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delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality in principle
leaving any of 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 endeavor
since the late 19th century science has been conducted under the aspect of a belief system
or worldview which is essentially that of materialism philosophical materialism and
these 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
solution 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 turn how well
they stand up if you look at them scientifically none of them stand out very well what I'm
going to do is first run through what these 10 dogmas are and then I'll only have time
to discuss one or two of them in a bit more detail but essentially the 10 dogmas which
are the default 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 um there's no consciousness
in stars in galaxies in planets in animals in plants and there ought not to be any in
us either if this theory is true so a lot of the philosophy of Mind Over the last hundred
years is being trying to prove that we're not really conscious at all um so the matters
unconscious then the laws of nature are fixed and this is the 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
dog before the total amount of matter and energy is always the same um 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 purpose The evolutionary process has no purpose
or Direction Dogma six the biological heredity is material everything you inherit is in your
genes or in epigenetic modifications of the genes or in cytoplasmic inheritance it's material
Dogma 7 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 8 your mind is inside your head all your Consciousness is the activity
of your brain and nothing more Dogma 9 which follows from Dogma 8 psychic phenomena like
telepathy are impossible your thoughts and intentions can not 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 just they're deceived by coincidences
or it's wishful thinking and Dogma 10 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 uh the National Health Service the medical research Council governments
uh and uh it's just the default worldview of educated people but I think every one of
these dogmas is very very questionable and when you look at it it turns they 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 14 billion years old growing and developing and evolving
for 14 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 Terence McKenna used to say modern
Science is based on 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 on a metaphor with human laws it's a very anthropocentric metaphor
only humans have laws in fact only civilized 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 that we got so used to we forget 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 of put forward at
the beginning of the 20th century by the American philosopher C.S purse 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 his mother's
womb it Tunes in to the amorphic Resonance of previous giraffes it draws on that Collective
memory it 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 shape or the form or the behavior uh 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 uh the very first time you make it it won't have an existing habit but
once it crystallizes 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 crystallize
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 crystallize all around 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 around the world Rats of
the same breed should learn the same trick quicker just because the rats have landed
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 use assumed to be constant things like the gravitational
constant 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 um I they're given in
physics handbooks handbooks of physics list the existing fundamental constants to tell
you their value but I wanted to see if they'd change so I got the old volumes of physical
handbooks I went to the patient office Library here in London and they're the only place
I could find that kept the old volumes normally people throw them away when the new values
come out they throw away the old ones when I did this I found that the speed of light
dropped between 1928 and 1945 by about 20 kilometers per second it's a huge drop because
they're given with errors of any fractions of a decimal points of error and yet all over
the world it dropped and they were all getting values very similar to each other with tiny
errors then in 1945 it went up at 48 it went up again and um 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 1928 and 1945 and he said
oh dear he said you've uncovered uh 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 so oh well then how do you explain the fact 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 by in
the minds of physicists um we don't like to use the word fudge I said well what do you
prefer he said well we prefer to call it intellectual phase locking huh
so I said well if it was going on then how can we say sure it's not going on today and
that the present values are produced by intellectual phase locking and he said oh we know that's
not the case I said how do we know he said well he said we've solved the problem and
I said well how he said well we fixed the speed of light by definition in 1972.
so I said but it might still change you said yes but we'd never know it because we've defined
the meter in terms of the speed of light so the units had changed with it so he looked
very pleased about that they'd fix that problem he but I said well then what about Big G the
gravitational constant known in the Traders big jig is written with a capital G Newton's
Universal gravitational constant that's varied by more than 1.3 percent 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 arrows 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 and they come out usually with a rather different average and then the international
committee on Metrology meets every 10 years or so and average the ones from labs 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 throughout 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 10 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 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 it's another if so they might be fluctuating together and that 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 inquiry 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 and newspapers you know this week Big G was slightly up the speed
of the charge on the electron was down the speed of light held steady and so on um that's
one area just one of one area where I think thinking less dogmatically could open things
up one of the biggest areas is the nature of the mind this is the most unsolved problem
that sounds 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 um our our experiences don't all
seem to be inside our brain your image with me now doesn't seem to be inside your brain
yet the official viewers 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 in 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 uh 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 research suggests is 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 different distances they're not just inside our heads now it may
seem astonishing that this is a topic of debate in the 21st 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 uh 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 [Music]
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thank you
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