Rupert Sheldrake - The Science Delusion BANNED TED TALK

The science delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality in principle

leaving only the details to be filled in.

This is a very wide spread belief in our society.

It's the kind of belief system of people who say

I don't believe in God, I believe in science.

It is a belief system which has now been spread to the entire world.

But there's a conflict in the heart of science between science as a method of inquiry

based on reason, evidence, hypothesis, and collective investigation

and science as a belief system or a world view.

And unfortunately the world view aspect of science has come to inhibit and constrict

the free inquiry which is the very lifeblood of the scientific endeavor.

Since the late 19th century, science has been conducted

under the aspect of a belief system or world view

which is essentially that of materialism. Philosophical materialism.

And the sciences are now wholly-owned subsidiaries of the materialist world view.

I think that, as we break out of it, the sciences will be regenerated.

What I do in my book 'The Science Delusion' - which is called 'Science Set Free' in the United States -

is: take the ten dogmas or assumptions of science and turn them into questions,

seeing how well they stand up if you look at them scientifically.

None of them stand up very well.

What I am going to do is first run through what these ten dogmas are,

and then I will only have time to discuss one or two of them in a bit more detail.

But essentially the ten dogmas which are the default world view

of most educated people all over the world are,

first that nature is mechanical or machine like, the universe is like a machine,

animals and plants are like machines, we are like machines.

In fact, we are machines.

We are "lumbering robots" in Richard Dawkins' vivid phrase,

with brains that are genetically programed computers.

Second, matter is unconscious, the whole universe is made up of unconscious matter.

There is no consciousness in stars, in galaxies, in planets, in animals, in plants,

and there ought not to be any in us either, if this theory is true.

So a lot of the philosophy of mind over the last hundred years

has been trying to prove that we are not really conscious at all.

So the matter is unconscious, then the laws of nature are fixed. This is the dogma three.

The laws of nature are the same now as they were at the time of the Big Bang

and they will be the same forever.

Not just the laws but the constants of nature are fixed which is why they are called constants.

Dogma four: the total amount of matter and energy is always the same.

It never changes in total quantity except at the moment of the Big Bang when it all sprang

into existence from nowhere in a single instant.

The fifth dogma is that nature is purposeless, there is no purposes in all nature

and the evolutionary process has no purpose or direction.

Dogma six: the biological heredity is material, everything you inherit is in your genes

or in epigenetic modifications of the genes, or in cytoplasmic inheritance. It is material.

Dogma seven: memories are stored inside your brain as material traces.

Somehow everything you remember is in your brain in modified nerve endings phosphorylated proteins.

No one knows how it works,

but nevertheless almost everyone in the scientific world believes it must be in the brain.

Dogma eight: your mind is inside your head.

All your consciousness is the activity of your brain and nothing more.

Dogma nine, which follows from dogma eight: psychic phenomena like telepathy are impossible.

Your thoughts and intentions can not have any effect at a distance

because your mind is inside your head.

Therefore all the apparent evidence for telepathy and other psychic phenomena is illusory.

People believe these things happen but it is just because they don't know enough about statistics,

or they are deceived by coincidences or it is wishful thinking.

And dogma ten: mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.

That is why governments only fund research into mechanistic medicine

and ignore complementary and alternative therapies.

Those can't possibly really work because they are not mechanistic,

they may appear to work because people would have got better anyway or because of the placebo effect.

But the only kind that really works is mechanistic medicine.

Well, this is the default world view which is held by almost all educated people all over the world,

it is the basis of the educational system, the national health service, the Medical Research Council,

governments, and it is just the default world view of educated people.

But I think every one of these dogmas is very, very questionable

and when you look at it, it turns they fall apart.

I am going to take first the idea that the laws of nature are fixed.

This is a hangover from an older world view before the 1960's when the Big Bang theory came in.

People thought that the whole universe was eternal, governed by eternal mathematical laws.

When the Big Bang came in, then that assumption continued,

even though the Big Bang revealed a universe that is radically evolutionary about 14 billion years old.

Growing, and developing, and evolving for 14 billion years.

Growing and cooling and more structures and patterns appear within it.

But the idea is, all the laws of nature were completely fixed at the moment of the Big Bang,

like a cosmic Napoleonic Code.

As my friend Terence McKenna used to say,

“Modern science is based on the principle: give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest."

And the one free miracle is the appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe

and all the laws that govern it from nothing in a single instant.

Well, in an evolutionary universe, why shouldn't the laws themselves evolve?

After all human laws do, and the idea of the laws of the nature is based on a metaphor with human law.

It is a very anthropocentric metaphor: only humans have laws, in fact only civilized societies have laws.

As C. S. Lewis once said,

"To say that a stone falls to earth because it is obeying a law makes it a man and even a citizen."

It is a metaphor that we got so used to, we forget it is a metaphor.

In an evolving universe I think a much better idea is the idea of habits.

I think the habits of nature evolve, the regularities of nature are essentially habitual.

This was an idea put forward at the beginning of the 20th century

by the American philosopher C. S. Peirce.

And it is an idea which various other philosophers have entertained,

it is one which I myself have developed into a scientific hypothesis,

the hypothesis of morphic resonance

which is the basis of these evolving habits.

According to this hypothesis, everything in nature has a kind of collective memory.

Resonance occurs on the basis of similarity.

As a young giraffe embryo grows in its mother's womb,

it tunes in to the morphic resonance of previous giraffes,

it draws on that collective memory, it grows like a giraffe,

it behaves like a giraffe because it is drawing on this collective memory.

It has to have the right genes to make the right proteins, but genes in my view are grossly overrated.

They only account for the proteins that the organism can make, not the shape, or form, or the behavior.

Every species has a kind of collective memory. Even crystals do.

This theory predicts that if you make a new kind of crystal for the first time,

the very first time you make it, it won't have an existing habit.

But once it crystallizes, then the next time you make it there will be an influence from the first crystals

to the second ones all over the world, by morphic resonance it will crystallize a bit easier.

The third time there will be an influence from the first and second crystals.

There is in fact good evidence that new compounds get easier to crystallize all around the world,

just as this theory would predict.

It also predicts that if you train animals to learn a new trick,

for example rats learn a new trick in London,

then all round the world rats of the same breed should learn the same trick quicker

just because rats have learned it here.

And surprisingly, there is already evidence that this actually happens.

Anyway, that is my hypotheses in a nutshell of morphic resonance,

everything depends on evolving habits not on fixed laws.

But I want to spend a few moments on the constants of nature too.

Because these, are again, assumed to be constant.

Things like the gravitational constant, the speed of light are called the fundamental constants.

Are they really constant?

Well, when I got interested in this question I tried to find out.

They are given in physics handbooks.

Handbooks of physics list the existing fundamental constants and tell you their value.

But I wanted to see if they've changed, so I got the old volumes of physical handbooks.

I went to the Patent Office Library here in London,

and they are the only place I could find that kept the old volumes,

normally people throw them away. When the new values come out, they throw away the old ones.

When I did this I found out that the speed of light dropped between 1928 and 1945

by about 20 kilometers per second.

It's a huge drop because they were given with the errors of any fractions, decimal points of error.

And yet, all over the world it dropped

and they were all getting values very similar to each other with tiny errors,

then in (1945) 1948 it went up again,

and then people started getting very similar values again.

I was very intrigued by this, and I couldn't make sense of it,

so I went to see the Head of Metrology,

at the National Physical Laboratory, in Teddington.

Metrology is the science in which people measure constants.

And I asked him about this, I said:

what do you make of this drop in the speed of light between 1928 and 1945?

And he said, "Oh dear",

he said "you uncovered the most embarrassing episode in the history of our sciences."

I said well, could the speed of light have actually dropped, and that would have amazing implications if so.

And he said, "no, no, of course it couldn't have actually dropped, it is a constant!"

Oh, well then how do you explain the fact that everyone was almost finding

it going much slower during that period?

Is it because they were fudging their results to get what they thought other people should be getting

and the whole thing was just produced in the minds of physicists?

"We don't like to use the word fudge."

I said, well what do you prefer?

He said, "well we prefer to call it intellectual phase-locking."

So if this was going on then, how can we be so sure it is not going on today,

and that the present values produced by intellectual phase-locking?

And he said, "no, we know it is not the case."

I said, how do we know?

He said, "well, we have solved the problem". I said well how?

He said, "well we fixed the speed of light by definition in 1972".

So it might still change.

He said, "Yes but we'll never know because we defined the metre in terms of the speed of light,

so the units have changed with it".

So he looked very pleased about that, they'd fixed their problem.

But I said, well then what about Big G?

The gravitational constant known in the trade as Big G, it is written with the capital G.

Newton's universal gravitational constant. That has varied by more than 1.3 per cent in recent years.

And it seems to vary from place to place and from time to time.

And he said, "well there is a chance of errors, and unfortunately there are quite big errors with the Big G.

So I said, what if it is really changing, perhaps it is really changing.

And then I looked at how they do it: what happens is that they measure it in different labs,

they get different values on different days, and then they average them.

And then other labs from around the world do the same

and they come out usually with a rather different average.

And then the International Committee on Metrology meets every 10 years or so

and averages the ones from labs from around the world to come out with the value of Big G.

But what if G were actually fluctuating? What if it changed?

There is already evidence actually that it changes throughout the day and throughout the year.

What if the Earth, as it moves through the galactic environment, went through patches of dark matter

or other environmental factors that could alter it? Maybe they all change together.

What if these errors are going up together and down together?

For more than 10 years I have been trying to persuade metrologists to look at the raw data.

In fact, I am now trying to persuade them to put it online on the internet,

with the dates and the actual measurements,

and see if they are correlated; to see if they are all up at one time, all down at another.

If so they might be fluctuating together and that would tell us something very, very interesting.

But no one has done this, they haven't done it because G is a constant.

There is no point in looking for changes.

You see, here is a very simple example of where a dogmatic assumption actually inhibits inquiry.

I myself think that the constants may vary quite considerably.

Well within narrow limits, but they may all be varying.

And I think the day will come when scientific journals like Nature have weekly reports on the constants

like stock market reports in the newspapers.

This week Big G was slightly up, the charge on the electron was down, the speed of light held steady,

and so on.

So, that is one area, just one area where I think thinking less dogmatically could open things up.

One of the biggest areas is the nature of the mind,

this is the most unsolved problem as Graham has just said.

Science simply can't deal with the fact that we are conscious.

And it can't deal with the fact that our thoughts don't seem to be inside our brains.

Our experiences don't all seem to be inside our brain.

Your image of me now doesn't seem to be inside your brain.

Yet the official view is that there is a little Rupert somewhere inside your head

and everything else in this room is inside your head.

Your experiences is inside your brain.

I am suggesting actually that vision involves an outward projection of images,

what you are seeing is in your mind but not inside your head.

Our minds are extended beyond our brains in the simple act of perception.

I think that we project out the images we are seeing and these images touch what we are looking at.

If I look at you from behind and you don't know I am there, could I affect you?

Could you feel my gaze?

There is a great deal of evidence that people can.

The sense of being stared at is an extremely common experience,

and recent experimental research actually suggests it is real.

Animals seem to have it too.

I think it probably evolved in the context of predator-prey relationships.

Prey animals that can feel the gaze of the predator would survive better than those that couldn't.

This would lead to a whole new way of thinking about ecological relationships between predators and prey,

also about the extent of our minds.

If we look at distant stars, I think our minds reach out in the sense to touch these stars

and literally extend out over astronomical different distances.

They are not just inside our heads.

Now it may seem astonishing that this is a topic of debate in the 21st century.

We know so little about our own minds that where our images are

is a hot topic of debate within consciousness studies right now.

I don't have time to deal with anymore of these dogmas, but every single one of them is questionable.

If one questions it, new forms of research, new possibilities open up.

And I think as we question these dogmas that have held back science so long,

science will undergo a re-flowering, a Renaissance.

I am a total believer in the importance of science.

I have spent my whole life as a research scientist, my whole career.

But I think by moving beyond these dogmas it can be regenerated.

Once again it will become interesting, and I hope life affirming.

Thank you.