- Okie doke.
 (audience applauding)
 So can everyone hear?
 Yes?
 - Yes.
 - Good.
 Okay, well we'll strive to maintain
 a certain level of formality,
 although this is definitely an in-house family get-together.
 I always say every time I'm at Will's
 that this feels like the home congregation.
 This is where we can let our hair down
 even when we speak from the pulpit.
 And I encountered Will a few weeks ago at a buffet
 and he said, "I'm glad to see you."
 And I said, "I'm glad to see you."
 He said, "This must mean we both need money."
 (audience laughing)
 So why don't we plan an event?
 But we needed a draw, so we thought probably
 we could lend some respectability to the enterprise
 by getting a British theoretical biologist
 to throw in with the plan.
 (audience laughing)
 (laughing)
 Every year now for several years,
 the annual return of the Sheldrakes to Turtle Island
 has been a high point in the social calendar.
 And sometimes it happens in the spring
 and sometimes in the late summer.
 But it always is an excuse to suspend
 the ordinary rules of engagement
 and party down as much as we can
 with these wonderful people.
 And Rupert and I have not seen each other
 for 10 months or so.
 He flew in from Vancouver this afternoon.
 I saw he and Jill for the first time this evening.
 I have yet to see Merlin, who is the latest adumbration
 of the Sheldrakean morphogenetic concrescence.
 (audience laughing)
 And I'm sure he lives up to the name.
 (audience laughing)
 So the way we conceived of this is I just think
 that what goes on in our living rooms
 is much more exciting even without the dope smoking
 than what goes on in the public lecture situation.
 So the idea was for Rupert and I to get together again,
 get to catch up again, and to have you
 as part of the extended family participate in this.
 So on very short notice, I conceived this
 and called it Forms and Mysteries,
 Morphogenetic Fields and Psychedelic Experiences
 as a kind of effort to split the deck two ways equally.
 Although in the past, Rupert and I have participated
 at Esalen, we spent a very interesting afternoon
 talking about the theory of formative causation
 and what it might say about the psychedelic experience,
 pharmacologically, psychologically, historically,
 and so forth.
 Forms and Mysteries seem to me a fitting title
 because of course form is a mystery
 that even science is willing to acknowledge.
 This is the great terra incognito of modern science
 is the persistence and genesis of form.
 What is it, where does it come from, and what sustains it?
 And typical of the history of science,
 the more complex problems have been postponed historically
 until epistemological and analytical capabilities
 were sufficient to deal with the problem.
 This is why, for instance, linguistics
 was no more than a metaphor until the 20th century.
 And in a sense, I think probably morphogenesis
 was in the same situation because powerful
 mathematical tools have had to be invented
 to carry it out of the realm of mere theoretical discussion.
 Rupert has been, I think, the most radical
 of all the people who have proposed
 a revisioning of causality and by extension
 the domain of science, what it is able to claim
 as its purvey.
 And I think that his position has been
 at first ignored and more recently
 with the publication of his second book excoriated
 because this is no small matter.
 This is actually a question of fundamental
 epistemic importance to the entire scientific enterprise
 because what is being proposed in the theory
 of the morphogenetic field is a revisioning of causality.
 The second book, which if you haven't read it,
 you're certainly missing an intellectual adventure.
 It's like a chance to read the Principia
 when the person who wrote it is striding
 around town giving lectures.
 It's really a rare intellectual adventure.
 I haven't known that kind of excitement
 reading theoretical biology since discovering
 L. L. White when I was a kid.
 But what is being proposed is a fundamental revisioning
 of how events happen in the world.
 And very fundamental to the performance of science
 is the notion of experiment.
 And experiment rests on the relative importance
 the relatively unexamined concept of the restoration
 of initial conditions.
 Well, the show Drakeian cosmos would play havoc
 with the notion of the restoration of initial conditions
 because what it is saying is that the universe
 is a steadily accreting and self-defining set
 of interlocking habits.
 And that no, that slices into this
 waveform interference pattern of habit
 are therefore necessarily going to be time dependent.
 In other words, it looks different
 at each point in its history.
 It makes it very hard, therefore,
 to see how in an atmosphere like that
 ordinary science can be prosecuted at all.
 So the interest that it holds for me then
 is that it seems to be a very calm, rational,
 attentive program of intellectual understanding
 which leads to the same radical conclusions
 that an emergence in the core experience of archaism,
 the psychedelic experience argues for.
 In other words, that all our intellectual constructs
 are in fact built on shifting sands.
 And all knowledge is provisional at this stage
 in the epistemic enterprise.
 It doesn't mean that a more epistemically grounded
 knowing is not possible.
 It merely means that up to this point, it has not occurred.
 Science's claim to fulfill this function
 is now in serious trouble.
 It actually has been in some areas
 since the elaboration of quantum physics in the '20s.
 But Sheldrake is coming at it not from a realm
 of extremely arcane mathematical modeling,
 but in the biological realm with a model
 which is both simultaneously true to felt experience
 and confounding to the scientific paradigm
 as it has been waged since Bacon, essentially.
 So Rupert is with us tonight.
 He will tell you, I hope, the state of the art
 in terms of experiments and the public dialogue
 that attends these things.
 Because make no mistake about it,
 the overturning of a scientific paradigm
 is a political act, and it has to do with reputations
 and tenure and publication and people
 who have built their lives defending something
 that they now see under severe attack.
 What I believe is happening, and that Rupert
 and my own fascination with the psychedelic experience
 and other phenomena in society all can be
 brought under the single umbrella of a resurgent vitalism,
 an awareness of the living vitality
 of form and organism and experience.
 And this is something that in order to do its work,
 the Newtonian model had to expunge all that,
 had to call these things secondary qualities,
 epiphenomenal, derivative, this, that, and the other.
 And yet, these are the existential stuff
 of the felt world of being.
 So Rupert brings to biology a theory
 which links it back into physics
 and forward into psychology in a way that restores meaning,
 however much it may do damage to the somewhat infantile wish
 of the Cartesians to construct a closed tautology,
 which is really what they want to do, you know?
 And that's why they want to get rid
 of all these troubling phenomena
 that are of such a complexity that it exceeds their model.
 Well, I'm a great fan of this theory.
 I could run on at length about it,
 but the man who invented it is here with us.
 He can lead us to a deeper understanding of it.
 Please welcome Rupert Sheldrake,
 the greatest biologist of the age.
 (audience laughing)
 - Ooh.
 (audience laughing)
 (Rupert laughing)
 Well, you see, it's a paradoxical situation.
 It's a difficult act to follow,
 and yet I've somehow got to try after that buildup.
 I mean, it's...
 I think what Terence's,
 his explanation of how morphic resonance works
 is obviously eloquent and bardic,
 and I agree with it.
 And the point that he's put to us now
 is the thing about the experimental tests.
 This coming down very much to Earth
 after this wonderful flight of Terence's imagination
 into those realms of the imagination
 that he leads us so easily.
 The tests so far have mostly been on human subjects,
 and those of you who've seen the new edition
 of A New Science of Life,
 which just came out two or three months ago
 in the United States,
 which was published about three years ago in Britain,
 that edition contains an appendix
 which brings you up to date on what had happened
 up until 1985.
 It contains a summary of the controversies
 and the discussions,
 including a reprint of the full Nature editorial attack,
 the book for Burning article.
 And it also summarizes the experiments
 which were done in the realm of hidden images,
 puzzle pictures.
 I've talked about those before several times
 here and in San Francisco,
 so I'm not going to go into those,
 but those were, roughly speaking,
 experiments that involved showing
 hidden pictures containing,
 pictures containing a hidden image,
 a puzzle picture, on television to millions of people.
 And the test was to find out whether
 more people in other countries could recognize it,
 could spot the hidden image in these puzzle pictures before,
 if more could do it after it had been shown on TV
 in one country than before.
 So groups of subjects were tested
 in a variety of countries.
 The transmissions took place on British television,
 first on Thames television,
 and then another experiment on the BBC
 involving about eight million people in the audience.
 And the tests in other countries
 were done by volunteer experimenters.
 The tests involved two puzzle pictures.
 People in other countries were shown
 both of these for 30 seconds each.
 They had to guess or say what they saw in it.
 They were either right or wrong, easy to mark.
 And whether they got the hidden image or not.
 And the same two pictures were tested
 on different subjects after the TV transmission.
 One of them was a control,
 the other one was shown on TV.
 Anyway, these experiments,
 which were then repeated in Germany,
 gave interesting but variable results.
 The first one showed a large increase,
 well, large, a significant increase
 at the 1% level of probability
 in the recognition of the transmitted picture
 compared with the control picture, which remained constant.
 Very gratifying result.
 And so the experiment was done again on BBC
 with its larger audience.
 The second experiment showed a strong positive effect
 in Western Europe.
 More people in Germany and other countries
 recognized the picture shown on TV in Britain,
 and the control picture didn't change.
 But it showed no effect in North America.
 (audience laughing)
 These results were very puzzling.
 And it's the kind of thing that,
 you know, what do you make of that?
 I don't expect morphic resonance
 to work by a distance effect,
 which is the most obvious explanation.
 Could it be that somehow people in Europe
 are being in the same time zone,
 are more in phase with each other
 than those in the US at six to nine hours shifted?
 If morphic resonance works as a resonance,
 then what phase people are in
 should be an important variable.
 So that's one possibility.
 And that's suggested by the results from South Africa,
 which is only one hour different from Britain,
 and at least as far away as New York
 and other places it was tested,
 which showed similar results to the European ones.
 It wasn't distance, it was time zone,
 it seemed to be the variable.
 Anyway, this experiment was then done again in Germany,
 transferred pictures, new pictures, of course,
 in each experiment.
 And the pictures there were transmitted
 on a Sunday afternoon on a program there,
 and tests were done all around the world.
 Again, no effect in North America.
 A highly significant effect in Britain.
 But in Britain, there it was highly significant
 and the control was no different.
 And the sample tested was something like 20,000 people.
 This was a huge sample.
 It was probably the biggest experiment ever done
 in terms of the number of participants.
 The effect showed that the picture
 had become significantly harder to recognize in Britain
 after it had been seen by a lot of Germans
 on a Sunday afternoon.
 (audience laughing)
 (laughing)
 Well, at this stage,
 I thought, well, this is too close
 to a kind of standard parapsychological experiment,
 a one-shot thing.
 I said to, I discussed it with Russell Targ,
 who I met at a conference, and he said,
 "I bet if you do this experiment,
 "you'll get all sorts of weird precognitive effects
 "and so on, it's so like a parapsychology experiment.
 "You'll get the same kind of anomalies
 "and bizarre things that we get in ours."
 And I thought, well, maybe that was one way
 of looking at it.
 And thought that probably I should do more
 what is more in the spirit of the hypothesis,
 namely try and test for the effect of repeated exposures,
 because it's a hypothesis of repetition leading to habit,
 not a kind of one-shot event.
 It was, I wanted to look for where puzzle pictures,
 for example, could be seen many times.
 Well, at this stage, it turned out
 that the only way to do this, feasibly,
 since I couldn't persuade a TV company
 to show the same puzzle picture in the same test
 hundreds of times in their program,
 the obvious way to do that would be
 have it in a TV commercial,
 or to have it in advertising in hoardings.
 And at this stage, I entered into discussions
 with various leading members of the advertising industry,
 including some at the Think Tank here in San Francisco.
 And it seemed that they were indeed
 quite interested in this approach.
 And at that stage,
 then they sent to me from their offices
 in Madison Avenue for some puzzle pictures
 and started doing some trial runs for a campaign.
 But at this stage, I began to get cold feet.
 I began to think, do I really want the first tests
 of morphic resonance to be done directly and completely
 as part of a kind of advertising stunt
 and as part of an advertising research project?
 And it's not, things should continue
 as they begin to some extent,
 and I thought it just wasn't a very auspicious beginning.
 And I didn't get too involved with that.
 I've sort of backed down on that one.
 They also had fears from their clients
 because anything to do with hidden images,
 advertisers are terrified of being accused
 of subliminal advertising.
 And so there's a kind of paranoia
 the minute hidden images come up.
 Anyway, so that experiments on the back burner.
 Several other projects are in the pipeline.
 A friend of mine has invented a puzzle in England,
 a nine-piece geometrical puzzle,
 which is exceedingly hard to do.
 It took me hours and hours to solve it.
 It's got tens of thousands, millions of combinations,
 and there's 148 possible answers,
 but they're very hard to find.
 He's planning to market this in the near future
 or in the more or less near future.
 So we're setting up an experiment
 that would go with that if it is marketed.
 We'd monitor in other countries where it's marketed,
 the rate at which people can solve it
 under standard conditions,
 and then measure at regular intervals in other countries
 before it's released there
 to see whether millions of people
 or thousands or tens of thousands learning it in Britain
 affect these successes.
 It's like monitoring the ability of people
 to solve the Rubik's Cube
 if you'd got in right at the beginning.
 It's that kind of thing, only on a smaller scale.
 Anyway, that's one thing in the pipeline.
 The other thing is the three experiments
 which won the Teretone Prize,
 which was awarded in June, 1986
 for tests of morphic resonance.
 All involved experiments on the ability of human beings
 to learn things that millions of people had learned before.
 Again, I won't go into these in detail
 'cause they're all written up in my new book,
 The Presence of the Past.
 Briefly, they involved the ability to learn
 or recognize words in languages unknown to the person
 in the written form.
 One involved Hebrew words written in Hebrew.
 The other involved Persian words written in Persian.
 These two experiments were very similar.
 They were done independently,
 one in the United States at Yale by Gary Schwartz,
 the other in Britain,
 by two people who both independently devised
 very similar tests to test for morphic resonance.
 Itself an interesting fact.
 These tests showed the ability of people
 to learn things more readily
 if they were things that other people had learned before.
 The third test was on Morse code.
 The main experiments that have been going on,
 apart from other ones planned in the human psychology realm,
 the ones that are actually going on right now
 are in the realms of chemistry and in fruit fly development.
 The experiment that's going on in Warwick University
 at this moment concerns protein folding.
 In my new book I discuss this.
 If proteins are unfolded,
 then it may be that when they fold up again,
 which involves a complex morphogenetic process
 at the molecular level,
 which can be monitored using quite simple techniques,
 when they fold up again,
 they may be refolding in a way
 that they've not done in nature before,
 especially there are reasons why this would be so
 for certain particular enzymes.
 So the more often they're refolded,
 they should learn how to do it, as it were,
 and the refolding process should take place
 measurably quicker.
 But we have an experiment going on to test for this,
 the refolding of enzymes and then repeated refolding
 to see if it happens quicker.
 I don't know the results yet.
 It's still going on and I'm not sure
 whether it will give conclusive results or not
 within the summer, which is when the project ends.
 The other one's on fruit flies
 and the development of fruit flies,
 following up results that already suggest
 that when fruit flies have developed
 in response to an abnormal stimulus,
 like ether or higher temperatures during pupation,
 that the percent abnormal flies,
 for example, flies with extra veins in their wings,
 a certain proportion are produced by their stress
 from the environment.
 But the more flies that have been exposed to the stress,
 the more that have become abnormal,
 the greater the abnormal response is
 when fresh ones are put into the stress.
 This has already been found.
 And it looks very much like a morphogenetic
 and morphic resonance effect.
 And some more experiments are going on
 to test the earlier results
 that showed this result to be the case.
 Again, this experiment's about halfway through
 at the moment.
 So these are some of the things
 that are going on to test the theory.
 I should perhaps mention one attempt
 to refute the theory that's been made
 and recently published in the Skeptical Inquirer.
 I don't know how many people here
 are readers of the Skeptical Inquirer.
 Perhaps rather few.
 The Skeptical Inquirer, as you may know,
 is the house journal of PSYCOP,
 the debunking organization,
 and the one that's most famous
 for James Randi being among its activists.
 And this was published,
 it was a paper by Francisco Varela
 who claimed to have refuted
 the hypothesis of formative causation.
 And the experiment that he'd done
 involved programming a desktop computer
 to carry out a particular operation,
 measure the time it took to do it,
 and then repeat this operation millions of times,
 and then measuring the rate of it.
 And he found that the computer didn't do it any quicker.
 So he concluded that this refuted
 the hypothesis of formative causation,
 and he first wrote this paper in 1983
 and sent it to me,
 and suggested we had a public discussion on this,
 which I agreed to.
 So we had two or three exchanges,
 and the idea was to publish the papers together.
 I argued in my first exchange
 that it didn't test the theory
 because the theory only applies to indeterminate quantum,
 systems which contain enough indeterminacy
 for these probabilistic fields to get a grip on it,
 whereas computers are completely determinate
 in their functioning.
 There's nothing that the fields could do.
 Secondly, that computers are not self-organizing systems
 in the same sense that morphogenetic systems
 and cells, crystals, molecules, and atoms are.
 Rather, the program that's going on
 is not something that's created itself,
 but rather it's something which Varela had thought up
 and put inside the machine.
 There's nothing self-organizing about that.
 And therefore, this wasn't a test of the theory.
 Anyway, Varela didn't agree,
 and said that I couldn't maintain
 that living organisms were not machines like computers
 because both organisms and machines were machines,
 and that there was no difference at all
 between computers and living organisms
 because they were all machines.
 So we got into this kind of argument,
 and I said I thought that was rubbish,
 and that it wasn't like that at all, and so on.
 Anyway, what happened then was that a physicist,
 the late Professor Michael Ovenden
 of the University of British Columbia,
 who was one of the judges of the Terry Turn competition,
 read Varela's paper, which was entered for the competition,
 and all four judges rejected
 as being a valid test of the theory.
 He pointed out to me that it didn't test the theory
 because the way computers work
 is that every microsecond or so there's a pulse,
 and the instructions are carried out pulse-wise.
 So a program with 30 steps in would take 30 microseconds
 'cause each step is pulsed by this internal clock.
 Well, roughly speaking, that seems to be
 what's going on in the computer.
 Varela's program of 30 steps took 30 microseconds
 for his computer to do.
 It's a computer that has a microsecond clock.
 And after millions of repetitions,
 it still took 30 microseconds.
 Well, all this shows is that the clock
 that pulses the things in the computer
 was pulsing the instructions at exactly the rate
 that the computer has to pulse them at,
 namely one microsecond.
 And so it took 30 microseconds
 to run through these instructions.
 Even if the silicon chips had responded quicker
 to the pulses, then it wouldn't have shown up
 in this experiment 'cause they would still
 have had to happen every microsecond.
 Anyway, this error in the basis of the experiment
 was pointed out to him.
 Anyway, he published the original paper
 and I've now written a reply in the Skeptical Inquirer
 pointing out these issues.
 But when I sent this in to the editor
 of the Skeptical Inquirer, he wrote back to me saying
 that my paper, my reply probably wouldn't come out
 till the winter number since the letters section
 of the fall number was already full
 of letters from other people pointing out the same error.
 (audience laughing)
 So that's the status of the refutation debate
 at the moment and you'll be able to see
 these various things in the forthcoming next two issues
 of the Skeptical Inquirer,
 should you ever see it around.
 There are quite a number of projects being planned
 in the realms of chemistry and developmental biology
 and experimental psychology.
 Some funding has become available
 for morphic resonance research,
 which is why these projects are going on right now,
 owing to the generosity of three or four individuals
 and then smaller subscriptions through the Fund
 for Morphic Resonance Research from individuals
 who have been good enough to try and help this process
 along and this money really has helped it along
 because it has made it possible to hire people
 to do these experiments in labs in universities
 and there are quite a number of universities ready
 and willing to do them and the only limiting factor
 at the moment is money to hire the people to do them.
 We're hiring students in the summer vacation
 to do these projects because that way we can get
 a three to four month project done for $1,500.
 Yes.
 - I don't know if I'm the only one in the audience
 who really doesn't grasp what the theory
 of morphogenetic resonance is,
 but I'd appreciate a couple of sentences description.
 - Yes, quite right.
 Well, I should have said that at the beginning.
 All right.
 The theory, sorry about that,
 I was assuming that most people didn't know
 and I should have realized that not everybody would
 and maybe most people.
 - Something intrigues me about it, but I don't grasp it.
 - Well, it's hard to grasp in its detailed forms,
 (audience laughing)
 that's what our dialogue was going to be about
 in some of these things, but in it,
 basically what it's saying is that the so-called laws
 of nature are like habits,
 that things happen the way they do
 because they've happened that way before.
 The way crystals crystallize depends on the way
 similar compound, the same compound
 is crystallized in the past.
 The way rats learn a new trick depends on whether
 the rats have learned it before.
 If rats in another place have already learned it,
 then it'll be easier to learn somewhere else
 for subsequent rats by the process called morphic resonance.
 So there's a kind of collective memory in nature
 in different species, in different kinds of things.
 And this collective memory is transferred
 from the past to the present
 by the process I call morphic resonance.
 That means that in general,
 think new things which happen repeatedly
 should happen more and more easily
 or more and more quickly and more and more probably
 as time goes on because of the effect,
 the buildup of this morphic resonance.
 And this theory is controversial as Terence pointed out
 because it's not the way that scientists
 usually think about these things.
 And the issue that I've just been discussing
 is various experimental ways to test it
 because this theory says when proteins fold up
 a new way and do it repeatedly,
 they should do it quicker.
 And when some people have learned something in one country
 like on television in a hidden image,
 it should make it easier for others to spot it elsewhere.
 Or if fruit flies have developed in a particularly,
 in a new way, for example, with extra veins in their wings,
 then the more that do it,
 the easier it should get for others to do it,
 other things being equal.
 And that's the point of all these experiments
 I've been describing.
 They're all designed to test this theory
 to see whether there is in fact this kind of memory
 or habit in nature.
 There's one more aspect of the theory
 that I should mention,
 which is that it leads to a completely new interpretation
 of memory.
 And it says that ordinary memory,
 our ordinary memories of what we've done,
 depend not on traces or physical material changes
 stored in the brain like traces on a tape recorder
 or recordings in a hologram.
 It doesn't depend on a material storage system in the brain.
 Rather, memory depends on tuning in to our own past directly
 by morphic resonance.
 And the brain's more like a tuning system
 than a storage system.
 Damage to the brain can interfere with the tuning
 or the reception,
 and so you can get loss of memory through brain damage,
 but the memory isn't in the brain.
 And just as we tune into our own memories
 from our own past,
 so we also tune into the memories
 of large numbers of other people.
 And this is similar as a notion
 to what Jung called the collective unconscious.
 So that's a summary of what it's all about.
 And the experiments I've just been talking about
 were in response to Terence asking for an update
 on the experimental test situation.
 So that's more or less what's been going on so far
 in the way of experimental tests.
 And more are in the pipeline,
 and the limiting factor at the moment is funds,
 and some funds are becoming available.
 So that's where we are from that point of view.
 - Yes, I might say about all this,
 to my mind, the criticism of the theory
 has to this point been fairly inane.
 And largely carried out by people
 who didn't really understand the theory.
 That doesn't mean that it is not open to criticism.
 The reason I have such an interest in it
 is because it solved a lot of what I felt
 were outstanding problems in my own model-building efforts.
 But it certainly raises other questions.
 In the first paragraph of "The Presence of the Past,"
 Rupert condenses the theory into a slogan
 which could be shouted in a theater or a parade.
 It's that things are as they are
 because they were as they were.
 And that, in essence, is what this theory is saying.
 Well, now notice that this is as conservative
 a point of view as one could possibly imagine.
 (audience laughing)
 The problem, if you believe things are as they are
 because they were as they were,
 then your problem is to account
 for anything new or novel ever happening.
 How, in a world where things are as they are
 because they were as they were,
 are you ever going to get creative advance?
 It seems to preclude it from the outset.
 Well, what drew me originally to Rupert
 or what drew us together was I had a theory
 that was entirely about accounting for novelty.
 (audience laughing)
 And that was what it delivered on
 was a model of how new things could come into being.
 Rupert's theory is a model of how structure is conserved
 and perpetuated through time.
 So my thought was you could bring these together
 and if they were not mutually exclusive,
 then you would find out why there was persistence of form,
 why there was this overwhelming presence of the past,
 and yet why there could still be apparently free will
 and novel situations arise.
 And you really participate,
 when you participate in this idea,
 in an intellectual adventure
 upon which the curtain has only risen.
 No one can stride to a blackboard this afternoon,
 this evening, and write the equations
 of the morphogenetic field.
 We are a long, long way from that.
 This is basically at the level of a parlor room discussion.
 But if the morphogenetic field is written,
 then if the equations are written,
 then it will flower into who knows what
 in the same way that when the electromagnetic equations
 were finally written by Clerk Maxwell,
 suddenly radio, television, all of these things
 became a possibility.
 I think that accounting for form
 is the great unsolved problem
 that science has put off for about 500 years.
 Accounting for novelty is a somewhat newer problem
 that is not even addressed by science
 until you get to the theory of evolution in the 1850s,
 and then only addressed in the biological realm.
 The theory that I originally elaborated
 had novelty as the down-sloping part of a fractal wave,
 and the up-moving part of that wave.
 I called entropy or disconnectedness,
 or I can't even remember, and it was Rupert who said,
 "You should call it habit, and you should see then
 "that the world is an ebb and flow of habit versus novelty,
 "of temporal situations of varying durations
 "in which the presence of the past is so overwhelming
 "that basically the past is replayed
 "in that space-time domain."
 And yet, there are other space-time domains
 where the way in which causality
 and formative causation come together
 creates novel connection,
 and these novel connections come into being
 with their own morphogenetic field,
 with their own ability to be a past-present
 in a future yet to be realized.
 So, though I think that the attacks
 that have been mounted so far have been trivial,
 the real challenge for the morphogenetic field
 is to formalize itself,
 to aim toward mathematical expression,
 and to construct itself in such a way
 that the self-evidence of novelty is not sacrificed
 in the way that the Newtonian model had to sacrifice
 the self-evidence of primary experience,
 of felt experience.
 So, you and I haven't talked about this this much,
 but I would love to hear you talk
 about the conservation of novelty
 in a universe ruled by formative causation,
 and how you see that,
 and perhaps the way in which it plays
 into the psychedelic issue
 is that we can take the word habit very generally
 and realize that one of the curious things
 about ourselves as higher animals
 is our susceptibility to habituations.
 I define habituation as unexamined obsessive behavior.
 (audience laughs)
 Seems reasonable.
 And we are, more than any other creature,
 we seem to fall into behavioral loops
 of television-watching, snack-consuming,
 fascist-voting patterns,
 (audience laughs)
 tasteless, tonsorial tendencies, and so forth.
 (audience laughs)
 What is it, what precisely, if,
 you see, my notion, again, to try and unite
 the psychedelic thing with what Rupert is doing,
 my notion of a new model of the psychedelic experience
 is to call these things morphogenetic field amplifiers,
 and to say, you know, this is why,
 in the presence of a psychedelic experience,
 one can hold an object in their hand
 and visualize its past states.
 This is how shamans determine who stole the hen,
 or where the, or who's sleeping with who.
 Actually, the morphogenetic field,
 if sufficiently amplified to sufficient clarity,
 is nothing more or less than a record
 of the past history of whatever is being examined.
 So that suddenly, instead of being focused
 in a kind of atomized present,
 with a receding past and an anticipated future,
 we lose our particulate nature
 as the individual, as meat object,
 and we enter into ourselves
 defined as a morphogenetic field,
 as a body of wave-mechanically maintained information
 about past and future states of time.
 And you may be sure that these theories,
 like the theory of formative causation,
 like the theory of relativity,
 like the theory of Newtonian mechanics,
 eventually filtered down into the realm
 of everyday experience and common models
 of ordinary consciousness.
 And if the morphogenetic field theory, or idea,
 was to become empowered as the model
 for millions and millions of people,
 then the past and the future
 would change in their connotation
 to our existential dilemma.
 It is, I think, probably the ultimate legacy
 of the transition from a particulate
 to a wave-mechanical point of view.
 It binds us to the past at the same time
 that it exercises the terror of the future,
 and it really empowers the notion of Tao.
 So it is not far removed
 from the realm of our immediate experience.
 But how can we preserve the self-evident fact of novelty
 and still get all the good stuff
 out of formative causation?
 Well, I think there's a simple answer in a way,
 which is that the entire evolutionary cosmology
 of which formative causation is part,
 it makes sense because if we live
 in an evolutionary universe,
 then it makes sense for the regulative principles
 of all things to evolve,
 rather than be fixed as eternal laws.
 And the standard view, of course,
 is that the regularities of nature
 are all governed by unchanging laws of nature,
 which were totally eternal
 and all there before the Big Bang.
 Well, that's the standard cosmology.
 But if one moves into the Big Bang cosmology,
 which is what I'm trying to do
 with this idea of an evolutionary universe,
 and the laws of nature as habits,
 is to say that everything evolves,
 even the regularities of nature,
 then the very basis of the Big Bang cosmology
 is that the driving force of evolution,
 which is one of expansion,
 the Big Bang is the initiation
 of an ongoing expansion of the universe.
 And the entire cosmology we have
 tells us that the universe is expanding,
 the redshift of the galaxies and so on.
 The whole of modern cosmology
 is based on underlying expansion of the universe.
 And it's this expansion which, first of all,
 allowed the Big Bang to cool down enough
 so that particles, nuclear particles, could form.
 And it then cooled enough for atoms to form,
 and then enough for molecules to form.
 And the emergence of form,
 the progressive emergence of form
 in the subatomic and the atomic and the molecular
 and the chemical realms,
 and through the forms of stars and galaxies,
 and then ultimately of planetary systems,
 the emergence of all this form
 has only been made possible by a progressive cooling process,
 which is the other side of the expansion process,
 because forms such as you and me
 couldn't exist at 25 billion degrees centigrade,
 which is how the universe began,
 and nor could anything else here,
 nor could the solid rocks of the Earth.
 I mean, there's a cooling process
 which is linked to the universal expansion,
 which one could regard as the primary cause
 or of the novelty wave.
 I mean, there's going to be novelty
 if the universe is always expanding,
 if there's always new space, new territory,
 new possibilities.
 The new space creates new possibilities
 in some kind of literal way.
 And the creation of new space and new possibilities,
 which is happening both at the physical
 and the metaphorical and at the imaginal levels,
 if we have a view of evolution,
 which where everything's evolving,
 the mind matters, it's all part of one process,
 it's a great evolutionary process,
 then the creation of new space,
 new possibilities and new expansion
 means there's an ongoing novelty
 going to be there as an inbuilt feature
 of any universe of this general kind,
 an expanding universe,
 like in our Big Bang cosmology.
 It has to be there, the cosmology demands it.
 So that's an accepted, a given.
 So for me, the problem isn't the existence of novelty
 through the expansion,
 I mean, that's the basis of the whole cosmology.
 The problem would be in such a universe
 how to account for the stabilization of novelty
 so that it's just not swept away
 by this onrush of expansion and change,
 which is the underlying process of evolution.
 So I would see morphic resonances
 providing a way in which the novelty of things,
 when new forms come into being,
 that persistencies, habits can build up,
 'cause otherwise, pure novelty
 without any persistence would be chaos.
 I mean, chaos is precisely that
 which no regularity emerges.
 - Utterly unpredictable.
 - And pure novelty, novelty alone,
 the novelty wave alone without stabilization
 would be chaos, endless chaos,
 an expanding chaos, but nothing more.
 And so I think that the,
 I think the two ideas are completely complementary.
 But the thing that's just occurred to me
 as you were talking is that if the novelty wave
 applies to novelty in general, as I think is its claim,
 not just in the human mind,
 not just in cockroaches and ecosystems,
 even in this planet, but to the whole universe.
 - Yes? - Yes.
 - Well, then I deduce from that
 that the universe is not expanding at a steady rate,
 the usual theory given by the idea
 of Newtonian absolute time,
 simply cranked onto the new cosmology.
 But rather, the expansion of the cosmos
 is taking place at a rate which is determined
 by the novelty wave.
 And that there should be a variable rate
 which should have all the fractal ripples
 and features of the novelty wave,
 if your theory is correct.
 - Now, where would we look
 (audience laughing)
 for a trace of this?
 - I don't know, but I mean, the trace,
 what gives the measure of the universal expansion
 is the cosmic microwave background radiation.
 - That's right, and there's argument
 about whether it's uniform or inhomogeneous.
 - That's right, but the reason why it's
 at such a very long wavelength is because it's relic light,
 it's fossil light from the Big Bang.
 And since the universe has been expanding
 ever since the Big Bang,
 light which remains light from that first moment,
 which has never yet been intercepted by matter,
 because when light's intercepted by matter,
 it stops being light, it's absorbed,
 unless it's reflected.
 But this light is light from the original,
 but since the universe was,
 x, I can't say very, very small to start with,
 the light was at very high energy,
 the wavelength was very, very, very, very short.
 But as the universe expands,
 the same light, you see, gets sort of stretched out,
 and the wavelength goes longer and longer and longer.
 And this 3.5k is the result of this stretching process.
 It's light cooled down to that wavelength
 corresponding to 3.5 degrees above absolute zero.
 But nevertheless, it should show irregularities
 in its wavelength, irregularities in the change
 of its wavelength which reflect the novelty wave.
 - Well, it is true that both at its beginning and its end,
 the novelty wave undergoes, at its beginning,
 a series of balloon-like expansions,
 which is what these new cosmologies are calling for.
 Instead of a smooth, big bang,
 they're calling for tremendous expansions
 very shortly after the beginning of the universe
 in a series of successive stages.
 So in that sense, you may be right.
 We were talking before we came on stage tonight,
 and I was saying that to my mind,
 in the 10 months since I've seen Rupert
 but have read "The Presence of the Past,"
 I've come to wonder about conceiving
 of what we're trying to talk about as a field, exactly.
 What it is is it's the theory of formative causation.
 The morphogenetic field is just an image
 of trying to understand how this preformative causation
 could work, and one thought that has occurred
 to me about it is the big bang is basically
 tremendous energy, free energy, which, as Rupert described,
 goes through a series of coolings,
 and as it cools and energy dissipates
 and is lost as heat, form emerges,
 first the form of nuclear chemistry,
 then organic chemistry, then molecular chemistry,
 so forth and so on, but progressively
 more and more complex form as you move
 toward the point of the arrow of time.
 Well, rather than visualizing this
 as a field in which previous states,
 "The Presence of the Past," where previous states
 are impacting on successive states,
 another way you could think of it is energy
 enters a universe in which, at a very great distance,
 ahead of time's arrow, there is a plenum of form,
 a kind of form of forms, if you want,
 and if the causality that operated
 within this form of forms was a two-way causality,
 then what you would have is the expanding shell
 of energy that is the universe slowly being
 influenced, essentially, by information
 flowing backward from the future,
 and so it isn't so much the presence of the past
 that puts the stamp of form onto things,
 but that form is an intimation of a future state
 that is a kind of maximizing of form
 into a kind of metaphysical hypostatization
 beyond our ability to conceive.
 - Have you ever considered this possibility?
 We should have rehearsed that.
 (audience laughing)
 - Well, I think so.
 I mean, I take your description, you see,
 to be very like, I don't know if you like this
 or not, the similarity, but like the omega point
 of Tyre de Chardin, which he sees as the goal
 or attractor of the entire universe.
 If there is to be a model of morphogenetic fields,
 to come back to one of your earlier points,
 it has to be in terms of dynamics of some kind,
 and the interesting thing about modern dynamics
 is that it's based on the idea of attractors.
 Systems are attracted towards states
 which, from their point of view, lie in the future.
 So these morphic attractors, which are the basis
 of the kind of dynamical models,
 including in chaotic dynamics, that are emerging now.
 And so that gives the idea, as morphogenetic fields
 have to have, is the idea of containing the goal
 or form or final state of something within themselves.
 The morphogenetic field of the oak tree contains,
 in some sense, the form of the fully formed oak,
 and draws the growing seedling towards it.
 This is like the Aristotelian system of final causes.
 So if the entire nature of morphic fields
 is to have attractors, and the only way to model them
 mathematically that we have something
 that hints towards it at the moment
 is in terms of dynamics, including chaotic dynamics.
 The idea of non-stable endpoints or dynamic endpoints.
 And if one has a model of the universe based on those,
 and if one has also, as one does in this kind
 of organismic holistic universe,
 the idea that the microcosm mirrors the macrocosm,
 that the part, in some sense, mirrors the whole,
 so each system is in some way related to the whole,
 then the morphic field of the entire universe
 must have a kind of cosmic attractor,
 from that point of view, which is drawing the universe
 towards something, so that instead of,
 this would then, you see, lead to the view
 that even the flux of energy has another side to it,
 because we normally think of the Big Bang
 as pushing matter out from behind,
 everything being pushed from the past,
 and the Big Bang is certainly that model,
 there's an explosion, it's the original impetus
 of the explosion, which is pushing the galaxies
 and the whole universe apart.
 But the idea of an attractor is that it's not being pushed,
 it's being pulled.
 And so, the energetic causation, as we know,
 it is based on a pushing principle,
 and formative causation is based on a pulling principle,
 towards a kind of goal or form or an attractor.
 - So placing it in the future is not that inappropriate?
 - Well, you see, if one has the idea
 that the universe as a whole has a morphic field,
 which has a morphic attractor for the evolution
 of the entire universe, then what could that attractor be?
 And we don't know what it is.
 It might be a kind of ever-receding attractor,
 so the universe would just go on expanding
 forever and forever and forever,
 with an endless creation of new forms with no end.
 That's one possible kind of attractor.
 - That's one possible view.
 - But if there's an end, which is what the entire
 Judeo-Christian myth of history leads us to believe,
 we're within the field of a Judeo-Christian myth of history,
 whether we like it or not,
 the whole cult of progress depends on it.
 And the idea that there's some kind of end
 or goal of history is deeply rooted in our entire culture.
 It comes out in some forms, you know,
 Star Wars and these kinds of visions of the future,
 of the ultimate nuclear war.
 And mostly images drawn from the book of Revelation.
 These are things that happen at the end of ordinary history,
 before the coming of the millennium.
 Plagues, famines, seas and rivers turning red to blood,
 fire from heaven, and finally the great war in heaven.
 Signs of the end, which many of us
 can easily find very plausible.
 The approaching of a new millennium
 means we're absolutely bound to have
 a vast outbreak of millenarian prophecy,
 of which you're one of the earlier exponents.
 (audience laughing)
 - Thank you very much.
 - But I mean, this is just, I mean,
 you're ahead of your time,
 but since the millennium's only 12 years away,
 you can't possibly be more than 12 years ahead of it,
 because the crescendo of prophets is going to grow,
 obviously, as we approach December, January the 1st, 2000.
 And, you know, harmonic convergence
 was only the beginning of a beginning of a dress rehearsal
 for what's going to be a mammoth revisioning.
 And this sense of the combinations in time,
 and of goals and ends,
 is something very hard to escape from in our civilization.
 The idea of it just going on and on and on and on forever
 isn't very attractive.
 The tired, the shoddy view of an omical point
 is the idea of there being an end or goal to history.
 And then, of course, there's the pessimistic
 discussion of this, which is always associated
 with the postulation of dark matter,
 which dark matter, dark mother, Kali,
 I mean, it's the dark one who is going to destroy all,
 the destructive aspect,
 by having enough dark matter undetectable by any instruments,
 which will cause the expansion to slow down
 owing to this dark matter in the universe,
 and then to contract until everything ends
 in the final implosion, the big crunch.
 Well, this is one cosmology on the market, you see.
 So, then, of course, the return to the great cycle cosmologies
 who welcome that because they see that
 if it's the big crunch of this universe,
 it could be the big bang of the next.
 And then you get back to endless cycles forever,
 which is back in the realm of archaic cosmology,
 eternal laws, it's where the whole tradition of our science
 rooted in Greek cosmology feels comfortable,
 the idea of an eternal cyclic universe with eternal laws.
 So, but if we have this idea of an evolutionary universe,
 then it seems to me the main choice is between these,
 either it's all going in reverse
 or coming to a sticky end model, the big crunch,
 or that it just goes on and on and on forever
 and there's no end, there's no final form,
 in some sense, pulling things forward,
 except pure diversity for its own sake,
 a kind of universal free economy that goes on forever.
 - Okay, so is what you're saying,
 since there obviously was a big bang since we're here,
 you're more comfortable with placing
 the morphogenetic causality as something
 which moves from the past toward the future
 rather than from the future toward the past
 because the hypothesized final end state
 we have no evidence for?
 - Well, there are two things,
 that if the influence from the future,
 in some sense, influences creativity,
 if that, in some sense, causes new forms to come into being,
 once they've come into being,
 I think that they take on a life of their own
 and there's this kind of memory aspect.
 I think memory is so intrinsic a part of our own life,
 so obviously a part of all life,
 so undeniably the basis of all our experience
 that any view of the universe
 that doesn't take memory seriously
 as an influence from the past
 and tries to substitute in its place
 an influence from the future is going to be inadequate
 and if there's an influence from the future,
 I don't think it can work in the realm of memory
 on habit phenomena, which we know very well
 depend on the past.
 Rather, it may work in the realms of the as yet,
 in the realms of the possible,
 which are the realms into which we're always moving
 and they're the realms which, in fact, consciousness inhabits.
 I mean, consciousness is the realms of the possible,
 as far as I can see.
 Well, I think one way to think about
 information coming from the future
 is to imagine that ordinarily this is not allowed,
 but to make a quantum mechanical metaphor,
 you can imagine bits of information
 that tunnel into the past
 in the way that particles overcome energy transitions
 by magically appearing on the other side of them
 without ever having gone over them.
 And it's possible to imagine
 that a very small amount of information
 actually leaks into the past
 and that this information becomes
 the province of seers and shamans
 and visionary thinkers of all sorts,
 that creativity is this appetition.
 You know, there's a word in Gaelic, heraeth,
 which means simultaneously nostalgia
 for the past and the future.
 And it seems to me that kind of nostalgia
 for the past and the future
 is what drives great creative spirits, poets,
 and visionaries.
 And it has this enchanted, this fey kind of aura about it
 because information from the future
 is necessarily magical.
 It exists and yet it cannot exist
 because in its existence is implicitly,
 implies a paradox.
 Well, I think there are two ways
 that information from the future works.
 One isn't really so much information from the future
 as what I'd think of as the primary cause of the whole thing
 which is the attraction of the attractor.
 There's something in the future
 which draws us, for example, forwards.
 And what we experience the future as
 is not as definite information,
 not even as exactly concrete plans,
 but more in the experience of hope
 and more consciously in the experience of faith.
 And faith is basically a vision of the future
 which we believe in
 and believe is the right one for us
 and to which we're attracted.
 So people who have, as we read in thousands of books
 on how to get on in business,
 if you have faith that you're going to succeed,
 you really believe that you're going to be rich,
 then the chances are you may well be so.
 Whereas if you don't actually want to be rich
 and if you don't have faith in it
 and if you don't keep putting out that kind of image
 and you don't have that hope and so on,
 then the chances are you won't be rich.
 So there's also the kind of religious faith
 that drew the Pilgrim Fathers to the United States
 and it was the faith from the Judeo-Christian heritage,
 the faith in the Promised Land,
 the promise of a land in the future or somewhere else
 which will be flowing with milk and honey,
 where there will be bounty and prosperity,
 the land will yield up its riches,
 the land of course, the original Promised Land wasn't empty,
 it had inhabitants in it,
 but they were killed off and their land was appropriated.
 And this was the Promised Land was that,
 and it's America.
 And that dream of the Promised Land
 which drew everybody here to America or their ancestors
 is this kind of hope, this drawing, this attraction,
 is what actually we know from our own experiences
 how this attraction works.
 It works through faith, through vague mythic hopes,
 through sense of promises as yet unfulfilled and so on.
 - So the disturbing thing about that then
 is what you referred to,
 this utter conviction in the approaching end of the world
 which motivates vast numbers of people
 caught up in this monotheistic myth system.
 All the major monotheistic religions
 have a point and an end to the world
 and for several of them it's soon.
 (audience laughing)
 - But you see, I think we're in a worse way
 than you may think because if we say,
 all right, let's not bother so much
 with these monotheistic religions,
 what other models, since I think that
 if morphic resonance works,
 then it means that our collective unconscious
 and particularly our cultural unconscious
 contains elements which we've,
 they're so deep down,
 they influence us much more deeply than we know.
 And the Anglo-Saxon race, the English language,
 its cultural roots are in Germany.
 The Germanic gods, the whole Germanic mythology
 is that the whole age will end in a twilight of the gods.
 And one of the problems that Hitler had
 in reviving the German gods
 is that that entire theology of those gods,
 the entire pagan system of the Germanic gods
 is one that comes to an appalling end
 in the twilight of the gods.
 Even the gods die out in this twilight of the world
 when there's a destruction of all things, Ragnarok.
 So even if we look to pagan mythic sources
 as well as the Judaic ones,
 and even if we look to the Hindu mythic sources,
 the, you know, the idea of the Kali Yuga
 at the end of every age
 where there's this densification of time
 and finally the entire universe is dissolved.
 And then at Brahma,
 it's the inhaling of the breath of Brahma
 and then a new universe is created or breathed out.
 It seems to me that many of these have this view
 that would lock into the idea of an end to time.
 Yes, well, or an end to history.
 Or an end to history.
 It's occurred to me recently in thinking about this,
 my own model of time comes to an abrupt end
 for all of its prophecies to work.
 There has to be an end date assigned
 and it only works when the end date is assigned
 very close to the end of the Mayan calendar,
 which is 24 years in the future.
 So I've spent a great deal of time trying to imagine
 how the world could end in 24 years.
 How is such a thing possible
 without just God Almighty descending in a chariot of flame?
 But how could it happen without that?
 Could there be a plausible scenario created
 that would have our world utterly end in 24 years
 in a happy way?
 And it occurs to me that
 the way in which this is to be accomplished
 is staring us in the face.
 It is simply this,
 that in the close,
 in shortly after the first few years of the next century,
 a technology will begin to be developed,
 the purpose of which will be to transmit
 a message forward into time.
 And unbeknownst to the technocrats
 who will create this massive governmental project
 to communicate with the future
 will be certain paradoxes
 which are built into the effort to do this.
 One of the things that will be discovered is
 if you invent a time communicator
 that can send a message into time, into the future,
 then anyone in the future can send a message back to you,
 but no message can go further back into the past
 than the moment of the invention of the first time machine.
 Do you follow?
 So suddenly in human history,
 an absolute membrane for information is established.
 Before time communicator,
 all causality moves from the past to the future.
 After time communicator, causality moves both directions
 and consequently more advanced states,
 states thousands, millions,
 hundreds of millions of years in the future
 will diffuse through the entire temporal medium
 like heat through a gas.
 And at that point, what you will suddenly find
 is the moment the switch is thrown
 on the first time communicator,
 the future end state of evolution on this planet
 will appear one microsecond later
 because the entirety of the future
 will be forced to happen all at once.
 I'm not sure you're with me.
 (audience laughing)
 What?
 - That's pretty good, keep going.
 - So, well, so basically it's simply
 a technological innovation which would be like a whistle
 for calling almighty God into the historical process.
 The first person to invent a device
 which communicates with the future
 will discover that all of the future
 is suddenly communicating with them.
 And this will be experienced
 as a very radical sort of transition
 in the way we maintain our homes and businesses.
 (audience laughing)
 Well, I don't know, I think we've run past
 intermission time, maybe we should have an intermission
 and then all these people who are burning
 to ask questions should come back.
 How do you feel about that?
 - No.
 - Sure.
 - Who whines behind the lines?
 (audience laughing)
 I don't care, fine, you.
 - If that were true, we'd already be affected by that.
 Well, 'cause when that switch got thrown
 and the future kind of falls back onto that moment,
 the past is gonna pile up behind it with momentum.
 - Well, but we haven't reached the moment
 when the switch is thrown.
 - Somebody has.
 - But the future cannot go any further
 into the past than that moment.
 - Absolutely, but the past is still
 like a pileup upon that point
 because the past is in a causal mode, right?
 First one thing, then another, and another.
 - Well, don't you think that's what's making
 the world so crazy?
 - It may well.
 - It's that we are running smack into another dimension
 and that's what's creating the shockwave
 of cultural effects that we call the 20th century,
 but which, once we get through all this,
 it will be known as the bow shock of transition
 to the millennial eschaton or whatever it was.
 - I've been storing up questions on that,
 but the most recent one is about the nature of time
 and whether in fact it is linear and fluid.
 I had a talk with a couple of people,
 Mark Miller and Roger Gregory,
 who run Project Zomato for Universal and the Royal Library,
 and they clue me into one of these great cosmic secrets.
 They told me about a month ago
 that time is in fact asymptotic
 and that we are approaching the asymptote
 and at that moment, this point is known
 as the naked singularity.
 And he said, "We're entering this asymptotic curve now
 "and this is when the, quote unquote,
 "the weirdness is about to begin."
 Which apparently, synchronicity begins
 piling up on synchronicity.
 I wonder if this fits in with the word synchronicity.
 - Well, I think that this asymptotic thing
 that you're talking about, how you perceive it
 depends on where you stand in time.
 There is a certain point of view
 where only a few moments after the Big Bang,
 the asymptotic weirdness began to set in.
 It was interesting, a few weeks ago,
 I was visited in Hawaii by none other than Carl Sagan
 and he had a number of things on his mind.
 (audience laughing)
 One of the things that he was at great pains
 to point out to me was I said something
 about this asymptotic approach to the end of history.
 And he said, "Well, my dear boy,
 "you just have it all wrong.
 "The speed of information transfer
 "reached the speed of light with the invention of radio.
 "It's been absolutely flat ever since.
 "The largest thermonuclear blast ever detonated
 "was in 1958.
 "There hasn't been a bigger one for 30 years."
 "The fastest human object ever built was launched in 1967.
 "There hasn't been a faster one since."
 So this nonsense about ever increasing this, that,
 and the other just doesn't hold water.
 - But he's dealing with the cybernetic.
 - Well, what is increasing asymptotically
 is density of connectedness.
 And obviously, at a certain point,
 you reach maximum density of connectedness in the present.
 The only way you can then continue to densify connection
 is if the connections begin to move outward in time,
 into the future and into the past.
 And you undergo this transition
 from particulate Cartesian-Newtonian existence
 to this wave-mechanical, shamanic,
 both present in the past, present in the future,
 present in the present kind of existence.
 This is what I meant about the social implications
 of integrating Rupert's paradigm.
 It is permission to feel this new way
 and to know that it is a more correct mirroring
 of the greater cosmos than the model
 that had us as the citizen, the ego, the individual,
 all of that sort of thing.
 - But we've made all the threshold of major changes
 in our information universe,
 in some hypertext, in some way,
 which would allow us to go on.
 - Well, see, I think it's something
 much more profound than that.
 Let's take my example about the time communicator
 for a moment, and let's tell a little science fiction story
 to make it more understandable what I'm talking about.
 Let's pretend it's not a time communicator,
 it's a real time machine.
 And we're going to send somebody
 into the far-flung reaches of the future,
 and we've never done this before.
 And so we load them into the jeweled device
 that we've built in our laboratory,
 and we pass out the champagne,
 and we have a brief countdown,
 and then we throw the switch,
 and our lab chief sails off into the future.
 Well, now, what do the rest of us sitting there see?
 What happens at that moment?
 Well, at first I thought what would happen
 is suddenly, all over the world,
 time travelers would begin arriving
 from the far-flung reaches of the future,
 having come to witness the first voyage into time.
 Obviously a great thing to see if you're a time traveler.
 It's like if you had a Cessna airplane
 that you could fly to Kitty Hawk in 1906,
 wouldn't you fly there and see?
 (audience laughing)
 But it kept nagging at my mind
 that there was some paradox in this,
 or something was wrong with this idea.
 And then I said, aha, I see.
 What it is is that it's the
 kill-your-own-grandfather problem.
 If time travelers could travel backward into the past,
 even as far as only the invention of the first time machine,
 one of them might conceive,
 one from many centuries in the future,
 might travel back and kill their grandfather,
 and initiate that good old paradox
 of how could you kill your grandfather?
 Because you killed your grandfather, you didn't exist,
 so how could you exist to kill your grandfather?
 That sort of thing.
 But then I realized, no, in the same way
 that the most advanced cultures on the sphere of the planet
 dominate and overwhelm less advanced cultures,
 the most advanced future states would dominate
 and overwhelm the entire temporal continuum,
 clear back to the moment of the invention
 of the first time machine.
 So what you would really see when you threw the switch
 on the first time machine would be the simultaneous arrival
 of the ultimate state of human evolution, whatever that is,
 something beyond our conceiving.
 So it's, in very practical terms,
 it would fulfill this apocalyptic dream of monotheism.
 It's conceivable that if we could invent a device
 which would transmit information or objects forward
 into time, that the moment that device were invented,
 we could call upon the resources
 of all future human history to bail us out
 of this mess that we're in.
 It may be the only way to save the planet,
 an immediate time wars commitment to spare no effort
 to send information forward into the future,
 looking for help.
 I'm not serious, of course, but I am peculiar.
 On that note, why don't we take an intermission?
 And then come back.
 Oh, I don't know, 10 minutes.
 (audience applauding)
 - That's a lot of questions.
 - Oh, well.
 Let me, I'll take one bit first.
 I mean, there's a lot of separate questions.
 The punctuated evolution thing,
 the idea that evolution moves by fits and starts,
 which was denied by neo-Darwinists and by Darwin himself
 in favor of the idea of a slow, gradual, steady progression,
 moving at a more or less uniform rate.
 Darwin was a great disciple of Lyell's
 and the principle in geology of uniformitarianism,
 the idea that things go on at uniform rates.
 And this particular school of geology
 was opposed to the theory of catastrophism,
 the idea that there are catastrophic events on the earth,
 like the flood, the biblical flood,
 and that the development has been discontinuous.
 There's been breaks and fits and starts
 and periods of more or less stability and then big changes.
 That catastrophist theory, which was a popular theory
 at the beginning of the 19th century,
 was rejected by Darwin as it was rejected by Lyell
 because as soon as you allowed catastrophes,
 all the Christians agreed with this and said,
 "Yes, the Bible tells us that.
 "We know from our whole cultural history
 "that there are catastrophes,
 "and this is saying the same kind of thing."
 They wanted to be saying something totally different
 that wouldn't fit into any kind of biblical view whatsoever,
 the idea of a totally progressive, linear process of change.
 Anyway, the fossil record never supported that,
 and punctuated equilibrium seems to be what happens,
 and it suggests that evolution moves by fits and starts.
 And what started as an appalling heresy,
 it's been a recurrent heresy ever since Darwin
 first put forward his book.
 People have objected to it on the grounds
 that evolution may well move by fits and starts.
 Even T.H. Huxley disagreed with Darwin on this one.
 Anyway, if evolution moves by fits and starts
 rather than uniformly,
 then it looks as if there's not a uniform rate
 of novelty formation in the universe.
 And of course, that's just what Terence tells us.
 - That's right.
 One way of thinking about the novelty wave
 on the largest level is that it is a picture
 of the ebb and flow of mutation
 in the history of life on the planet.
 In other words, the idea that mutation is random
 is based on the untested and cheerful assumption
 that radiation is arriving on the Earth at an even rate.
 But there's no reason why it should be.
 If the rate of radiation arriving on the Earth
 were fluctuating for any reason,
 you would expect to see a concomitant fluctuation
 in the fossil record.
 And there are many other reasons.
 The catastrophism, the idea that there have been
 extremely violent episodes in the Earth's history,
 huge volcanic outgassings, cometary and asteroidal impacts,
 and this sort of thing is now pretty widely accepted.
 And in fact, the extinction of the dinosaurs
 is put down to an asteroidal impact.
 But go on.
 It would be interesting to hear you deal
 with the salts that tie it.
 Yes, I'm fascinated by these salts that get tied.
 I don't know, I mean, I'd be interested to get
 from you later a reference to the literature
 so I can look it up, because that sounds really interesting,
 eutectic salts going back and forwards and getting tied.
 I mean, the only thing that I think offhand
 in response to that is that I've been thinking
 quite a lot recently about exactly that kind of phenomenon,
 melting points, and asking the question of myself
 and of chemists, whether compounds
 that are fairly newly synthesized,
 when they're crystallized, have a particular melting point,
 and that as time goes on, the melting point might change,
 because the habit which holds the crystal in its form
 might become stronger and it might be more resistant
 to thermal disruption, so the melting point might go up.
 It turns out that in the chemical literature,
 far from being fixed, melting points fluctuate,
 but in the published literature,
 I've found differences of up to 12 degrees over 20 years,
 and there do seem to be extraordinary fluctuations,
 and most organic chemists agree
 that strange changes occur, that they don't seem
 half as constant as they're cracked up to be.
 - So we're going to keep the ice caps in place, then?
 - Well, that might be--
 - Changing the melting point.
 (audience laughing)
 - Eutectic mixture, you see, one of the things
 I've been thinking about is that when a substance melts,
 you've both got a formative field of the crystal,
 but the liquid phase of the substance
 also has a morphic field.
 Liquids have characteristic properties.
 They're not totally chaotic and formless.
 And if it's a new substance that's never been melted before,
 it won't have had a sort of morphic field
 for its liquid phase.
 By repeated cooling, I was trying to think of experiments
 involving cycles, cycling a substance
 through cycles of melting and cooling,
 because there would be a way in which
 the number of transitions and also the endurance
 of the liquid versus the solid phase
 would tend to stabilize the morphic fields
 of these two phases, and in a sense,
 around the melting point, it would be as if
 there were two competing fields,
 and if one were the stronger, it might tend to raise
 or lower the melting point.
 So, I've been thinking about this sort of thing,
 so I'm fascinated to hear about these eutectic crystals,
 and I'd love to read out the literature.
 I'm adopting a very traditional scientific position
 in one way, by assuming that,
 by putting forward the hypothesis
 in its most general possible form,
 if I said it sometimes works and it sometimes doesn't,
 then it would be very difficult to test, because...
 (audience laughing)
 And it would actually be irrefutable.
 That's advice and not a virtue in a scientific theory.
 I'm more inclined to think of it working,
 trying to think of it working everywhere.
 Now, there are many systems like the behavior
 of hydrogen atoms, the crystallization of sodium chloride,
 and all sorts of phenomena that physics has studied
 in great detail, which have happened billions of times,
 and as far as we know, for billions of years,
 even before this planet formed.
 So, there are certain kinds of phenomena in nature
 which have happened so many times before,
 they're so deeply habitual, that they behave
 as if they're governed by eternal laws.
 Their habits are so deeply entrenched,
 and I think many of the phenomena that scientists
 have studied, particularly in the physical sciences,
 are of that kind, and therefore they do look
 as if they're governed by eternal laws.
 Where the difference shows up is when you look
 at any new phenomenon, because then you can see
 the habits building up.
 With old established habits, they might look as if
 they're not really habits at all,
 but following eternal laws.
 So, I would say that the...
 I would prefer to think of the theory applying everywhere,
 and I would account for the apparent non-changing
 of many physical habits, in terms of their extreme antiquity,
 and the fact they're so deeply embedded
 in groups of habit, they don't change.
 - Some things you simply won't be able to test, then.
 - Well, you can test the theory in any area
 where you can do something new.
 New forms, new crystals, new molecules,
 new patterns of protein folding, new ideas,
 new ways of learning.
 There seem to be plenty of areas it can be tested in.
 - Yeah.
 - Is there anything that was hard to review, your theory?
 Or what do you consider, you know, the status of?
 Is it just a good idea to do experiments?
 - It's a hypothesis.
 What a hypothesis is, is a guess
 about the way things may be.
 And what I've done is contrasted this guess
 in a variety of areas.
 The realms of memory, crystallography, morphogenesis,
 instinct, behavior, transmission of learning,
 behavior and evolution of social groups.
 So I looked at the predictions of this way
 of looking at things, compared with the standard way
 of looking at things.
 And in every area, one finds that there's a whole range
 of shadowy phenomena, which, where the evidence
 for the conventional position is very weak, indeed.
 And one sees that that's actually a guess, too,
 which is, in most essential areas, unproved, even now.
 So, one's got one guess versus a much more common
 and habitual guess.
 And there are other guesses on the market, too.
 - Is there anything that would falsify
 the morphogenetic field in your mind?
 - Well, a failure of experiments
 to show morphic resonance would falsify it.
 Except that falsifying scientific theories is never,
 people often go on as if, they say,
 Popper says the ideal is to falsify theories.
 I don't know a single example
 of science proceeding in that manner.
 Most scientists are trying to prove theories.
 And they may try and falsify theories of their rivals,
 which is the way it usually happens.
 And it's a kind of dialectic, then.
 Science becomes a dialectic between rivals.
 And science is full of ego rivalries.
 Well, most people think that this is terrible vice,
 but actually, it's one of the motors
 of competitive science, as we know it.
 If somebody puts forward a theory,
 and someone has a rival theory,
 and then the way the contest is decided is by experiment.
 The rules of the scientific game.
 Experiments are usually designed
 to test between rival hypotheses,
 rather than testing a single one in isolation.
 And I'm putting forward a variety of tests
 which test between the idea
 that nature has this habitual tendency,
 as against the conventional idea,
 which is always that nature's governed
 by immutable, changeless, eternal laws.
 And some tests may be inconclusive.
 Some tests may, I think, favor the idea
 of morphic resonance.
 If all the tests that are done fail it,
 if it fails, if it looks as if things are governed
 by eternal, changeless laws,
 that there's no evidence for any incremental change
 in time in any area,
 that everything goes on as if it were governed entirely
 by laws that were already there to start with,
 I'd find that rather surprising.
 But failure of these experiments
 would actually support that view.
 And the conventional view would then,
 for the first time, actually have empirical evidence
 in its favor.
 (audience laughing)
 'Cause this would be the first time
 it's ever been challenged.
 And if those challenges fail, it would strengthen it.
 So these tests, I think, are in everybody's interest.
 But if they support the idea of morphic resonance,
 then indeed, it would show that that is not a perfect one.
 It's maybe the idea of a memory in nature,
 a morphic resonance, however crude the theory is
 in its present preliminary form,
 it would be a better theory,
 and a theory more worth developing.
 And the question is, is the field connection
 in quantum non-locality in Bell's theorem
 and the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky paradox,
 that kind of quantum non-locality,
 related to morphic resonance?
 Are they two aspects of the same phenomenon?
 That's the really interesting question
 in relation to existing physics.
 And nobody knows the answer.
 I don't know how morphic resonance is conceived
 would fit with quantum non-locality,
 which, although it does in fact involve a past,
 because both systems originate from a past,
 and it's to do with a system with a past,
 which is, I would say, the very existence of these particles
 is a kind of resonance from their own past.
 And I would say that there is a kind
 of morphic resonance link,
 and probably that's what it might be.
 But I can't fit that into the formalism of quantum theory,
 because I don't know it, I'm not a quantum theorist.
 And really to work with those equations
 with any degree of subtlety
 would require a deep understanding of the subject.
 On the other hand, J.S. Bell,
 the inventor of Bell's theorem,
 has been in correspondence with me.
 He's read both my books and has sent me his latest book.
 So we've been in a correspondence
 about the possible connection
 between morphic resonance and his own theory.
 He's perfectly intrigued by morphic resonance
 and morphogenetic fields.
 He thinks they may be connected with his own theory,
 but he can't see how,
 because there's nothing in the conventional physics
 which has yet proved,
 because it's so based on eternal equations,
 the idea of Schrodinger's equation
 is a kind of eternal platonic form
 that governs all quantum processes
 from the beginning of the universe to the end
 in exactly the same way.
 That's the kind of inherited formalism of quantum mechanics,
 and that kind of mathematics,
 which postulates eternal platonic-type forms,
 is not going to be adequate
 for modeling an evolutionary universe.
 And so it's not clear how the bridge can be made,
 or even whether that connection,
 but I think there must be some kind of connection.
 There can't be lots of totally unconnected
 types of non-locality in the universe.
 - Rupert, why not replace the platonic models
 with fractal models,
 and then say that time itself is the morphogenetic field?
 That it is some kind of fractal topological manifold,
 and so the repetition or the connection to past states
 is really accomplished through resonance within the fractal,
 and then we have a model for resonance
 because it's familiar to us from other domains of nature.
 - Well, I don't see quite how,
 there's a sense in which the fractal
 is a new mathematical model that gives us the same idea,
 the ancient idea of the microcosm mirroring the macrocosm,
 the idea of the different levels.
 - Well, but not only different levels,
 but different points on the same level,
 in the same way that the past occupies
 a relationship to the future of formative anticipation,
 so in a fractal do early portions of it
 anticipate later forms,
 so it is like a prediction,
 a self-fulfilling prediction is what a fractal is.
 It predicts by virtue of its past states,
 they define what its future states will be,
 exactly in the same way that I imagine
 the morphogenetic field defines
 what future states will be.
 The fractals that have been talked about to date
 have been used to describe spatial phenomena,
 coastlines, molecular arrangements,
 distribution of flowers in a meadow, this sort of thing,
 but if instead you thought of fractals
 as descriptors for the temporal dimension
 and replaced the notion of a flat
 or slightly curved manifold
 with an actual fractal surface
 over which events were flowing
 and flowing over patterns which repeated themselves
 at many, many levels in resonance
 with previous similar patterns,
 then you would begin to have a mathematical picture
 of how the morphogenetic field would work
 and you would also have found a phenomenon in nature
 upon which to hang it by saying time is obviously it.
 It's just that we are so ingrained by Newtonianism
 to accept time as an abstraction,
 as something not having equal status
 with the other three dimensions
 that we've overlooked this fact,
 and yet obviously that is the carrier wave.
 That's why you would speak of the presence of the past.
 What then can it be but time, past time in the present?
 - Well, it is past time in the present,
 but the fractal wave, you see,
 why I don't like the fractal model
 taken to any great extreme
 is because any kind of mathematical modeling,
 given the whole nature of mathematics as it's practiced,
 fractal mathematics is conventional paradigm
 in the sense that you create an equation
 and you generate this form.
 The equation itself is not subject,
 the governing equation is not subject to evolution.
 It's generating the same form
 and it would go on generating the same form
 right into the future.
 In other words, it would be a kind of determinism
 based on a kind of platonic or Pythagorean ideal form,
 the fractal equation which generates the fractal.
 And I don't understand evolution as happening like that.
 I don't think it's as deterministic.
 - Well, you're right that as they are presently understood,
 it would generate, however complicated,
 ultimately a determinism.
 But I wonder if we're just not mathematically
 sophisticated enough to inculcate
 into the fractal equations
 sufficient randomness within the fractal constraints
 to begin to get the kind of complexity
 that we need in the real world.
 That would seem to be what is lacking,
 is a random factor that causes the fractal equation
 to skew toward production of ferns
 and then suddenly to switch over to feathers
 and then to river systems
 and then to industrial economies or something like that.
 But it can do all these things,
 it can model all these things,
 but as you say, in a deterministic way.
 But maybe we don't know enough about them yet
 and that there may be higher dimensional
 or higher order fractals with a degree
 of self-determinacy or autopoiesis built into them.
 I think this must be so
 because I think the world we're living in
 must be such a world and that we are these fractals,
 we are essentially three-dimensional expressions of DNA
 and all the DNA is the same
 and yet each one of us is different
 and yet 10 of us are like any other 10 and yet different.
 And we as human beings have the same quality
 and so do our cities and our nation states
 and the continents we inhabit
 and the religious systems that we're inside of.
 So it seems to me the fractal model
 may be the one which holds out the greatest hope
 for a formalizing of the morphogenetic field.
 All other fields are fractals,
 the electromagnetic field, radio wave,
 all of these things are found to have this quality
 and in fact the development of this kind of mathematics
 initially was in an effort to describe
 the field phenomenon, Fourier transforms
 and that sort of thing.
 So then why not this one?
 And then that vastly narrows down the mathematical domain
 in which you have to search for a formal description
 of the morphogenetic field.
 It would also yield a perfect theory of history
 because that would be part of the morphogenetic field.
 - Well I suppose that one of the problems I have
 is that I'm not so fascinated with mathematics.
 I mean I don't think that mathematics,
 most mathematicians think that the maths
 is more real than the thing it models,
 that the equations of the universe
 are more real somehow than the universe.
 They were there before it after all.
 They were its source, they were prior to it,
 both logically and temporally.
 They're the more real thing.
 This is a platonic tradition.
 And this is alive and well.
 I mean its latest, greatest exponent
 in the bestseller lists of the last few months
 is Stephen Hawking, who is a perfect exponent really
 of that platonic view of the eternal intellect,
 the eternal mathematical mind
 which somehow is over and above the universe,
 the mathematical mind of God in some sense
 is there before and prior to matter or bodies.
 And as one of our British journals put it,
 Stephen Hawking is the closest thing we have
 to a disembodied mind.
 (audience laughing)
 And it's a perfect, you see, in a sense there's a perfect,
 I think the reason for his mythic quality,
 'cause he is a mythic figure, mythic power,
 is because of that.
 And the vision is totally consistent with it.
 And so I don't really,
 all mathematics tends to have that quality.
 And I would think of the fields not as something
 which to grasp we have to model mathematically,
 but as something which I think of them
 as much more like living things.
 And our models would be much more and more appropriately
 based on an intuitive sense, a living sense
 of things that we actually learn from experience
 as living things ourselves.
 So the models would be much more communicated
 by seeing how they correspond
 to our actual subjective experiences,
 the kind of things that we experience.
 - So through ordinary language?
 - Through ordinary language,
 through the realms of the imagination,
 through our understanding of memory,
 through the mind, through the power of hopes,
 fears, desires, fantasies,
 through the experience of our consciousness
 as the realm of the possible.
 And so these are much the best models.
 And mathematics is a tiny fraction
 of a formalized modeling of the possible,
 which is constrained by very particular rules
 and is entirely so far in the whole history
 of the subject under the aegis of the platonic spirit.
 And I just think that to try and pin it all to that
 just seems a limitation that one doesn't need at this stage.
 I mean, it may be helpful, it may be interesting.
 (audience laughing)
 My God, I see why they're alarmed now.
 (audience laughing)
 Yes, well, I'm sure you're quite right.
 (audience laughing)
 So what you're really calling for
 is the rebirth of poetry.
 - Well, and all kinds of lived experience
 through which we directly relate to the world.
 Because a science which helps us
 directly to experience nature,
 and actually when we walk in the wood,
 understand it more deeply and more profoundly
 than we do now, something that tells us
 something we don't know about the quality of woods, trees,
 the nature of the birdsong we hear,
 how they communicate.
 I mean, I think they're just call signs,
 they're songs and the actual message is,
 as it were, telepathic once they've tuned in
 through the right cause.
 This kind of world we might come to live in
 and actually experience.
 And the mathematical models just wouldn't seem,
 I don't think, terribly interesting or important.
 - Well, so this is the connection
 to the psychedelic experience,
 the felt realm of immediate perception
 that somehow with the psychedelics
 we're coming into the full spectrum
 of our experiential birthright.
 And you're saying that this theory correctly assimilated
 brings us also into a full appreciation
 of the felt spectrum of experience that is our birthright.
 - It makes us realize that we're living in a magical world
 in which there are unseen connections
 that the power of thought and imagination and dream
 actually has a reality.
 And our ancestors lived in such a world.
 And the whole medieval and animistic world
 and the worlds before that.
 And most people in the whole world have lived in such a world
 a world in which these things are possible.
 It's only since the 17th century
 that our civilization has stripped the world of its magic.
 And it's stripped the world of its magic
 by turning it into a machine.
 And if it becomes a living organism again,
 alive once again as I think it's becoming,
 then it's a living thing
 and we have to relate to it as living things.
 And the disembodied mind approach
 of totally abstract mathematics,
 seeing the universe as if from without,
 the whole point of the mechanistic picture
 is that you withdraw yourself from the world.
 You see the world as a spinning ball
 as we now finally through the space mission
 come to see the world.
 It's a total confirmation of the initial leap
 of the mechanism of Copernicus.
 It's a proof of the Copernican theory
 in the most dramatic form.
 'Cause there it was to step off the earth,
 which everyone else had taken the earth
 as the center from which to model things.
 'Cause it's the center from which we experience them.
 And it's true to our experience.
 Saying that's not the center at all.
 And Kepler in 1609 wrote this early work
 of science fiction, "The Dream."
 When he imagined himself being in a transport,
 a visionary state transported to the moon,
 from the moon, on the moon,
 encountering strange creatures that lived underground
 and crawled out from under rocks.
 And looking back at the earth
 and seeing the earth spinning on its axis,
 just as astronauts in our cameras see it from the moon.
 And using this in his book, "The Somnium,"
 to persuade people by this thought experiment
 to see that the earth could be moving
 even though they themselves experienced
 the rest of the heavens to be moving.
 And this is the thought experiment
 that takes our minds off the earth
 and puts them out in space.
 And then through Newtonian space,
 takes them outside the entire universe
 until they occupy the same vantage point
 as the imagined god of the mechanistic world machine,
 somehow external to the mechanism.
 And this is the world in which Laplace and his followers
 thought that their minds were actually dwelling
 through experiencing these eternal mathematical truths,
 learning them in physics textbooks.
 And there they were, the eternal truths of the universe,
 as named by God, if such a God existed.
 And so the human mind was totally abstracted
 from the whole universe,
 leaving the body and the feelings behind
 in some other kind of realm,
 the realm of everyday life, poetry,
 imagination, religion, et cetera.
 But the intellectual understanding of the whole universe,
 which was finally applied to the whole of this earth,
 to the whole of life, to the whole of the human body,
 and finally to the whole of the human brain,
 purporting to explain everything
 in terms of this abstracted intellectual vision
 rooted in eternity,
 as the mind of the scientist
 somehow outside the universe observing it.
 This has been collapsing.
 I mean, the observer in quantum theory,
 the unworkability of that view,
 and now the collapse of any justification for eternal laws.
 And so I think that we don't really have to stay in that,
 you know, we have to change our whole way
 of experiencing it, yes.
 - And it is an archaic return.
 It is a brief intellectual detour
 since the 17th century, as you point out.
 - Terence's interest in the time flows,
 and I'm interested in the habits.
 But I think they're complementary,
 because you're never going to understand
 the quality of time flow
 if you haven't already understood
 the power and nature of habit.
 Because there's no doubt whatever
 that a great deal of the time flow that's happening,
 in spite of all the fluctuations,
 involves the persistence of a vast number of habits,
 which is why we're all here tonight.
 If these habits, the major ones by which we live
 from day to day, our bodies work,
 our language works, our social conventions work,
 and so on, if these habits were severely disrupted,
 it would be virtually impossible
 even to sit here and talk about it.
 We're here because there's a vast ability of habit.
 And so I think that one has to understand the habits,
 as well as, they're two sides of the same coin,
 in a sense, the time flow and its quality.
 What affects, or it's the other side of the coin of habits,
 and understanding them goes together, I think.
 But I would think, see the primary task, as I see it,
 for me, at any rate, is to try and establish
 the nature of these habits.
 Once we understand the nature of habits better,
 I think it would be easier to set up,
 if one wanted to study the nature of time flow,
 around, one would, I suppose, look for correlated events
 around the world, seeing whether certain patterns
 of events tended to happen around the world,
 what Jung would call synchronicities,
 which he thought of as manifesting
 some kind of underlying pattern in the flow of time.
 And so, the study of synchronicities already exists,
 of course, Jung initiated it,
 or even before him, Camerer and others.
 So that's one way of looking at time flow,
 because synchronicities suggest
 there's something behind the scenes
 of what appear to be new events in different places.
 So, no, these are complementary approaches,
 it's not one or the other.
 And I think both the study of synchronicities
 and the quantity of time might help
 to explain a lot of anomalies in scientific experiments.
 Very few scientific experiments are repeatable, in fact.
 And they're repeatable only approximately.
 Now, I've spent years teaching practical classes
 in Cambridge and other universities, Harvard.
 Teaching practical classes to undergraduates
 in biochemistry is an enlightening experience,
 because they're only given experiments to do,
 which are textbook experiments,
 everybody already knows work.
 I mean, you wouldn't give students
 something that's not going to work.
 So you give them the most certain, established,
 and repetitive and repeatable
 of all the systems you can think of.
 You don't want them right up at the research frontiers
 where results fluctuate wildly
 and no one knows really what's going on,
 until it's sort of stabilized, been published,
 and become a kind of habit of thought and expectation.
 You give them things that are already believed
 by everyone to work.
 And the results you get are astounding.
 They're all over the place.
 I mean, even competent undergraduates are...
 (audience laughing)
 The results are extremely variable.
 For any biological experiment I've ever had,
 and hundreds of ones I've conducted in lab classes,
 they're given the same apparatus, the same pipettes,
 the same solutions, the same...
 You know, lab technicians put these things out
 by the dozen in first year and second year
 undergraduate practical laboratories.
 The results are all over the place.
 Well, even in third year undergraduate things,
 in graduate studies, the results keep coming out
 all over the place.
 And you explain away the ones that don't work.
 Either they didn't know the technique,
 they put the wrong solution in,
 they must have done it this, you must have done that,
 you must have done the other.
 And you can find a hundred ways to explain
 why this actually happens.
 The only actual examples we have
 where people try to repeat experiments on a mass scale
 turn out to be highly unrepeatable.
 And most scientists don't spend their time
 repeating standard experiments
 and measuring whether they fluctuate or not.
 They're always getting on to the next thing.
 And so this idea has never been tested.
 And I think if it is tested, we'd find synchronized,
 perhaps synchronized fluctuations
 in the way experiments work in labs around the world.
 People have lab notebooks kept separately.
 The date, the way of presenting the experiments,
 you never mention the date you did it.
 It's assumed that time flows uniformly.
 You say, figure one shows the effect of magnesium ions
 on the activity of phosphofructokinase.
 And you have sort of enzyme activity,
 magnesium ion concentration, there's this graph.
 It's treated as if it's an eternal truth.
 And yet any biochemical experiment you do,
 they're always different.
 I've done hundreds in my time.
 You publish one of them that gives a sort of clause
 that fits the date and say,
 representative results are shown in figure one.
 (audience laughing)
 No two experiments give exactly the same results
 in any real interesting scientific system,
 such as those looked at by biochemists and so on.
 And so I think actually there's vast amounts of data.
 If scientists dated their results, for example,
 it would be an elementary move towards recognizing
 the quality of time.
 If one found that sort of all sort of particular kinds
 of results were dated there,
 and if scientists all around the world found that,
 say on the 12th of September,
 experiments weren't working very well,
 but they all tended to work on the 15th,
 this would be very interesting information.
 Everyone agrees that sunspots, for example,
 the 11-year cycle, affects climatic patterns
 and growth rings in trees.
 You can measure it way back.
 And this is standard science now.
 I mean, everyone, and cosmic ray fluctuations,
 every year the Earth passes through meteorite clouds.
 There are all sorts of things that are known to be,
 and cosmic rays affect mutation rates
 and they're different.
 And if you do experiments where people have tried to do,
 some of the Rudolf Steiner people did experiments
 where they crystallized standard solutions,
 they crystallized them on different days,
 the same conditions, and yet the patterns,
 the dendritic patterns of crystal growth differ
 from day to day, indicating a kind of quality of time.
 Now, no normal science would do that, you see,
 because it's assumed that any day is as good as any other.
 So there's, although in lab notebooks,
 if you went to the, the data's all there,
 there's tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands
 of lab notebooks in the world today.
 And scientists do date their experiments in their notebooks.
 You keep a daily register of experiments all dated.
 Just an examination of lab notebooks
 would be quite revealing,
 and it wouldn't even involve new experiments.
 But as soon as they write out the paper,
 it's taken out of its temporal context
 and put into this kind of seemingly timeless context
 of eternal truth.
 - Well, this is because science cannot operate
 without this notion of the restoration
 of initial conditions.
 And yet, this is a highly unexamined notion.
 And as all these anecdotal incidents indicate,
 there is no restoration of initial conditions.
 All of science is being practiced on an unexamined
 and apparently false assumption.
 So a more honest definition of what science is,
 is science is the art of studying those phenomena
 so crude that they can have an apparent restoration
 of initial conditions.
 But that leaves out all investment schemes,
 love affairs, dynastic families, military campaigns,
 and what have you.
 None of those can have their initial conditions restored.
 And those are the things that are really important to us.
 So it then is correctly seen to be a very limited way
 of doing intellectual business,
 having a very narrow spectrum of applications.
 One way I think of thinking about the difference
 between ordinary science and what Rupert is trying to do
 is to think of science as that enterprise
 of human thought which attempts to state what is possible,
 what is possible.
 But out of the very large class of the possible,
 certain things are going to have to be selected
 to actually happen, to undergo what Whitehead calls
 the formality of actually occurring.
 And an idea like Rupert's is a way of saying,
 well, here it's the past.
 The past is the factor which selects
 against the class of the possible
 to narrow it into this much narrower class,
 the class of those things which have actually occurred.
 Science never talks about how the class of the possible
 is narrowed into the class of the actually occurring.
 And yet this is obviously a big question.
 We don't want to know what's possible.
 We want to know what's going to happen.
 We don't want to know what might have happened.
 We want to know what happened.
 And so new ways of thinking about causality,
 new ways of thinking about time,
 new ways of thinking about the way influence,
 the influence of form is mitigated
 into the world of three-dimensional space.
 Does it come from the past?
 Does it come from some kind of platonic never-never land
 that is a hyper-dimension that surrounds
 apparent space and time?
 Does it come from the future?
 Is it like a dynamic attractor?
 Is it a huge flickering shadow
 across a lower-dimensional landscape
 that is somehow gathered into itself?
 These are the kinds of questions that have to be asked
 to create a new model of time
 that is empowering of the felt presence
 of immediate experience.
 That is the new ground zero
 of any kind of humane science.
 The felt presence of the immediate experience
 of the individual has to be the primary datum
 of a new science.
 Otherwise, it isn't going to be a new science.
 It's just going to be a retread on the old science.
 Well, it's well after 11 o'clock.
 Maybe we should pack it in.
 Thank you very much.
 (audience applauding)
 (upbeat music)
 (applause)
 (audience applauding)


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