I believe that society – in the West especially – is overdue a paradigm change, from the mechanistic model derived historically from Newton’s laws of motion, to a model which is more organic, more about growth and evolution, more in tune with how we experience life. If such a paradigm change occurred it would help people to feel positive about the change that is going to be necessary, post Peak Oil, from the current ‘statist’ model of globalised capitalism and the urbanised nation state, to a ‘culturist’ model based on self-reliant and sustainable local communities: cells of perhaps 25 households, networked more widely as necessary and as they choose, but with decisions taking place at the local level, with full participatory democracy.

An alternative paradigm, which could be suitable for a ‘culturist’ society, is that suggested by the ideas of Rupert Sheldrake: ‘the hypothesis of formative causation’, ‘morphic resonance’ etc. Sadly, Sheldrake is so obsessed with putting his hypothesis to the test, in order to prove to his peers he is right (despite ‘repeatable experiments’ being part of the paradigm he is challenging), that he engages in progressively more weird experiments, so that short of appearing on Celebrity Big Brother, he could not appear more ridiculous, despite his fine academic pedigree.

Stephen Rose is one orthodox scientist who – out of a desire to be open-minded – has cooperated with Sheldrake in an experiment to test his hypothesis. As a preliminary to reporting the failure – as he saw it – of the experiment, Rose gives his reasons for believing that the hypothesis Sheldrake is putting forward is unnecessary and misconceived 1. But what Rose fails to see is that paradigm change goes far beyond changing science’s models in the circumstances he cites. Sheldrake (and, of course, Marx too) points out that it is society as a whole, not just a few scientists or philosophers, which determines the way that society understands and envisages the world. In particular, Sheldrake points out that a decline in religious belief led to the ‘laws’ governing the universe, conceived by Newton and others as residing in the mind of God, having no home or location, and yet that anomaly did not lead to the model being abandoned as nonsensical.

However, the mechanistic model is nonsensical, and I offer the following thought experiment to demonstrate this by reductio ad absurdum.

Suppose the mechanistic model is true: the universe is a vast inanimate machine, each of whose components is changing through time according to mathematical laws, with assemblies of components at every level through to the entire universe changing through time according to complex combinations of such laws.

In the mathematical model of a system changing through time, it is conventional to consider time as a dimension – perhaps represented as the axis of a graph – with a small movement in time represented as ‘δt’, and the limiting case as the infinitesimal ‘dt’.

In the thought experiment, the ‘machine’ moving in time δt, would be like a ratchet, nudging the structure from one position to the next. Fine, one can visualise such a ratchet, and one can imagine position (t+ δt) being dependent on position (t) according to – determined by – an iterative rule or formula.

The problem comes when one considers the limiting case, in order to find a mathematical expression for the movement. Yes, one can say the words, ‘as δt tends towards zero, we replace δt by dt’, but what does that do to the universe in time? Does the universe disappear utterly – the way the past is supposed by the conventional model to cease to exist as time passes. If so, in the limiting case there would be no ‘now’? The only alternative is to conceive of the existence of the entire universe, up to and including the gradually progressing moment in time in question. The latter makes much more sense, but what we get is Sheldrake’s model: ‘the presence of the (whole of the) past’, which is easy to envisage as growing and evolving at time’s leading edge. We do not need the mechanistic model with all its complex mathematics. Not only should we use Occam’s razor to cut it out as over-complicated and redundant, but recognise that all that stuff is inconceivable and absurd. End of thought experiment.

‘That’s just silly!’ I can hear any self-respecting scientist or mathematician who might come across this saying, ‘The point you make is so general it would de-bunk any use of calculus, differential equations etc.’

‘On the contrary,’ I say, ‘funnily enough, all my experiment shows is that maths is in the minds of you people, not in the real universe we inhabit. Use it if it works, makes a useful explanatory model, by all means,’ – and note the language: the word ‘works’ is telling, and ‘explain’ means render flat, take the life out of a phenomenon and make out it’s machine-like – ‘but don’t suppose the universe is really like that.’

1. ‘The circumstances in which novel hypotheses (paradigms) become important in science have been well described by Thomas Kuhn; they emerge when there is an accumulation of observational anomalies which existing hypotheses cannot account for, or when a theory becomes excessively cumbersome and “inelegant” and the alternative seems to handle the same material more coherently. To Kuhn's account we can, at least in the particular context of the present discussion, add the well-worn view that to have utility, a hypothesis should be capable of disconfirmation.

‘The trouble with the Sheldrake hypothesis is that it fails on all of these criteria. First, there is no convincing evidence adduced in Sheldrake’s books that there are any anomalous phenomena, in the biological or non-biological world, which require his explanation. Most of the somewhat random assemblage of phenomena he describes are better accounted for by existing, less grandiose, hypotheses - such as, in psychology especially, experimenter effects. And most of the rest seem anecdotal in the way that has bedevilled research into parapsychology for getting on a century. Second, so-called “formative causation” is an hypothesis of such astounding generality as to be virtually vacuous. And third, as I have always recognised as a danger in principle, but which the experience of this collaboration has convinced me in practice, Sheldrake is so committed to his hypothesis that it is very hard to envisage the circumstances in which he would accept its disconfirmation.

Stephen Rose, http://www.sheldrake.org/papers/Morphic/Rose_response.html [accessed 5/2/06]

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