Impossible...

for the Current Physics

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Discussions

Rupert Sheldrake

Impossible... for the Current Physics

Reply to the Open Letter by Giuseppe Sermonti

Dear Giuseppe, Thank you for your open letter and your remarks on Seven Experiments. You seem pleased that these experiments could help to make the world seem more enchanted, and at the same time worried that physical explanations could lead to this enchantment being taken away again. But I do not think that finding explanations for unexplained phenomena will narrow our vision. Such explanations may well go beyond anything in the current paradigm of science, and help to give us a larger scientific world view. This would not be a reductive process, but an expansive one. Much depends on how we define the words physical and normal. I think that the mysterious abilities of animals to know when their owners are coming home, for example, or the ability of people to know when they are being looked at may have a physical explanation. But this explanation may not be part of existing physics. I think the explanation will be physical in the sense that physics deals with nature; its etymological root is in the Greek word for nature, phusis. In this sense anything that is part of nature is physical, although it may not be part of existing physics. It could however be part of a physics of the future. In the same way if normal is defined in terms of what science can
Rivista di Biologia / Biology Forum 89 (1996), pp. 483-486.

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currently explain, many of the phenomena I am discussing seem paranormal. However they may seem normal if science expands. We have to remember that the current scientific definition of the paranormal is based on a narrowly academic starting point. The sense of being stared at, for instance, has been experienced by the great majority of the population and from most peoples point of view is normal, not paranormal. The seemingly inexplicable powers of pets, likewise, seem quite normal to most pet owners, who usually take them for granted. When C.G. Jung called synchronicity an acausal connecting principle he was limiting the use of the word causal to that accepted in mechanistic science. I prefer to consider widening our scientific understanding of causation. My purpose in this book is three-fold. The first is to open up to scientific enquiry areas that have been neglected or subject to taboos. The second is to point out that original research need not be the monopoly of a scientific priesthood. The third is to explore the idea of interconnections between organisms and other members of their social group, and also between organisms and their environment which could, I think, be explained in terms of morphic fields. In the hypothesis of formative causation (Sheldrake [1981], [1988]) I make two fundamental proposals. The first is that self-organising systems are interconnected and co-ordinated through morphic fields. These fields are spatially extended, and embrace all the parts of the whole system. For example, the morphic field of a developing embryo is within and around the entire embryo, just as a magnetic field is within and around a magnet. Likewise, the morphic field of a social group is within and around all the members of the society. Thus termites are embedded in the morphic field of the colony, which is greater than any individual within it. If the queen is killed or disturbed, the field is perturbed, but not destroyed. Termite colonies can respond to the loss of their queen by the production of new queens, and the social group can continue for decades, far longer than the life of any individual within it, including the queen. In this respect termite colonies are like human societies, continuing over generations. The second aspect of my hypothesis of formative causation is that morphic fields contain a kind of memory given by the process I call morphic resonance. This means that the fields themselves should

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evolve in time. Most tests of the hypothesis of formative causation to date have involved an attempt to detect these changes in time (see for example my article in Biology Forum 85: 431-443). The experiments I am proposing in Seven Experiments are not principally to do with the temporal aspects of morphic fields, but rather with their spatial extension, and their ability to connect organisms with each other and with the environment. My aim is not to attempt to prove the impossible. Nor is it to deny the importance of normal physics, nor to diminish the wonderful ability of some migratory birds to recognise patterns in the stars. It is to explore areas that lie beyond the prevailing scientific paradigm. I hope that this process will help to enlarge science, and to change our view of the world. I do not think that this new view of the world will remove wonder from our experience. Rather I think it will help us to recognise aspects of nature that we have been trained to ignore or deny in the interests of a constricted rationality. I think both nature and human reason are greater than current science generally admits. Yours, Rupert Sheldrake

REFERENCES Sheldrake, R. [1981], A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation. Blond and Briggs, London. Sheldrake, R. [1988], The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature. Collins, London.