Rupert Sheldrake — On Scientism, Morphic Resonance and the Extended Mind (Infinite Loops CLASSICS)
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Hey everyone, Jim here with a quick note. We're taking a brief two-week break from new episodes to spotlight a couple of golden oldies from the Infinite Loops archive. Years later, these remain some of my favorite conversations I've had on the podcast. We'll be back with fresh episodes soon, but in the meantime, enjoy this trip through time. Thank you.

Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.

Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out. Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started. The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the way we think and how we might be able to change that

to avoid going in infinite loops of thought. We hope to offer our listeners a fresh perspective on a variety of issues and look at them through a multifaceted lens, including history, philosophy, art, science,

linguistics, and yes, also through quantitative analysis. And through these discussions help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker. With each episode, we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together.

Thanks for joining us. Now, please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops. Well, hello, everyone. It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. I have been looking forward to today's guest for quite some time. It's not very often that a scientist with the impeccable credentials, double first class honors from Cambridge University,

Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard, author of innumerable books and papers advancing novel scientific theories.

earns the ire of the conventionally orthodox scientific establishment. But that's just what happened to my guest, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. His book, A New Science of Life, released in the early 80s, was labeled by Sir John Maddox, the then editor of Nature, the UK's most prestigious scientific journals, as a book for burning. And

And then on a BBC special that branded Dr. Sheldrake as the most heretical scientist of our time, he went on to say, actually spew in a very vitriolic way, a denunciation of Dr. Sheldrake's work

that he took right from the Pope and his denunciation and branding a heretic and an apostate, a certain scientist by the name of Galileo. Irony alert, the Pope was wrong. Galileo was right. So perhaps hermetics picked the wrong metaphor when he said he had exactly the same right.

as the Pope did, because in his view, the laws of nature, which Dr. Sheldrake more modestly suggests should be called abbots, being promulgated at the time, are infallible and may not be questioned. Could it be that this reaction was caused because the so-called heretic was procliving

creating heresy from within the citadel of science, and that his credentials were absolutely the same as many of the people denouncing him, and he was essentially simply asking questions. Science seems to have lost its vigor, curiosity, and vitality.

in a way that gave rise to scientism, trust the science, science says, as opposed to the scientific method, which is embraced by all of the scientists who've ever made massive discoveries. It continues on to this very day. A TED Talk given by Dr. Sheldrake was banned,

which is a great way, by the way, to get millions more people to listen to it. So please enjoy my discussion with the heretic, the apostate, the guy doing actual scientific research under the scientific method, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. Enjoy.

Welcome, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. I have been fascinated by you and your career for quite some time. You took double first class honors at Cambridge. You were awarded the Botany Prize and many others. You were the Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard. You got your MA and PhD at Cambridge. Awesome.

author of innumerable books and papers, and yet everyone from the citadel of rationality wants to brand you a heretic. In fact, last night I watched a BBC presentation that was recorded in 1981, and the title was Rupert Sheldrake is the most heretical scientist of our time. And then I

We get a quote from Sir John Maddox, who was the editor of Nature at the time, saying that your book was a book for burning. And then he went on to say that can be condemned with exactly the same language that the Pope used to condemn Galileo. It's heresy. It's pure heresy. That blew my mind because when did science adopt heresy?

Well, exactly. I mean, it's a very unfortunate parallel that he chose, isn't it? Especially since Galileo turned out to be right. So, for some reason, I provoke irrational responses in some people. Luckily, not in everybody. But I'm not going to be able to do that.

I think the reason for this is that basically what I'm trying to do is to move the sciences on together with lots of other people who are trying to do this beyond the materialist dogmatism, because I think it will liberate science, open things up and be good for science.

And some people have made it into a kind of belief system, scientism, and they find what I'm doing deeply offensive. So basically, the people I'm up against are the scientific fundamentalists. Absolutely. And the parallels, as you note, that he chose Galileo just blew my mind. Yes. Because he was right.

I know. It's incredible, isn't it? And the video, when you see the video, he's not joking. It wasn't a joke. He was really angry.

I agree. And one of my theories is that you bring out these sort of vitriolic and unhinged responses precisely because you come from the same exact background with the same credentials as many people who sit in the citadel of science. And so I wonder if they see you not only as a heretic, but as an apostate, one of us.

going outside of our dogmatic belief systems.

Well, they do see me as an apostate. And in fact, none other than Sir John Maddox in another of his articles, that was just one of his diatribes. He wrote quite a number of diatribes against me. But another one was one in which he compared me to a lapsed Jesuit attacking the Church of Rome. So, you know, he can't get away from these Roman Catholic metaphors. And the lapsed Jesuit thing, you see, was very much that apostate point that you just made.

There's a wonderful book, I don't know if you've read it, by Robert Anton Wilson called The New Inquisition, Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science. Yes, I have read it. Yes, I mean, it was a very good account of this thing. I mean, it's not just me and it's not just Maddox. It's a much bigger issue, really, as Wilson puts it.

And it seems to me that it's continuing. Recently, you had a TED Talk basically banned. I watched it. You were incredibly reasonable. You were suggesting the dogmatic principles of science. Let's turn them into questions. And then let's apply the scientific method and see whether they hold up. And in your talk, you point out quite well that most of them don't.

which you cover in your book, The Science Delusion, the one that seems to really get people worked up is this idea of morphic resonance. Essentially, didn't you also sort of learn of that

from tests that were done at Harvard in the 1920s with rats trying to navigate a water maze. And their theory was they wanted to see how many generations it took intelligence to be expressed in the genetic pattern of the offspring of the rats. But what they did was they bred the smart rats together, yes, but they also bred the smart rats with the dimmer-witted rats that didn't really excel at the maze.

And then they found, to their astonishment, and this was replicated in Scotland and Australia from my reading, that at the end of these experiments, rats all over the world were doing these mazes. I mean, to me, that's something you would really want to dig into and question deeply as you did. Yes.

But you see, you're clearly not, like I'm not, someone who's a complete devotee of that materialist worldview. You see, the materialist worldview is...

They think the mind's nothing but the brain, that all heredity is in the genes. From their point of view, this is simply impossible. So it doesn't matter how much evidence there is. As I found in some of my other areas of research, you can pile up the evidence. It doesn't make the slightest difference because if they think it's impossible, then all the evidence must be flawed and there's no point wasting time looking at it.

And actually, a couple of years ago, the rationalist Steven Pinker wrote a book called Rationality, in which he actually said, there's no point looking at the evidence because we know it's flawed, it's impossible.

So I challenged him to a public debate on the subject. I publicly challenged him through an organization in England where both he and I had done interviews. And he at first didn't reply, but then he had to reply. And he just said he hadn't got the bandwidth for the debate, meaning I said, what does that mean? He said, basically...

if I took part in a debate, I'd have to spend time looking at the actual evidence, and I just haven't time to do that. So he basically admitted, well, he'd already admitted he wasn't interested in the evidence. So, you know, we're dealing here with a dogmatic frame of mind, which unfortunately is still being inculcated into school and university students all over the world, because this stuff goes pretty unchallenged within academic science.

What's interesting is that Pinker also goes on at length in his book, The Blake Slate, that we are in fact not Blake's slates at all.

that we come out with, dare I say, the learnings, perhaps from the morphic resident that you advocate for. So the disconnect just really blows my mind. Is it because of the growth of scientism, i.e., science has been morphed into a religion of sorts, where there are the holy texts and

And you dare not challenge the holy texts, but the whole history of science, I think of Ptolemy, right? So Ptolemy had his ideas about the universe. And of course, he noted a lot of inconsistencies. And so he just drew more and more circles around.

until it collapsed under the weight of its own errors and led to Copernicus, right? And this is also the long history of science. When did this changeover occur in Europe, Adrian? Well, I think that there's always been a tendency for science to be dogmatic, and I think it's partly because in the 17th century,

The ideology of science then, which was persuasive at the time, was that in the 17th century in Europe, Protestants and Catholics were killing each other in the Thirty Years' War. And what the early scientists said was, well, we found a better way, not arguing over texts and priests' interpretations of texts, but looking straight at nature and through the mathematical laws of nature, going straight to the mind of God.

So they thought that the laws of nature were in the mind of God, like eternal laws. They were all believers in God. And so they thought science was a higher form of truth and superseded religion. And of course, at the Enlightenment, this became the ideology of progressive thinkers all over Europe. And what happened is that any challenge to science was then seen as a challenge to reason. And so...

I think that this dogmatism has always been there, but it's got much worse in the 20th century because far fewer scientists work independently. You know, in the 19th century, a lot of scientists were independent. Charles Darwin, for example, never had a government job, never had an academic post, never had a grant.

he was independently wealthy, partly because he did very well speculating in railway stocks and got out just before the railway bubble burst in the 1860s, and partly because he married an heiress, the daughter of the owner of the Wedgwood pottery, Josiah Wedgwood's daughter. So Darwin could work independently. He didn't have to toe the line. And you

You know, then Faraday, who was another great innovator, was working at an independent institution, not a university. He was working at the Royal Institution in London and was extraordinarily independent.

And so was James Clark Maxwell, who came up with the laws of electromagnetism and found out that light's an electromagnetic radiation. He was a Scottish laird who did most of this work in his castle in Scotland. So Faraday wasn't a rich man, but he was supported by the royal institution. So there were various ways in which people could work independently.

But now, if you count the number of independent scientists in the world, it's vanishingly small. I mean, I've been forced to be one because of being proclaimed a heretic and being excommunicated. So, you know, I've worked independently for years. But most scientists can't do that. They're on short leashes. You know, they have three-year grants and they have to write grant proposals after three years. Their promotion, the entire institution

incentive system within institutional science is not based on changing the world for the better or coming up with useful inventions. It's based on the number of papers you get published in high prestige journals. It's a bibliometric system. And if you want to get papers published in high prestige peer-reviewed journals, then you better stick to the conventional lines because then you'll get lots of citations, you'll get through the peer-reviewed system.

challenge anything and you're in serious trouble. You won't get the grants, you know, your career will be in ruins, etc. So most people have a kind of straitjacket nowadays. That was not the case in the 19th century when a lot of scientists could work independently.

If you look at the 20th century, I mean, the number of independent scientists is vanishingly small. I mean, there's one example is Mitchell, who was a Peter Mitchell, was a biochemist who came up with the idea that energy in cells is not made by enzymic reactions, but by a pH or ionic gradient across mitochondrial membranes. When I was a student of biochemistry at Cambridge in the 1960s,

Mitchell was treated as a complete eccentric and ridiculed in the lectures. And he was doing this. He was a wealthy man. He was doing sort of private laboratory at the end of his garden in Cornwall. And now Mitchell was proved right after a number of years. And now it's the standard theory. But that was an example of an independently minded scientist.

James Lovelock of the Gaia hypothesis is another example. But there is very, very few in the world today because the system has grown up to have a huge inertia. Whenever I give talks in scientific institutions,

I find that, you know, there's usually a fairly polite silence after the talk and then a few technical questions. But in the tea break afterwards or in the drinks reception, you know, one after another, people come up and they say, you know, I'm really interested in your work. You can't discuss it with my colleagues here. They're all so straight, you know, and stuff. And then one after another from the same institution comes up and tells me the same thing.

And I said, well, actually, they're not all quite as straight as you think. They said, well, how do you know? And I said, because they've just told me so, him and her and him. Why don't you talk to each other after hours? So I think within, after hours, after outside the lab context,

Many scientists are much more open-minded than you might otherwise think. It's just that they don't dare say so at work. So part of the revolution in science would be a bit like the gay liberation movement, people coming out of the closet, because there's already plenty of holistically-minded scientists within science. But they just, you know, they've got mortgages, they've got kids to educate, kids to get through college and stuff.

Most of them don't want to rock the boat for obvious, very understandable reasons. But it's not because they're all fanatically committed to ideological materialism. There are some who really are. Stephen Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett. There are a number of people for whom this is a kind of lifelong crusade.

But a lot of scientists are lukewarm at best about this ideology. It's just they go along with it because they don't want to get into trouble. Which is such a pity given the fact that I think Pasternak once said something living under the rule of these communists in the Soviet Union. Having to falsify your preferences, say things you know that are untrue,

has a profoundly bad effect on one's basic constitution, one's outlook, one's health. And do you anticipate a time when there will be enough of these scientists who you've mentioned who are willing, like the gay liberation movement, which led to all sorts of great changes? Do you think that a phase change is possible here?

Well, I think it is. I mean, I've spent my whole career working in the belief that it's possible to change the sciences. It may be, you know, one may have to start in one particular branch of science at a time, but there are some areas which are opening up. One of them is consciousness studies. You know, in the 20th century, the dominant theory of consciousness was the behaviorist school, which basically said it doesn't exist.

And the only thing that you can study is, you know, the rats pressing levers for pellets of food as rewards. It's all just conditioned reflexes and stuff. Well, that was the dominant school. And then by the end of the 20th century, it was replaced in most universities by cognitive neuroscience. The brain's a computer and the job of psychology is to study the algorithms that do the computations.

But really, only in the last 20 years has consciousness studies become important. People saying, well, look, if we want to understand consciousness, why not actually understand consciousness itself and study it? So now there are people studying near-death experiences, lucid dreaming, mystical experiences, psychedelic experiences, chronological

you know, people who hear voices, who are not schizophrenic, what's going on. Now, a whole bunch of shamanic cultures. There's a whole range of studies now, altered states of consciousness in general, where consciousness studies really is expanding beyond those narrow limits. And near-death experiences, you know, now there's a whole field of investigation after-death contacts and, you know, end-of-life experiences. All of these experiences

are going on in universities and that's opening the field up. There are some areas that are more hardcore than others. I mean, molecular biology is one of the most hardcore areas where it has a higher concentration of committed materialists than most, partly because of the ethos

set in place by people like Francis Crick, who was a very, I knew him at Cambridge, and he was extremely hardcore materialist. He was extremely bright guy. I liked him and we got on well, but he was a completely committed crusading materialist as well, you know, and very, very atheistic, a militant atheist.

So that culture influenced molecular biology. But I think a phase change should be possible. And, you know, I think what would really change things fastest is if there was some new invention that had commercial applications and then entrepreneurs started investing in it and then...

Silicon Valley billionaires invested. So you had billion-dollar companies giving grants to people in universities, furthering research. That would create a bandwagon effect. But I think it has to come...

I think that the revolution is going to have to be triggered by people outside institutional science rather than from inside, because within the conflicts would be too great. But if somebody suddenly appeared and said, you know, there's $10 billion fund for unconventional scientific research,

Quite a lot of people would apply for it. But right now, you know, the main funding agency for, say, psychical research is the Bial Foundation in Portugal, which is doing a great job. But I think they give away...

about a million dollars a year and they fund almost everyone in the field on peanut budgets whereas the large hadron collider a new version of it is just being announced for 20 billion euros so it's partly a question of funding it's partly a question of ideas and thinking but it's

It's surprising to me that in countries like India, where there's no cultural preference for dogmatic materialism, on the contrary, most Indian scientists are Hindus or Muslims. They're religious. They're certainly not. I worked in India as a scientist, and I hardly ever met any hardcore materialist atheist types there.

But they do exactly the same kind of science as people in the West, not because they think it's the deepest approach to truth. They don't. But that's the way you earn your living. That's the way you get your grants. It's totally pragmatic in their case, not ideological. But if someone changed the rules and you could get a salary for doing something different, they'd quickly move over to something different.

So it's a big revolution because in the past, scientific revolutions involved convincing a handful of people. Whereas now you've got...

You know, NIH alone spends $32 billion a year on biomedical research. And that's just one that worldwide is over $100 billion a year. And that's millions of jobs and huge institutions and lots of journals, huge vested interests and enormous numbers of textbooks and stuff. It takes a while to change something like that around.

So we must keep Planck's idea that science advances one funeral at a time to art here, I guess. Well, I'm not sure. I mean, a lot of young scientists are well aware of the limitations, but it's become more and more competitive for young scientists now because...

Only about a quarter of PhD graduates end up with permanent jobs in institutional science. Most of them then have to spend years as postdocs, low-paid postdocs in someone else's lab basically doing the donkey work for some high-flying scientist. And low pay with no security. And then when that comes to an end, they've got incredibly specialized skills for which there's virtually no market. And

Only one in four will get a permanent academic post. So they're extremely competitive with each other, and that makes them very conservative.

rather than bold and daring, because, you know, they're desperately keen to get a job and not to ruin their career. So that is a problem. It's all a problem. I mean, it's partly a problem with these institutional structures. So I wouldn't say that when I look among young scientists I know, in their private life, many of them are open-minded and curious, but in their actual career moves, they're very conventional, because that's the way to get ahead.

We've got a system that rewards incremental improvements along existing lines and is a strong disincentive to anything radically innovative. In a sense, it's different from the entrepreneurial world of business where there's an incentive to do something new, maybe not too new, but there's an incentive to innovate and do something new, whereas in science there isn't really in its present form.

I like your idea very much. Our venture division of my company, Oshazi Ventures, has an investment in a company called Prophetic, and they are developing apparatus that will assist in lucid dreaming. And I think you're absolutely correct about that field being far more open

far more experimental. We also are contemplating investments in many funds that are dedicated to frontier science.

So that aspect of it, I think, is encouraging. And I agree that the follow the money works another way as well. Because if prophetic, for example, has a big hit and it actually works, people are literally going to have to take notice. And yet I have a good friend who I've had on the podcast who actually is a Ph.D. and actually was a consciousness researcher.

And he left the field. He left the field because essentially he said it was so locked down and unwilling to go down any path that he, now this is him speaking, that was even slightly not part of canon. And yet we don't know anything about consciousness really. No. No.

That's what's ironic. It's the least understood thing of all. And from a materialist point of view, there's no explanation possible because basically they say it doesn't exist or at least it doesn't do anything. So I'm glad to know that you've got this project because I think, I mean, I've been thinking along somewhat similar lines with some of my own research. I'm not an entrepreneur, but

One of the things I've been doing in recent years is, as you probably know, I've been studying telepathy in the sense of being stared at, which are taboo topics within regular institutional science. But they're not difficult to do research on, and the experiments are quite cheap. I mean, I have a minuscule budget, so I work very inexpensively. And you can do

I was brought up on the British string and sealing wax tradition, you know, sort of minimal cost experiments. So telepathy tests, I've been doing these online telepathy tests on mobile phones. I've just got an app about to be released for the sense of being stared at, where you can train yourself to get better at it. The key thing here is to let people train themselves to get better. And I think that if there were a company that...

had an intuition training app

where there's lots of people who'd like to improve their intuition. They're not going to get taught that you won't get intuition 101 at Harvard or anything like that. So, you know, but there are lots of people who see the point of training intuition, including in business. I mean, I'm convinced there's a lot of successful business people are successful because they're intuitive, not because they're just doing nothing but calculating things from spreadsheets. I mean,

Making decisions, you always have to make a decision on the basis of incomplete information, and intuition plays a major role. So I think an intuition training app, which, for example, a telepathy training app, first of all, I'll back up a bit. The telephone telepathy test that I've been running, automated on mobile phones, is

You may know about them, but for those who are watching, I'll explain it. Say you were the subject, Jim. You would then pick two people you might be telepathic with, usually people you know well, family members or close friends. And when you register on the phone, you put in their names.

What happens in the tests we've actually got is that a randomized time would call one of the two people and say, this is Jim's telephone telepathy test. Think about Jim. And when you're ready, press one. And when they're ready, the system then rings you. Your phone rings. The caller ID says telephone telepathy test.

It doesn't give the name of the person calling. And when you pick it up and say, hi, Jim, this is your telephone telepathy test. One of your two callers is on the line. Press one for Andrew, press two for Helen. And then you have to guess which one you think it is out of the two people you've chosen. And as soon as you've pressed it, the line opens up and you get to talk to them. So you get instant feedback if you're right or you're wrong. 50% chance of being right by chance.

And then after the present version of the test, it cuts off after a minute because I'm paying for the call. And then they just resume their normal lives. And after a random time interval, it does it again.

And if people, you know, one of the things the skeptics say is if these things are so good, if people who have these skills are so good, why aren't they millionaires? I think the answer to that is that they are. I think the world's full of millionaires or billionaires who use their intuitive skills. And then they say, well, why don't they, you know, break the bank at the casino? Well, some people do. And if they do, they're soon escorted out. And, you know,

You know, we in Britain have had online gambling for years now. I mean, in the U.S., it's relatively new or just starting, I gather. But these online gambling firms have algorithms to spot people who consistently win.

And they then either ban them from their site or reduce them so they have a maximum stake of one pound. So the fact is that they've got algorithms. So, you see, as soon as one looks at it through this lens, then...

It's not something totally weird, a tiny fringe number of theosophists or something think that might happen. It's going on all the time, hiding in plain sight. And I think an intuition training app could help flush all this out, as well as probably make a profit. I'm fascinated by the idea of morphic resonance. I think...

In many respects, when I talk about it with people, one of the first things they'll say is, oh, that's panpsychism. And I say, yeah, it actually is. And they seem so incredibly reluctant to even have a conversation about it. And yet, when we look at the field of quantum physics, for example, the idea that particles are non-locally entangled is quite commonplace.

broadly accepted by many quantum physicists. Why the disconnect? By the way, non-locality entanglement seems to be very congruent with your morphic resonance theory. Why the disconnect that you'll have

The quantum folks saying, yeah, of course. And you'll have the group of biologists and evolutionists saying, absolutely not. Well, it comes back, I think, to this whole thing we were talking about earlier, the ideology of scientism and materialism. Sir John Maddox, who...

We started off by discussing who condemned my work as a heretic. So John Maddox was a prominent member of the Rationalist Press Association, a secular humanist, a militant secular humanist, a fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, PSYCOP.

And his whole life was committed to this kind of, like Francis Crick, like Richard Dawkins. There aren't so many of these old-style militant atheists around anymore. It was a kind of generation that's fading away, fortunately. But Maddox was deeply committed to that worldview. And the reason he condemned my book was because he thought I was bringing magic into science.

And, you know, panpsychism, from his point of view, is a kind of magic. So it was ideological. And the hardcore, the opposition I've had most strongly is from people in my own field, biology. I've had much less opposition from people in psychotherapy. For example, Jungians, followers of C.G. Jung, love morphic resonance. And when my first book came out, A New Science of Life,

As inundated with speaking invitations for Jungian conventions, you know, in Europe and North America, because it's the only way you can explain the collective unconscious, or at least the most plausible way of explaining the collective unconscious. So they like it. You know, some ecologists like it.

But so within biology, there's this, you know, the idea we can explain everything with genes and molecules was the dominant philosophy in the 20th century. And, you know, the Human Genome Project was supposed to sort of reveal the whole details of human nature at the molecular level. And, of course, it didn't work, as I show in my chapter in the Science Delusion on Inheritance.

It didn't work. And now epigenetics have come along. The old heresy, Lamarckian heresy, is now back after being rebranded epigenetics. And it's now a major thing in biology. And so this actually has provided an opening. I wonder to what length, you know, when a ideological fervor is cornered, right?

it often becomes quite nasty and quite vicious. I think of David Baum, who was a brilliant physicist,

who presented a paper on hidden variables. And then his mentor, Oppenheimer, suppressed it because he was worried about the Red Scare. And apparently Baum had been briefly a member of the Communist Party. And Oppenheimer was quoted as saying that if we cannot disprove Baum, we shall ignore him.

And there's a lovely film about him in which some of the top minds in physics are saying the most vicious things about Baum, and yet they have no empirical evidence or objectivity to refute his idea of the explicate and implicate order, which went on to become a quite famous theory. I just wonder, would you have to brace yourself for

for these uh potential discoveries against that kind of outside well i mean i've already had that kind of attack for years so it's not as if it would be something new um

And, actually, incidentally, I knew Bohm quite well. He and I had many dialogues, and partly with Krishnamurti and partly just between ourselves, because I live in North London, he lived fairly nearby. So, you know, we used to meet, and I knew him and his wife, my wife knew Bohm. So it was like we used to just go around for tea and things.

So, and then Bohm and I had a dialogue about morphic resonance and the implicate order, which is reprinted in the new edition of my book, A New Science of Life, called Morphic Resonance in the US. So, yes, Bohm was sort of persecuted, was driven out of the US. He went to Brazil and then he,

ended up in England. Well, in terms of my own thing, I mean, there's not much else they can do they haven't already done. I mean, so I don't feel that, you know, I slightly, my attitude for years has been might as well be hung for sheep as for a lamb. You know, I don't feel the sort of caution or inhibition that most scientists do because it's

Within in terms of institutional science, I haven't got anything to lose. So, you know, I publish papers in peer reviewed journals. And luckily, I have to say that most journals I've written, I've been doing a lot recently. I have about seven in the last year is, you know, it's probably my most productive phase for a long time.

And I have to say that the journals, I used to get very hostile rejections from journals who reject my papers without refereeing. But in the last two or three years, I've managed to, you know, I've been fairly refereed. I mean, peer review is actually can be constructive. It is often constructive.

Because critics point out flaws and then you can put them right before you publish the paper. All things you've missed out you ought to put in or references you didn't know about and stuff. So, for example, my paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies two years ago called Is This Unconscious?,

panpsychist paper. I've been talking about this for years. I used to discuss it with my friend Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham and Matthew Fox. And I, you know, sort of talked about this for a long time. But then my son Merlin, who's a scientist, he wrote a book on fungi called entangled life, which was a bestseller still is. He said, you know, why don't you write this up for a mainstream journal?

And I thought, well, it wouldn't have been possible a few years ago. But I thought, well, okay, maybe Merlin's right. Times have changed a bit, and I'll try this. And so I wrote to the editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies and said, would they consider a paper on this subject? And he wrote back saying, well, yes.

Yes, but of course it would have to be subject to the normal peer review process. And he pointed out the subtitle of the journal is Controversies in Science and the Humanities. So he said, well, it is in our subtitle. He said, I can't really say no on the grounds it's controversial.

So I wrote the paper and I brought in, you know, modern ideas on panpsychism from philosophy and philosophy of mind. And it's now become within philosophy. There is now quite a number of panpsychists. It's now become quite respectable as a position. That's what's changed the situation. Integrated information theory and other forms of panpsychism have

opened a door. You see, so basically in my paper on the sun,

I said, well, look, lots of people are discussing panpsychism, but they discuss, you know, could electrons have a little bit of consciousness and molecules a bit more? And so when you get to the brain, there's quite a lot. But they stop when they get to the human brain. And they go, why not go further? You know, what about the sun? And then, of course, once I've opened the door for the sun, what about other stars? What about the whole galaxy? Indeed, the entire cosmos. So...

Anyway, the peer reviewers, one of them said that my treatment of integrated information theory was inadequate. It has a quantity called phi where you can calculate the consciousness of things. So it said unless I could calculate phi for the sun, I couldn't have a scientific argument for it being real and so the consciousness of the sun.

So I have a friend who's an expert on integrated information theory. So I asked him to give me, you know,

brief me on the more advanced parts of the theory. It turns out to calculate phi, because they try and calculate it from individual neurons and bits, anything you start from the bottom, you end up with a combinatorial explosion. You know, the number of possible combinations becomes huge. So to calculate phi, someone had worked out to calculate phi for a nematode worm. In fact, none other than senior abditis elegans.

with 302 neurons, to calculate phi for such a worm would take a standard powerful computer 10 to the 29 years, longer than the age of the universe. And so in my response to the peer reviewer, I said, well, since we can't really do it for a nematode worm, you know, since the sun's vastly more complex than its electromagnetic patterns, it would take...

you know, multiverses of calculation time to work out five for the sun. And so I don't think it's feasible for me to include it in this paper, which the referee and the editor, of course, had to accept. So, but, you know, I had to jump through all these hoops. But nevertheless, you know,

I had a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society a couple of years ago, and I've had a good run with scientific journals, and I have to say that I've been quite fairly treated in the last few years. I've had a lot of unfair treatment in the past. Now, of course, if I submitted a paper on morphic resonance to Nature, I doubt if I'd get quite such fair treatment. But I might be able to submit a paper on morphic resonance to some other biology journal somewhere,

and a real mainstream one, and it might be possible. Things are changing in that sense. And I think the extreme fanatical atheist, materialist, reductionist types of the Maddox, Richard Dawkins type, there are very few of them in the younger generation. There are a

a handful. I mean, but even the commensal atheists, the new generation are much more sort of fuzzy at the edges. I mean, Sam Harris, for example, who is one of the four new atheists, you know, from the end of faith and so on, all his books. Sam Harris is now giving online meditation courses, but

because he realizes that spiritual practices are actually beneficial, whereas old-school atheists would have been against any kind of spiritual practice. And so even Sam Harris is probably the most firebrand of the

newer generation of materialists and atheists, but his wife's a practicing Buddhist meditator. He himself teaches meditation online. In one of his recent podcasts, he talked about the amazing experience of a magic mushroom trip that he'd had. And after the trip, in his talk, he said, you know, well,

He said, this was such an amazing experience of connection with all things mystical unity. I can easily see how mystics would think the way they do because they've had this experience. And I felt like that myself. But after a few days, he said, I realized it must all just be due to molecular changes inside the brain and, you know, all inside the head. So he sort of, but this is a far cry from the kind of militant,

of the Dawkins generation. Definitely. And I think that everything you've just mentioned, I have done deep dives down those rabbit holes. I think that we actually are in a potential phase change environment right now. I call it the great reshuffle. And I definitely think that people are more open to the ideas that you are expressing, bias,

By the way, there's a lovely book called The Fifth Science written by a fellow Brit, but he goes, he's very mysterious. He lives in Bulgaria and he goes under a pseudonym for his book, but it's actually a collection of short stories. But Suns Being Conscious is one of the main elements of the book.

So I think you might enjoy that. Oh, look at it, Jim. Thanks for telling me. I've written it down. Yes. Yes. His name is Nome de Plume. He's ex-Serbia, and he's quite clever. And I think it's one of the best science fiction books that I've read in years.

I wonder, again, back to there seems to be both in culture and in what many laymen perceive as the far more disciplined scientific method. There seems to be remnants of like going all the way back to Aristotle, right? Where deterministic yes, no, zero, 100, zero.

And the scientific method is powerfully effective. I don't even want to debate that. But there's two elements of it that have already been falsified. First, it relies on our sense data.

And as you well know, our sense data is not great. And it also relies on pure reason. And, you know, even Charles Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, in his paper, What the Tortoise Said to Achilles, said,

made a very compelling argument for the idea that as you go down the logic tree and you get to the bottom of it, what you find is a human being asserting without proof that something was true. And so it does seem to me that, okay, it works and it's great, but why this still hostility to much more probabilistic methodology? So for

I often say that we are deterministic thinkers living in a probabilistic universe and hilarity or tragedy often ensue. And I just wonder, why are they having this big or very hard time updating their thinking? I mean, again, based just on real evidence in terms of sense data, in terms of pure reason.

Well, I think, in fact, most real scientific discoveries come from intuitive imaginative leaps, you know, as...

Karl Popper, the philosopher of science, said, you know, it's hypotheses and testing of hypotheses, but the hypothesis is basically a guess about the way things might be. And there's many examples of scientific hypotheses that come in a flash to people. It's not logically arrived at. It's an intuition. So that is actually part of the scientific process, and philosophers of science would agree about that. I don't think that's controversial.

When it comes to the probabilistic nature of things, I think there are some branches of science where that's absolutely standard. Everything to do with medical research or agricultural research is statistical. And parapsychological research and most psychology research is statistical. You know, if you're doing a drug trial, it's, you know, for a mainstream drug from a mainstream drug company, it's all based on statistics. And if you're testing out new varieties of crops, it's all statistical.

So in practice, large areas of science are statistical. Everything to do with sociology, predicting the outcomes of elections, opinion polls, all the stuff is not hardcore determinism.

And I think that one of the things that's loosening up, well, one of the big movements that loosened up thinking in science from since the 1980s was the chaos revolution. Everyone knew there was quantum probability, but then the chaos revolution happened.

made us realize that actually most things are probabilistic, including the weather. I mean, the weather forecasters get it wrong, not because they're stupid or because they haven't got big enough computers, but because it really is unpredictable more than, you know, a week or two in advance. And even that's not terribly predictable. So I think in the large areas of science, this is now pretty well taken for granted. So, yeah,

And statistical methodology is absolutely necessary. And the other thing which I think is changing it is the growth of quantum computing because quantum computing now has billions of dollars being invested in it by all these major companies and lots of startups as well. And quantum processes are inherently probabilistic. And normally,

In ordinary machines, like a computer, you want to iron out all that probabilism. I press A on my computer keyboard. I want an A to appear on the screen. I don't want T or J or something, some random letter to appear. So we've actually designed our computers and all our machines to be as predictable as possible and to iron out all these quantum fluctuations, which in large numbers they sort of average out.

So we've designed our machines to avoid these problems, but quantum computing is a technology where the superposition of possibilities, the fact that many different things could happen, is an essence of the entire process, and that's why it works.

And it's not terribly impressive what they do with quantum computers yet. But if it does become impressive, then it's precisely this indeterminacy and possibility realm which is going to be the basis of it. So I think that's an area where there's a changing thinking. That's likely to have knock-on effects. So I think that these simplistic deterministic ideas...

I mean, I think the problem is that people at the leading edge of science know what the problems are and they know that there's a lot that's not known. They wouldn't be doing research if they thought all the answers were known because you just look it up in a book. So anyone who's doing research knows that there's a lot that isn't known.

The problem comes from people who've done some kind of physics 101 when they were 19 or something and identified as a scientifically minded, modern, rational person. And then the rest of their life go on with sort of undergraduate attitudes of a kind of...

Dawkinsite type. I think the problems I have are actually quite often with non-scientists who think they know that science is all about determinism, that everything that they don't believe in has been refuted, etc. Very ill-informed people on the whole, but they put their faith in science.

So they're the same kind of people who say they're against religion because they think religion is based on blind faith and dogma. And ironically, I think that kind of scientism is based on much more blind faith than religion. Anyone who's religious knows that there are lots of different religions. Even if you're a Christian, you know there's Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Methodists, Quakers, Pentecostals, etc., and lots of Muslim sects and so on.

In religion, there's a wide choice. There isn't a single thing. In science, there isn't a wide choice. There is no pluralism in that same way. And so it's actually more dogmatic.

And in terms of blind faith, you know, if you went along and questioned somebody about the existence of the Higgs boson or said you didn't believe in electric charge or something, they're not going to say, oh, we welcome questioning minds. Wonderful, you're doing critical thinking. They're going to say, no, that's wrong. You know, just look it up. Do an elementary physics course. You'll soon learn. You're just ignorant. So anyone who tries to question is instantly put down.

Robert Persig had a lovely passage in Santa and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in which he says that people who feel fairly certain about something don't go around proclaiming it all day long. He goes, do you often hear somebody running around with just complete maniacal energy saying, the sun is going to come up tomorrow, the sun is going to come up tomorrow?

And he makes the point that they are trying to assuage their own feelings of maybe I need to be more open-minded about this. In terms of chaotic mathematics, that's also a really interesting topic that Mantle brought to We Market Types in his book, The Misbehavior of Markets.

And so it gained a currency outside of just pure science that was very, very valuable. I'm really impressed by this idea of moving things from pure science, your ideas, to something like the intuition contest. All of those ideas, I think, are brilliant because the more you can make

them cross-pollinization, then you're going to have people like me thinking, oh, that might be a good company. Let's give that a go. I wonder, what would you, let's say you have a young scientist, you mentioned your son is a scientist and published and is doing very well. What advice would you have for younger scientists today? What books would you point them towards? What type of research, et cetera? Well, I think...

I mean, this may sound like self-promotion, but I definitely point towards my book, The Science Delusional, Science Set Free. The English edition, the 2020 edition, the U.S. edition of Science Set Free hasn't been updated. My U.S. publishers didn't publish the new edition. So anyone who's interested should get the British second edition, The Science Delusion.

where I go through all the sciences, looking at the ten fundamental dogmas and showing how all of them can be questioned and how science opens up.

I think that would be a start. I think then it's if realistically, if anyone wants to be part of this new wave of this kind of revolutionary science that's going to happen, they're going to have to do a fairly conventional PhD and get the necessary skills and credibility. Because right now,

You can't do a PhD on morphic resonance or on... You can just about do... In two or three universities in Britain, you could do one on telepathy. I mean, that's relatively new. I don't know. There may be one or two universities in the US, maybe the CIIS in San Francisco, possibly Virginia University. But...

So there's a psychic research you can probably do in a handful of universities, but these more revolutionary ideas like morphic resonance, you can't yet do. But when things start changing, um,

There'll have to be people who've got the necessary skills, who know the language of science, who know how to publish papers in peer-reviewed journals, and so on. And for that, you're going to have to have a sort of fairly conventional training. The main thing to do there is that once you get sucked into the culture, the subculture of, you know, the PhD program, the laboratory tea room, the stuff...

I mean, as Thomas Kuhn showed in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, paradigms aren't just ideas. They're communities of people with shared beliefs. And when you're a part of a community with shared beliefs, if you start challenging that belief, basically it puts you outside the community. So you know you're expelled from the community. So I think anyone, young scientist, who wants to play a part in the forthcoming revolution in science should.

needs to be aware of the fact that they'll be immersed in a social world. And therefore, it's probably important to have a group of friends or associates or belong to an organization like the Institute of Noetic Sciences or the Scientific and Medical Network

where there's another peer group who don't share those standard materialist beliefs. Otherwise, you would be very isolated, which is a difficult position to be in. So I think at the moment, though, as I say, that probably acquiring the necessary experimental skills, expertise, and the ability to speak the language of science as a professional is

isn't important, will continue to be an important ingredient in bringing about a change. I'm invested. I'm actually the chairman of one of the largest open source AI companies. That's British Stability AI. And one of the things I constantly hear from researchers there is,

Boy, we really could get a lot more done if we didn't have to get our PhD, but it is absolutely required. And so we even we also through my company give fellowships of one hundred thousand dollars a year to brilliant people. One, by the way, the first one we gave was to a fellow named William Zhang for quantum computing.

And then we gave another to a PhD candidate in AI simply because he was such a tinkerer that his patron in one of the companies that we're invested in had to keep getting after him to like,

Complete his PhD. And so I think that that is wonderful advice in terms of the standard issue.

is going to need those credentials, even though some of the most brilliant minds that I've seen in the deep science entrepreneurial part are mostly tinkerers and mostly the types that go, oh, isn't that strange?

through doing their research. Well, Dr. Sheldrake, this has been such an honor for me. I admire your work.

enormously. And I think would love if you're agreeable to do a round two, because I didn't even get to half the things that I wanted to chat with you about because you're so fascinating. At the end of our podcast, we ask our guests the following, and it's a hypothetical idea. And that is, we are going to make you the emperor of the entire world,

For one day, you can't kill anyone. You can't kill any sparrows. You can't put anyone in a reeducation camp. But you can. We'll hand you a magical microphone, and you can accept two ideas into the entire population of the earth. Whatever their next morning is, they're going to wake up, and they're going to think, I have just had two of the most incredible ideas, and I'm going to act on them.

What are you going to accept in the world's population? Well, I suppose that the ideas that I've been working on for years, in a sense, I've been trying to do this without the magic microphone and without the one day and without the sort of popping into everyone's mind. So in a sense, it would be, for me, business as usual, but the hype is sort of

supercharged. One idea is that our minds are not just our brains, that our minds are much more extensive than our brains. And this is not just some kind of abstract argument. It's very practical. When we look at anything, like I'm looking at you now, Jim, on the screen, my image of you is on the screen where you are. It's not inside my head.

So I think our minds are extended in every act of perception. We look at a distant star, our mind is reaching out to touch that star. We're literally over astronomical distances.

If I think of somebody who I know well, who I want to call because I've got something I really want to say to them, my mind reaches out, my intention to call them reaches out to them. They may start thinking about me. And when I call, they may say, it's funny, I was just thinking about you. And I think that's the basis of telephony telepathy, that they pick up these intentions because the mind is extended.

And I think extended minds link together members of social groups, not just in human societies, but they work with pets as well. As you know, I wrote a book called Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home about telepathic encounters with dogs, cats and all sorts of other animals.

Also about animal premonitions like forecasting earthquakes, which has been totally neglected. That would be a viable app. We could perhaps talk about that on another occasion. Earthquake predicting app wouldn't cost much and could save hundreds of thousands of lives. So the extended mind, mind's extended in space and time, is idea number one.

And the other big idea that I've been working on for so many years now, more than 50 years actually, is of course morphic resonance. The idea that there's a memory in nature, the laws of nature are more like habits. Our own memories are not stored inside our brains. We tune into them. And we also tune into lots of other people's memories, the collective memory, like Jung called it the collective unconscious memory.

Individual memory and collective memory differ in degree but not in kind. We more specifically tune into ourselves because we're more similar to ourselves in the past. So the idea of morphic resonance...

Habits of nature, memory and nature, collective memory in each species, and our own memories not being inside our brains. So that and the extended mind are the two ideas that I want to put across when I have this magic microphone. You wouldn't have to incept me on either one. As you can see, I'm a big fan of Dr. Young. Oh, there you are, yes.

And the collective unconscious. And by the way, if you think about some of the greatest inventors of all time, Tesla comes to mind. He was quite open that he thought that he got all of his ideas, you know,

you know, by like tuning to the right frequency in the world mind. Edison, many of the most famous investors, when you investigate, that's kind of like they'd look at you like, well, of course, of course. Yes, exactly. I mean, these were not marginal figures. I mean, Tesla was marginalized in his later life, but quite unjustly. But I mean, genius figures admit that it's not.

not all just coming from random changes in nerve endings. You know, they're channeling this in some sense. And yeah, anyway, I haven't got the magic microphone yet, but perhaps your podcast is a kind of play pen for this moment. That's one of the best descriptions of my intentions with this podcast I've ever heard. Yeah.

Well, this has been absolutely fantastic. A real pleasure talking to you. It was a real pleasure to meet some of these well-informed, curious, interested, and in a position to change things. Thank you.