Day 20:
Lycra Lala
Day 20:
Lycra Lala

Day 20:

It’s day 20. It’s halfway. It feels like something big has to happen but I’m on the train on my way to visit a friend in Breukelen. I have been trying my hand at Insta stories. I’m still really bad at them. Look at the terrible stickers plastered all over my pink face.

Morphic Resonance

In this video, the scientist Rupert  Sheldrake, a researcher in the field of parapsychology, proposes the conjecture of morphic resonance – a universal collective memory that permeates everywhere. Energy travels across time and space in ways we cannot quite discern but what is evident is the similarity in patterns of vibration or patterns of energy and the patterns in myths. Dr Rupert Sheldrake is adamant that the conscious communicates and that laws of nature are outside time and space yet prevalent everywhere. This results in the existence of morphogenic fields – fields that create form or a shared consciousness since memory is beyond the material and can travel through time. His ideas go against the dogma of mainstream science that generally have sanctioned and valorized materialism, a theory that proposes that everything came into existence accidentally with the big bang.

In quantum theory nature is probabilistic. There is no rigid determinism, as can be demonstrated by the double-slit theory.  In this experiment a single photon is measured going through a double slit, the end position is random and unpredictable. Scientists can only determine a probability distribution. But in quantum theory, the kind of observation you make depends on what you are observing in other words the observation depends on the observer.  All science suffer this subjective fate though. All observations depend on the observer’s preconceptions and equipment. The answer depends on the questions.

Sheldrake is a bigger proponent of chaos theory where inherent indeterminism thrives. There is inherent freedom in nature, at the fundamental particles of matter. Sometimes mainstream science protects its dogma through denial of variation. This intellectual phase-locking – when scientists’ results agree although they are incorrect – can upend social stability and serve as the justification for the infringement of human rights. 

An example of intellectual phase locking was when Millikan measured the charge of an electron but used the wrong viscosity for air. His predecessors repeated the experiment with varying results, but instead of questioning Millikan’s original findings, they thought their measurements were wrong and adjusted the findings. Why didn’t they wise up sooner to Millikan’s mistake? Social science, especially, is based on statistical modelling of phenomena that are multifaceted and difficult to control for, and not actually produced by deduction. Institutions often refer to this science to push their agenda’s and tailor policies. This ‘evidence based’ management of institutions are primarily driven by tradition, rhetoric and anecdotes, not scientific inquiry. Incorrect findings are sometimes used as justifications for the infringement of human rights. Findings that buck conventional thought to the point that they can prompt irrevocable ramifications better have an “unimpeachable, reproducible path.” 

Sheldrake says: What is not empirical is the metaphysical belief system that nature is totally mechanical, that it’s all unconscious, that the laws are fixed.

There is much debate in the field of science:

There is ample evidence that: – there is no physical embodiment of “free will” – everything in the physical world is deterministic, although at the quantum level, “statistically deterministic with random sampling”

Thus, one cannot be said to “commit a crime,” only that the particles in one’s brain and one’s body happened to be in a configuration and receive interactions with other stimuli such that those actions physically occurred.

We already know these things, but we ain’t updating our justice system to account for this.

jwatte on Oct 1, 2019 

You’re making the mistake of projecting the deterministic nature of “machine level” causality onto the ability of the scripting language that is human agency to interact with the world in ways that can be characterized as “good” or “bad.” Which isn’t to say that compassion for the sinner and acknowledgement of how in thrall we all are to circumstance shouldn’t be encouraged. Just, high-level, there is choice, if only because the deterministic switches are black-boxed.

bsanr2 on Oct 1, 2019 

Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, said: “All human science is but passing fables. As we learn more everything we think of as absolute will necessary evolve because we are only looking at a small portion of available evidence”.

Science has been proven wrong in the past, but this is justified by the caveat that science is an ‘ever-evolving’ body of knowledge. If it is always changing, why is it the conclusive determiner of truth and logic Regardless of whether or not you support the scientific method or if you gravitate more towards, like morphic resonance (often spitefully refereed to as psuedoscience), I think we can all agree: when researchers test theories, they shouldn’t curate or be selective about what they publish. The data should be made available as it is recorded.

Morphic resonance is a process whereby self-organising systems inherit a memory from previous similar systems. In its most general formulation, morphic resonance means that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits. The hypothesis of morphic resonance also leads to a radically new interpretation of memory storage in the brain and of biological inheritance. Memory need not be stored in material traces inside brains, which are more like TV receivers than video recorders, tuning into influences from the past. And biological inheritance need not all be coded in the genes, or in epigenetic modifications of the genes; much of it depends on morphic resonance from previous members of the species. Thus each individual inherits a collective memory from past members of the species, and also contributes to the collective memory, affecting other members of the species in the future.

Rupert Sheldrake


In his talk about the limitations of science, Rupert Sheldrake urges scientists to free themselves from the dogma of materialism. The ’10 dogmas of modern science’ are:

  1. Everything is essentially mechanical. Dogs, for example, are complex mechanisms, rather than living organisms with goals of their own. Even people are machines, ‘lumbering robots’, in Richard Dawkins’s vivid phrase, with brains that are like genetically programmed computers.
  2. All matter is unconscious. It has no inner life or subjectivity or point of view. Even human consciousness is an illusion produced by the material activities of brains.
  3. The total amount of matter and energy is always the same (with the exception of the Big Bang, when all the matter and energy of the universe suddenly appeared).
  4. The laws of nature are fixed. They are the same today as they were at the beginning, and they will stay the same for ever.
  5. Nature is purposeless, and evolution has no goal or direction.
  6. All biological inheritance is material, carried in the genetic material, DNA, and in other material structures.
  7. Minds are inside heads and are nothing but the activities of brains. When you look at a tree, the image of the tree you are seeing is not ‘out there’, where it seems to be, but inside your brain.
  8. Memories are stored as material traces in brains and are wiped out at death.
  9. Unexplained phenomena like telepathy are illusory.
  10. Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.

References