"Do you remember that man I mentioned earlier when I was performing my melodramatic soliloquy in the park?"
"Who? Bohm?"
"No. Rupert Sheldrake. He was the biologist who gave a TEDx talk entitled 'The Science Delusion,' where he challenged the dogmatic assumptions underpinning materialism. An anonymous panel of scientists did not want to hear his dissenting point of view, so they labeled the talk 'pseudoscientific.' The talk was censored at the behest of these 'clever' mainstream scientists — even though I've just proved, from first principles, that Sheldrake is right, materialism is utter bullshit, and these 'clever' scientists are not as clever as they think they are.
Anyway, Sheldrake is a persistent dissenter. He is a well-educated biologist who is most well-known for his theory of morphic resonance. This is a small snippet from his website."
The memory of nature
From the point of view of the hypothesis of morphic resonance, there is no need to suppose that all the laws of nature sprang into being fully formed at the moment of the Big Bang, like a kind of cosmic Napoleonic code, or that they exist in a metaphysical realm beyond time and space.
Before the general acceptance of the Big Bang theory in the 1960s, eternal laws seemed to make sense. The universe itself was thought to be eternal and evolution was confined to the biological realm. But we now live in a radically evolutionary universe.
If we want to stick to the idea of natural laws, we could say that as nature itself evolves, the laws of nature also evolve, just as human laws evolve over time. But then how would natural laws be remembered or enforced? The law metaphor is embarrassingly anthropomorphic. Habits are less human-centred. Many kinds of organisms have habits, but only humans have laws. The habits of nature depend on non-local similarity reinforcement. Through morphic resonance, the patterns of activity in self-organizing systems are influenced by similar patterns in the past, giving each species and each kind of self-organizing system a collective memory.
I believe that the natural selection of habits will play an essential part in any integrated theory of evolution, including not just biological evolution, but also physical, chemical, cosmic, social, mental and cultural evolution (as discussed in The Presence of the Past).
Habits are subject to natural selection; and the more often they are repeated, the more probable they become, other things being equal. Animals inherit the successful habits of their species as instincts. We inherit bodily, emotional, mental and cultural habits, including the habits of our languages.
Rupert Sheldrake
"And this is from an interview with John Horgan in Scientific American…"
Horgan: I admit that I'm still not sure what morphic resonance is. Can you give me a brief definition?
Sheldrake: Morphic resonance is the influence of previous structures of activity on subsequent similar structures of activity organized by morphic fields. It enables memories to pass across both space and time from the past. The greater the similarity, the greater the influence of morphic resonance. What this means is that all self-organizing systems, such as molecules, crystals, cells, plants, animals and animal societies, have a collective memory on which each individual draws and to which it contributes. In its most general sense this hypothesis implies that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits.
Horgan: Did the idea of morphic resonance come to you in an epiphany, or was it a gradual process?
Sheldrake: The idea of morphic resonance came to me when I was doing research at Cambridge on the development of plants. I was interested in the concept of morphogenetic, or form-shaping, fields, but realized they could not be inherited through genes. They had to be inherited in some other way. The idea of morphic resonance came as a sudden insight. This happened in 1973, but it was a radical idea, and I spent years thinking about it before I published it in my first book, A New Science of Life, in 1981.
Horgan: What is the single most powerful piece of evidence for morphic resonance?
Sheldrake: There is a lot of circumstantial evidence for morphic resonance. The most striking experiment involved a long series of tests on rat learning that started in Harvard in the 1920s and continued over several decades. Rats learned to escape from a water-maze and subsequent generations learned faster and faster. At the time this looked like an example of Lamarckian inheritance, which was taboo. The interesting thing is that after the rats had learned to escape more than 10 times quicker at Harvard, when rats were tested in Edinburgh, Scotland and in Melbourne, Australia they started more or less where the Harvard rats left off. In Melbourne the rats continued to improve after repeated testing, and this effect was not confined to the descendants of trained rats, suggesting a morphic resonance rather than epigenetic effect. I discuss this evidence in A New Science of Life, now in its third edition, called Morphic Resonance in the US.
Scientific American
"Sheldrake's theory is based on the idea that all self-organizing systems have a collective memory that they draw on and contribute to. A surprise-minimizing algorithm suggests this too. If rats in Harvard learn to escape a water-maze, they have repeatedly practiced a set of beliefs about how to escape water-mazes. Those collective beliefs would presumably exist within the Lab Rats blueprint (i.e. their Markov blanket), from which other lab rats inherit. So when lab rats on the other side of the world are tasked with escaping a water-maze, it's not that surprising that they have an inbuilt instinct for escaping water-mazes."
"So you're saying Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance should supersede Darwin's theory of evolution?"
"No," I chuckled. "I'm just pointing out how this simple recursive surprise-minimizing algorithm might explain Sheldrake's experimental findings, as well as Darwin's."
