The Evolutionary Mind

by Rupert Sheldrake

  TM: No pun intended. But you’re right. There is a political problem. Though the British have this reputation in America for being the epitome of politeness, actually, in a British pub, people are willing to blow the whistle on what they perceive as absurdity.

  RS: By jokes and through humor.

  TM: The New Age is utterly humorless. The reigning paradigm of political correctness demands that you treat all of these testimonies and bits of news with complete equanimity. It’s thought to be rather out of sorts to suggest that anybody shouldn’t be taken seriously. The belief is that truth can’t be known, so all there is is opinions. You speak from your knowledge of calculus and world history, and this person speaks from the latest transmission from fallen Atlantis—and this is all placed on an equal footing. It’s crazy making, and it also guarantees that trivialness is the entire enterprise. I mean, I just don’t think fluff heads can make any revolution in human history.

  Ralph Abraham: In order to understand what you’re saying, I have to really try to figure out what a fluff head is. This is the crux. I like your historical approach. As we agree that science is rather in a bad place now, we can look back, find where it went wrong, go back there, and start over again. This is actually what fundamentalists do. Our ethics are gone, so we’re going to go back to something like the first speeches of Mohammed. I feel uncomfortable with William of Ockham’s idea of simplicity. The modern form is probably Kolmogorov’s measure of complexity. This determines what the length and bytes of the smallest computer program would be that could approximate this data set within epsilon.

  The problem with this, technically speaking, is that this year’s technology would give a much smaller measure than last year’s technology, because we’ve learned new tricks for building models. Or it may only depend upon the computer language that more or less was used to build the model. So, in other words, there is no simple measure of simplicity. Given three explanations, we’re not sure what is the simplest one. There’s no mathematics that could really be applied. It becomes a subjective judgment. Therefore, I think that you’ve suggested a one-dimensional scale of fluff-head—the McKenna fluff scale—where, down at one end we have what even Wolpert thinks is okay. Over at the other end we have the test that can be applied to Pleiadians to see if they’re real or not.

  So this scale is marked by two points. There’s the point at which you think that to the right of it it’s too fluffy, and to the left it’s okay. Then there’s another point where science agrees it’s okay. By doing this you’re ruling some things out and accepting other things. But Wolpert says morphogenetic fields are not okay, and DNA is. So there are these two points that you’ve described as being on some linear scale of fluff. I think you’d like this fluff scale in order to appeal to mathematics, and to some kind of real science—if there is such a thing—so that it can redirect our focus when the religion of science has gotten off track. But this is what bothers me. I wish that this were true, but I’d have no faith in it—that somewhere in the sky, or in the deepest bowels of the earth, there is a measuring stick which can somehow measure the truth of something, even if it’s just a degree of truth. In chaos logic, you don’t have true and false. You have truth as a percentage between zero and a hundred percent. Chaos logic would be a good alternative for you.

  The truth of a proposition—using a formal logic, like Zeno’s paradox—is only a temporal assessment. The input of the measuring stick of truth lasts only until we get another measurement. So what we know so far is sixty-percent true. Now we assume that at sixty percent true that’s the input to another assessment. Then we find it’s sixty-six percent true. When we’ve got the input of another assessment, then it’s sixty-four percent true. Hopefully, this process of successive judgment, which could be regarded as the history of science—from the past through William of Ockham, on through the infinite future—would converge or something. But in chaotic logic it doesn’t converge, because certain kinds of propositions, like Zeno’s paradox, are circular in a way. In circling around they have chaotic attractors always giving different results.

  It never settles down. It gives changing estimates between zero and a hundred percent. From this perspective—the successor of Aristotelian logic, which served science up until around 1985—you can’t have a clear measuring stick of truth or a clear scale of fluff. So the attempt to make something perfectly clear might be doomed to failure. We understand it, then, as something psychological. I’m applying Ludwig Fleck here. Fleck is the founder of the sociology of science, which does a Freudian analysis of the scientific community.

  As parents in the sixties, we were very libertine with our children. Now we see these children have gone on, and they’re having children. They’re much stricter, and there’s the idea that in successive generations people are more or less strict with their children. I think they’re more or less strict about fluff also. So the fluff scale is actually a sociological aspect of a given culture or civilization which fluctuates wildly in time. I think that as we age and as we receive input from young people—as far as the morphogenetic sequence of a fluff scale is concerned—we’re affected by them. We’re becoming a little more critical. We’ve become more critical of ourselves, because a decade ago we were more open. So our fluff scale is changing, and, therefore, we have to rearrange our social grid. Some people that were previously okay are now too fluffy for us, or their brains have fallen out.

  TM: I think I agree with almost everything you said. On the end of pointing out that truth is a very difficult thing to assess, you didn’t mention Kurt Gödel. Certainly his proof that no formal system produces all true statements shows that even ordinary arithmetic is subject to debate and represents a kind of circularity. So, on one end, I completely agree with you that truth is a very complicated concept and why shouldn’t it be? It’s motivated thinkers since thinking began. And, as yet, we have no certain index for it.

  You mentioned that you thought my approach was one-dimensional, and I agree from your example. But much of your criticism was couched in the vocabulary of symbolic logic and analytical deconstruction. Here’s a way we might go at this. Agreeing that it’s a messy problem, let’s also agree that the solutions may be somewhat messy. So, for instance, perhaps we need to talk about kinds of fluff. I immediately identify two kinds of fluff. One is unscientific speculation, persistent throughout history, and with the consistent provenance.

  RS: Are you referring to religion or mythology?

  TM: I wasn’t going to attack religion. I was thinking of more marginal ideas, but religion is a good example. I was going to suggest alchemy. Alchemy believes certain things about matter which science absolutely abhors and rejects. The history of Alchemy is far older than the history of science. It has always been in existence, and its thinkers have always evolved their field of concern. So that’s one kind of fluff-fluff with punch, because it has historical continuity. But what are we to make of someone who produces a complete cosmological model generated in the past ten years by themselves alone. They never read Plato. They know no mathematics. They never read the Bible.

  They just got it all in one download. It’s a faith that tells you that vegetables lose their auric fields unless peeled with wooden implements, that major earth changes have already happened but are invisible to most people, that there are only one hundred real people alive on the planet anyway—everyone else is a simulacrum from a different dimension. In other words, preposterous on the face of it—history-less, idiosyncratic, and utterly unanchored to any body of previous human thought, sanctioned or unsanctioned.

  RS: So the question before us is, how do we distinguish all these speculations from one that superficially might appear to be similar—the revelations summarized in your book The Invisible Landscape? How do we distinguish between your book and all the rest?

  TM: I think the category of The Invisible Landscape is I Ching commentary. The I Ching is a legitimate object of speculative discourse. It has been since pre-Han times.
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  RA: Okay, so let’s say we accept a two-dimensional model for fluff—where there’s deepest fluff, like I Ching commentaries, and more superficial fluff, like the entire manifest universe is the circulation of a single electron.

  What is it that science hates besides Rupert? Science hates homeopathy, acupuncture, and alternative medicine altogether. Science hates cold fusion. So a lot of things would be missed. This makes me think of those paradigm shifts that redirected the path of science. For example, the discovery of continental drift or the Ice Ages. The discovery of the Ice Ages was a really terrific discovery by some mountain climbers, and it was rejected by science for thirty or forty years. It is one of the few successful examples of a paradigm shift in science.

  TM: You mentioned thirty or forty years. I think one way to think about this problem is to give the school of fluff a certain amount of time to advance their agenda. But if, after twenty, thirty, forty years they go nowhere, they should lose their place in the discourse or move to the back of the room. I think this should be applied to science as well. For example, science has been beating its breast since 1950 about how they were about to elucidate the mechanism of memory. I think it’s time to just pull the plug on that. You’ve had fifty years to flail at this with every tool available, and you have zilch to show for it. Similarly, the people who believe aliens from other star systems are visiting this planet—with great plans for mankind—have been running that riff since 1947. It’s time for them to lower their voices and let other people have something to say.

  RA: I’d say maybe a century or two. Why are you so tight?

  TM: Because they inhibit progress. Other fields have created multiple revolutions in the same time scale.

  RA: But sometimes progress is very subtle. For example, they didn’t find any memory mechanisms in the brain, but, while they were looking, they did figure out how to do a certain kind of surgery that helps with the removal of tumors.

  TM: I would challenge you to make a list of spin-off effects from the New Age that would reduce the suffering of mankind. There have been a few back-scratchers, some nutritional supplements, and a mantra or two, but in terms of the money consumed, the lives distorted, the hype that we’ve all had to put up with, there has been little of value.

  RA: Okay, if we were the National Science Foundation, and we’ve been funding channelers for years in the hope that they would find gold in South America, then we might withdraw our funding at this point. But we can’t make it illegal for them to channel.

  TM: No. What we have to legitimize is critical discussion, so that when someone stands up, and starts talking about the face on Mars, people behave as they apparently behave in British pubs. People just stand up and say “Malarkey, mate!” and force people to experience a critical deconstruction of their ideas. The face on Mars is a perfect example. The Voyager sends a low-resolution image of what might be a face, and all of these self-promoting, so-called ex-NASA scientists gather around, and proclaim this thing an alien artifact. When I hear the phrase “ex-NASA scientist” in the New Age, I reach for my revolver.

  When the first Mars orbiter fails at orbital injection around Mars, they scream “Conspiracy! Mankind isn’t ready for the truth.” Eighteen months later the second Martian orbiter goes into orbit flawlessly. NASA, responding to the previous hullabaloo, actually moves this site up in its photographic agenda—exactly under the conditions these people say it must be photographed under. It’s clearly an eroded mesa, part of the Martian landscape, no different from any other. Immediately the face on Mars’s people scream that the data has been tampered with, that all kinds of terrible things have gone wrong. One guy sent me email saying, “if there isn’t a face on Mars, there will be in the future.” Someone else wrote me and said, “obviously the aliens wouldn’t leave an artifact. The face on Mars is cleverly disguised as an eroded mesa.”

  RA: I agree. But I’m not sure that it’s good to rant against the face on Mars, because there’s no way, by William of Ockham or whatever, that you could have ruled out the possibility that there was really a pocket watch on Mars. In fact, they do know there’s life here and there. There’s water on the Moon. There’s not a face on Mars, but there’s something that nobody suspected that was found by going there. So my fear is that by drawing the line too tight, many discoveries will be missed. I think that a certain amount of open-mindedness is necessary for novelty to come in and to nourish the evolution of the collective mind.

  RS: I’ve got a political answer to this. However much we choose to define the criteria, we have no power whatever to enforce them—unless we run a funding committee like the National Science Foundation or the British Medical Research Council, or unless we are the editors of a prominent journal such as Nature or Science. Under those conditions—through controlling grants or the editorial policies of major journals—you really do shape and influence the science community. But the people in those positions are unlikely to listen to what we say. So the realistic question is, how could the system be reformed?

  One proposal is advanced in the book The Economic Laws of Scientific Research, by a Cambridge biochemist named Terence Kealey. He shows that in the nineteenth century, when there was a great deal of creativity and originality in both Britain and America, there was a great diversity of sources of funding. There was very little public money. The funding came from wealthy individuals and from companies that needed to do the science in order to make what they needed.

  By contrast, by the late nineteenth century, continental science was highly professionalized and institutionalized. In Britain and America, it was not until after the Second World War that science became so centralized and state controlled. People like Vannevar Bush got the idea of a military-industrial complex—with big science, and massive government funding, especially for military research. In Britain, we also have a centralized system of science funding through government research councils, which decide who gets the grants. These councils are run by small committees of establishment scientists and representatives of large corporations. This imposes a kind of monopoly control, and uniformity of thought—the enemy of unorthodox thinking.

  Because Kealey is a believer in free markets, he suggests that the only answer to this is not to follow Sir Francis Bacon’s idea of central government spending, where you have a sort of state priesthood of scientists. Instead, Kealey advocates reduced central government spending. Science would then be paid for in accordance with any interest group that’s got enough lobbying power. For example, there are a large number of people who want organic food who could lobby for money to be spent on organic farming research, which at present gets very little funding.

  If priorities were set by popular opinion, pet research would be high on the biological agenda, not the sequencing of more proteins, or the cloning of more genes to help the biotechnology industry. But instead, pet research isn’t even on the agenda set by the small elite, who have no interest in the interests of ordinary people. But it’s the ordinary people who in fact provide the money for all government research through their taxes.

  RA: I agree that the monopolistic control of financing scientific research worldwide is bad. Nevertheless, the National Science Foundation does rely on the judgment of peer reviewers and a group of experts. Finally, it’s their opinions that direct the flow of money. That would also be true if there was no central control, and you had every industry financing its own research. Actually, that’s the way it works in the pet food industry. There are two or three pet food companies that are outstanding for their research on the dietary needs of cats and dogs, and they do research based on funds that are coming in from pet owners. This is the nineteenth century model. So it still exists to a degree.

  RS: As well as introducing more democratic principles into science funding, I think we need to extend skepticism to the sciences themselves. There’s an interesting paper in the recent issue of the Journal of the History of Medicine on the history of double-blind techniques. Double-blind techn
iques were invented by Benjamin Franklin in Paris in the late eighteenth century when he was appointed by King Louis XVI to head up a Royal Commission to investigate the claims of Anton Mesmer, as the whole of Europe was talking about Mesmerism and animal magnetism.

  Franklin and the other members of the Royal Commission were firmly of the opinion that this was some kind of delusion, a product of people’s minds and their beliefs. In order to test this hypothesis, they developed blind methodologies where people didn’t know who was being treated and who wasn’t. The blind methodologies literally involved blindfolding people to find out if they could still detect this animal magnetism. Often they couldn’t.

  Blind techniques became a standard practice when skeptics examined marginal phenomena like hypnotism and the claims of homeopaths. The homeopaths took this criticism seriously, and they were the first group in scientific research to internalize blind techniques by running their own blind trials. It wasn’t until after the Second World War that the standard randomized double-blind clinical trial became the norm in medical research, and it didn’t really become widespread until the 1950s or 1960s. So this is another case of blind techniques being internalized. In parapsychology, blind techniques were internalized as early as the 1880s and in regular psychology in the 1960s, with the recognition of experimenter effects.