23/2/2006

Dear Rupert,

I have felt the need to try to communicate with you over the waste – as I see it – of the wonderful work you did in the late 1970s and 1980s which culminated in your books:

A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation, 2nd edn (London: Palladin, 1987) (first published 1981) and
The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (London: Collins, 1988). (You signed my copy of this book at Winchester on 8th April 1988.)

I initially wrote a teasing, familiar letter to you, but I’ve taken that off my web site because it was inappropriate – to someone I actually respect and hugely admire – and it was self-indulgent: a way of expressing my anger and frustration.

Why am I angry with you, how are you wasting your ideas, why couldn’t you answer my question? *

I am angry – but perhaps more disappointed and sad – because I believe your ideas are worth sharing with the world. They could be the basis for an entire paradigm shift. Twenty years ago I am sure you believed this too. Your first book announced a revolution in science. You used to debunk the old mechanistic, reductionist model of the universe, with its eternal laws of physics, which you pointed out had nowhere to reside since the demise of Newton’s mathematical God.

It seems to me that what you are doing now is promoting the Sheldrake brand of alternative science books, whilst desperately trying to retrieve your reputation as an orthodox scientist, doing experiments in a conspicuously rigorous, professional manner, ceding the laws of physics their domain and insisting you are merely making additions here and there to extend science’s scope to cover a few hitherto unexplained phenomena. You delight in mentioning possible links to new science’s own ‘proven’ counter-intuitive oddities, like ‘quantum non-locality’. Worst of all, instead of sharing your big ideas, you belittle them and confine them to your CV.

Given your obsession with gaining re-entry to the Orthodox Science Church, you are careful no longer to challenge the dominant ideology of which this establishment is a key part. Capitalism relies on the mechanistic, reductionist paradigm, and needs its orthodox scientists to remain loyal to that ideology, however far the science on which it was based has been left behind by the new science of the last century. But we are all victims of the capitalist machine which destroys and distorts life on earth. We need the living, growing, evolving, conscious conception of the universe your theories once offered.

But you are neglecting those theories. Your lectures barely mention them. To introduce your researches into human and animal telepathy, you say that mind and consciousness are not just in the brain but extend in space, and ‘morphic resonance’ is what you say is behind this. But when I asked you (at your lecture on 21 February) to confirm that mind also extends backwards † through time: to enable someone’s consciousness of a bird singing, [or appreciation of music, or indeed comprehension of language,] you offered ‘short term memory stored in the brain’ as a necessary component of the process, together with memories of earlier recognised sounds. Daniel Dennett, who ‘explained consciousness’ according to the orthodox mechanistic model would be happy with that.

I would really like to discuss my concerns with you, but I know you are very busy keeping all the plates you have in the air spinning. Maybe you will get in touch, and I look forward to that.

Take care.

Love, Chris

* I am referring here to the question I asked following your lecture for the Scientific and Medical Network on 21 February at Surrey University. I have done enough public speaking myself to know that fielding questions is difficult, and there is the temptation to latch onto something in the question to which one has a ready made response, rather than to try to understand what the questioner is really getting at; your disappointing answer may have been due to this. Or it may have been due to a tendency with established people: top politicians are notorious for this, senior academics and others with a name and following in some sphere are subject to it too, of (unknowingly) losing the ability to listen, and hence never really answering a question put to them. I hope it wasn’t this with you, but seeing you wandering around with someone before the lecture, I thought you seemed rather aloof , not looking around in a friendly, approachable way. But that could have been shyness, and I was somewhat reassured by seeing you apparently nervous when you started your talk, until you got into your stride. The third possibility is that you could not answer my question because you have neglected your ideas, using only the small part: the term ‘morphic resonance’ and a minimal definition of that, which you need in order to have available an ‘explanation’ for the phenomena you have been researching.

† I was referring literally to ‘the presence of the past’. When challenged to try again to answer my question by someone else in the audience, you mentioned consciousness extending through time into the future in the form of precognition. That phenomenon is explainable, but not central, by my variant of your theories, which I called ‘pattern’. That link is to some writing of my own, more than ten years old now, from a time when I was exploring the ‘spirituality thing’ with the Quaker Universalists, hence the terms in which it is expressed. Shortly afterwards I left the Quakers to work on practical aspects of world change, and soon reverted to being an atheist. Pattern persisted in the back of my mind meanwhile, a necessary protection against ‘death dread’, a disabling fear I have suffered from since childhood, due to my atheist father passing on orthodox science’s belief in a universe which disappears into oblivion as the present moment tick-tocks along.

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