| home |
Habitude - dialogues with Rupert Sheldrake070327 6/4/07
I am delighted to hear about your renewed interest and efforts to seek evidence of morphic resonance operating on ‘transitions of crystalline materials’. I hope the trip to Washington goes well and look forward to hearing if you’re successful in getting some cooperation and access to facilities for such work.
I am interested in the distinction you make in your reply between ‘morphic resonance’ as the process of habit operating through time, and ‘morphic fields’ as a term for spatial interconnections. To the extent I am an academic, my field is Literature (I have an MA and am working towards a PhD), which brings in philosophy and the role of language. At a common sense level, language matters, communication depending on it, but the power of language goes beyond that, particularly concerning what Deleuze calls the ‘concepts’ created by the major philosophers: Descartes’ ‘cogito’, Einstein’s ‘relativity’ are obvious examples. It is a very powerful thing for a philosopher to have the right name for his concept, a handle to pull to call to mind the whole thing. In Deleuze’s sense your concept is called ‘the hypothesis of formative causation’ – quite a mouthful. The terms ‘morphic resonance’ and ‘morphic field’ are part of that, but neither links to the whole concept, which is why I call your concept ‘habitude’, which means the forms in space (morphic fields) persisting – and/or growing and evolving – in Bergsonian time or duration (morphic resonance). (If you know Deleuze you’ll be aware that he makes a distinction between philosophers, who create ‘concepts’, and scientists, who create ‘functions’ and are not philosophers. However, Deleuze is notoriously slippery and ‘difficult’…)
I have not forgotten that you are interested in suggestions for giving morphic resonance and morphic fields (habitude) more prominence on your web site. I am giving this quite a lot of thought, but I rather feel that tweaks and additions to the existing web site wouldn’t do it. One of the difficulties I have in discussing my hopes for your ideas is that my priority is world change, and yours is your experimental work. Obviously you know that morphic resonance has a hold both on how the planet ‘behaves’ organically – hopefully holding off climate change entering a positive feedback stage as Lovelock fears it might – and on how society ‘thinks’ collectively, tending to mitigate against revolutionary change or paradigm shift. I think perhaps the way to go is for me to describe my ‘version’ of your ideas on a new web site, and I’ve just acquired the domain name www.habitude.org.uk. If you like what I do with this, you could at a minimum put a link to it on your web site, I would love it if you contributed something to it, and you could even take it over at some stage.
Best of luck with the trip.
Love, Chris
From : Rupert Sheldrake <ars@dircon.co.uk> Sent : 03 April 2007 14:33:37 To : Chris Marsh <chris_e_marsh@hotmail.com> Subject : Re: experiments
Dear Chris,
Thanks for your further reflections. I suppose the difference in opinion between us is that you think I should be putting far more emphasis on morphic resonance than I am. But I think evidence for telepathy would help to establish fields of interconnection, which I would call morphic fields and would be a step on the way. I think it’s also important, for reasons not just connected with my own hypothesis, to open up thinking about the nature of the mind and break out of the narrow materialist view that’s still predominant, and evidence for telepathy, or any form of ESP, would help that.
The best evidence for morphic resonance would be from crystal systems, I quite agree. Unfortunately I don’t have a laboratory to do experiments with crystals and many attempts to persuade people with such laboratories have failed. They have no incentive to do unconventional work that might get them into trouble with their colleagues. However I am in touch with an open-minded crystal materials scientist in the US, who I’m planning to meet later this month when I’m in Washington, and I am indeed making efforts to try and get experiments done in that area. What has held me back for years is that fact that I can’t do them myself, whereas I can do experiments on telepathy and kindred phenomena.
In particular, what I’m hoping to find is somebody who works on transitions of crystalline materials at high pressures, or at very low temperatures, or in strong magnetic fields. All these kinds of transitions are probably new transitions in nature. They can be measured quite precisely. The prediction of morphic resonance would be that if the measurements are repeated, the transition should occur more easily the more often it has happened before. This would in principle provide a good test for morphic resonance. But it all hinges on finding someone who’s interested and sympathetic and I am indeed renewing this quest.
All the best Rupert
On 30 Mar 2007, at 10:12, Chris Marsh wrote:
Hi Rupert, I must tackle a crucial misunderstanding between us:
You say: ‘A lot of sceptics are interested in empirical evidence so I don’t think you need to denigrate experimental tests as much as you do.’
But I DON’T ‘denigrate experimental tests’ at all, experimental tests are fine and necessary. But YOUR PARTICULAR experimental tests, tests to demonstrate the reality of phenomena of telepathy, don’t have the potential to prove or to disprove your ‘hypothesis of formative causation’ (what I call ‘habitude’). Suppose those ‘sceptics’, your peers in the academic scientific community, or elsewhere, were to become convinced, such that they say, ‘OK, yes, you’ve proved that telepathy happens,’ then what? That might be satisfying for you, Rupert Sheldrake, but would get your hypothesis nowhere. And conversely, if your experiments failed and you were to say, ‘Oh, well, there is no evidence that telepathy happens; I give up!’ That wouldn’t disprove your ‘hypothesis of formative causation’.
You seem to have lost sight of the importance, and sheer brilliance, in my view, of your ‘hypothesis of formative causation’ – which I call ‘habitude’ (because it needs a convenient handle, so that you don’t use ‘morphic fields’ as your shorthand and thus get diverted into this ‘field’ thing, which is a terminological red herring) – which postulates that habit is THE essential property of the universe, the universe consisting of forms in space-time which tend to persist, the oldest forms persisting so strongly and reliably that they appear to be invariable, and ‘law-like’. Habitude is an even more general ‘General Relativity’, the latter also being about forms, whereby a body on a forward path does not go ‘straight’, with respect to Cartesian, endless box, geometry, but follows the gradients in space-time due to the presence of other bodies. You take that idea further to conceive of a universe of complex and subtle forms/habits in space-time. For me that conception takes genius, ergo, you are a genius. But you seem to have forgotten that.
In your email, you also say: ‘This is an interesting quote about Bergson and is of course very close in spirit to my own thinking, so much influenced by Bergson.’ Well, fine, go back to that thinking, to what you said in the early books. Here is that quote again: ‘The past and the present do not denote two successive moments, but two elements which coexist: One is the present, which does not cease to pass, and the other is the past, which does not cease to be but through which all presents pass. It is in this sense that there is a pure past, a kind of “past in general”: The past does not follow the present, but on the contrary, is presupposed by it as the pure condition without which it would not pass. In other words, each present goes back to itself as past.’
Telepathic phenomena do not require ‘the presence of the past’. ‘Fields’, of the kind orthodox science talks of, brought about by ‘forces’, will do just fine.
You say, ‘There’s nothing wrong with having something in common with the existing ideas. In fact it’s essential. All new ideas must have something in common with old ones, and at the same time go beyond them.’ But proving telepathy doesn’t go beyond them far enough, if at all. I’m sure if/when you have demonstrated telepathy beyond reasonable/statistical doubt, those sceptics will seek to explain it in terms of the fields they already accept as operating in the universe. Then what will you do?
The experiments you used to describe on the crystallization of new chemicals happening slowly at first until a new habit is established, would provide evidence of habitude, as would the ‘hundredth monkey’ kind of experiment, where a new trick learned in one location gradually acquires a strong enough habit to influence individuals of the same species in another location.
Time, the presence of the past, the non-Euclidean, non-Cartesian/Newtonian geometry of the universe of habits – that’s what you have discovered. If you can’t conveniently demonstrate it experimentally, then declare yourself a philosopher rather than a scientist and write and talk about it until people get the idea. Love, Chris
From : Rupert Sheldrake <ars@dircon.co.uk> Sent : 27 March 2007 14:42:01 To : Chris Marsh <chris_e_marsh@hotmail.com> Subject : Re: Schumacher College
Dear Chris, Thanks for your comments, and also for your recent email and defence. A lot of sceptics are interested in empirical evidence so I don’t think you need to denigrate experimental tests as much as you do.
This is an interesting quote about Bergson and is of course very close in spirit to my own thinking, so much influenced by Bergson.
Morphic fields do indeed connect things together in space, otherwise they wouldn’t be fields. In this sense they are similar to existing fields of physics and take the field concept further. There’s nothing wrong with having something in common with the existing ideas. In fact it’s essential. All new ideas must have something in common with old ones, and at the same time go beyond them.
You could say any social species that the group is the unit of evolution, most of all perhaps in things like termites and bees.
To separate the realms of science and religion is not dualistic in my opinion. It’s simply that some things are more empirically testable and others less so. In the realm of the spirit or spiritual reality or consciousness beyond the human level, there are certain things that all religions would agree on: primarily that there is a form of consciousness beyond the human level. But precisely because it’s beyond our level it’s beyond our clear comprehension and therefore it is formulated differently in different religious traditions leading to potential conflicts and misunderstandings. I personally am an Anglican but it would be ridiculous for me to say that the universe follows conventional science up to the point where that fades out, and thereafter is exactly the same as the Anglican interpretation of God and trans-human consciousness. Other interpretations maybe just as valid, and all are vague.
This comes to the fore in my discussion of creativity in THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST. Morphic resonance of the theory of habit. It’s compatible with different theories of creativity including materialistic and theistic ones. In other words it can be fitted within a larger natural philosophy or worldview, and I leave this open, simply because I think the question is open.
If you’d like to suggest ways in which the essay on morphic resonance and morphic fields can be given more prominence on the website, please do. I’m afraid it’s the nature of websites to deal with the person whose website they are rather than just abstract ideas.
Best wishes Rupert
On 3 Mar 2007, at 10:27, Chris Marsh wrote:
Hi Rupert,
>070220 Dear Chris, >Thanks for your thoughtful email.
Thank you for your reply, to which some more thoughts:
>Yes, I like the idea the past is still in the universe and grows and evolves from all the growing tips in the present.
I’ve just looked at The Presence of the Past to see what philosophers you studied prior to coming up with your ideas, and noted that you refer to Bergson. I’ve just been reading Deleuze’s Bergsonism and there’s so much Sheldrake! – such as: ‘The past and the present do not denote two successive moments, but two elements which coexist: One is the present, which does not cease to pass, and the other is the past, which does not cease to be but through which all presents pass. It is in this sense that there is a pure past, a kind of “past in general”: The past does not follow the present, but on the contrary, is presupposed by it as the pure condition without which it would not pass. In other words, each present goes back to itself as past.’ (p.59)
>There are two kinds of experiments I’ve been doing. First, experiments on memory in the universe, in other words experiments on morphic resonance. Second experiments on morphic fields which connect things together in space. It’s easier to do the second kind of experiments which is why I’ve been working on telepathy and other similar phenomena. I try to explain all this in my book the sense of being stared at.
The problem I have with that is that the idea of ‘morphic fields which connect things together in space’ is not fundamentally new conceptually. The fields which orthodox science believes in (in a religious sense, in my view) are of that kind. If you were to prove telepathy to their satisfaction, that would be no challenge to their ideas and mindset.
>Your idea about the evolution of morality is similar to some notions at present around in the field of evolutionary psychology where people try to explain human and animal social moral codes in terms of selective pressure and the need for cooperative living. I’m sure there’s a lot in this idea.
Maybe you misunderstand. Those notions are vague and uninteresting, I think. What intrigues me though is the idea that humans evolved exo-symbiotically, the species not being the individual human being, engaging in cooperative behaviour, but the group being the species.
>All social groups have an us/them aspect, and this certainly gives rise to conflict not only in humans but in chimpanzees. And conflict doesn’t seem to be caused by capitalism alone. Head hunters in New Guinea seem to have plenty of it without capitalism, and just with a kind of stone age technology. Capitalism creates larger units and larger systems of conflict so magnifies the problem, as does national identity, as a nationalism, and ideology, as in Soviet and Maoist communism.
You misunderstand again. But it’d take too many words to explain. If you read Helena Norberg-Hodge’s Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh you’ll get the idea.
>If you look at my website you’ll find there’s a clear separation between science and the spirituality aspects, and I think you’ll also find the same if you look at my books. There’s nothing I can do about people confusing themselves, but I try to make it clear distinction in these areas.
So you have a dualistic conception of the world, like that of Descartes? That is something quite foreign and peculiar to me. Surely the ‘universe’ means everything that exists – for me that includes all of its past – so how can you separate off this other thing called ‘spirituality’?; where is that? if it exists it’s part of the universe surely? If it’s part of the universe, it can be the repository of the ‘laws of science’ and vindicates orthodox science. That annoying ‘religious atheist’ Dawkins says (in his The God Delusion) ‘If God is all the laws of science, the I believe in God.’ Well, quite!
> I also try to set out the basic principles of morphic resonance and morphic fields in the introductory essay on the website, but I can’t force people to read to it!
Yes you do, and very nicely too, but the web site does not come across as being ‘about’ those principles or ideas, but ‘about’ Sheldrake; it’s Sheldrake self-promotion – sorry but that is the impression, and maybe that is a necessary evil. Part of the problem may be that the basic principles you’ve come up with don’t have a convenient name or ‘handle’, unlike Einstein’s ‘relativity’, for example. In my first flush of enthusiasm for your ideas I called the ideas ‘pattern’, and wrote a whole load of my own stuff around that. A few days ago I thought of a simple term you could adopt that is more specific than ‘pattern’; how about ‘habitude’?: ‘1 a mental or bodily disposition. 2 a custom or tendency.’ Spot on, don’t you think? You refer to habit and habituation in TPotP, but I think ‘habitude’ is more suitable as a handle for your ideas.
>What I could do is modify the introductory essay and if you’d like to make some suggestions about that, please do. But I can’t make it much longer otherwise people simply won’t read it. Most people don’t read it even now!
People don’t read it because it is easily overlooked, and it doesn’t seem to be the focus of the site. Also you don’t invite people to participate except by signing up to your experiments. I’m not an expert in how to make a site interactive, but blogs, links, invitations to comment with prompt publication of what people say is what’s needed, imv.
>Best wishes >Rupert
Must tell you about last Saturday. I went up to London from Exeter on a coach to the demo organised by Stop the War (Bring Troops Home) and CND (No Trident Replacement) and got talking to a group of students from Exeter University. One of them had a copy of Dawkins’ book and they were discussing it. When he put it down I asked to have a look at it – I’ve not read it; I find Dawkins annoying. But I came across the bit I just mentioned to you: ‘If God is all the laws of science, then I believe in God.’ (p.18, I think) So I said to the student that I think Dawkins is less of an atheist than I am, because I don’t ‘believe in’ these ‘Laws’ that are merely human conceptions – where are they other than in human minds and books? Nowhere, so they can’t ‘govern’ the universe. There was a buzz of discussion about that. Then I talked about your ideas – as I do, whenever I get the chance! And again as usual, I made excuses for your seemingly silly experiments, saying you do them to get back in with your peers in academia. And one of the students said of the telepathy experiments, ‘Good for him! Many people are suspicious of science anyway.’ That is very revealing I think. There is a paradox at the heart of your project. The experiments you do are appealing because people don’t like or trust science, and yet you do them to rejoin science, to prove yourself a proper scientist. All best, Chris 070303
>070220 Dear Chris, >Thanks for your thoughtful email.
Thank you for your reply, to which some more thoughts:
>Yes, I like the idea the past is still in the universe and grows and evolves from all the growing tips in the present.
I’ve just looked at The Presence of the Past to see what philosophers you studied prior to coming up with your ideas, and noted that you refer to Bergson. I’ve just been reading Deleuze’s Bergsonism and there’s so much Sheldrake! – such as: ‘The past and the present do not denote two successive moments, but two elements which coexist: One is the present, which does not cease to pass, and the other is the past, which does not cease to be but through which all presents pass. It is in this sense that there is a pure past, a kind of “past in general”: The past does not follow the present, but on the contrary, is presupposed by it as the pure condition without which it would not pass. In other words, each present goes back to itself as past.’ (p.59)
>There are two kinds of experiments I’ve been doing. First, experiments on memory in the universe, in other words experiments on morphic resonance. Second experiments on morphic fields which connect things together in space. It’s easier to do the second kind of experiments which is why I’ve been working on telepathy and other similar phenomena. I try to explain all this in my book the sense of being stared at.
The problem I have with that is that the idea of ‘morphic fields which connect things together in space’ is not fundamentally new conceptually. The fields which orthodox science believes in (in a religious sense, in my view) are of that kind. If you were to prove telepathy to their satisfaction, that would be no challenge to their ideas and mindset.
>Your idea about the evolution of morality is similar to some notions at present around in the field of evolutionary psychology where people try to explain human and animal social moral codes in terms of selective pressure and the need for cooperative living. I’m sure there’s a lot in this idea.
Maybe you misunderstand. That idea is vague and uninteresting, I think. What intrigues me though is the idea that humans evolved exo-symbiotically, the species not being the individual human being, engaging in cooperative behaviour, but the group being the species.
>All social groups have an us/them aspect, and this certainly gives rise to conflict not only in humans but in chimpanzees. And conflict doesn’t seem to be caused by capitalism alone. Head hunters in New Guinea seem to have plenty of it without capitalism, and just with a kind of stone age technology. Capitalism creates larger units and larger systems of conflict so magnifies the problem, as does national identity, as a nationalism, and ideology, as in Soviet and Maoist communism.
You misunderstand again. But it’d take too many words to explain. If you read Helena Norberg-Hodge’s Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh you’ll get the idea.
>If you look at my website you’ll find there’s a clear separation between science and the spirituality aspects, and I think you’ll also find the same if you look at my books. There’s nothing I can do about people confusing themselves, but I try to make it clear distinction in these areas.
So you have a dualistic conception of the world, like that of Descartes? That is something quite foreign and peculiar to me. Surely the ‘universe’ means everything that exists – for me that includes all of its past – so how can you separate off this other thing called ‘spirituality’?; where is that? if it exists it’s part of the universe surely? If it’s part of the universe, it can be the repository of the ‘laws of science’ and vindicates orthodox science. That annoying ‘religious atheist’ Dawkins says (in his The God Delusion) ‘If God is all the laws of science, then I believe in God.’ Well, quite!
> I also try to set out the basic principles of morphic resonance and morphic fields in the introductory essay on the website, but I can’t force people to read to it!
Yes you do, and very nicely too, but the web site does not come across as being ‘about’ those principles or ideas, but ‘about’ Sheldrake; it’s Sheldrake self-promotion – sorry but that is the impression, and maybe that is a necessary evil. Part of the problem may be that the basic principles you’ve come up with don’t have a convenient name or ‘handle’, unlike Einstein’s ‘relativity’, for example. In my first flush of enthusiasm for your ideas I called the ideas ‘pattern’, and wrote a whole load of my own stuff around that. A few days ago I thought of a simple term you could adopt that is more specific than ‘pattern’; how about ‘habitude’?: ‘1 a mental or bodily disposition. 2 a custom or tendency.’ Spot on, don’t you think? You refer to habit and habituation in TPotP, but I think ‘habitude’ is more suitable as a handle for your ideas.
>What I could do is modify the introductory essay and if you’d like to make some suggestions about that, please do. But I can’t make it much longer otherwise people simply won’t read it. Most people don’t read it even now!
People don’t read it because it is easily overlooked, and it doesn’t seem to be the focus of the site. Also you don’t invite people to participate except by signing up to your experiments. I’m not an expert in how to make a site interactive, but blogs, links, invitation to comment with prompt publication of what people say is what’s needed, imv.
>Best wishes >Rupert
Must tell you about last Saturday. I went up to London from Exeter on a coach to the demo organised by Stop the War (Bring Troops Home) and CND (No Trident Replacement) and got talking to a group of students from Exeter University. One of them had a copy of Dawkins’ book and they were discussing it. When he put it down I asked to have a look at it – I’ve not read it; I find Dawkins annoying. But I came across the bit I just mentioned to you: ‘If God is all the laws of science, then I believe in God.’ (p.18, I think) So I said to the student that I think Dawkins is less of an atheist than I am, because I don’t ‘believe in’ these ‘Laws’ that are merely human conceptions – where are they other than in human minds and books? Nowhere, so they can’t ‘govern’ the universe. There was a buzz of discussion about that. Then I talked about your ideas – as I do, whenever I get the chance! And again as usual, I made excuses for your seemingly silly experiments, saying you do them to get back in with your peers in academia. And one of the students said of the telepathy experiments, ‘Good for him! Many people are suspicious of science anyway.’ That is very revealing I think. There is a paradox at the heart of your project. The experiments you do are appealing because people don’t like or trust science, and yet you do them to rejoin science, to prove yourself a proper scientist.
All best, Chris 070215
As you pointed out to me recently, you announce yourself on your web site as: ‘Rupert Sheldrake, one of the world’s most innovative biologists has revolutionised scientific thinking with his vision of a living, developing universe with its own inherent memory.’ I wish!!!
I have often told you that in my view you fail to do your insights and ideas justice, in particular by doing experiments to challenge orthodox science but not promoting your alternative, your full Hypothesis of Formative Causation (HFC), and pointing out just how innovative and revolutionary, and powerful, that hypothesis is. (Of course, you say in your books that the ideas are not wholly new…)
I am currently doing research on Tagore and Voltaire, and I came across the item on ‘Destiny’ in Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, and thought of your HFC. Luckily ‘Destiny’ is also on the internet at: http://history.hanover.edu/texts/voltaire/voldesti.html . What struck me is that only the HFC can reconcile determinism: the belief that everything in the universe is governed by ‘laws’, with free will: the psychological experience (some argue illusion) that we can exercise choices. HFC explains how morphic fields make the repetition of past patterns very likely, such that they seem to obey ‘laws’, but that variation is possible at what one can see as the fluffy fringes of what is happening.
Best wishes, Chris 20/2/07
Thanks for your thoughtful email. Yes, I like the idea the past is still in the universe and grows and evolves from all the growing tips in the present.
There are two kinds of experiments I’ve been doing. First, experiments on memory in the universe, in other words experiments on morphic resonance. Second experiments on morphic fields which connect things together in space. It’s easier to do the second kind of experiments which is why I’ve been working on telepathy and other similar phenomena. I try to explain all this in my book the sense of being stared at.
Your idea about the evolution of morality is similar to some notions at present around in the field of evolutionary psychology where people try to explain human and animal social moral codes in terms of selective pressure and the need for cooperative living. I’m sure there’s a lot in this idea.
All social groups have an us/them aspect, and this certainly gives rise to conflict not only in humans but in chimpanzees. And conflict doesn’t seem to be caused by capitalism alone. Head hunters in New Guinea seem to have plenty of it without capitalism, and just with a kind of stone age technology. Capitalism creates larger units and larger systems of conflict so magnifies the problem, as does national identity, as a nationalism, and ideology, as in Solviet and Maoist communism.
If you look at my website you’ll find there’s a clear separation between science and the spirituality aspects, and I think you’ll also find the same if you look at my books. There’s nothing I can do about people confusing themselves, but I try to make it clear distinction in these areas. I also try to set out the basic principles of morphic resonance and morphic fields in the introductory essay on the website, but I can’t force people to read to it!
What I could do is modify the introductory essay and if you’d like to make some suggestions about that, please do. But I can’t make it much longer otherwise people simply won’t read it. Most people don’t read it even now!
Best wishes Rupert
070213 Hi Rupert,
Please excuse the length of this reply, I hope you're not too busy...
You say, ‘I could try altering the presentation on my website to emphasis the importance of seeing the universe as one of evolving habits. It already says this in introduction to me right at the top of the home page, so I’m not quite sure how I could fit it in, in a way that did not put people off or seemed over-dramatic.’
Yes, I see that you announce having ‘revolutionised scientific thinking’ in the box about you at the top of your home page. I don’t spend lot of time exploring your web site – probably I should to earn the right to criticise it – what I do is the same as with other juicy web sites, dip in from time to time. This time I read the page with ‘Rupert’s Autobiography’, which is fascinating, not the life history, which wasn’t new to me, but how your journey out of your scientific speciality happened. The key to that process is bringing a disparate collection of ideas together, from people and from books, such that ‘something else’ emerges. That’s been my experience too. I’m not tied to any speciality and am unusually free to explore and study. I’ll tell you what I’ve got on the go right now – you won’t need me to say all that I got from these books; it’s the mix that matters – but they brought up again what I see as revolutionary about your hypothesis of formative causation, and my regrets that (imv) you have drifted off promoting the essence of that, which for me is the literal ‘presence of the past’. In your previous email you referred a bit dismissively to me and my kind as ‘a few radicals’, and I know what you mean. However, we radicals are not that few, it is more that we tend to be sectarian – maybe even more so than scientists in their specialist cells, if that’s possible! The new Age of Enlightenment your ideas should have brought about – and still could – has more potential for shaking us radicals out of our ideological boxes than those scientists, who are seriously stuck because they’re part of the dominant ideology. Anyway, here’s my on-the-go-book list:
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1951) Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (1979) (not a new read, but a well-thumbed reference book) Voltaire, various of his books and couple of biographies Rabindranath Tagore (two shelves of books, none on the go right now but recently completed MA dissertation on his prose fiction and thinking about doing further research on him, comparing him with Voltaire: deism, human rights, rural reconstruction, massive oeuvre but barriers to reception) Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (1972) Frank Ryan, Darwin’s Blind Spot: Evolution Beyond Natural Selection (2003) Kropotkin, Mutual Aid (1904) W.E.Tate, The EnglishVillage Community and the Enclosure Movements (1967)
Well, you’ll get the idea, I’m sure.
On your stuff: start with Popper, the idea that deductive logic can be used in disproving a theory/hypothesis, but not to prove it, which can’t be done (Hume), that a theory not yet disproved is preferred to one that has been disproved, that any theory can be disproved (happened to Newton’s), any new theory should include earlier disproved theories, and they should be approximations to the new, yet to be disproved, theory and so on. But what is it one is disproving? Popper refers to the theory’s ‘truth’. But what is that? – more to the point, where is that? If it’s in scientists’ minds and in their books, how can it work on phenomena? It can’t, so all the theory is doing is expressing observed patterns in mathematical language. But surely, there has to be causation, otherwise there’d be randomness not patterns? Along comes Sheldrake and says that causation lies in past patterns tending to persist, with the oldest patterns persisting more strongly than patterns of newly arisen phenomena. The question arises, where are the patterns of the past then? Sheldrake says, in a non-local universe (and he puts the mind there too). Marsh (who’s she? well, nobody…) says the past doesn’t go anywhere; it’s still in this universe, which grows and evolves from all the growing tips in the present, but our dominant senses are only aware of the present, including memory in the mind/brain. [Rupert, you were intrigued when I told you back in 1991 about my son, then aged about 8, imagining what being in the world would be like if the past didn’t vanish. It would be like tubes or worm casts, extruded by himself in the present: not his words, but he did the actions, looking behind at his immediate past, trying to dodge it – like Peter Pan losing his shadow, perhaps.]
Your hypothesis is great stuff, utterly convincing, in my view, and people who are not orthodox scientists, or hard-left materialist atheists, are quite relaxed about ‘the presence of the past’ – often coming up with anecdotes of their own, revelations, if you like, which they see as evidence.
But I don’t get your experiments. The early experiments into the crystallisation of new compounds: slowly at first, then faster once morphic field built up, could prove the hypothesis. But telepathy? To me that’s ‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio…’ stuff. And the causative process seems to be action at a distance – bit like Newton over again, a kind of mental gravitational force – not the presence of the past.
I’m also concerned that the power of the hypothesis falls down is if you bring God into it. It’s a bit like Descartes’ dualism, whereby the phenomenon of ‘I think I’ll move my arm’ (spirit), and ‘it moves’ (body) is due to God’s two synchronised clocks. Similarly, orthodox science’s ‘true theories’ have somewhere to be and operate from: the mind of God. That’s why I have a problem with your religious beliefs: they render your hypothesis unnecessary.
I’m interested in Tagore’s and Voltaire’s deism because of the twin ideas that such a wonderful world in itself demonstrates that there must be a Creator, plus people wouldn’t behave morally if there wasn’t a God for them to fear, revere, live up to. My answer to the latter picks up on Kropotkin’s ‘mutual aid’ and Ryan’s (also Lynn Margulis’s) theories of symbiosis. If the human species, evolving over a million or so years (before history and the agricultural revolution), evolved by exo-symbiosis, as a social, cooperative higher organism, its ‘moral code’ would be innate – so it’s hardly surprising that children seem to know right from wrong without needing to be taught.
So why is there so much wrong-doing in the world? As a serious socialist, I blame capitalism – big subject, but to bring in a long-ago read book: Helena Norberg-Hodge, Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, she describes seeing materialism and conflict arise as the modern world arrived, couple that with Patrick Colm Hogan and others on ‘identity politics’: ‘categorical identity’ whereby people identify with a named group they don’t necessarily live and work with, replacing the ‘rooted identity’ of traditional societies. Categorical identity leads to ‘them/other’ and ‘us’ divisions, and to conflict fuelled by competition for jobs etc. and facilitated by the arms trade.
In conclusion, I’d like you to revisit the whole hypothesis of formative causation, and put some sort of restatement of it on your web site – with an explanation of how your current experiments show that in operation and/or are meant to test it, as against revealing a mysterious set of phenomena to cast doubt on orthodox science’s explanatory capability. More crucially, could you not suggest what difference to the world a paradigm shift to your model might make? and on that, there needs to be an opportunity for people to contribute. Maybe you’ll say that there’s enough already there, and of course you welcome feedback, but some of the people I engage with (socialists, anarchists and the like) will scoff at the spirituality stuff, others (permaculturists) will like that stuff too much, a bit like your Schumacher students. What I’d like to see come out of such discussions is a recognition that the dominant ideology has a morphic field of its own reinforcing it, such that even rational discussion can’t budge it, and that some of us radicals are still caught up in aspects of that field: materialist science, in particular, which is seen as progressive and enlightened, but is actually stuck.
OK, that’ll do – you may be too busy to respond in detail, but it helps me to revisit this from time to time.
Best wishes, love, Chris 16/1/07
Thanks for your reply. We’ve been round this loop before, haven’t we, with you ending with a forlorn apology for falling short of my expectations. But from what you say here, you are disappointed yourself: with the people who come on Schumacher courses, and with the impact of your ideas. The Schumacher students tend to be lovely and well-meaning alternative types, who will believe anything as long as it promises the best of possible worlds. But surely there are people with good and critical (in the best sense) minds who would get the potential of your ideas. Could you not say more – at least on your web site – about how potentially world changing your hypothesis of formative causation is. You need to go deeper, imv, than talking about morphic fields, which can be seen as coexisting with fields recognised by orthodox science. (Maybe you’ve come to see them that way yourself…)
What should have happened when you published A New Science of Life, and The Presence of the Past is the launch of a new Age of Enlightenment, after all you were / are? challenging an established orthodoxy comparable to the medieval Church. (I know you are a Christian, and that’s a problem for me…) You used to talk in those terms. I can’t remember how exactly you put this – sorry, can’t be bothered to dig out your own words – but you did I think point to Descartes’ explanation of moving bodies as following grooves in the ether, then Newton’s weird idea of bodies in empty space attracting each other from a distance – but people liked the algebra so it caught on – and then, deeply ironically, 200 or so years later, Einstein comes along and says it’s heavy bodies making grooves in space that lighter bodies follow! But science pretty much carried on regardless, never as positivist as it pretended, still wedded to laws and maths, and believing fundamentally that the sun will rise tomorrow because it did yesterday and has done all the yesterdays so far. Then along comes Sheldrake and says that that’s due to habit, both the sun keeping on rising and you guys believing in laws – plus society believing in owning property as a human right, all the way to capitalism being the best of possible worlds despite all the evidence to the contrary.
I consider myself your friend rather than your disciple because I want you to reach further and higher and really make a difference. I tell everyone about you. Like recently I had lunch with Kevin Cahill, author of Who Owns Britain? and Who Owns the World? We got talking at midday and couldn’t stop, and I only just caught the last train home that night. Magic when that happens. We talked quite a lot about your ideas, he was clearly intrigued. Next time I saw him I met him I lent him The Presence of the Past – not heard from him since – hmm! – but he’s a busy man, recently hopping off to Budapest for a conference on land etc. But, as usual, I apologised for your ‘silly experiments’, and explained why, apparently, you do them: you have to demonstrate there are phenomena which orthodox science can’t explain – or doesn’t believe exist – and you’re a meticulous empiricist, assembling masses of evidence, and on the cheap. Kevin was impressed by your credentials, and yes, I can see that you believe you have to work from ‘transforming views within the scientific community’. But, but, but…
As I always say, I wish we could meet and talk. Take care.
Love, Chris
From : Rupert Sheldrake <ars@dircon.co.uk> Sent : 07 February 2007 11:10:42 To : Chris Marsh <chris_e_marsh@hotmail.com> Subject : Re: SchumacherCollege
Dear Chris,
Thanks for your email. I don’t suppose things will be very different this time at SchumacherCollege, where I’ll only be teaching for a few days. Most people who come on these courses have not read my books and know very little about my work. They are not prepared for, and do not expect advanced-level discussions. They just want to hear the basic material in an easy to digest form. This is simply a reality. I’ve twice given seminars where everyone had read the material beforehand and where it was possible to start the discussion from where the books left off. One of these was at a small seminar in Cambridge last year, and another one in the theology department at ClaremontCollege in California about 15 years ago. If I had spent the course at Schumacher in discussions on the kinds of questions that you’re interested in, I’m sure that most of the other participants would have been left behind. And the same would happen again today.
I have of course thought a lot about the potential impact of these ideas, but unfortunately for them to have any impact at all it seems necessary for them to work through transforming views within the scientific community. Otherwise they’re not reported in the media, not taught in schools, not mentioned in universities and have very little effect except on a small number of people who think more radically than most, but who have little effect on the wider world. .
I’m sorry I constantly fall short of your expectations.
Best wishes Rupert.
Hi Rupert, I had a quick look at your web site recently – you had mentioned that being redesigned, but I couldn’t see much difference. I looked at your Schedule and noticed that you are doing a course at Schumacher in July, 16 years after the one of yours I went to! Sorting stuff from our attic in prep of work on the roof, I’ve just come across the letter I wrote to Brian Goodwin after leaving the course early, and I scanned it in because I think part of that letter may still be of interest to you, so here is an extract:
‘One of the main causes of my disappointment with the course was the extent of repetition of material in Rupert’s books, without much opportunity to discuss his ideas with him. In the Programme of Courses and in the Course Outline supplementing it, the impression was given that the course would be highly participative, with Rupert leading discussions rather than lecturing, and also small group discussion opportunities. There was some improvement in this area as the course progressed, but I somehow never found the space to discuss what I had come on the course to explore; changes in the world in the light of Rupert’s ideas. As you observed, the course was over-scheduled, we were constantly hurrying off to something-or-other and everyone went to bed early.
‘Part of the problem was that few of the participants had read Rupert’s books. Perhaps the college could have indicated to enquirers that they would be expected to have prepared for the course by reading at least one of the books. In any case, the member of the core faculty attending the sessions could have taken on the responsibility of ensuring that pure lecturing was strictly limited. Someone like Rupert, who spends a lot of time travelling around giving lectures, is likely to need to be reminded – perhaps more than once, and quite firmly – that this is not what the college wants from him. I don’t think he would have resented such reminders.
‘A second cause of disappointment to me was that such time as was not repetition of material in the books was largely devoted to exploring myth and ritual from ancient times or other cultures. Admittedly, this was advertised in the programme, and most of the participants enjoyed this part a lot, so I have no cause for complaint here.
‘I did have certain hopes and expectations of the course which were based on my understanding of what the college is about in a general way. The college prospectus is full of phrases such as: new vision needed to sustain the earth, new culture, the inherent contradictions of Western way of life, issues of immediate concern, shape of society etc. For me, Rupert’s course managed to miss all these. He did not look at how his model of the workings of the natural and cultural world could form the basis of a more sustainable society (talking to trees will not help save the natural world if we continue blindly to rely on systems for meeting our material needs which are destroying forests, soils and ecosystems elsewhere on the planet. Rupert did not even follow through what difference it might make to the world if his ideas were adopted by the scientific community – I got the impression that his mission to have his ideas adopted by other scientists was a purely personal one.
‘I think it was a pity the idea of encouraging and supporting participants in constructing individual study programmes and carrying out personal projects was not carried through.
‘I was happy to see that the college had had a permaculture design carried out. But it was symptomatic of the lack of interest on this course in developing sustainable ways to meet our needs that very few people took part in the permaculture afternoons. Rupert himself was rather dismissive of this initiative. I would like to see the college prepare a strategy and a plan for moving towards local self sufficiency. This should be made available to all course participants so that they ,can see where the college has got to in the plan, and their part in it during their stay. (I am not saying that you should have got this already – I know these things take time!)’
So, Rupert, Probably it’s all very different now, but what hasn’t changed is that you still don’t see your ideas on morphic resonance as having world changing potential, and you still seem to be anxious to have your work accepted as pukka science by those in the established scientific community – hence your rigorous, but in their terms silly, experiments in telepathy. If the coming course is more participative than the 1991 one was, it’ll be in that stuff, which to me is a waste. (Sorry!) Maybe since you are coming down this way, you could find the time for us to talk.
With very best wishes, Chris |