Interview with Rupert Sheldrake on ESP, telepathy, morphic-resonance and the paranormal

April 2012, GHMB community interview

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Rupert Sheldrake, one of the world’s most innovative biologists and writers, is best known for his theory of morphic fields and morphic resonance, which leads to a vision of a living, developing universe with its own inherent memory. See his official website at:
http://www.sheldrake.org/

And his new and interesting video site,
Sheldrake TV

Rupert will answer your questions on the GrahamHancock.com messageboards. Please share your questions with Rupert Sheldrake on his thread on the messageboards. Once we’ve collected the questions, we will send him the best 10, then we’ll post them up here with Rupert Sheldrake’s answers to them.

Enjoy! And if you would like to request anyone in particular to be a GHMB Community Interview subject, please put your name suggestion in the Name Suggestions thread.

Questions and Answers below

Q1:

RUPERT:
Neo-Darwinism is often accused of being a blanket theory that is irrefutable. Any trait can be explained by making up a ‘just so’ story about how it got there in the first place and was favoured by natural selection. The philosopher of science Karl Popper called Neo-Darwinism ‘irrefutable’ precisely because it was such a blanket theory. This doesn’t mean that the evidence for evolution is poor. I think it’s very good. Evolution has happened and is still happening. But the evidence that it all happens through random genetic mutations and natural selection is a big assumption and is hotly contested within evolutionary theory as well as outside it.

Q2:

Author: Nesha, and annj1123

RUPERT:
I think panpsychism is almost the only reasonable way to account for the material systems, like brains are associated with consciousness. The usual alternatives are much less satisfactory. Dualism says that consciousness is totally different from matter, and is a very unhelpful theory from a scientific point of view. Materialism tries to explain consciousness away and has been an unhelpful model in consciousness studies. Idealism tries to explain matter away, making consciousness primary. Panpsychism seems to me a much more fruitful theory, and I discuss it in my new book THE SCIENCE DELUSION (CA, UK, US), especially in the light of the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and the panpsychist tradition in western philosophy.

Q3:

RUPERT:
Morphic fields underlie all habits of thought and we gain access to them everytime we learn something or even do something, because we are all creatures of habit. In relation to psychedelics, I think that there is a morphic resonance between past takers of a given psychedelic and takers in the present precisely because the substance affects their brains and brain activities in similar ways, putting them in resonance with each other. I think this maybe one reason why in Claudio Naranjo’s studies of the effects of ayahuasca on urban people, he found visions of serpents and jaguars which are features of the cultures in which this herbal mixture has been taken for centuries or even millennia. It seems more likely to me that his urban participants were tapping into a kind of collective memory associated with the taking of this drug than that the drug has a molecular effect in the brain which creates jaguar images or serpent images.

Q4:

Author: Chris Jordan

RUPERT:
My own research in developmental biology in the 1970s was about reaction diffusion systems, so this question was my own starting point. In plants there is a reaction diffusion system, on which I was working, whereby the plant hormone auxin sets up patterns in differentiating tissues, for example in tree trunks as they form the new bark and wood cells. The problem is that these patterns can, at best, explain gene activation in different cells, but do not explain how making the right proteins creates cell form. The same problem arises in a more obvious form in single cell organisms like the giant Acetabularia, which is about 5 cms long and has a photosynthetic cap on a long thin stem, with the single nucleus in a little root-like protrusion at the base. All this form and structure develops in a single cell so it cannot be explained in terms of differential gene activation in different cells. Moreover, if a section of stem is cut out, lacking the nucleus, it can still regenerate a new cap showing that this complex morphogenetic process does not depend on the nucleus or on gene activation. I discuss this in THE SCIENCE DELUSION (CA, UK, US). So I certainly think that morphic fields are essential for explaining physical form in biology. People have been trying to explain it in terms of reaction diffusion systems and other chemical systems for more than 50 years and all the main problems are still unsolved.

Q5:

RUPERT:
I don’t think that intelligent design is the right metaphor for living organisms. It takes for granted a machine theory. Machines require designers because they themselves have no design or purpose within them. That’s why we have engineers and machine designers. Organisms do not require designers because they contain their formative principles within themselves. I think organisms organise themselves in accordance with morphogenetic fields, not in accordance with designs and I don’t think DNA contains designs or is an intelligent designer. Organisms themselves are capable of creativity and I think of the creativity in the evolutionary process neither as depending on God as an external designer, nor on blind chance, but on the creative capacity inherent in organisms themselves.

Q6:

Author: caugusto

[Edited for brevity. Full text]

RUPERT:
New morphic fields arise through a creative process and creativity is the ultimate mystery. I myself think it’s unlikely that it’s all driven by the constellations of the zodiac or related to the precession of the equinoxes. And this would certainly not have much to do with creativity outside the solar system, and yet the entire cosmos is engaged in a creative evolutionary process. For me this is simply an experimental question. Are the correlations with astrological patterns so strong that they can account for the creativity of nature, at least on Earth or in the solar system? At the moment I don’t think the evidence is compelling and I’m sure there are other sources of creativity, even if the solar system, as an organism, has a creative influence on what happens within it.

Q7:

RUPERT:
Morphic fields are associated with a kind of collective memory, and my hypothesis is that the so-called laws of nature are like habits. I don’t think this memory is stored in a spatial record of any kind, but rather depends on the direct resonance between similar patterns of activity across time. Nevertheless the Indian and the theosophical nation of Akashic records does rightly emphasis the memory in nature, and in that sense is somewhat similar to my own hypothesis.

Q8:

RUPERT:
I don’t think that memories are stored in stones, as in stone-tape theory. I don’t even think they are stored in brains. I think they depend on resonance with similar events in the past. My own hypothesis for hauntings would be that when somebody is in a particular location, he or she may come into resonance with previous people in that location precisely because they are subject to a very similar sensory stimuli and the memory is because of a kind of previous resonance with the people in that place, rather than it being stored in the stones. This of course works for good memories as well as bad ones and might help to explain why sacred places help some people to enter a positive state of consciousness and sense of connection.

Q9:

RUPERT:
I agree about the sense of ascending out of localised time into something more majestic, beautiful and satisfying. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that there are platonic forms. It maybe more to do with the frame of consciousness itself. That by which we see or think is not that which is seen or thought, and the capacity for seeing or thinking, the capacity for consciousness itself, is what people seem to access in meditation and altered states of consciousness . They do not necessarily access eternal forms, as in Platonic philosophy. In any case, we know very little about the history of mystical experience. Plato, after all is very recent in the history of humanity, a mere 2,500 years ago, whereas modern humans have existed for at least 100,000 years. There may well have been some evolution in alterned states of consciousness through millennia of proto-shamanism of which we know almost nothing. So I don’t think that the acceptance of mystical experiences is incompatible with an evolutionary approach.

Q10:

RUPERT:
I’m glad you asked that question! This is exactly what my new book THE SCIENCE DELUSION is all about.

Join the discussion of Rupert’s Community Interview here