The science delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality
in principle, leaving only 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 endeavour.
Since the late nineteenth century, science has been conducted under the aspect of a belief
system or a world view which is essentially that of materialism; philosophical materialism.
And the 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
Delusion, 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 stand up if
you look at them scientifically. None of them stand up very well.
What I'm going to do is first run through what these ten dogmas are. And then I'll only
have time to discuss one or two of them in a bit more detail. But essentially the ten
dogmas, which are the 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. There's no consciousness in stars, in galaxies, in
planets, in animals, in plants, and there ought not in any of us either, if this theory's
true. So a lot of the philosophy of mind over the last hundred years has been trying to
prove that we're not really conscious at all. So the matter's unconscious, then the laws
of nature are fixed. This is 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.
Dogma four: The total amount of matter and energy is always the same. 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 process has no purpose or direction.
Dogma six, the biological hereditary is material. Everything you inheret is in your genes, or
in epigenetic modifications of the genes, or in cytoplasmic inheritance. It's material.
Dogma seven, 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 eight, your mind is inside your head.
All your consciousness is the activity of your brain, nothing more.
Dogma nine, which follows from dogma eight, psychic phenomena like telepathy are impossible.
Your thoughts and intentions cannot 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 deceived by coincidences, or it's wishful thinking.
And dogma ten, 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,
the national health service, the medical research council, governments and it's just the default
world view of educated people. But I think every one of these dogmas is very, very questionable.
And when you look at it, 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 fourteen
billion years old. Growing and developing and evolving, for fourteen 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 Terrence McKenna used to say, modern science is based upon
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 a metaphor with human laws. It's a very
anthropocentric metaphor; only humans have laws. In fact, only civilised 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 we've got so used to we forgot
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 put forward at the beginning of the twentieth century by
the American philosopher C.S. Pierce, 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 its mother's
womb, it tunes in to the morphic resonance of previous giraffes. It draws on that collective
memory, 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 form or the shape or the behaviour. 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, the very first time you make it, it won't have an existing habit. But once
it crystallises, 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 crystallise
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 crystallise all round
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 round the
world rats of the same breed should learn the same trick quicker just because the rats
had learned it 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, assumed to be constant. Things like the gravitational
constant of 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. They're given
in physics handbooks. Handbooks of physics list the existing fundamental constants, tell
you their value. But I wanted to see if they'd changed, so I got the old volumes of physical
handbooks. I went to the patent office library here in London - they're the only place I
could find that kept the old volumes. Normally people throw them away when the new values
(volumes) come out, they throw away the old ones. When I did this I found that the speed
of light dropped between nineteen twenty-eight and nineteen fourty-five by about twenty kilometres
per second. It's a huge drop because they're given with errors of any fractions of a second/decimal
points of error. And yet, all over the world, it dropped, and they were all getting very
similar values to each other with tiny errors. Then in nineteen fourty-eight, it went up
again. And 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 nineteen twenty-eight and nineteen
fourty-five?" And he said "oh dear", he said "you've uncovered
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!" "Oh, well then how do you explain the fact
that 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 in the minds of physicists?" "We don't like to use the word 'fudge'."
I said "Well, so what do you prefer?" He said "well, we prefer to call it 'intellectual
phase-locking'." So I said "well if it was going on then, how
can you be so sure it's not going on today? And the present values produced are by intellectual
phase-locking?" And he said "oh we know that's not the case."
And I said "how do we know?" He said "well", he said "we've solved the
problem." And I said "well how?"
And he said "well we fixed the speed of light by definition in nineteen seventy-two."
So I said "but it might still change." He said "yes, but we'd never know it, because
we've defined the metre in terms of the speed of light, so the units would change with it!"
So he looked very pleased about that, they'd fixed that problem.
But I said "well, then what about big G?" The gravitational constant, known in the trade
as "big G", it was written with a capital G. Newton's universal gravitational constant.
"That's varied by more than 1.3% 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 errors.
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, they come out usually with a rather different average.
And then the international committee of metrology meets every ten years or so and average the
ones from labs all 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 througout 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 ten 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 up 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 at another. If so, they might be fluctuating together. And
what 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 enquiry. 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 in the newspapers. You know, "this
week, big G was slightly up, the charge on the electron was down, the speed of light
held steady, and so on." So that's one area where I think thinking
this dogmatically could open things up. One of the biggest areas is the nature of
the mind. This is the most unsolved problem as Graham just said, that science 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. Our experiences don't all seem to be inside our brain. Your
image of me now doesn't seem to be inside your brain, yet the official view is that
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 inside 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 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 evidence actually
suggests it's 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 distances. They're
not just inside our heads. Now it may seem astonishing that this is a topic of debate
in the twenty-first 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 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.