Section 7 – June 9th 1992

Fizz’s birthday! (stuck in at front of ‘Sheldrake’ chapter, May 21st onwards)

Solution to ‘destruction’ problem?

For some time I have been wrestling with an apparent difficulty with pattern! theory. The theory is based on the idea that awareness (and/or the rest of the package of terms) creates reality; each entity, human or otherwise, creating its own truth, but strongly influenced by resonance with past patterns!, its own and those of similar entities (its ‘past’ being a dimension of a particular pattern!, its strength, depth or mass, which is present although obscured by the human solscius). Because reality is formed of thought, contradictory realities can co-exist, and belief that something is not so has no effect, only what is believed to be so comes into being.

Although human consciousness cannot experience the consciousness of other entities, it is intuitively obvious to me that other entities are conscious, and creators of their reality. Herein lies the difficulty: how is it possible that we – the human species – is able to destroy ecosystems teeming with non-human entities, for example tropical rainforests? Is this not a manifestation of their reality being denied by our’s, of denial having power, and hence a contradiction of the theory?

The solution lies in exploring further the difference between human consciousness, which is dominated by the solscius, and the kind of consciousness which is universal: the comscius. There is only a problem with the theory if we fall into the trap of attributing solscius-type individual personality to other entities.

The particular danger is assuming that other entities have the same sense of time as we generally do: of a single, inescapable, universal dimension, existing independently of the material objects which reside in it and travel through it. But pattern! theory postulates that time is a dimension of an entity, special to it and consisting of the influences on its growth; its inward and outward resonance and relationships with patterns! it resembles. This means that our time is not the same as another entity’s time. If we render a species extinct we have certainly taken it out of our own time and our own reality, but nothing which has existed can be destroyed. The fact that there are no more dodos being hatched is our loss, not the dodo’s. We recognise the difference between our identity and another animal’s identity in the way we are concerned about the extinction of species, rather than the death of each individual animal of that species (another example of pattern! revealing what we know already, rather than imposing a completely new model or theory).

But the solscius is such a dominant feature of modern man’s consciousness that I expect that my drawing attention to our concern over species rather than about individual creatures, would provoke protestations from some people that they do care about every individual, that they suffer for every rhino, every macaw, every dolphin. But that is projection of our own sense of self onto another creature. It is a feeling I know well having often protested when I was a child at my mother swatting a fly, arguing that what she was destroying was the only life that the fly had, its own precious piece of existence. We are proud of such concern as evidence of our humanity and compassion. We feel ourselves to be morally superior to the predator which brings suffering to its prey.

Of course in saying this I am grossly over-simplifying human attitudes. ‘Nature red in tooth and claw’ and ‘the survival of the fittest’ are invoked by some (the ‘Social Darwinists’) as an excuse for competitiveness in human society. A wide variety of views of nature, and on its and our own morality or brutality will be found amongst people in the world today. But we are probably more similar to each other in how we behave than we are in what we say we believe. Nature conservationists may differ little from leaders of trans-nationals in the burden they impose personally on the resources of the planet; by eating animal products, driving cars, using large quantities of paper etc. What we do shows what we believe, what we think or say shows only what we would like to believe – or would like to think we believe ...

The worst ecological destruction is caused by clearing away forests and wilderness. This is much more damaging than burning fossil fuels and other pollution. We have destroyed ecosystems and whole biomes to make room for cereals and pasture. In so doing we render it impossible for the patterns! there to continue to coexist with our reality. But the patterns! are still there, and will re-emerge if we just leave those areas alone. It is not necessary for us to re-plant or manage degraded land. In its own time, following regeneration patterns! which have been followed previously, the land will become wilderness again if it was wilderness before. The human arrogance which insists on managing nature in its own interests is scarcely different from the human arrogance which destroys nature for its own purposes, such as for power and profit.

Even extinct species will re-emerge if their habitat is allowed to regenerate. Their patterns! are there; their seeds or breeding stock are not essential. Concerns over whether there is sufficient genetic variety for viability are red herrings. Captive breeding does not produce the same creature as the one which exists in the wild. It does not help a species to store frozen genetic material. If we want the species to be part of our reality, we must give it space in our space. If we want our reality to coexist with wilderness; if we decide that wilderness is necessary to heal us spiritually, we must make room for it. We can only make room if we change our ideas about human identity.

The notion that each human being is in some sense equally valuable is not only a sermon we preach but fail to practise, it is restricting humanity to the meanest possible prison. Every major religion says ‘love your neighbour as yourself’. This does not mean share your worldly goods with the world’s poor; it means recognise that you and your neighbour are part of the same reality, both cells of humanity and meaningless without each other, without every other that has even been or will be, and in terms of that greater reality, completely expendable.

With that expanded sense of reality it is nonsense to defend passionately the unborn foetus, the seriously malformed and handicapped, the degraded declining months or years of the senile or terminally ill, the right of infertile couples to technologically-assisted parenthood, or the priority of human survival over all other concerns.

Part 7 – Pattern! version of Sheldrake theory

May 21st 1992

1. Notes from ‘The Presence of the Past – Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature’ (1988) contrasted with pattern! in

Preface

‘all nature is evolutionary’

‘The hypothesis of formative causation proposes that memory is inherent in nature.’ conflicts w pre-1960s orthodox science: nature & its laws eternal

Introduction

‘natural systems, such as termite colonies, or pigeons, or orchid plants, or insulin molecules, inherit a collective memory from all previous things of their kind, however far away they were and however long ago they existed. Because of this cumulative memory, through repetition the nature of things becomes increasingly habitual. Things are as they are because they were as they were.’ [Pattern! picks up on the title of the book and postulates that ‘as they were’ is ‘as they still are’ since the present builds without leaving behind the past.]

‘All humans too draw upon a collective memory, to which all in turn contribute.’ ‘the memory of individual organisms may depend on direct influences from their own past.’

‘According to this hypothesis, the nature of things depends on fields, called morphic fields.’ [Major point of departure for pattern! which dismisses any need for ‘fields’, because this term has no inherent meaning – it is a human mental concept and a hangover from orthodox science cf. electro-magnetic and gravitational fields. Instead we have the idea of ‘comscius’ = ‘knowing together’, which is the ability of any entity or pattern! to recognise and resonate with any other pattern! on the basis of similarity.]

‘The process by which the past becomes present within morphic fields is called morphic resonance. Morphic resonance involves the transmission of formative influences through both space and time. The memory within the morphic field is cumulative, and that is why all sorts of things become increasingly habitual through repetition. When such repetition has occurred on an astronomical scale over billions of years, as it has in the case of many kinds of atoms, molecules, and crystals, the nature of these things has become so deeply habitual that it is effectively changeless, or seemingly eternal.’ [No transmission though space and time needed because space and time are not separated in comscius experience. Space is the form of pattern! and time is the process of resonance, influence and growth. Repetition renders a pattern! deeper and, in a sense, heavier. Its stronger influence can be likened to the conception of gravitation in the general theory of relativity, whereby massive bodies distort the space-time continuum.]

Chapter 1 – Eternity and Evolution

Summed up in first para. of Ch 2 ‘In the context of the new cosmology, all physical reality is evolutionary. But the old idea of eternity lives on in the conception of eternal laws that transcend the physical universe.’

Chapter 2 – Changeless laws, permanent energy

Mystical idea of changeless reality beneath illusion of everyday experience. Pythagoras 6C BC. No beginning or end – numbers, ratio & proportion -> natural laws. Music & ratios. Reason highest aspect of soul.

Plato – world of changing things reflection of eternal Forms or Ideas outside time & space. Only grasped by intellectual intuition, reached by mystical insight. Later Christian neo-Platonism – Platonic Forms ideas in Mind of God.

Aristotle – forms inherent & immanent, in things themselves – animate – guides development – drawn towards goals by their souls. Souls did not evolve.

Synthesis of Aristotle & Christianity – Thomas Aquinas – souls created by God & unchanging, Progressive dev. in human realm – divinely guided history of Jews to new knowledge & exp. of God – orthodoxy of medieval universities.

Renaissance of Pythogorean & Platonic – rejected Aristotlian philosophy. Nicholas of Cusa ‘knowledge is always measurement’. Copernicus, earth around sun – intellectual appeal & reverence for sun.

Kepler ‘Harminices Mundi’ (1619) mathematical harmony discovered in these facts was their cause. God made human mind so it could know by means of quantity. Also Galileo.

Descartes – material universe in mathematical space governed by mathematical laws / rational human minds – non-material, spiritual, like mind of God. Vision of Angel of Truth (1619). Geometry science of resting bodies, physics of moving bodies. World vaste machine set in motion at beginning by God ‘mechanical philosophy’. New theology with God as infinite and incomprehensible being.

17C heir to ancient Greek traditions of atomism (Parmenides) – permanent atoms (perfect spheres) changeless basis of changing phenomena, matter is Absolute Being – marriage w. Pythag/Plato -> Newtonian physics: permanent matter in motion governed by permanent non-material (mathematical) laws. ‘It was born of a marriage between the eternal laws and mathematical time and space of the Heavenly Father, and the ever-changing physical reality of Mother Nature. (‘Matter’ from ‘mater’.)

Maxwell’s unified theory of electromagnetism, 1860s, electricity, magnetism & light into broad mathl framework – fields – modification of subtle medium, the aether – Michelson & Morley disproved in 1887.

Einstein Special Theory of Relativity (1905) – non-material fields. Speed of light absolute, unified mass & energy. General Theory of Relativity – extended field concept to gravity – property of space-time continuum curved in vicinity of matter – time spatialised or geometricized. Einstein, like Kepler, sense of mathl rationality of universe. Eddington stuff of W is mind stuff.

Quantum theory predictions in terms of probabilities so abandonment of strict determinism – still numbers, harmonic series – Platonic approach into heart of matter – Heisenburg ‘smallest units of matter are, in fact, not physical objects in the ordinary sense of the word; they are forms, structures, or – in Plato’s sense – Ideas, which can be unambiguously spoken of only in the language of mathematics.’

Still looking for ultimate particles of matter – > 200 so far. Attempts to fit into numerical schemes.

Law of conservation of energy – first law of thermodynamics, second law, universe running down.

Laws of nature man-made, but assumed reflect eternal mathl principles of order – metaphysical assumption, challenged by David Hulme in 18 C. Heinrich Hertz 19 C ‘One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulae have an independent existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we, wiser even than their discoverers, that we get more out of them than was originally put into them.’

Formalism – mathematics intellectual game, but mathematicians are secret Platonists.

Scientific repeatability depends on mathl laws eternal (although energy, fields & matter thought to have arisen in time as universe was born 7 grew).

What if laws more like habits? Challenges basis of scientific method. New phenomena cumulative memory so hypothesis testable.

[By pattern! belief is creative, so can belief in eternal laws or forms create them? Pattern! is universalist, so should have no quarrel with anyone’s beliefs; their truth should also outlive them, particularly since they are still present as influences and as actualities. Significant that later theories absorb the older. Is there a ‘Ministry of Truth’ in human thought which re-writes the past, or rather fills a bit of the past in that was not there before, in a similar way to a person alive now adopting the past as existing in his present consciousness? Does a ‘realisation’ create a ripple of reality extending back into the past so that it was ‘always’ true?]

Chapter 3 – From human progress to universal evolution

Cultural heritage: eternities of physics from Greek; faith in progress from Jewish journey

Ancient times: great cycles of time. All myths start w golden age. Hindu & Buddhist, Pythags & Plato believed in reincarnation.

Bible: cosmic vision of creation, destruction & recreation, millenarian, Francis Bacon 1624 ‘New Atlantis’ millenarian scientific utopia, 1660 Royal Society, New England pilgrim fathers, rev. political movements late 18C, Marxist forms to E Europe, capitalist forms to Japan & Far East, ‘developing countries’

Medieval synthesis: human dev. thro’ God’s revelation & purpose; rest of nature constant.

18C human progress by understanding esp. science. Enlightenment progress by human reason alone. 19C: all living things evolved. Hegel ev. of human thought as an aspect of the process of the Absolute, thought progresses dialectically, thro’ contradiction & argument: initial proposition, thesis, antithesis, opposites to higher synthesis, new thesis etc (Hegel spirit developes, antithesis Marx matter devs. dialectically. Spencer progress supreme law of univ. word ‘evolution’, Darwin scarcely used the word, because suggests unrolling plan. Now all nature evolutionary. Sheldrake: not just nature but laws of nature evolve.

Gradual or series of catastrophes eg asteroid collision causing extenction of dinosaurs, mass extinctions over 250m years w periodicity 26m, suggests astronomical explanation – cf great cycles – possibly sun has dark companion star Nemesis in excentric orbit, distubs comet cloud at edge of solar system, or changes in sun’s radiation. If gradual, v long timescales. Hutton & Lyall gradual, also Darwin.

Darwin, God creative intelligence designed world machine. Paley’s watchmaker. Darwin blind workings of natural selection. Dawkins blind watchmaker. Why describe life w mechanistic metaphores? Why not think of them as living organisms?

Holistic or organismic philosophy or ‘systems’ approach last 60 years. Alfred North Whitehead: organisms are ‘structures of activity’ at all levels of complexity, even subatomic particles, atoms, molecules & crystals are organisms, and in some sense alive, hierarchy of wholes & parts.

L L Whyte: universe tendency towards order he calls ‘morphic’.

Chapter 4 – The nature of material forms

11th June 1992

‘Any particular thing we can directly see and experience has certain quantitative characteristics, but it somehow remains more than these: it also has a form, or shape and structure.’ As a plant grows, incorporates matter and energy from surroundings, when dies these are released, no change in total matter and energy.

Consider carbon atom – potential to be part of any one of countless millions of different forms, natural or artificial. Forms over and above material components.

Traditional ways of thinking about forms of things: Platonic, Aristotelian and nominalist.

Nominalist in Middle Ages, reation v P & A, from ‘nomen’ or name, produced by human minds. Positivist and empiricist forms of nominalism dominate academic philosophy in English-speaking countries – materialism. Eg Hobbes believed in atoms in motion but not in objective existence of forms outside our minds – paradoxical, why not apply to atoms? Short step to solipsism or idealism: solipsist – all in own mind; idealist in universal or Absolute mind – leads via maths back to Plato and number. Eg atomic numbers, formulae. Orthodox assumption that can predict all properties of new molecule. But cannot by quantum mechanics and other theories of present-day physics.

Platonic biology – Linnaeus classification by taxonomic categories: species, genus, class order, outline of divine plan of creation by rational Creator.

Aristotelian biology – vitalism, lives on in ‘selfish genes’.

Chapter 5 – The mystery of Morphogenesis

Preformationists – egg contained tiny version of adult. Modern form – germ plasm (Weisman 1880s). Need to explain regeneration as well as embryonic dev.

Duality of matter and information inherent in all traditional philosophies of form.

Genes code info for seq. of chemical building blocks in RNA & protein molecules. Not known to code for morhogenesis or for inherited characteristics of an organism – inherited non-materially. [Point of difference with pattern! which has no need of non-material as opposed to material inheritance – assumes process of growth by conscious recognition of what is present already – matter is consciousness and vice versa. Form is space dimension, formation is time dimension.]

In course of morphogenesis, cells differentiate – diff kinds of cells make diff proteins, same genes but diff genes expressed.

Control of protein synthesis by systems of ‘positional information’ – tells cells where they are – by morphogens – not detected but math’l models made. Prigogine ‘order through fluctuations’. In unstable system, randon fluctuations can be amplified by positive feedback – give rise to patterns – non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Order can arise fom chaos.

Meinhardt and Gierer – ‘activator’ and ‘inhibitor’ substances – computer stimulations – models of morphogenetic fields.

Development not programmatic. Idea of genetic programme replaced by ‘internal description’.

Organic wholes – holistic approach – not reductionist – organisms behave a wholes, with an organic unity that is irreducible.

Hierarchies nested, holons & holarchy (Koestler).

Chapter 6 – Morphogenetic fields

Fields are non-material regions of influence eg gravity & electro-magnetic fields. 1920s – 3 biologists proposed morphogenesis organized by fields. Weiss each species own mg field, subsidiary fields w’in organism – nested hierarchy. Waddington ‘individuation fields’, creode or developmental pathway, epigenetic landscape, alternative pathways, development ‘canalized’ towards definate end-points – cf Driesch’s entelechies – ends or goals of the chreodes lie in the future, ‘attractors’, teleological. Can be interpreted according to philosophies of form (including nominalist – convenient way of describing, but proceed mechanistically).

Essential feature of mg fields – they have evolved – how? Combination of genetics & Platonism (mechanistic) Dawkins Biomorph Land eternal forms in transcendent realm – or memory inherent in the fields, immanent in organisms, evolve within realm of nature, habits build up within them. Structures of mg fields depends on what has happened before. Works by resonance – takes place on basis of similarity. Does not involve transfer of energy, but non-energetic transfer of information. Resembles known kinds of resonance in that it takes place on the basis of rhythmic patterns of activity, eg electrons vibrating in orbit, vibrating molecular structures in cells – biochemical & physiological activities exhibit patterns of oscillation, cells cycles of division, plants daily & seasonal cycles of activity, animals heart beat, nervous system.

Morphic res. occurs between such rythmic structures of activity on basis of similarity, thro’ res. past patterns of activity influence the fields of subsequent similar systems. Action at a distance in space & time, influence does not decline w distance in space or time. [Pattern! – form is space, resonance is time.]

Developing embryo ‘tuned in’ to fields of species, embedded in the chreodes that shape its dev. Influence is cumulative, and two-way – fields to orgs & orgs to fields.

‘... how does mr take place thro’ or across time and space? ... we might imagine a ‘morphogenetic aether’, or another ‘dimension’, or influences passing ‘beyond’ space-time and then re-entering. But a more satisfactory approach may be to think of the past as pressed up, as it were, against the present, and as potentially present everywhere. The morphic influences of past organisms may simply be present to subsequent similar organisms.’ (p.112) [Yes!]

Not more mysterious than mechanistic theories which are, if anything, more metaphysical than the idea of mr.

Now morphogenetic fields -> ‘morphic fields’ – includes other kinds of organizing fields eg animal & human behaviour, social systems & mental activity. Can be regarded as fields of information.

Origination cannot be explained by formative causation.

Chapter 7 – Fields, Matter, and Morphic Resonance

[What then? Must check printout, if I can find it...]

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