Forms and Mysteries

Okey-doke. So can everyone hear? 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. I said, this must mean we both need money.

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.

So every year...

For 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...

And Rupert and I have not seen each other for ten 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 compressants.

And I'm sure he lives up to the name.

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, you know.

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 seemed to me a fitting title, because of course, form is a mystery that even science is willing to accept.

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 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.

Because powerful mathematical tools have had to be invented to carry it out of the realm of mere theoretical discussion.

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.

Because powerful mathematical tools have had to be invented to carry it out of the realm of mere theoretical discussion.

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.

revisioning of causality and by extension the domain of 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

scoriated 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 have a

book which if you have a book which if you have a book which if you have a

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 striving around

town giving lectures it's really a rare intellectual adventure I haven't known

that kind of excitement reading theoretical biology since discovering LL

White when I was a kid but what is being proposed is a fundamental revision

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 relatively

unexamined concept of the restoration of initial conditions 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 a steadily accreting and self-defining set of interlocking

habits and that know 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 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 is claimed to fulfill this function is is

now in serious trouble it actually has been in some areas since the elaboration

of quantum physics in the 20s but shell Drake 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 and 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, you know, it's not just a theory.

It's a theory 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.

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.

And it's, I think what Terence has,

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,

you know, 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 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.

Now, 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,

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

that seemed to be the variable.

Anyway, this experiment was then done again in Germany,

trying to, the pictures were,

of course in each experiment.

And the pictures there were transmitted

on Sunday afternoon on a program there.

And tests were done all around the world.

Again, no effect in North America.

A highly significant in fact in Britain.

But in Britain, although it was highly significant

and the control was no different,

and the sample tested was something like 20,000 people,

it was a huge sample.

It was probably the biggest experiment ever done.

And this is a very significant experiment.

experiment ever done in terms of the number of participants.

The effect showed that the picture had become significantly harder to recognise in Britain

after it had been seen by a lot of Germans on a Sunday afternoon.

Well, at this stage, I thought, well, you know, 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, 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.

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

on their programme.

.

The obvious way to do that would be to 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, I, I, then they, they sent to me from their office, and I said, well,

I'm going to go to the office in Madison Avenue for some puzzle pictures, and started

doing some trial ones 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 it, 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 experiment's 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, than where it's marketed, the rate at which

people can solve it.

The 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 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 Tarrytown Prize.

They're very interesting.

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, because 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 the ability to learn or recognize words in languages unknown to the

person, in the written form.

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 a very similar test

to test for morphic resonance.

Itself an interesting fact.

These tests showed the ability of people to learn things more readily if they were thinking

about them.

They were doing 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.

And,

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 this 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 this 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.

.

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, the 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 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

it 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 because 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 with 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 because they would still have had to happen every microsecond.

Anyway, this error in the basis of the experiment

was found in the experiment.

It 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 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.

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.

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 appreciate a couple of sentence descriptions.

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 did know,

and I should have realized that not everybody would, and maybe most don't.

Something intrigues me about it, but I don't grasp it.

Well, it's hard to grasp in its detailed forms,

but that's what our dialogue was going to be about in some of these things.

But 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 has crystallized in the past.

The way rats learn a new trick depends on whether other 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, new things which happen repeatedly

should happen more and more easily or more and more quickly or more and more probably

as time goes on because of the effect, the build-up of this morphic resonance.

And this theory is controversial, as Terence pointed out,

because it's not the way that scientists usually think about it.

It's 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

our 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 is 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 in to our own memories from our own past,

so we also tune in to 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,

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.

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.

And that was what it delivered to me.

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 know, 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 discussion.

But if the morphogenetic field is written,

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 downsloping part of a fractal wave

and the upmoving 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 they are,

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.

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,

tasteless tonsorial tendencies,

and so forth.

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 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 filter 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 a 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 is 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 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 red shift of the galaxies and so on.

The whole of modern cosmology is based on

an 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

of the novelty wave.

I mean, there's going to be novelty

if the universe is always expanding,

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

where everything's evolving,

the mind, matter, space,

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

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 persistences, habits can build up.

Because otherwise, pure novelty

without any persistence would be chaos.

I mean, chaos is precisely

that which where 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 eagles,

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,

the fractal ripples and features of the novelty wave,

if your theory is correct.

Now where would we look

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 of such 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 pass, 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 slower,

longer and longer and longer.

And this 3.5 k 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,

ten 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.

That what it is, is it's theory

of formative causation

the morphogenetic field is just an image

of trying to understand

how this pre-formative 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 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 of the arrow of time.

Well, rather than visualizing this as a field,

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 operates

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 a form

into a kind of metaphysical hypostatization

beyond our ability to conceive.

Have you ever considered this possibility?

We should have rehearsed.

Well, I think so.

I take your description, you seem to be very like,

I don't know if you like this or not, the similarity,

but like the omega point of Teilhard 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,

as 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.

And 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 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

pushing matter out from behind,

everything being pushed from the past.

And the Big Bang is certainly that model as 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 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,

and 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.

Well, thank you very much.

But I mean, this is, you're 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,

the crescendo of prophets is going to grow,

obviously, as we approach 9th December,

January the 1st, 2000.

And, you know, harmonic convergence was even,

only the beginning of a beginning of a dress rehearsal

for what's going to be a mammoth revisioning.

And this sense of culminations in time,

and of goals and ends,

is something very hard to escape from in our civilisation.

The idea of it just going on and on and on and on and on forever

isn't very attractive.

The Teilhard de Chardin view,

of an omega point,

is the idea of there being an end or goal to history.

And then, of course,

there's the pessimistic fashion 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

into 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 cosmologists

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.

So, is what you're saying,

since there obviously were

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 undeniable 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 and habit phenomena,

which we know very well depends 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,

hiraeth,

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's...

It exists and yet it cannot exist

because in its existence

is implicitly...

is 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

was 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 properly 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

appoint an end to the world

and for several of them,

it's soon.

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 are the 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 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 revising

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 the 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,

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 the Brahma,

it's the inhaling

of the breath of Brahma

and then a new universe

is created or breathed out.

It seems to me

there's great many of these

have this view

that would lock in

to 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, you know,

God Almighty descending

in a chariot of flame?

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

that the way in which

this is to be accomplished

is staring us in the face.

It is simply this,

that 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 in

to 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.

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.

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 do

should come back.

How do you feel

about that?

Who whines

behind the light?

I don't care.

Fine.

You.

The moment

the past is going

to pile up

behind it

with momentum.

Well, but we haven't

reached the moment

when the switch

is thrown.

The future cannot

go any further

into the past

than that moment.

Absolutely.

But the past

is still going

to pile up

upon that point

because the past

is in the 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 not.

It's that we are

dimension

and that's what's creating

the shock wave

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

your questions

all night

but I was

I had a

Project Zonitor

from Universal

and the Royal Library

and they put me

into a wonderful

space

and 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

with the

synchronicity

begins piling up

on the

synchronicity

and I wonder

if this fits in

with the

Well, I think

that this

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

several

things on

his mind

but

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

which is

absolutely

flat

ever since

the largest

thermonuclear blast

ever detonated

was in

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.

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

go 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

a new way

and to know

that it is

a more correct

mirroring

of

of the greater

cosmos

than

the model

that had us

as the citizen

the ego

the individual

all

all of that

sort of thing

well

we think

all the threshold

of major changes

in our

information

universe

in some

you know

hypertext

and so forth

which

would allow us to go

into more

well see I think it is something

much more profound

than that

ah

let us 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 am talking about

let us pretend

it is not

a time

communicator

it is a real

time

machine

now

we are going

to send somebody

into the far

flung

reaches

of the future

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 I

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 that if you had to

cessna airplane that you could fly to Kitty Hawk in 1906 wouldn't you fly there and see

it

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 overpower

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 the human mind

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 now.

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?

on that note, why don't we take an intermission?

and then come back

The punctuated evolution thing

The idea that evolution moves by fits and starts

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

That Darwin was a great disciple of Lyell

that Darwin was a great disciple of Lyell

and the principle in geology Удачи и Alle, и בד stair, hier, легко и в IR Circle

and the principle in geology here

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 final...

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 uniform,

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.

A catastrophist...

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...

Yes.

I'm fascinated by these salts that get tired.

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 backwards and forwards and getting tired.

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...

asking the question of myself and of chemists

that 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%.

I mean, the melting point fluctuates by 12 degrees over 20 years.

And there do seem to be extraordinary fluctuations.

And most organic chemists agree that the strange changes occur,

that they don't seem half as constant as they're cracked up to be.

You know, we're going to need to keep the ice caps in place then.

Well, that might be...

By changing the melting point.

The 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 substance,

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.

They have...

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, this is...

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...

And it would actually be irrefutable.

That's a vice and not a virtue in a scientific theory.

And so...

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,

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.

The 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,

um...

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 habits,

they don't change.

Some things you simply won't be able to test, though.

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.

Is there anything that would hardly refute your theory?

Or is it just a good idea that you experiment with?

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,

morphology,

morphogenesis,

instinct,

behaviour,

transmission of learning,

behaviour and evolution of social groups.

So I've 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,

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,

Papa says the ideal is to falsify theories.

I don't know a single example of science proceeding in that manner.

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.

Somebody puts forward a theory and someone has a rival theory,

and then there's a...

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 is governed by immutable, changeless, eternal laws.

And some tests may be inconclusive.

Some tests may, I think, favour the idea of morphogenetics,

if it resonates.

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 favour.

Because 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.

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.

So the question is, is the field connection in quantum nonlocality

in Bell's theorem and the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky paradox,

that kind of quantum nonlocality, 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 as conceived would fit with quantum nonlocality,

although it does in fact involve a past,

because both systems originate from the 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.

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 modelling 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 nonlocality 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

that...

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 that...

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

in 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 modelling,

given the whole nature of mathematics as it's practised,

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 platonical 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 now

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 meet 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 if 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 ten of us are like any other ten

and yet different.

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,

the 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 best seller list of the last few months

is Stephen Hawking

who as 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.

And it's a perfect, you see,

in a sense there's a perfect,

I think the reason for his mythic quality

because 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 subjectivity.

Through our collective 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 formalised modelling 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.

My God, I see why they're alarmed now.

Yes, well I'm sure you're quite right.

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, their songs,

and the actual message is, as it were, telepathic

once they've tuned in through the right calls.

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.

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

to 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 civilizations stripped the world of its magic.

And it 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.

Because it was to step off the earth,

which everyone else had taken the earth as the center

from which to model things.

Because 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.

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 and 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 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 known 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, etc.

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,

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 is interested in 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 the,

they're two sides of the same coin

in a sense.

The time flows,

the time flow and its quality,

what affects or,

it's the other side of the coin of habit

and the understanding 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 one,

the study of synchronicities already exists,

of course, Jung initiated it,

or even before him,

Kammerer 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.

I've spent years teaching practical classes

in Cambridge and other universities,

Harvard,

teaching practical classes

to undergraduates in biochemistry.

It's 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...

The results are extremely variable.

For any biological experiment I've ever had,

in 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

and 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 this,

you must have done that,

you must have done the other.

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 plausible if it's the date,

and you say representative results

are shown in figure one.

And 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,

this would be an elementary move

towards recognizing the quality of time.

Nifflin found that sort of all sorts

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.

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 meteorites.

They have different 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.