13/3/06

Dear Rupert,

When I emailed you about my previous Open Letter, you replied: ‘Somehow you have the effect of making me feel bad, either I’m giving the wrong lectures, … or doing the wrong research, or answering the wrong questions, or using the wrong methods, or having the wrong motives. You are very hard to please!’

I don’t want to make you feel bad – I’ve said I think you’re a genius – but I don’t mind being your conscience. I kind-of understand why you do research, give lectures and write books, on telepathy: you have to make a living and a name for yourself, and this is a fascinating subject for many people, and you present it all very wittily: you’re a class act. My problem with it is that your ‘hypothesis of formative causation’ is what interests me, and I cannot see research on telepathy as being crucial to verifying the hypothesis (although...), so why put virtually all your energies into this research? (I have other questions too, and I’d like to talk with you: about your story, your critics and why they find your ideas so threatening, if you can find the time.)

The person I would love to make feel bad is Daniel Dennett, and it was this piece in the Observer that led to this letter to you: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1728920,00.html .

You see, I was a ‘bright’, in Dennett’s terms – as you were, I think. I was brought up a believer in no-God (this is a religious position). I’m still an atheist (more like a flavour of the mind, a preference – the nearest I’d get to spirituality or religion is this piece by Rabindranath Tagore). But I’m a renegade, an apostate, having rejected the core beliefs of Dennett’s religion. Brights believe in the mechanistic, reductionist scientific tendency, whereby one has to prefer an ‘explanation’ of a set of phenomena in mechanistic, reductionist terms to a description of what members of that set of phenomena have in common. I prefer the description, which is what I call a ‘pattern’ – sometimes I write it as ‘pattern!’ – which is my version of your hypothesis: same ideas, different language. I think it is helpful to take the orthodox-science-style terminology out of your theories, so pattern or pattern! is also my term for your morphic resonance and your morphic fields. You conceive of your morphic fields as located in some non-local universe (obviously nonsense – sorry!); I say they stay in the one ordinary universe, whose past does not disappear into oblivion as the brights would have it, with the tick-tock of the time machine ratcheting on the mechanical universe in space. By my conception, it is all still there/here, although conscious human senses are focussed mainly on the growth surface, on the present. ‘The Presence of the Past’ is literally true, by pattern theory.

I could say more, and the trouble with writing is one could always say more – when’s the time to wrap it up and publish? I rather like the Marxist booklets in my collection, which are more prefaces than core text. The beauty of a hypertext book, which is what my website is, is that one can keep on adding.

Anyway, my point in writing to you, Rupert, is that I’m a convert to your way of thinking from the orthodox side of the scientific fence. I don’t suppose there are many of us. I don’t have an orthodox science pedigree though, because I wasn’t an academic or a practising scientist. I got a degree in maths and went into a business career in what used to be called ‘data processing’ or ‘DP’, fairly successfully for a woman with children to bring up, progressing from programmer to systems analyst, project leader, departmental manager, management consultant. I helped run the system – not something as a revolutionary socialist that I’m proud of. The skills I once had are largely redundant: no one reads a core dump and puts in machine code patches: how quaint! But all the while, until I read A New Science of Life, I was an orthodox science believer, a believer in no-God, one of Dennett’s brights. Now I’m all yours – despite my reservations.

It was more than ten years ago that I started to write up pattern. At the time I was exploring the spirituality thing as a Quaker Universalist – to see if I’d been missing anything. It didn’t take, and I left, more atheist than ever. What hasn’t changed in my life is my interest in world change, and my recently renewed interest in your ideas is due to realising that what is needed is paradigm change, and you’ve got the makings of the kind of organic model of the universe that the world and human society needs. And I would love the opportunity to talk to you about that.

With best wishes, and love, Chris

although...
I have seen the hypothesis of formative causation as the basis of the urgently needed paradigm change, and the telepathy research as a distraction from helping people understand the hypothesis, however, there is another view on this. HT sent this in a recent email:
‘I would see Rupert’s contribution to paradigm change in these terms: telepathy shows there’s more going on than the mechanistic view would admit. Regardless of how it actually works, if we are all connected in a deep, personally meaningful, non mechanistic and unifying way, then nature is something much more immersively organic than science first took it to be. The other species are indeed all our relatives, deserving our respect and protection. If Rupert’s work helps more people to see that, then would it not contribute?’

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