamar in around 1800 uh it was considered to be uh completely tical because all heredity was supposed to be genetic interestingly In the Soviet Union under TD lenko the inheritance of acquired characters was Orthodox um and that made it even more controversial in the west and and taboo because um it became tied up with a cold war so there was a kind of cold war in biology as

well however around the year 2000 the evidence for the inheritance for acquired characters became overwhelming and it was rebranded epigenetic inheritance and is now a major research field within biology most people assume that this inheritance required characters can be explained by modifications to the expression of gen inheriting genes being switched on or Switched Off through things like methylation of the DNA or of hisone proteins associated with it um but actually I think a lot of what is branded epigenetic inheritance is actually a form of morphic resonance so I think morphic resonance leads to the inheritance

of required characters just as it's now known to happen and there may well be inherited epigenetic molecular changes but I think a lot of this inheritance is in fact due to morphe Resonance do we know the actual mechanism because you say resonance resonance so it means it must Resonate right but how does it work do we really know or it's a hunch still oh no one knows how it works um it's a postulate a hypothesis the hypothesis is that this happens now exactly how it happens nobody knows there have been various people whove attempted to

explain it for example David B the well-known Quantum physicist uh thought that morphic resonance could work through what he called the implicate order which is a hidden order that underlies Quantum processes um and affects the probabilities of events happening at the quantum level um Bernard Carr who is a British theatrical physicist thinks that morphic resonance may work through some of the extra Dimensions that are present in super string or M Theory in modern theoretical physics they have 10 or 11 Dimensions one of time and the others of space and he thinks these additional spatial Dimensions

could allow for these kinds of connections based on similarity that I'm talking about but hardly anyone understand super String Theory so if somebody says well you know what's the mechanism I say well here's super String Theory pages and Pages of impenetrable equations um most people aren't actually going to be any of the wiser uh as a result of this so I myself don't understand pages and pages of equations so I don't bother too much about these theoretical models because for me the important thing is the empirical question does it really happen um and doing experimental

tests to see if morphic resonance really does happen seems to be the priority if it can be established uh Beyond reasonable doubt that it's really going on uh then I think a lot of theoretical physicists and others would try and come up with models for it and we might not end up with a single model I mean after all when Faraday postulated the electric and the mag magnetic fields in the 1840s he had no idea how they worked and then Maxwell came along 20 years later with his equations of electromagnetism uh Maxwell's equations which treated

light as a vibration in the ether as an electromagnetic vibration in The Ether subtle matter then Einstein came along in 20 1905 in the special theory of relativity said there's no such thing as The Ether um it's just fields and then Quantum electrodynamics came along and Said oh well this is quantum vacuum field and electromagnetic phenomena depend on Virtual photons that appear and disappear from invisible field so theories of something as straightforward as light have changed a lot over the last 150 years um and so I don't think that even if there was a physical

theory of how morphic resonance works it probably wouldn't be the last word and new theories might come along so that's why I mean I I'm an empirical Scientist by Nature I mean I like doing experiments which is why I think that the primary question at the moment is what sort of phenomena does morphic resonance happen in and in in what ways can it actually be detected so what are the key examples you mentioned already some U of the morphic fields the most striking and most obvious maybe in your view you mean of morphic resonance um

morphic resonance and types of morphic fields you mentioned some of them already well the thing is that I think that morphogenetic fields which shape developing organisms um probably have an electrical component to them Michael Levan at T has shown that in developing tadpoles for example there are electric Fields over the whole organism and I think that's the morphogenetic field expresses itself through these electric Fields um but in terms of morphic resonance the memory principle I think the most striking examples are rats learning a new trick when rats were train trained to escape from water maze

in the long series of experiments at Harvard they got better and better at it and then because this looked like a inheritance for acquired characters which was very controversial people in Edinburgh University and Melbourne Australia um university uh did the same experiments their rats learned much quicker than the Harvard rats they took up where the Harvard ones had left off and the researchers in Australia showed that this Improvement continued uh the more rats that learned the trick the easier it got for others to learn it and this was not just rats descended from parents who'd

learned the trick but other Rats of the same breed also got better now that I think is a very good example of morphic resonance also in chemistry if you make new chemical compounds for the first time they're very hard to crystallize and I think that's because there isn't A morphogenetic field for that Crystal it hasn't happened yet um chemists often have to wait months or years before the first Crystal forms but after it's formed it gets easier and easier all around the world to crystallize the same compound uh the more often it's made chemists recognize

this but they just assume it must be because of fragments of previous crystals being wafted around the world in the atmosphere is invisible dust particles what I'm saying is the same would happen even when you filter out invisible dust particles and to take a contemporary example which uh is the subject of research at the moment in Britain there's a a student doing a project on this right now as we speak um if you take the word puzzle Wordle it's a felter word puzzle published every day by the New York Times um the word puzzle is

solved in a given day by millions of people I would predict that the word puzzle would be harder to do in the morning when it's just been published than in the evening when millions of people around the world already done it and indeed uh the student who's called Georgia black has uh actually found that people do in fact find it easy to get Wordle Right the first time or the second time um as the day goes on um so that looks as if more could be working that of course in the real life experiments life

sort of messy because people could be cheating and one would need to do more rigorous experiments but the fact the fact that this seems to be happening with wle is particularly interesting because one of the things I predicted years ago is that it should be easier to do the Times crossw puzzle the day after it's published and the day it is published because so many people would have done it as should make it easier for others to do and quite a number of people who do serious crosswords have actually found that and there was even

uh an experiment with crossword puzzles here in England uh showing that yes they did seem to get easier to do after many people had done them so morphe resonance can be tested in many different ways in the chemical realm in in the biological realm through inheritance um and also in in the realm of human learning through things like word puzzles so what I'm hearing you saying is that actually we cannot study morphic Fields directly Or morphogenetic fields or morphic resonance we can only study the effects of of those right yes there isn't a way to

measure it because for example you know NASA just measured for the first time the global electric field of the earth and that's a theory which is 60 years old but we only managed to measure it for the first time just just now recently like last month or something do you think morphic Fields will ever be measured as such well I think you can measure them um the thing is you measure fields are measured through Fields themselves if you want to measure an electric field you don't use a pendulum like you'd use to measure a gravitational

field or or um you use an meter if you want a magnetic field you use a magnetic meter if you're measuring a gravitational field you use a torsion thing or or some pendulum system where you're looking at the attraction between masses you don't do it electrically you can't measure a gravitational field with electric meter um and so you can't measure a morphogenetic field with a gravitational detector or detector or an electric field except in so far as the morphogenetic field Affects the electric field but you're not measuring it directly we always measure Fields through their

effects um we don't measure the field directly we measure the electrical field through its effect on some electrically charged particle or we measuring a magnetic field throughs effect on a magnet for example the Earth magnetic field we measure through a little magnet which is the compass needle um we're not measuring the Earth's magnetic field through uh through say a thermometer you you have to measure it through the right kind of thing so if you want to study the morphogenetic field of um the involved in the development of a plant then you could measure the strength

of the field by having large numbers of plants modified in a particular way adapting to a particular environment and then seeing um how strong the effect is Al take the rat example um if you have rats that are getting better at learning a maze the strength of the field depends on how many have already learned it so if there's a thousand rats have learned it the effect should be stronger than if only 10 rats have learned it and so you'd see Rats learning it more quickly after a thousand than after 10 had learned it before

and that would give you a measurement of the strength of the field you could plot it on the gr the number of rats that have Lear Le it versus the speed at which new rats learn it um so you can measure them but you have to measure them through Mor morphic effects rather than through electric meters or thermometers do you know that in Japan um they use physarum algorithm and and that's something uh which was developed by biologist Professor toshiyuki nakagaki who I'm not really my Japanese not really up these days uh and what he's

done he used he used mazes slime mold and sugar and um so he he let the mold F in the Maze uh going from one end to another seeking sugar on the other side and the first thing the first thing uh what happens the mold filling up completely the entire Maze and then it starts retracting and it retracts and it removes itself from every dead end and and suboptimal Route so he ended up several times with absolutely optimal uh you know path from one end to another in the Maze and so they developed they studied

that they developed phm algorithm They call it and they use it to optimize the National Railway Network because it's cheaper it's more effective and more ingenious um I don't know if you've heard of this example so is there is there a way to explain this through the point of view from the point of view of morphic or Mor morphogenetics of resonance well I mean in in that kind of experiment you see one of the things that slime molds and also fungi can do and this is something my son Merlin writes about in his book on

fungi entangled life um they they can Branch out in many different directions all at once I mean an animal if it's in a maze say a fruit fly it reaches a junction it can any go one way left or right but if it's a mold or a slime mold it can go both ways all at once and then find the answer and then retract or dissolve the other branches now that's I mean it's basically I suppose to start with trial or error just exploring all possibilities then you find something that works and then concentrate on

that um what I'd like to know in relation to the fusarium experiments is when they did exactly the same experiment again and again did the did They learn quicker on subsequent trials now you see that morphe resence might then be involved if they now learn quicker and could adapt faster unfortunately most scientists when they do their experiments are based they base it on the hidden assumption within science that nature is governed by eternal laws this was built into science as an assumption in the 17th century and it's basically a version of the platonic philosophy that

there's an Ultimate Reality out there that's mathematical it never changes it's beyond space and time and it influences everything in the universe at all places in all at all times um and therefore when you do an experiment uh if you do it again another time it should be exactly the same the results because the laws of nature don't change every scientific experiment should in principle be repeatable indefinitely and not depend on what's happened in the past and because most scientists just take that for granted they're not even aware that it's an assumption it's just so

much the common sense of science is part of the Eternal law Paradigm which is built into the foundations of contemporary science um that when They do an experiment over and over again instead of looking carefully to see if it happens quicker as time goes on they just assume that it's the same uh and if it does get quicker they assume it's just them getting better doing the experiment through experience and people often find they do get easier to do and the experiments things do happen faster but when they're doing research they're not looking for morphic

resonance effect and so they always explain way these findings by saying oh well it must has have been us um this is I one example of this is in chemistry um I predict that because of morphic resonance when you make a new Crystal as time goes on the crystal become more and more stable as a result of morphic resonance from previous crystals of the same kind and because it's more stable it would be hard to break harder to break it up and how you break up crystals is by heating them and the point at which

they break up is called the melting point so I predict that new compounds should show gradually increasing melting points as time goes on now most chemists assume that melting points are physical constants in fact they're printed in Books called handbooks of physical constants but when you look at n libraries science libraries or online resources at these physical constant U reference works um they're continually updated you know the the CRC Handbook of physical constants is like the 45th Edition and the reason they're outdated is because the constants actually change and new ones come new one new

chemicals come along um and actually the melting points do go up um you know the vast majority of chemicals newly formed chemicals the melting points do rise I I've found this by looking into the history of melting points and I've uh several chemists have helped me with this research um so then when you say chemists look these melting points are actually changing they're going up they say oh that's just because we're getting better at making the chemicals you know the impurities is lower the melting point and so we must be getting pure and purer samples

that have higher melting points you say well how do you know they're pure they well they must be pure they've got higher melting points so you see they they don't just don't think in terms of Trying to look at the same phenomenon under exactly the same conditions repeatedly which is why I think morphic resonance is going on in the bares all the time but frustratingly people simply don't notice it um um so one the things I try and do is encourage people working in Laboratories where they're studying new chemicals or new materials or new Quantum

systems which are actually Material Science and solid state physics is one of the most exciting areas of current physics people are continually developing new superconducting systems or with new physical macroscopic Quantum properties and I think if they look uh if they do exactly the same experiment repeatedly they should see the process speeding up or happening more easily um and the I think the data are already there in lots of Laboratories but people simply don't look at it through this lens are there laws of nature you mentioned laws of nature or maybe well are there any

constants at all because or is just Tendencies and habits of nature because when I was at school it was all very clear solid you know you measure you get the result it's all the same you know and they're are Hard laws of nature you just have to learn them yes that's it well that's the standard assumption you see since the 17th century there are laws of nature and but actually when you think about it uh the whole concept of laws of nature is very very questionable to start with it's incredibly anthropocentric um here in Britain

one of the founders of modern science was s Francis Bacon and Sir Francis Bacon was one of the first people in the early 17th century to speak about the laws of nature and the role of Science in finding that well Francis Bacon's day job was was Lord Chancellor of England he was a lawyer and so naturally the metaphor of law came to him uh the idea just as the king of England could make up new laws and and and the Lord Chancellor could help enforce them and interpret them so the ruler of the universe God

made up laws of nature and because God was all powerful and was the cosmic police force but nothing could disobey the laws of nature um they were just rigidly had to follow the laws of nature as totally obedient to the laws of nature or matter the whole universe that was the metaphor so it's obviously highly Anthropomorphic but if you think through the metaphor the fact is the laws of England change and the laws of everywhere else change um and in fact in England the laws depend on common law some of them depend on you know

what we call common law depending not on what laws being passed by Kings or Parliament but on precedents if a judge finds a particular judgment in a particular case then that judgment is cited in subsequent cases because it sets a precedent and a lot of our law is based on common law it's based on custom or tradition um it's different from the Continental System of Napoleonic law um where you have a kind of codified code Napoleon you know where all the laws are codified hied and so on in England they've evolved and the laws of

even the code Napoleon I mean was started under Napoleon it's not as if it was the law of the French law forever um so even that has a of course a history and French laws and been modified ever since that Cod was put forward so I think that the uh if we actually think through the metaphor of laws they evolve they change with time and Circumstance so the idea of aernal and fixed is a violation Of the very concept of law as we actually know it um but then the other thing is you see it's

hugely anthropocentric because only humans have laws and in fact tribal societies have Customs they don't have codified laws only civilized societies have laws so it's a highly anthropocentric metaphor um and I think the metaphor of habit is much more natural I mean we have habits animals have habits even crystals have habits crystallographers speak about Crystal habits um so um habits are very very widespread in nature laws are not so I think evolving habits make much more sense than fixed laws and then of course the idea of constant which you mentioned that again is it's assumed

that the laws and constants of nature were all LED done at the moment of the big bang that somehow at the very moment of the Big Bang about 13 billion years ago um suddenly out of nowhere the entire universe came into existence all the matter and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it suddenly appeared and they've never changed since um that's the standard scientific assumption as my friend Terence McKenna used to say the modern Science is based on the principle give us One free miracle and we'll explain the rest and this

is the one free Miracle all the matter and energy in the universe suddenly appears from nowhere um and all the laws that govern it and uh and the constants the speed of light the charge on the electron uh the fine structure constant the big the gravitational constant Big G um all these constants are supposed to be fixed well um how do we know if you actually measure these constants uh they change all the time which is why you have ever new editions of handbooks of physical constants Big G varies quite a lot the Newton's gravitational

constant by as much as 1% in recent decades U these things are supposed to be defined to many places of decimals um and so when they they vary the normal Assumption of physicist is to say oh well the previous ones must have been measuring errors and the new one is the latest best value and stuff and then five or 10 years later there's a new best value comes along um so all of this you see is just pure assumption that the laws and the constants are fixed and then it leads to a tissue of speculation

which obsesses cosmologists and people who follow Popular Science If all the laws and constants were fixed at the moment of the Big Bang why were they fixed in exactly the right way for us to exist for life to appear the laws could have been different the constants could have been different and if they were the universe would never have given rise to carbon atoms to life on Earth etc etc this the anthropic principle the cosmological anthropic principle um so people say well then if they're exactly right for us and all these things have completely fine-tuned

exactly right then either there must be a kind of engineering God who's outside the universe who fine-tunes the knobs the constants and everything before he presses the start button for the Big Bang which is a kind of neoism a kind of 18th century machine making god um outside the universe which then proceeds automatically once it's been started um or they say Well there must be billions trillions of actual universes we just exist in the one that's right for us as the only one we can actually know but all the others actually exist and then you

say to why else do you want to postulate billions of unobserved universes for which there's not A shred of evidence no evidence whatsoever um for all these extra universes and yet the people who believe this are eminent scientists for example Lord Reese who was president of the royal Society master of Trinity College Cambridge astronomer Royal um is one of the proponents of this evidence free hypothesis um it's amazing to me that cosmologists can get away with this I mean if you work in say as I do things like telepathy and you have really good evidence

for telepathy there sort of hulls of protests there oh no no evidence would be enough to convince us that something like that could exist yet billions of extra univ I es and get away with it scot-free um so anyway they assumed that there are all these extra universes in order to try and explain why the laws and constants were fixed at the big bang and the way they are and the reason they wanten lots of universes as I asked Lord Reese himself about this I said well why do you want all these ultimate all this

all these universes and he said well that way we can get rid of God and I said well you mean by postulating trillions of universes you think this is a simpler hypothesis than God he said but I Said it seems to me like the ultimate violation of aam's Razor you know that you shouldn't postulate unnecessary entities um he said well I agree that's a bit of a problem we're working on it um so U so the point is that as the alians have pointed out um if an infinite God could be the god an infinite

number of universes they haven't even got rid of God they just proliferated universes and all this follows from the unquestioned Assumption the laws and constants must be fixed whereas in an evolutionary Universe to me it makes much more sense to think of them as evolving U through natural selection unsuccessful habits don't get repeated successful ones get repeated the more often they're repeated the more habitual they become so most of the phenomena in physics that we look at in physics Labs the behavior of hydrogen atoms for example uh they've been doing much the same thing for

14 billion years so these habits are extremely fixed they they behave as if they're governed by Eternal laws but when you look at new chemical compounds or new physical systems like Bose Einstein condensates that probably never existed in nature before they were created in low Temperature physics Labs then you're looking at things that are really new where you may well be able to see morphic resonance effects so anyway I think the idea of fixed laws and fixed constants leads into absurd uh absurd theoretical speculations which are completely unnecessary the whole question of is there a

God who fine-tunes nature or other billions of universes as an alternative to this engineering god um this entire ridiculous debate just Fades away it melts away like the Morning Mist uh if you have the idea of the evolutional habits of nature not laws what is the role of the brain in the context of morphic field theory is it the tuning mechanism for morphic systems and where memories are stored and where Collective memories are stored in your view yeah the brain is a tuning system I think um and it helps to coordinate our perceptions through our

senses and our movements um obviously you need a brain in order to coordinate your bodily movements including movements of your MTH and speech organs in order to speak um so brains are intimately connected with perception and with movement I don't think all our thoughts ideas And dreams Etc are stored inside our heads uh I don't think that our Consciousness is confined to the inside of the head either I think our minds stretch out like Fields far beyond our brains um the field of a magnet stretches out far beyond a magnet um the field the gravitational

field of the earth stretches out far beyond the Earth invisibly the field of your mobile telephone stretches out far beyond the mobile telephone invisibly I mean this room I'm mean in the room you're in are full of mobile telephone Transmissions radio and TV Transmissions they're invisible we can't see them but they're all there uh we can find them if we have a device that resonates with them that Picks Them Up by resonance so I think that our brains are are like that resonant devices pick up Memories by resonance and I think the fields of our

minds are extended all around us all the time for example I'm seeing an image review Natalia on the screen at the moment about 2 feet in front of me um and I think my image review is located on the screen where it seems to be whereas the official view is that it's inside my head the official view is the light comes from the Screen goes into my eyes inverted images changes in cone cells impulses up the optic nerve changes in the cerebral cortex particularly the visual cortex and then in a way no one understands um

a three-dimensional full color image of the World Around Me appears inside my brain which I imagine I have the illusion that it's actually out there but it's actually inside my head now I think the images I'm seeing are out there I think I project them out I think changes happen in the brain and I'm projecting out everything I'm seeing it's out there it's in my mind but it's not inside my brain so I think just the simplest acted Vision just looking at anything um tells us the mind is extended the official view would cram all

of this into our brain and tell us it's all really inside the head um and so I think that the fields of our minds are morphic Fields I think when we see things their perceptual Fields we're not seeing what's exactly there what we're seeing is our interpretation of it which is projected onto whatever we're looking at um some neuroscientists call perception a controlled hallucination I think is quite a good phrase I think it's A it's controlled because it has to fit with the input of our senses um if it doesn't then it's an uncontrolled hallucination

and we're seeing things that aren't really there we're hallucinating or we're seeing Illusions but normally it's control by being brought into T correspondence with what we're actually seeing or experiencing through the senses but it's not inside the brain um I one of the things I do is try to test this you see the idea is are all our thoughts and inside our brains um is taken for granted by most psychologists and most materialist philosophers and most people whove been indoctrinated with the materialist world view but it doesn't correspond to our experience and no one's ever

seen these three-dimensional virtual reality displays inside heads um uh but so some philosophers have started questioning it and they there are some of them who called radical externalists some of them called enactivists um uh who say that yes uh the controlled hallucinations aren't all inside our brain they do Stand Out beyond our brain into the world around us but the trouble with with just saying that is it's kind of armchair philosophy It doesn't make any difference really uh because they don't think these extensions of our minds actually do anything whereas I think they do do

something I feel that if I look at something my mind is reaching out to touch it and it might affect it just by looking at it now if I look at another person from behind and they don't know I'm there if my mind touches them and if I can affect them they might feel me looking at them and turn around and actually this is a very very well-known phenomenon the sense of being stared at or the technical scientific name is scop athesia scop look looks as in microscope aesthesia feeling as in anesthesia synesthesia um so

I think that uh people and animals can be affected by being looked at and they respond by turning around 95% of people have had this experience looking at others who've turned around or turning around to find someone staring at them um now this is a completely taboo topic within the academic world it ought not to happen if the mind's all in the brain therefore for many scientists it doesn't happen it can't happen therefore it doesn't happen and therefore all the evidence For it from millions of people all through the world all through human history the

results of tens of thousands of controlled experiments which have already been done uh all of this is of no relevance at all because it's impossible it doesn't exist and no one should be allowed to discuss it in a university or in scientific journal um because it's a taboo topic this is the current situation but actually the evidence for it is quite strong and so I think that this is an area where we can actually explore a philosophical idea a metaphysical idea about the nature of mind the extended mind the nature of vision uh empirically um

so I think for me and that's for the Stile ideas to be tested experimentally um you know they they have less interest than if they if there's is just philosophical ideas I think testing things experimentally is very important and now coming to your question about memory in the brain um as I already said I don't think memories are stored inside the brain uh you see people think it's all inside the head the memories are all there the mind's all there everything's inside the head this very Centric View of Consciousness uh which is has been standard

in materialism um the whole universe is unconscious there's no memory anywhere in the universe the only consciousness in the entire universe is inside human brains and maybe the brains of other animals um as the standard view um and so memory uh is purely a psychological phenomenon and therefore must be inside the brain well people have tried to find physical memory traces inside brains for more than a 100 years with very with no success they've just simply been elusive over and over again and I think that's cuz they're not there there I think the brain's a

tuning system not a memory storage system I think it's more like a TV set than a video recorder um I think it's tuning in to the memories across time a TV set Tunes in by resonance across space electromagnetic resonance across space I think memory depends on brain tuning in through morphic resonance across time um and uh so it's a tuning system the memories aren't in the brain and our perceptions are everything we see isn't in the brain either so the brain is certainly important essential for perception and for action and so on Uh but I

think it's grossly overrated and I think all the things are supposed to happen inside it um are not really inside it at all the memories aren't really inside it and the perceptions aren't really inside it and indeed this goes for our whole body when I feel a pain in my toe um the official view is the pain isn't actually in my toe it's in my brain and it's then referred to the toe I think it's actually in the toe I think our minds are extended throughout our bodies and far beyond them but where is the

Mind located and is there such thing like mind at large and what's the relationship between mind at large and our perception or experience of our own little Minds in your view well I think our body is normally the center of our Consciousness I mean our Consciousness is centered in our bodies normally when we're awake when we're asleep then it's a different matter um in our dreams we have dream worlds which are lit up by light we have a kind of Inner Light which is present in our dreams and in visions and in h and in

Psych elic experiences you can have vivid psychedelic experiences with your eyes shut yet things are Lit up and they're in full color um so and we're you're in a different space in my dreams I can move around I can talk to people I can go to places I have a dream body that's not the same as my physical body that's lying asleep in bed um so that space the normal assumption is all that space is inside the brain too it doesn't feel like it and there's evidence it is I mean the brain certainly has certain

changes in Rhythm when you're dreaming but that doesn't prove that everything you're dreaming uh is is nothing about those changes in Rhythm uh in the brain uh those may be a state you go into when you're when you're dreaming I mean you could leave a car engine on and you could go for a walk in the countryside and the car would be stationary the engine would just be running if someone who measured the car engine would say well this is what the engines like when people feel they're having an experience outside the car by wandering

around and it would correlate with going for a walk uh in the countryside but it wouldn't correlate with what you're seeing or experiencing it would simply correlate with the um the fact that you're not in the car and the Car stationary I mean a lot of people think the brain is Consciousness is nothing but the brain because changing the brain changes Consciousness but the philosopher Ari bergon had a very simple answer to that which is you know if you have a coat hanging on a nail uh in or coat hook take away the coat Hook

and the coat collapses to the floor but the coat hook um doesn't explain the shape of the coat or the color of the coat or anything like that although the coat being there intimately depends on the Cod hook so dreams may depend on the brain but the content of the dreams may not be related uh in any very close way to what's happening in the brain so I think that know our minds extend beyond our brains in ordinary perception but also in our dreams and so where is your mind when you're dreaming I think it's

in a dream world in a dream space which is a virtual realm of consciousness that's not the same as our waking State of Consciousness and I think psychedelic experiences are also in something a bit like the dream world but it's much more Vivid and immediate the same kind of imaginal world that we can and maybe when we die we enter A world like that we can't get out of it because we can't wake up anymore um so um so I think our minds are normally centered in our bodies in Waking Life in dream life they're

centered in our Dream bodies because we have a cent a point of view in dreams we're not everywhere all the time we have a a presence in a particular place in in a dream body I think there's a collective mind or memory that works through all people we all participate in a collective unconscious as you put a collective memory um and that's expressed through individual humans I think the mind of the if we take a panus view and say well the the Earth has a mind then the mind of the Earth would be in and

around the earth and if we take the view the sun has a mind which I think it has and I think the sun is conscious um then the mind of the sun is within and around the sun and the mind of other stars is within and around those Stars the mind of the Galaxy is within and around the Galaxy the mind of the entire Cosmos is is within and around the entire Cosmos so I think there is a cosmic mind uh underlying the whole Cosmos um it's not a new idea of course the animal Mundi

the soul Of the Earth in Plato and in neoplatonism it's a very important concept so if you want the idea of Mind At Large the I spose the cosmic mind would be the ultimate um mind and then if we take the idea of the Divine mind then one one would say unless one's a pantheist where the cosmic mind is the mind of God and the mind of God would be Beyond The Cosmic mind Transcendent of the cosmic mind which would include not just our Cosmos but all possible coses all possible um worlds um so I

I think that if we're going to have the idea mind at large then it's a it's it's going to be very large if we think this idea through can morphic Fields be understood as collective memories of Nature's mind or the Mind At Large and why do you think nature is organized in fields what's the reason for it well nature is made up of organizations of different levels of size and complexity um know if you have have an atom it's made up of a nucleus and the electrons around it and the nucleus is made up of

nuclear particles um so and then a molecule is made up of atoms bound together so at each level you have say the atom like that and then you have a molecular field around the Molecule then if it's a crystal you have a crystal field around all the molecules that make up the Crystal and give it its order and in in our bodies you have fields around each molecule in the body around ular complexes like ribosomes organel like mitochondria and nuclei then fields of the whole cell and Fields of tissues fields of organs fields of organisms

fields of societies of organisms like termite Ms Fields of whole ecosystems fields of the planet Earth of the solar system of the Galaxy you have a whole series a nested hierarchy or holarchy of fields one within the other each level uh the whole is more than the sum of the parts and at each level I think there's a morphic field with its own memory organizing that hole so I think there are many levels of fields and they're in a hierarchy not in some kind of arbitary H hungry structure where one field is dictating it over

other ones but simply by virtual inclusion you know the Earth is undoubtedly included within the solar system which is a higher level field the solar system is undoubtedly included within the Galaxy which is a higher level field and and it's it's higher level it's more inclusive and Larger and more inclusive um so I think that's why Fields you need different levels of morphic fields you know you you have that you say that the mind is not really located in our brains and it's all around right so you're saying essentially that minds are porous I have

a friend of mine and she doesn't like football but she loves to go to games so I asked her why are you going to football games she said oh I want to feel all these emotions and soak it up I feel so energized afterwards so my question is I thought our thoughts and emotions do you think they're all our own well there I think as you say we we share in Collective um moods we're connected we resonate with each other we're part of social groups um we're social animals and all social animals have a way

of resonating with other members of the social group I mean flocks of birds when you see starlings flying together you can have hundreds of thousands of Starlings flying together and they change direction without bumping into each other not only do they know know where their neighbors are but they know where they're going to go there's a kind of group mind phenomenon which Is modeled mathematically it can be modeled as a field um that's how it's modeled um so I think that we're termites and you know the whole Behavior the whole behavior of a flock of

of of animals know like a flock of sheep uh they can all be frightened at the same time and panicked together and and and and and show Collective responses and as humans we do too um I think that the we have a whole range of social fields of which we're part probably the most basic being the family and family Fields have um patterns or structures that hold the members of the family together in their relationship with each other and I think our morphic fields and our families inherit patterns from previous generations of the family and

this is one of the things that comes to light in systemic family constellation work my wife Joe Pur is a practitioner of systemic family constellations so I've often seen this at work and it really is as if there's a memory coming through the family field uh that affects people in the family so individual Psychotherapy uh often can't help somebody Who's acting out a p p as part of the family field only becoming aware Of the family field and the inherited pattern within it can the person be released from what would otherwise be compulsive destructive behavior

um so I think we're always influenced by these and then of course a football team is a social field uh working together uh coordinated with each other and then their supporters uh which share in the mood of the changing mood as the game goes on Al all sing or all excited when there's a goal and stuff they they're sharing in these Collective emotions is very much part of being a wider social field all social Animals by definition have uh social structures and organizations and which I think are a kind of morphic field and we have

lots so we have our family fields we have the fields of schools of businesses of particular groups of friends teams like football and cricket teams um and you know the fields of jazz bands fields of orchestras fields of choirs and then they're all fields of religion and religious rituals which again are fields of activity and through taking part in them we connect by morphic resonance with other people and with those who've taken part in similar rituals before all of these I think Are examples are are being part of something larger than ourselves what is intuition

from the perspective of morphic resonance well there are different kinds of intuition so you you have to distinguish between them and there's one kind of intuition uh which is presentiment feeling the future I don't think that's necessarily a part of morphic resonance at all because it's morphic resonance come from the past and there seems to be a way in which we can be open to the future we can dream about events that haven't yet happened as in precognitive dreams um animals can feel for boings or premonitions of events that haven't yet happened for example earthquakes

and tsunamis I done research on the way in which animals can respond sometimes several days in advance before an earthquake they pick up something's going to happen no one knows how they do it um but they can do it and often do do it before earthquakes and tsunamis lots of different species um so I think there's I don't morphic resonance explains everything it doesn't explain creativity and various aspects of Consciousness it explains habits it mainly explains Unconscious habits um and when a crystal or plant cell are developing I'm not saying they're conscious because of morphic

resonance they they may be but most of our own behavior is unconscious and uh I think most of nature the habits are unconscious um so yeah so I think that the morphic resonance and uh can help explain some form of intuition particularly telepathy um telepathy occurs between members of social groups almost all cases of human and animal telepathy are between closely bonded people or animals um I wrote a whole book on animal telepathy called dogs that know when their owners are coming home because many dogs and cats and other animals pick up the intention of

their owner when they're on the way home they go and wait into a door or window um often quite a long time in advance 10 minutes 20 minutes half an hour in advance long before they could have heard or smelled the person coming I've done lots of experiments on it too have people come at non-routine times from at least 8 kilometers away um in unfamiliar Vehicles we film the dog all the time and sure enough the dog starts waiting when they form the intention To come home and some dogs only do it a few minutes

before and and when it's very shortly before it could be hearing footsteps or car wheels on the gravel or something but in many cases it's long before that could possibly explain it um and so I think there's a kind of resonance in telepathy um where if if I'm bonded with someone we're connected through the morphic field of our group we've interacted many times in the past uh there's a kind of memory of our interactions and if I focus my intention on that person or animal uh they may feel it by a kind of resonance um

so I think dogs can feel when they're in are coming home many people feel when someone wants to call them uh the commonest kind of telepathy in the modern world is telephone telepathy which happens in connection with telephone calls emails or text messages um where most people have had the experience of thinking of someone who then calls them or sends them a message uh and then they say it's funny I just thinking about you or lots of people just know who it is when they hear the phone ring before they look at the caller ID

um or um answer the telephone so these forms of Telepathy are a kind of intuition I think those are expiable uh through morphic resonance because they're about connection Within the social group and a resonance between a resonant connection between different members of the social group even when they're far away from each other you Advocate change in the current scientific Paradigm what do you think needs to change and why well I what needs to change is is moving towards a view of nature as alive organic and interconnected as opposed to a view of nature as Machin

likee inanimate unconscious and unconnected um except through gravity electromagnetism Etc um so I wrote a book The Science delusion which is called science set free in the United States where I take the 10 dogmas of contemporary science and show that we really need to move on Beyond them uh in all 10 cases the the dogmas have been proceded by science itself that's it yes and so um what I'm arguing you see is that the U mechanistic materialism the current Paradigm is inadequate what we need is a view of nature as alive nature is more like

an an organism than a machine if we if we want to guiding metaphor for the universe For the Sun for the stars for organism then the organism is a better met for than the machine the idea that the laws evolve in fact they're more like habits is part of that new U Paradigm which I've already talked about um the idea that Consciousness is pervasive throughout the Universe and the universe in the end comes forth from Consciousness um is I think a very important part of the new paradigm now th those differences of opinion about how

that ultimate Consciousness is related to the universe analytical idealism as in Bernard castr is one way of thinking of it there are other ways too I myself take a different view but I agree with castr that Consciousness is primary um and so then it's question of how do we explain the material structures and the behavior of nature um With An Origin in Consciousness an ultimate origin or Source in Consciousness that takes us into Realms of metaphysics and theology which we don't have time to discuss now um that would be the topic for a separate U

discussion do we need to bring or should we strive to bring science closer to spirituality Would we not lose science if we do that I wrote two books On science and spirituality one called science and spiritual practices and another one called ways to go beyond and why they work and each book is about seven different spiritual practices including prayer meditation pilgrimage fasting um rituals singing and chanting uh connecting with nature um celebration and holy days that each book that deals with a variety of spiritual practices which have been investigated scientifically and when scientists actually investigate

the effects and say meditation on people they have measurable effects there's changes in blood pressure physiology brain waves um there's increased wello well-being less proness to depression there's all sorts of measurable effects from spiritual practices so I think science can help to illuminate uh spiritual practices and already shows that they're beneficial in general people who have spiritual or religious practices are happier healthier and live longer than those that don't so I think the evidence is already pretty clear that I think militant atheism should come with a health warning uh in so far as it alienates

people from traditional spiritual practices and Gives them very little in turn except an elusory sense of intellectual superiority um so I think that the practice of science uh needs to be liberated from these constrictive dogmas of mechanistic materialism as I show in my book The Science delusion um if we go beyond those dogmas science gets much more interesting all sorts of new research becomes possible new questions can be asked we can find out more about nature and more about Consciousness um by doing science in a new more open way um but what remains part of

science so crucial to it is the empirical approach the putting forward of hypothesis the critical discussion and the testing of hypothesis by experiment um that the scientific method um I'm only infavor of but I think what we need is a science that uses scientific method but which is is no longer constricted in the way it is at present by the dogmas of mechanistic materialism then all sorts of new questions and new experiments would become possible Robert one last question for students and young scientist what advice would you give them striving you know for future science

to change the Paradigm What what would you say to them it's difficult at the moment to change it if you're a student I'm not a student and I find it pretty difficult to try and change it it's controversial if you do anything really radical you'll lose your job um you won't get grants from official granting agencies uh leading journals will turn down your papers because they say they're not scientific enough or they don't fit the existing models and so forth um and there's virtually no one teaching in universities moment um a more holistic approach to

science so I think the only thing at the moment is to go ahead with studying regular science so you need to know how do experiments you need to know the concepts the terminology you need to how know how to publish papers and scientific journals um and you won't be able to make much difference to science without knowing about it and without knowing its conventions but then I think U there are certain areas where things are opening up for example in the realm of research on psychedelics um there's been a real opening in in terms of

what's possible within institutional science uh and in Consciousness Studies in general uh is now possible to study things that would have been impossible to study in the 20th century things like lucid dreaming uh near-death experiences end of life experiences um you know Visions uh mystical experiences and so forth um so I think there are certain areas that are already opening up I think in other areas they haven't opened up yet but they will and they'll only be able to open up if there are people willing to do research in these areas and willing to fund

it and I don't think official government sponsored agencies are going to fund anything very radical anytime soon CU they're dominated by committees made up of establishment scientists who will preserve the existing Paradigm that's what they've been trained to do that's what their whole career is based on but there is the possibility of unconventional science funding there are now more billionaires than there have ever been before and some of them are interests in science um so hopefully there will be foundations that will found uh research in these areas that all already one or two the B

foundation in Portugal B uh funds a lot of research in Paras pychology and In psychophysiology um so there are already a few fairly small foundations funding this well I think that number will increase and I think we all need to encourage people who have sufficient money to use that money more creatively than it's being used at present so I hope that the scientific Paradigm will change but anyone who goes to University or does a PhD expecting it to change you know in the next year or two is going to be disappointed the whole educational system

is still mechanistically materialist throughout we're still educating children in schools and universities um you know in the mechanistic materialist worldview uh so change will come but most of the ways in which you can learn about the these broader ideas unfortunately are not inside universities and the official courses but fortunately readily available through YouTube and other online sources like the asentia foundation itself and these are educational institutions which are not in the traditional mold and in most of them you won't get a bit of paper say you're qualified in a way that will get you a

better job but there's certainly plenty of ways now to broaden your mind And to learn about things that you wouldn't learn about in a university yet but hopefully soon you will be able to but not very soon probably rer thank you very much for this interview a pleasure [Music]