Exposing Scientific Dogmas - Banned TED Talk - Rupert Sheldrake

foreign [Music] [Music] delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality in principle leaving any of the details to be filled in this is a very widespread belief in our society it's the kind of belief system of people who say I don't believe in God I believe in science it's a belief system which has now been spread to the entire world but there's a conflict in the heart of science between science as a method of inquiry based on reason evidence hypothesis and Collective investigation and science as a belief system or a world

view and unfortunately the world view aspect of science has come to inhibit and constrict the free inquiry which is the very lifeblood of the scientific endeavor since the late 19th century science has been conducted under the aspect of a belief system or worldview which is essentially that of materialism philosophical materialism and these Sciences are now wholly owned subsidiaries of the materialist world view I think that as we break out of it the Sciences will be regenerated what I do in my book The Science solution which is called science set free in the United States is

take the ten dogmas or assumptions of Science and turn them into questions seeing how well they turn how well they stand up if you look at them scientifically none of them stand out very well what I'm going to do is first run through what these 10 dogmas are and then I'll only have time to discuss one or two of them in a bit more detail but essentially the 10 dogmas which are the default world view of most educated people all over the world are first that Nature's mechanical or machine like the universe is like a

machine animals and plants are like machines we're like machines in fact we are machines we are lumbering robots in Richard Dawkins Vivid phrase with brains that are genetically programmed computers second matter is unconscious the whole universe is made up of unconscious matter um there's no consciousness in stars in galaxies in planets in animals in plants and there ought not to be any in us either if this theory is true so a lot of the philosophy of Mind Over the last hundred years is being trying to prove that we're not really conscious at all um so

the matters unconscious then the laws of nature are fixed and this is the Dogma three the laws of nature are the same now as they were at the time of the big bang and they'll be the same forever not just the laws but the constants of nature are fixed which is why they are called constants dog before the total amount of matter and energy is always the same um it never changes in total quantity except at the moment of the big bang when it all sprang into existence from nowhere in a single instant the fifth

Dogma is that Nature's purposeless there are no purposes in all nature and The evolutionary purpose The evolutionary process has no purpose or Direction Dogma six the biological heredity is material everything you inherit is in your genes or in epigenetic modifications of the genes or in cytoplasmic inheritance it's material Dogma 7 memories are stored inside your brain as material traces somehow everything you remember is in your brain in modified nerve endings phosphorylated proteins no one knows how it works but nevertheless almost everyone in the scientific World believes it must be in the brain Dogma 8 your

mind is inside your head all your Consciousness is the activity of your brain and nothing more Dogma 9 which follows from Dogma 8 psychic phenomena like telepathy are impossible your thoughts and intentions can not have any effect at a distance because your mind's inside your head therefore all the apparent evidence for telepathy and other psychic phenomena is illusory people believe these things happen but it's just because they don't know enough about statistics or they're just they're deceived by coincidences or it's wishful thinking and Dogma 10 mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works that's

why governments only fund Research into mechanistic medicine and ignore complementary and alternative therapies those can't possibly really work because they're not mechanistic they may appear to work because people would have got better anyway or because of the placebo effect but the only kind that really works is mechanistic medicine well this is the default world view which is held by almost all educated people all over the world it's the basis of the educational system uh the National Health Service the medical research Council governments uh and uh it's just the default worldview of educated people but I

think every one of these dogmas is very very questionable and when you look at it it turns they they fall apart I'm going to take first the idea that the laws of nature are fixed this is a hangover from an older world view before the 1960s when the Big Bang Theory came in people thought that the whole universe was eternal governed by Eternal mathematical laws when the Big Bang came in then that assumption continued even though the Big Bang revealed a universe that's radically evolutionary about 14 billion years old growing and developing and evolving for

14 billion years growing and Cooling and more structures and patterns appear within it but the idea is all the laws of nature were completely fixed at the moment of the Big Bang like a cosmic Napoleonic Code as my friend Terence McKenna used to say modern Science is based on the principle give us one free miracle and we'll explain the rest and the one free Miracle is the appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it from nothing in a single instant well in an evolutionary Universe why shouldn't

the laws themselves evolve after all human laws do and the idea of laws of nature is based on a metaphor with human laws it's a very anthropocentric metaphor only humans have laws in fact only civilized societies have laws as C.S Lewis once said to say that a stone Falls to Earth because it's obeying a law makes it a man and even a citizen it's a metaphor that we got so used to we forget it's a metaphor in an evolving Universe I think a much better idea is the idea of habits I think the habits of

nature evolve the regularities of nature are essentially habitual this was an idea of put forward at the beginning of the 20th century by the American philosopher C.S purse and it's an idea which various other philosophers have entertained and it's one which I myself have developed into a scientific hypothesis the hypothesis of morphic resonance which is the basis of these evolving habits according to this hypothesis everything in nature has a kind of collective memory resonance occurs on the basis of similarity as a young giraffe embryo grows in his mother's womb it Tunes in to the amorphic

Resonance of previous giraffes it draws on that Collective memory it grows like a giraffe and it behaves like a giraffe because it's drawing on this Collective memory it has to have the right genes to make the right proteins but genes in my view are grossly overrated they only account for the proteins that the organism can make not the shape or the form or the behavior uh every species has a kind of collective memory even crystals do this theory predicts that if you make a new kind of crystal for the first time uh the very first

time you make it it won't have an existing habit but once it crystallizes then the next time you make it there'll be an influence from the first crystals to the second ones all over the world by morphic resonance it'll crystallize a bit easier the third time there'll be an influence from the first and second crystals there is in fact good evidence that new compounds get easier to crystallize all around the world just as this Theory would predict it also predicts that if you train animals to learn a new trick for example rats learn a new

trick in London then all around the world Rats of the same breed should learn the same trick quicker just because the rats have landed here and surprisingly there's already evidence that this actually happens anyway that's my own hypothesis in a nutshell of morphic resonance everything depends on evolving habits not on fixed laws but I want to spend a few moments on the constants of nature too because these are again use assumed to be constant things like the gravitational constant the speed of light are called the fundamental constants are they really constant well when I got

interested in this question I tried to find out um I they're given in physics handbooks handbooks of physics list the existing fundamental constants to tell you their value but I wanted to see if they'd change so I got the old volumes of physical handbooks I went to the patient office Library here in London and they're the only place I could find that kept the old volumes normally people throw them away when the new values come out they throw away the old ones when I did this I found that the speed of light dropped between 1928

and 1945 by about 20 kilometers per second it's a huge drop because they're given with errors of any fractions of a decimal points of error and yet all over the world it dropped and they were all getting values very similar to each other with tiny errors then in 1945 it went up at 48 it went up again and um then people started getting very similar values again I was very intrigued by this and I couldn't make sense of it so I went to see the head of Metrology at the national physical laboratory in Teddington Metrology

is the science in which people measure constants and I asked him about this I said what do you make of this drop in the speed of light between 1928 and 1945 and he said oh dear he said you've uncovered uh the most embarrassing episode in the history of our science so I said well could the speed of light have actually dropped and that would have amazing implications if so he said no no of course it couldn't have actually dropped it's a constant so oh well then how do you explain the fact everyone was finding it

going much slower during that period is it because they were fudging their results to get what they thought other people should be getting and the whole thing was just produced by in the minds of physicists um we don't like to use the word fudge I said well what do you prefer he said well we prefer to call it intellectual phase locking huh so I said well if it was going on then how can we say sure it's not going on today and that the present values are produced by intellectual phase locking and he said oh

we know that's not the case I said how do we know he said well he said we've solved the problem and I said well how he said well we fixed the speed of light by definition in 1972. so I said but it might still change you said yes but we'd never know it because we've defined the meter in terms of the speed of light so the units had changed with it so he looked very pleased about that they'd fix that problem he but I said well then what about Big G the gravitational constant known in

the Traders big jig is written with a capital G Newton's Universal gravitational constant that's varied by more than 1.3 percent in recent years and it seems to vary from place to place and from time to time and he said oh well those are just arrows and unfortunately there are quite big errors with big G so I said well what if it's really changing I mean Perhaps it is really changing and then I looked at how they do it what happens is they measure it in different labs they get different values on different days and then

they average them and then other labs around the world do the same and they come out usually with a rather different average and then the international committee on Metrology meets every 10 years or so and average the ones from labs around the world to come up with the value of Big G but what if G were actually fluctuating what if it changed there's already evidence actually that it changes throughout the day and throughout the year what if the Earth as it moves through the galactic environment went through patches of dark matter or other environmental factors

that could alter it maybe they all change together what if these errors are going up together and down together for more than 10 years I've been trying to persuade metrologists to look at the raw data in fact I'm now trying to persuade them to put it online on the internet with the dates and the actual measurements and see if they're correlated to see if they're all up at one time all down it's another if so they might be fluctuating together and that would tell us something very very interesting but no one has done this they

haven't done it because G is a constant there's no point looking for changes you see here's a very simple example of where a dogmatic assumption actually inhibits inquiry I myself think that the constants may vary quite considerably well within narrow limits but they may all be varying and I think the day will come when scientific journals like nature have a weekly report on the constants like stock market reports and newspapers you know this week Big G was slightly up the speed of the charge on the electron was down the speed of light held steady and

so on um that's one area just one of one area where I think thinking less dogmatically could open things up one of the biggest areas is the nature of the mind this is the most unsolved problem that sounds simply can't deal with the fact we're conscious and it can't deal with the fact that our thoughts don't seem to be inside our brains um our our experiences don't all seem to be inside our brain your image with me now doesn't seem to be inside your brain yet the official viewers there's a little Rupert somewhere inside your

head and everything else in this room is inside your head your experience is inside your brain I'm suggesting actually that Vision involves an outward projection of images what you're seeing is in your mind but not inside your head our minds are extended beyond our brains in the simplest Act of perception I think that we project out the images we're seeing and these images uh touch what we're looking at if I look at you from behind you don't know I'm there could I affect you could you feel my gaze there's a great deal of evidence that

people can the sense of being stared at is an extremely common experience and recent experimental research suggests is real animals seem to have it too I think it probably evolved in the context of predator-prey relationships prey animals that could feel the Gaze of a predator would survive better than those that couldn't this would lead to a whole new way of thinking about ecological relationships between predators and prey also about the extent of our minds if we look at distant Stars I think our minds reach out in a sense to touch those stars and literally extend

out over astronomical different distances they're not just inside our heads now it may seem astonishing that this is a topic of debate in the 21st century we know so little about our own minds that where our images are is a hot topic of debate within Consciousness studies right now I don't have time to deal with any more of these dogmas but every single one of them is questionable if one questions it new forms of research new possibilities open up and I think as we question these uh dogmas that have held back science so long science

will undergo a reflowering a Renaissance I'm a total believer in the importance of science I've spent my whole life as a research scientist my whole career but I think by moving beyond these dogmas it can be regenerated once again it can become interesting and I hope life affirming thank you [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign