Meet The Scientist BANNED By TED Talks (ft. Rupert Sheldrake)

humans know beyond A Reasonable Doubt when we're being stared at and that animals can sense earthquakes and other natural disasters most of these things are things that children Inuit it and often know are true they are also all things that we have experienced many times in our lives if we're being honest with ourselves but we live in the age of disenchantment of rationalism of your eyes are playing tricks on you don't trust your mind so we are taught to override our everyday experience in sensory phenomenology with materialist

Dogma that says that the universe is random that we only have four physical forces that attenuate over space and time and that DNA is the only mechanism of inherited information transfer in biological beings sheldrake pokes holes in Darwin and natural selection but also shows that the Neo darwinian like Dawkin aren't even true followers of Darwin he shows that the physical constants in physics are some sometimes actually averages of fluctuating measurements he's basically a nightmare for the Priestly Citadel of modern academic

scientists and all the more so because he's Cambridge educated and Harvard Affiliated many conventional scientists ignore or actively dislike sheldrick but more often than not they secretly admire his boldness willingness to work outside the Beltway and follow his intuition among an elite intelligencia that is overeducated and taught what to think and not how to think sheldrake is a rare gadfly rarely are Skeptics able to debunk his protocols their misgivings are generally summed up by but that

can't be so but as you'll see in this interview sheldrake is an eloquent defender of his experiment in 2013 rert sheldrick's Ted Talk was censored and taken off YouTube because in Ted's opinion while science has not moved far in solving the riddle of Consciousness sheldrake's ideas are so radical and far removed from the mainstream scientific thinking that we think it's right for us to give these talks a clear health warning besides the absurdly condescending nature of these statements

do we really think that if we ever get to some ultimate Theory Of Consciousness that it wouldn't drastically deviate from the modern scientific mainstream why do we assume that it would be mere punctuation at the end of a sentence we've already written what sort of hubris does that involve that is usually not how science works we did this interview in his beautiful home in Hampstead in London and I was fresh off having just debated scientific skeptic Michael shurmer in Italy and so I was extra fired up to speak to a fellow heretic in sheldrick in this

conversation we discussed the truth electromagnetism the sense of being stared at how Consciousness exists outside one's mind and why so many people have false Impressions about AI we also get into his long close friendship with the legendary Terrence McKenna finally we even get into one of his trippiest but less well-known books the physics of angels which explores traditional conceptions of angels and how they might work in a modern scientific context obviously this has

big implications for the modern UFO conversation so without further Ado sit back and enjoy this wide- ranging conversation with today's scientific heretic but tomorrow's scientific hero rert sheldrick sheldrake uh you know my show is sort of known for actually exploring phenomenal like UFOs but uh people probably don't know that I was actually originally interested in parapsychology and Mind

Over Matter effects and that's mainly attributable to you my father was a massive fan of yours the whole show uh you know I can I have you to thank for and we met um six years ago and uh you know it was an honor to meet then and it's an honor to do this now and um you have uh traditional academic credentials and that's why I think you piss off Academia so much because you've really uh gone off on your own path and uh explored all sorts of exciting phenomena that lay outside of kind of conventional

models and so uh I'm excited to be here and the final thing I'll say is actually I have you to thank for uh my my job because uh in my first conversation with with Peter Peter teal who I ended up working for I brought you up and he was is like I think he remember I remember him kind of looking at me and and with like a you know specific face where he's like oh this this guy's kind of you know a little he's into he's into rer sheldrick he's a little weird like in a way and so you know I always I always say that when people are like why did he

hire you I'm like I don't know to this day but I did bring up rer shelrick well that certainly a surprise yes why is that a surprise I didn't know what sorts of things he was interested in and I'm surprised he was interested in my own work well I think generically he's interested in people who think differently and are cons he's always looking for who the modern heretic is because that's always hard to spot it's easy to spot the historical heretic and I think uh you know they get Vindicated over time and even as an investment

thesis it's probably not bad to you know do that as a mental exercise and so you'd be good candidate for that I don't know if you take that as a compliment but I mean it as a compliment yes all right yeah um well thank you for having us and uh I guess why why don't we start with do you think Consciousness is sort of this irreducible prime mover it's like the it's the fundamental layer is is consciousness is that would that describe your sort of world view well no

I'm not I'm not I don't don't think of myself as an idealist the idea that Consciousness is primary and everything is ultimately Consciousness is called idealism it's the Mirror oppos Mirror Image or the exact opposite of materialism yeah materialism says everything's matter yeah and even when you get Consciousness like in human brains it's basically just matter and it's not really doing anything um whereas idealism says everything's Consciousness and matter is sort of

dumbed down mind um uh so materialism has a problem explaining Consciousness and I think idealism has a problem explaining matter CU it's not exactly clear how Consciousness could give rise to electrons and atoms and salt crystals and and and trees and things so uh I don't think that it's I don't find either of those philosophies particularly helpful um I spent a lot of time thinking about how Consciousness

might be related to electromagnetic fields and that's one reason that in recent the last few years I've been particularly interested in the nature of vision because in Vision um everyone agrees that this depends on the electromagnetic field um you know when I see you now the light that's coming into my eyes is traveling through the electromagnetic field light is

somehow I'm forming an image of view sitting there um as a result of the light that comes into my eyes and the official theory is the light comes into my eyes inverted images on the retinas changes in the ganglia up the optic nerve changes in the visual regions of the brain and then all that's clear enough has been studied you can measure it and all that you can have brain scans no problem about that but then the question is how do I form an image of you and the official Theory would be

that somewhere inside my brain I produce three-dimensional full color virtual reality display inside my head and and that my image of you is actually inside my head there's a little Jesse somewhere inside my head wearing a red t-shirt and stuff it's all inside my head and it's only an illusion that my image of you is where you seem to be well what I'm saying is that that theory which is believed and believed with passionate intensity by a lot of people within

institutional science without a shred of evidence I mean no one's ever seen a virtual reality display inside the head um what I'm saying is that bizarre theory that is all inside the brain um is not backed up by evidence and much more persuasive is the idea that's believed in by virtually everyone in the world except scientific intellectuals in Western universities um um including children under the age of 10 what everyone else believes is that when

light comes in changes happen in the mind mind in the brain and then the images are projected out so my image of you is exactly where it seems to be it's in 3D in full color but it's located right where you're sitting and it overlaps with you as it were and so every I see is projected out of my mind so my mind is extended beyond my brain filling the whole world around me well this would comport with some of your famous experiments around the sense of being stared at right that's why I do

them yeah partly cuz I'm interested in the feeling of being stared out in its own right as an unexplained phenomenon and if you were to pull nine people out of 10 on the street they would probably say you know that they've experienced this anecdotally I think most people are like yeah I could kind of tell somebody was looking at me or something and it's just this thing or like when you're you're crossing a crosswalk you almost look off the car like your awareness of the car coming at you somehow will like will block it and you can say that's Superstition but I think everybody has that sort of of instinct and maybe it's

actually an Adaptive Instinct and so you're saying that the the your mind is almost a transceiver and it's emitting yes yeah that when when I project an image of you to where you are um the my mind has this image in it it's going the opposite direction to the light and it's somehow touching you it's overlapping with you now so what am I am I just a am I just a product of holography of mind or well no

you're you're the the neuroscientist annel Seth here in Britain calls it a controlled hallucination that our perceptions are controlled hallucinations I'm perfectly happy with that idea that because we can also have images in our dreams when we're not seeing things those are kind of hallucinations but during perception visual perception the images I'm producing and projecting are normally coinciding with what's there if they're not then it's an illusion or hallucination which also

occur but the easiest way to see how our minds project is to think of what happens when you look at something in a mirror when you look at something in a mirror what I'm suggesting in fact what physics textbooks tell you as well is that uh your light comes in is B say here's the mirror the lights Bent by the mirror comes into my eye but I project out images that go along with the light coming the eye but when It Gos to gets to the mirror the mirror acts like a kind of beam splitter and the virtual

image produced that I'm projecting out go straight through it because it's virtual not physical doesn't get bent by the mirror so all my projections that I'm normally projecting out that coincide with what I'm seeing when you look at things in the mirror and now behind the mirror as virtual images and that's the standard physics textbook explanation of virtual images so oddly enough although this theory of sending images out from the eye is totally heretical within science it's actually

taught in physics textbooks to every school child to explain mirror images because they can't explain it any other way so what would be emitted from your eyes in this case or that you'd have to look for a candidate there well that's I spend a lot of time thinking about this yeah um because you know one way would be to say that you have something's emitted that's purely mental and it's not really very closely coupled to the light it just happens to go in the opposite direction um another

possibility would be that there's a kind of that light itself can flow in both directions and there's a theory of quantum entanglement not not quantum entanglement quantum theory called the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics yes due to John Kramer yeah and develop handshake between the present and the past that's right yeah well and recently developed by Ruth castner who's another quantum physicist and what Kramer says is that when light

leaves say light leaves your T-shirt red light leaves your T-shirt comes into my eye absorbed by a cone cell in cone cells in my eye at the very moment that those pigments in the eye absorb that Photon they send out a reverse as it antiphoton uh that moves from the future towards the past your when the one coming from your T-shirt to my eye is from the past towards the future it's flowing in the normal Direction causal

Direction but at the very moment it hits my it's emitted by your T-shirt my eye emits as it were an anti Photon going the opposite direction so the two form a kind of standing wave linking that which is seen with that which is seeing it and so there's an actual connection through the light itself according to this interpretation of quantum mechanics now if I look at you from behind and you don't know I'm there I'm

projecting my image onto your back and the maybe the light rays are connecting me with your back and if no one knows how if you can somehow detect that um then the sense of being stared out you see ties in with vision it has to be tied in with vision it happens in response to vision and one of my most recent papers on the sense of being stared at which is scientifically called scop athesia from scop as in microscope

seeing aesthesia feeling as in synesthesia um my most recent paper on the subject is called directional scalesia and its implications for theories of and by examining almost a thousand case histories of people responding to being looked at both the people who've responded and the people who've done the looking I've got stories from both sides uh it emerges that in real life this

happens almost always in a directional manner so say you look at somebody from an upstairs window I mean this is a typical example in my case history looking at someone walking past and from an upstairs window if they feel you're being stared out they don't just they don't think in fact they don't think at all they just turn and look straight at the person looking at them it's a directional response and it works with animals as well animals respond

directionally to human looks and humans respond to animal looks and so I think the sense of being stared at is very deep in animal nature it's to do with vision I think it evolved originally in connection with Predator prey relations because a prey animal that could tell when a hidden Predator was watching it would stand a better chance of escaping than one that couldn't tell so there'd be natural selection in favor of this and so I

think this is very common um and I think it does tell us something about the nature of vision which is why I'm so interested in it but nobody has a clue why this is happening and if you look at the number of people in the world investigating scop athesia I think the the total number is probably around three at the moment I'm one of them um and the it's there's virtually no attention to it because it's completely taboo because from the point of view of

regular science the mind's nothing but the brain all your thoughts are inside your head so if you look at someone from behind um there's no way these thoughts which are just electrical changes inside your brain could influence them 100 yards away uh so therefore the official scientific position is this doesn't exist it's non-existent it's a Superstition it's pseudo science it can't possibly exist therefore it doesn't um and therefore it's not a valid topic for scientific investigation

it's especially provocative because you're almost saying that the measurement of an object is affecting the past in some ways like your your perception is uh you're sort of uh flowing something back onto the object and then your your perception of it is uh somehow dependent on that that backwards flow as well or there's maybe kind of a retrocausal model uh or you know causality goes both ways future into present and past into present or something yeah I think so so I think if

you look at a distant star that say four light years away when you see the star I think not only the light's coming to it takes four light years to get to you but on this transactional Theory you're sending your visual images from now to four years in the past when the light was emitted from that star and so it's actually moving not only out across space but backwards time and you see there are some people who the philosopher Alfred North

Whitehead thought that the whole of mental causation is retrocausal that our minds work in the opposite direction from the future towards the past whereas regular physical causation works from the past towards the future they overlap in the present um and you see our minds are concerned they're primarily cons conscious minds are primarily concerned possibility um all the possible things you could do or say U our minds contents

of Consciousness are possibilities this is extremely clear in dreams where they're nothing but possibilities um but normally they're constrained by the sensory information but it's all about possible actions and so when you have a lot of possible actions in your mind and then you choose to do one of them as soon as you do that does it like the collapse of the wave function the collapse of these possibilities something you actually do and when you actually do it it becomes a

physical fact that can be measured but possibly ities are not physical facts they're possibilities they're real but they're not physical and that's the real the realm of Consciousness is that is what's happening in Consciousness is real but not physical because it's about possibility and Consciousness is about forming intentions and intentions are things about that are going to happen in the future and there's a sense in which this virtual future acts back on the

past like both of has formed an intention to be talking here right now M and the and sure enough we're doing it and it's an objective fact being recorded on cameras and by microphones and so by all the normal scientific criteria is an objective physical fact but before it happened uh we had this date and time that existed only in the future and our Direction our activities were directed towards it I mean you came here and you travel here and find your

way here on the Underground Railway and that kind of thing um so you your actions were directed towards a future goal and in that sense the future goal in your Consciousness worked back on your past to draw you towards this point now yeah and it's even been shown in Quantum computations you can reverse Cubit positions and there's temporal non non-locality and like double slit experiments where it seems like measurement of something in the present is affecting the past

and so I almost wonder if uh if there are levels of mind or something if you are literally experiencing shards of the future at some point if if if the future can't actually send semantic information back in time well I think it can I don't think it does it all the time but it it I mean pre synchronicities you know like is that sort of well synchronous is by definition the things that happen at the same time but I think what you're

talking the sort of like a like a Deja Vu exper you know yes well that I think would be more it's as if you've known the thing in the future and then you're re experiencing it in the present well where that shows up most is in dreams and lots of people have precognitive dreams you dream of something a day or two it's usually only a few days before it happens um but precognitive dreams are are much more common than most people think partly because we forget most our dreams and as

Washington Square um and I ran a series of ads in the Village Voice um asking did you dream of the World Trade Center and I have a collection of more than 75 dreams that people sent me wow um of the they fell into three main categories one were of dreams that people were on planes that were flying into skyscrapers really scary dreams of not necessarily the World Trade Center some were the empire State Building some of the Sear's Tower you know they weren't necessarily

in New York but they were flying into Towers the second category were people trapped in blazing buildings you know the Panic of being trapped in a in a SI scraper that's on fire and the third category were walking down city streets with an eerie sense of Doom in vast clouds of dust rolling down the street all of these things of course happened and all of them were widely seen on TV um so I think what people were actually

dreaming in advance was the dreaming of their actual own experience of seeing these images on TV or of hearing about the disaster after it like a Prem memory a pre-memory yeah and some people who do research in this area in psychic research suggest that things like this could be called preall yeah as opposed to recall yeah yeah there's a there was a story of a resident artist in uh one of the towers actually because they they

had some Artistry program and he did a rendition of a him as a tusy Airman with like old you know XP 40 fighter jets all flying into him and this was 12 days before 9911 I have to look up his name but it's it's just wild like you can't attribute that to chance I think it's this yes it's this kind of thing and then there were some people who just didn't go into work that day because they had premonition a weird feeling there was a whole article about it in

the Washington Post I mean this is this wasn't just some obscure psychic researcher there was an article called lucky to be alive in the Washington Post that actually told the stories of people who hadn't gone to work that day for a variety of reasons so strange you know there's a there's a book I think in the early 20th century 10ish years before the Titanic and it describes this big ship called the Titan and it has all these sort of blue blooded elites on board and it you know hits an iceberg and goes down and it's like a literal

description of the Titanic and that seems to be way more common I think and the more you notice it I think the that that begets noticing it even more or something so I think there's no doubt that precognitive dreams happen um and you know they've been known throughout all history and and um so you know research on precognitive dreams has been done mainly by psychical researchers but the problem we have in

all these areas is that the because of this dominant scientific Orthodoxy of mechanistic materialism none of these things should happen according to that model therefore they don't happen according to standard Defenders of mechanistic Orthodoxy and they have all these skeptic organizations you know they're actual skeptic organization like the committee for skeptical inquiry Publishers of the skeptical Inquirer I just debated um Michael Shermer who I know you've debated before and it's just

it's bad basian reasoning because you just have this bucket of like impossible and you place all these things like all your experiments you just place it in the bucket of impossible and then your prior knowledge is is going to be lacking it's going to be bad you're just not it's a prior disinterest I know it's basically it's defending a world view by rejecting things that don't fit in explaining them away yes and long long ago Thomas [ __ ] the philosopher of science the historian of Science in his theory of paradigms and Paradigm shifts

pointed out that at any given stage of science you have an established Orthodoxy which is taught in the schools and universities which is what frames accepted practice but there's always anomalies things that don't fit in and the response of the Orthodox to the anomalies is to ignore them or deny them or explain them away um and psychic phenomena are exactly that in the present mechanistic materialist Orthodoxy yes and the result is that the number of people who do research in these areas is very very small and none

of them receive any official funding you know from Government funding and National Science Foundation that kind of thing yeah and and then people complain about the lack of progress and you do like a comparison of funding from like you know it's like the large hron colliders like $5 billion or something they just all of

Portugal portug B um and about half their grants go to parapsychology so I think it's probably in the order of about a million dollars a year yeah right and that's the biggest funding agency you know and National Institutes of Health is what $35 billion a year and it's just it's this bizarre phenomena where a lot of elite universities in the US had parasyuk with the Ryan Center or Princeton Paras lab or SRI at Stanford

it's more bound up with uh person's moral development and character progression or kind of internal coherence than we'd like to admit or something so it's like I have a mentor named John Valentino who helped run the Princeton parapsychology lab pair under Bob John and I think he would say that you know so you have a random event generator you take this binary computer it produces ones and zeros on a graphical interface but it's tied to something that we think of as random in quantum mechanics so like radioactive

isotope Decay or Quantum tunneling and you have the Observer and the Observer is able to skew it towards ones and zeros it's supposed to be this perfect coin flip that doesn't make any sense sense but what John would say is that your sort of internal alignment or coherence which sounds kind of woowoo is actually affects your sort of zcore or you know the statistical distribution that you would get as a result and I think that just breaks too many priors for uh you know conventional materialist reductionists because all of a sudden they're saying

you know the state of the Observer is important for what is observed and that's kind of comports with the model you just mentioned of the mind being a transceiver and you imposing in actual kind of elements of the image that you're seeing onto the thing itself but I think it's just too much for science to look at well I think you know there are a lot of individual scientists who are very interest in these things and you know because I I've talked about them openly for a long time whenever I visit

scientific institutes I always have the experience of people coming up to me when no one else is listening you know the the drinks reception or the tea or tea reception they look both ways and they say you know I'm really interested in your work I've had these experiences you know you know these telephone telepathy or I've been interested in morphic resonance and St and then they say but I can't talk about it here because everyone's so straight and then a few minutes later another one comes up and says almost the same things and you

know by the time four or five time I said well actually you're not alone you know there are several people in your own Department who think like this and they said oh no there aren't I said oh yes there AR they said how do you know and I said because they've just told me him and her and him and so the thing is that within actual institutional science most scientists are in the closet about their own personal views they're frightened of this culture of dogmatic materialism and um and won't apply for Grants or do research in this area well

partly because there aren't any grants or hardly any and partly because it would endanger their career to do research in these areas but they don't even talk about it usually with colleagues unless they know them very well and trust them because they're afraid of being thought weird but if you take the actual opinions of actual scientists it's not the case that the 99% of pro uh materialist skeptical denial position about these things the majority are open-minded and in fact the majority have had these experiences

themselves I agree they just have to tiptoe around it they're kind of epistemically constrained at the start and it's this sort of publish or Parish they're they're they are addicted to sort of prestige and they're sort of always Prestige hounding I mean a good example I've noticed and I don't want to bash him too much but it's like the on the UFO World which I'm really interested in the UFO alien thing which is very in the Zeitgeist right now and um you know there's this professor and we' had some early conversations you know four or five years ago and you know

I I've been interested in this kind of time travel hypothesis or or some the idea that uh you know what we're seeing and I want to get into this because I know you wrote a book called the physics of angels which might touch on this a little bit but the idea of what we're seeing is more of an emanation from man uh versus some you know little green man from Zeta reticuli and anyways I'm I'm with him at some conference where like by the bar and I'm like I'm like if you actually use inductive logic these things are not

from other planets and he like looks at me and he sort of like Whispers and he's like you're right like he's like I agree with you but he like can't say it publicly or something because like the alien thing is popular and he needs to get funding or whatever and it's just lame like I I would just be so bearish Academia on a go forward basis and bullish uh people like yourself uh especially if we can get more patronage out there for you know serious work in in what are considered Fringe areas because you you have to tiptoe around

and dance around you can't you have to posture constantly you can't engage in Earnest real thinking yes it's a shame in certain areas of of Academia that's definitely true I'm I'm curious to hear more about your recent paper on the Sun as conscious I wrote this paper called is the sun conscious which is published in the Journal of Consciousness studies which is a fairly mainstream journal to do with the nature of consciousness um the reason I'm interested in it is

generally taken for granted that the stun and the other stars were conscious beings and Plato thought the sun and the planets were what he called visible gods and we still call the planets by the names of gods and goddesses like Venus and Mars and um the context for writing this paper was the upsurge in academic philos phos ophy of pans psychism the idea there's Consciousness throughout nature that Consciousness is not just confined to

brains um and the reason that pans psychism has become influential within academic philosophy in the last 20 years or so is because of the hard problem of explaining human consciousness or animal Consciousness as well and why it's a hard problem is that the prevailing world world view within institutional science is mechanistic materialism the idea the whole universe is made of unconscious matter that

behaves mechanically in accordance with mathematical laws there's no God out there no Spirits No Angels all that's make believe and it's just ideas in human minds and therefore electrical or chemical patterns in human brains there's nothing out there um that's the standard View the whole universe is made of unconscious matter so then the problem arises well how come we're conscious if everything's meant to be unconscious

matter and our brains are made of matter why does matter become conscious in our brains and possibly in the brains of a wide range of other animals but nevertheless confined to brains with the whole of the rest of the universe utterly unconscious except perhaps for Little Green Men or um sort of Science Fiction type beings on other planets um so the the within the philosophy of Mind people have made entire careers out of

professors in universities U of trying to prove that we're not conscious so we ought not to be conscious because if everything's unconscious we ought to be unconscious too so some professors believe it or not have actually made a career out of saying that we're not really conscious at all Sam Harris it's it's like all existence is an illusion you have no self or something well yes well then some of them some of them are straightforward denialists some of them say Consciousness is a meaningless epip phenomenon like the kind of shadow of

the activity of the brain but it doesn't do anything to which the problem then arises well why is it evolved in that case if it doesn't do anything um they don't have an answer for that and then the perhaps one of the more common positions is that Consciousness is illusion produced by the physical activity of the brain but that doesn't work either because illusion is itself a mode of Consciousness so you can't explain Consciousness as an illusion because illusion presupposes Consciousness so that's why it's called

the hard problem all these attempts to solve it um in terms of this framework of mechanistic materialism have failed and philosophers just go round and round and round in circles I mean it lasts a whole lifetime of academic you know career this kind of thing and there's this problem of the eye seeing the eye it's sort of the Chomsky Mind Body problem or something where fundamentally the aperture through which you understand or see anything is the Mind itself so how do how does one

understand its own well exactly I mean you need to be conscious in order to do physics or science I mean it's the whole thing is a product of Consciousness it presupposes Consciousness right so you can't really get rid of Consciousness without getting rid of Science and the whole of human culture as well as all our own subjective lives as well and it's so interesting to read some of the early like Quantum field theorists who are now totally misattributed as being kind of you know hardcore material materialist reductionists and they all say the same thing you know it's all

it's all filtered through the mind all of them flirted with the mind being the you know collapser of the way function at at points in their career um but going back to your paper on the sun well yes well I I just to finish that bit about the hard problem yeah you see one group of philosophers the pan psychist have revived an ancient idea that was Consciousness throughout nature pan means everywhere um so what they saying is Well if there's a tiny little bit of Consciousness in

electrons a little bit more in atoms bit more in molecules and bit more in cells and tissues and organs and things then when you get to a complex structure like the brain then it's a difference of degree not of kind so they think they can solve the hard Problem by saying well Consciousness is actually in all these lower systems lower level systems that add in the brain allow this higher level of Consciousness to emerge so that's their motive and they've

persuaded a lot of people that that's the case and pan psychism is now taught in a lot of mainstream universities whereas you know when I was at University the idea of nature being alive was called animism and it was just rejected as a sort of primitive Superstition or a kind of childish thing that people grow out of by the age of 10 or 11 um so um but now it's you know taken seriously but what these philosophers do is when they get to the brain which they aim is to explain human

consciousness they stop and so I thought well what happens if we carry on what happens if we look at the sun because given the background that lots of people have always thought sun is a conscious being of some kind what would it look like to take pan psychism seriously and apply it to the Sun that was the purpose of my paper um and so in it I look at one or two well several different aspects of this question one is what would be the

interface between the sun's Consciousness and its body its physical body the Sun that we actually observe and I think the answer there would be the electromagnetic field because the interface between our minds and our bodies most people would agree is the electromagnetic activity of the brain you know different kinds of alpha waves theta waves beta waves gamma waves Etc different kinds of brain waves which are electrical waves of activity in the brain measured by electrodes on the

skull so they they're affecting the electromagnetic field um these are correlated with Consciousness and most people would feel they have something to do with it um so if the interface we don't know how it works but if the interface of Consciousness in our own brains with the physical activity of the brain is through the electromagnetic field then the sun has vastly more complex electromagnetic fields that stretch out through the whole solar system which is its body who know where

in the solar wind the magnetosphere of the Earth Earth it's like an envelope around the earth and when there's a solar flare or a coronal mass ejection huge amounts of ionized electrically charged particles are spat out from the Sun and if they hit the earth as they did recently um then you get spectacular Northern Lights the northern lights were seen as far south as London right here actually I didn't see them myself cuz it was cloudy but in where people were in less cloudy places in Southern England

it's very unusual see the Northern Lights which are caused by electrical discharges from the Sun getting into the ionosphere and then coming down to the Earth as sheets of plasma and charged particles so the if the sun's um conscious then the electromagnetic field of the sun provides a very good interface for it and then the next question well well if it's conscious then what does it think about uh you know what does it do with its cons

Consciousness there's no point in having in mind if it doesn't do something and what decisions could it make what choices could it make how could its mind influence its actions and there one possibility would be uh affecting the direction in which solar flares or coronal mass ejections take place it has this this 11e cycle of activity um and in the middle of that cycle there's lot of sunspots and solar flares and things

so the direction in which they shoot out um would have big effects if they're shot out directly aimed at the Earth they could take out our power system Carrington event of 1859 so are you familiar with the solar storm of 1859 Carrington took out it would have taken out now the entire grid but it took out electrical lines and there was you know big outage as a result of it and we're we're seeing as you mentioned an upsurge of activity right now with the magnetosphere of the Earth weakening absolutely well the the

so the sun can affect life on Earth through directing its flares and if it chooses which direction to shoot them in then that would be one thing it could be thinking about modulating the activity of the whole solar system through its its own activity which immediately influences the entire heliosphere there's around the entire solar system there's a kind of membrane electromagnetic membrane called the and the whole of the solar system is within an arm of the Galaxy where

there's uh streams of particles and electric currents called the galactic wind similar to the solar wind so there's a kind of membrane where within the galactic wind and that's really the kind of body of the sun the sun itself would be like the brain or the heart of the whole solar system the entire thing is filled with this electromagnetic field and the sun would be able to sense what's happening in the whole solar system through changes in the electromagnetic field we're now within

the electromagnetic field of the sun through the daylight everything that happens on Earth is within the solar magnetic electromagnetic field um so then you see if one goes on thinking about the sun's Consciousness then what about other stars well why not and if stars are conscious why not the whole galaxy I the stars and solar systems are like cells in the body of the Galaxy that might have a kind of Galactic mind and then galaxies are grouped together

in clusters of galaxies and those are linked up through the entire Cosmos by something called The Cosmic web which were threads of plasma through which huge electric currents and magnetic field lines millions of light years long uh link everything together and when you look at the big picture it looks very like a neural network joining up all these galaxies so there could be a kind of cosmic mind uh the whole universe might be conscious um and it might have this interface with electromagnetic

phenomena uh throughout the entire universe that's fascinating are you familiar with the work of Dr Michael Levan at tus by any chance yeah I know Michael Levan so his stuff fascinates me because he shows just how important the electromagnetic field is as far as dictating human and animal morphology yes and so I find it interesting you know maybe maybe the SCH res of the earth is actually essential for uh bodies to grow in in proper ways in fact

if you put a frog embryo in a faraday cage it won't grow normally if you put it next to a Wi-Fi router it also won't grow normally so there's something it's kind of like a point towards the anthropic principle around the magnetosphere of the earth and then I think about what causes mutations one of the you know the main culprits there and even In Darwin's model it's got to be U UV radiation from the Sun itself so there's something about the magnetosphere of the earth and the interaction with solar radiation that is essential to creating these sort of

fine-tuned conditions around life and it just feels like the super underexplored now you're exploring it area well I mean all this of course is speculative uh but it's also speculative that the sun's unconscious I mean no has ever proved that it's just been assumed um so I it's to my mind is an open question and I think that nature becomes much more interesting the whole of nature when we take a pan psychist view is it speculative though it's it it's

it's not speculative that the sun is acting in this sort of seemingly perfect way to create if you think about it like again if you take the the Faraday chamber example and then the Wi-Fi router example there is something about that interaction between UV radiation magnetosphere of the earth that creates the evolution that we've seen today of animals and humans and we know that there is an effect between electromagnetism and because of you know Mike L and Gary Becker before him and so is it you know there there's some sort

of finely tuned thing we don't know that there's some Creator behind it or Consciousness behind it there's still the hard problem but I don't think it's that heretical to say that that is you know it's creating this perfect condition well no that's one thing but the question of why these conditions are so good I mean that's another question the the the the materialists would say it's just chance or there's billions of planets in the universe we just happen to be on the one that's right for us sort of thing so I don't think that would convince anyone particularly but

um I think that moving away from the idea that Consciousness has to be located in brains what I call the Centric view of Consciousness uh would is is quite helpful um and then of course this is isn't saying that everything in nature is superconscious all the time most of our own mind is unconscious all our habits are unconscious and as Freud and Yung and many others showed a lot of mental activity is unconscious so I would

expect that other Minds in nature including the solar mind are largely habitual and largely unconscious just like our own I think that's a perfect segue into morphic fields which I think most people probably know you for uh which are these sort of a collective memory or mechanisms of inheritance that are orthogonal or lie outside of the traditional kind of materialist reductionist darwinian model uh do do you want to describe what they are and

maybe maybe one seminal experiment there are two parts of my hypothesis really morphic fields and resonance the idea of morphic fields is that all self-organizing systems um are organized by a field Which shapes their form and organization the word morphic means form in Greek um so they're fields of and that at every level of organization the whole is more than the sum of the

parts so the morphic field of an atom which is pretty well what Quantum field Theory describes is the are those fields of the Proto of the the nuclear part particles the nucleus itself and all the electrons around it that together makes up a vibratory pattern of activity which is everyone agrees underlain by fields in this case called Quantum fields or Quantum matter Fields then the field of a molecule includes the fields of the atoms but

links them together through chemical bonds or clouds of electrons going all around wizzing around the outside like a kind of membrane of an organic molecule and then in you have the membrane you've got all the structures within them all the molecules um held together in a lot higher hole within tissues and organs and organisms and then societies of organisms like flocks of birds or termite colonies at each level the whole

is more than the sum of the parts and organizes the parts to form a coherent hole that's what I think morphic Fields do I think they're what give the Hess that which is more than the sum of the parts but such Fields could not be inherited by DNA or genes because DNA and genes code for the sequence of amino acids and proteins which is very different from organizing the structure of a termite Colony or the shape of the

wing of a bird or the form or the instincts of a giraffe um these things are not just protein molecules they're much more complex pattern of organization so they can't be inherited through genes so how are they inherited because they obviously are I mean animals of a given species form the right kinds of bodies over and over again and have the right kinds of instincts over and over again um so this is the second part of my proposal that this happens through a kind of memory U

across time directly connecting similar systems through the process that I call morphic resonance and resonance is analogous to acoustic resonance where if you make so you put the sustaining pedal on a piano for example you go ooh into the piano it'll resonate back ooh if you go e you go e what's happening is the strings in the piano are resonating with the tone you're making and the overtones which

are different for the different vows making those strings all vibrate and that gives off the sound and that's resonance and radio and television and cell phones all work on R resonance too when you tune in a radio set to a particular frequency the areial of the radio sets resonating with the frequency at which the transmission's happening which is why each transmission has its own frequency um so that's a wellknown form of resonance it happens across this

space and um this room is full of r radio and cell phone and television U Transmissions we can't see them what would you say is the seminal I mean they're various seminal experiments you know around rats and Riverbanks and you know other other sorts of scenarios but do do you have a sort of a favorite one when it comes to kind of speaking about this to a mass audience well I think the the simplest example of morphe resonance the easiest to understand is the rat ex example that if you train rats to learn

a new trick in London then rats in New York and San Francisco and Melbourne Australia and Beijing should all be able to learn the same trick quicker just because the rats have learned it here um and that should happen without any normal means of communication would happened by morphic resonance they confronted by a similar problem the rats are similar they should be able to do it quicker now there's actual evidence from a long series of experience with rats

that that actually happens um also if you make a new chemical compound for the first time and you crystallize it that Crystal form won have existed before because it's a new compound and the more often you crystallize it the easier it should get for crystals of that kind to form and in fact that's amazing well it is actually really well known to chemists that new compounds are very difficult to crystalize you maybe wait years before you get the first Crystal but thereafter

it gets easier to C world that's insane that's crazy I think about sometimes athletic accomplishments too where somebody pushes the bar just a little bit farther and then all of a sudden it just seems easier or something ostensibly and like you could attribute that to like modern doping or something but I think it's something more than that it's almost as if an accomplishment that formerly was thought to be impossible is uploaded to a central monad or repository or something and then if somebody calls upon it with the

right resonance in the future you know they it's it's it's that much easier because you have more more data in the repository or some something like that yeah I mean that could be I mean that's one possible explanation I mean the thing is that whenever I put forward ideas about morphic resonance I'm assailed by crowds of Skeptics yeah rightly so I mean it's important in science to have skepticism with Athletics one of the Skeptics arguments is well you know tapping into a huge

much expanded pool of contestants yeah and and you know before any a few sort of middle class English people and a few Rich Americans could take part in Olympic Games and now you've got people from all over the world millions billions of people who potentially could compete so the ends of the normal distribution curve go out further as it were can I tell you why I think it's not accepted because you can't turn it into math and people only it's we're math

reductionists and it breaks the existing Paradigm and so we and we don't have a good theory as to the causal mechanism so it's like we were talking about black body radiation in the 1860s or something people would be like that's impossible you know like how does that work it doesn't make sense and then you you sort of need the quantum Revolution to explain that or something and so yeah can can you turn it into can you turn it into an equation well but I don't know the thing is right now one has to say

that almost everything in biology can't be turned into math and almost everything in Psychology can't be there's no one who could write an equation for your mind um or for your thinking processes right now I mean there's there's no mathematical equation for that and there's no mathematical equation for the most simple things about plants and animals if you're classifying plants you look at the plant you look at the form with the leaves and the flowers and if you want to know which species it is you consult an

expert and if they're not sure they go to Q Gardens to the herbarium look up a pressed specimen and compare it and the ultimate reference is a pressed specimen of a plant not very mathematical I'm on I'm on your side but I'm going to play devil's advocate here because I think you know we need to get stronger which is like you know if you're um a radio or you're a TV or something it's like clearly it's like a it's a radio frequency signal and so that resonance is the causal mechanism is clear and you

can manipulate it you can reduce it and so I'm sympathetic to certain things being irreducible Allah mind and biology which I think is very Tethered to the mind but you know is there is there something in you know some version of electromagnetism or something that we can actually point to as you know the conduit for information transfer here no I would say that morphic resonance is itself a fundamental principle of nature you know like gravity is and actually no

one really understands gravity you know we all take it for granted we're not floating around in this room now because we're held down by gravity it's invisible force permeates all the space around us but does it depend on waves or particles you know some people say yes and they say occasionally we've got some evidence for gravitational waves Etc but if you ask us simple question like what's the speed of gravity um it turns out no one knows the usual assumption is the speed of light but it

takes 8 minutes from the light for for the Sun's light to get to the Earth and if you're calculating where to send probes and Rockets yeah um and you assume the sun's where it was 8 minutes ago or at least the gravity is coming from it's taking 8 minutes to get here all the calculations don't work they only work if you assume that is instantaneous and so some people there's a physicist called van flandern um argues that the speed of gravity is at

least two billion times the speed of light um but in practice physicists assume it's instantaneous that's the only way their their calculations work so there's so much we don't know but I would say that morphic resonance is well you can quantify the effects if you're doing a rat experiment and you train a thousand rats does more effect than if you train 10 rats and you can do graphs that show its relationship to quantity uh intensity of effect so it's not if it's

not quantitative it's quantitatively measurable through these experiments and you can make models of morph morphic Fields um the French mathematician Renee Tom made mathematical models which were in in a branch of mathematics called topology and differential topology um now most mathematicians don't understand differential topology it's a specialized Branch but it's about the shape of things and he thought that these fields

contain attractors which attract the developing system towards a goal and in fact you can make models and theoretical biologists do make models of how developing organ biological systems are attracted towards morix attractors um so there there are actually mathematical models um so the thing is about mathematical models that I people write to me with mathematical models of morphic resonance

um but I'm not a mathematician and so you know when I see several pages of equations about their theory of how morphic resonance might work I sort of glaze over because I can't I can't understand it yeah um you know and if somebody said to me you know where's a mathematical model of morphe resonance I could forward them some of these things say okay here's one I don't know if it's right or wrong because I can't understand it myself but if you want pages of equations here they are most people don't really want to see pages of equations because they don't understand

them they just want a rhetorical Ploy yes for ignoring that's right or they want they want you to just assure them that they can be made into math but they don't want to look at the actual math wants to look at the mass but as I say there's most things in in biology can't be reduced to mass I mean you can say flowers have three four or five petals and there's a Fibonacci series in sunflower heads but once you said a few things like that um Mass isn't much help anymore is there something about biology

that is exceptionally Tethered to Consciousness in a way that inanimate matter is not so like I love uh Irwin Schrodinger's what is life you know that lectures where he talks about biology as being again very coupled with with the mind and mental processes I mean we use Placebo like it's this dirty word right like it's like oh they they took a sugar pill and it was just as effective as you know some other experimental protocol

but uh it's just Placebo as if that's not this like miraculous you know insane sort of thing um yeah do do you think there's a a a tie there between Consciousness and biology well I think mind-like activities um underly or biology I mean morphic fields are mind like they have habits they have forms shapes structures patterns of organization and I think mostly they're

working at the habitual level and we're not conscious of our inhabits so I think they're basically habitual but they're mind-like and but I think something similar would be well I think is i' I've already said of of non-biological systems like the sun and the Galaxy and even molecules and crystals you see you have a ordering principle a structure a form and you can't predict that from basic quantum physics I mean if you start with the shredding equation of

quantum physics the whole thing Peters up by the time you get to the helium atom yeah um so you know it's not as if this is giving as precise predictions of complex protein molecules so that brings up a really important question which is if we're all part of Greater morphic Fields like on a macroscopic level is there is it not really important to choose which morphic Fields you interact with so that you are you know uh engaging in the right goals like is that not somehow really essential to the life

you're you're leading well this to to answer that we have to step back a little bit um that I think that our habits are influenced by morphic resonance from lots of people in the past and I think that this morphic resonance or Collective memory a bit like what Yung called the collective unconscious I think that these are shaped by many people in the past and they facilitate learning things so when a baby learns to speak and language I

think a lot of that's happening by resonance the um linguist know Chomsky talked about an innate language ability innate grammar um because he was fascinated by the way that young children learn to speak and it's not genetic you see you can take a Chinese baby and be adopted by a European family and learn to speak English or French and vice versa and there's big difference between the genetic backgrounds so it's not if it's

hardwired in the genes um yet it is inherited in some way and I think that's happening by morphic resonance you see I think it's a kind of resonance as you learn something and when you learn something lots of people have learned before like swimming or riding a bicycle I think this is facilitated by morphic resonance so when it comes to the cultural forms we adopt then every cultural form every Behavior pattern that's been shared by lots of people

would have a kind of morph field and what we tunee into uh we if well if we take up a hobby say like building model airlanes then you'd sort of tune into the field of model airlane Builders and you'd learn how to sort of glue the balls of wood together and stuff more quickly than you might otherwise have done I think you mentioned Darwin even touching on something that was like morphic field like phenomena in The

Descent of man is that right where he's talking I think about like dogs inheriting the traits of their parents um that's outside of just you know pure he didn't have DNA at the time but this pure kind of material model well darn was very interested in the inheritance of acquired characters you know that The Offspring could inherit adaptations or behavior from their parents sometimes called lamaran inheritance but Darwin was a lamaran um Neo darwinian Like

Richard Dawkins reject that aspect of D Darwin but since the beginning of the 21st century um lamaran inheritance is really back in fashion having been rebranded epigenetic inheritance yes so um I think that a lot of epigenetic inherence is in fact a result of morphic resonance and it's usually assumed it's all a matter of molecular changes in methylation of the DNA or changes in histone

or small RNA molecules or something so the fact that people can propose some molecular basis has given people permission to accept that it's real but it's not proven that that's how it actually works in most cases um the question is open um so I I think that the U well the case that Darwin was reported in a paper in nature was a dog that belonged to someone he knew

that got very frightened whenever it went past a butcher's shop and it turned out his father had done the same and so Darwin speculated that this Behavior may have been because the grandfather had been maltreated by a butcher and a fear of butcher had been inherited um by these dogs but you see he couldn't that was just telling the story I mean Darwin like me was interested in what people actually observed he didn't just say this is mere anecdote it has no

relevance or is of no interest he thought this was a a data point that was worth taking seriously and now um Recent research in epigenetics with mouse behavior has shown something very similar in laboratory experiments I don't know if you've followed the mouse fear experiments no well when they were published in in nature there was that the title was inheriting the fear of

thing so after a few times when the mice smelt acetophenone they were petrified and when mice have frighten frightened they simply freeze you can measure the freeze response so they trained these mice to be terrified of acetophenone then they bred from them with mothers who'd never been exposed to aceto phone um and then tested the children and the grandchildren and they were terrified of acet for known in a single generation a fear of a particular

chemical been inherited um by these uh mice uh in a way that couldn't possibly be explained by cultural transmission was a form of epigenetic or inherence or perhaps morphic resonance that's fascinating it's so funny it is very invogue to say I'm healing my ancestral trauma and everybody is talking about DNA methylation and epigenetics and you were talking about morphic resonance and morphic far before like organ donor recipients uh inheriting some of the attributes of the donor like in certain

cases you suddenly know French or you know how to drum or like you you pick up the skill from the person that's giving you the organ yes I mean the best documented of the heart transplant cases um well you see what people usually say there is well the memories must have been stored inside the heart you know in the cells a cellular memory or something that's got transferred what I think because I don't think memories are stored in cells I think they work by morphic resonance when

someone's had a heart transplant that heart continues to resonate with the donor and including characteristics of the donor's behavior and appetites and likes and dislikes and so on and um these are fascinating cases where the recipient takes up characteristics of the donor and they without knowing anything about the donor and so there's a transfer of memory with the heart but I don't think it's in the heart um there's a somewhat similar experiment of

have much of a brain but they do have a sort of cerebral ganglion in the head he trained these flat worms to respond to particular stimuli that he could measure their response they learned the effect then he cut their heads off and flat worms regenerate very easily um and the flat worms regenerated new heads and when he tested the flat worms they could still remember what they had learned before wild so um you see one possibility would be that the memory had

of biology but he remains fairly non-committal about exactly how this is happening I know he's very intrigued by the possibility of there being more to biology than just physics and chemistry and standard science but he walks a tight rope between pushing the boundary and going too far if he went too far I mean most people would say I go too far the result of going too far is then you you're no longer employed as a prestigous professor in in a top university and

that sort of thing it it does affect your career that's my sense of him is I look at the books he reads and it seems like he's pretty sympathetic to a lot of this sort of Consciousness being approach layer in biology and parasyte with some monks out there and I get this sense that he's far more heretical in his private beliefs than what meets the eye he has to kind of walk walk the tight RPP but um are you familiar with a a scientist at actually

University of Sur named um John Joe mcfaden yes yes I knew him yes cuz that that would be one example of kind of a non-local the Theory Of Consciousness you know but in this case it would be electromagnetism would be the kind of conduit for information transfer but would what would you say about that theory well that's relevant to what we were talking about earlier in the consciousness of the sun yeah because joh Joe mcfaden not only argues that the conscious activity of our brains is is

linked to the electromagnetic field he argues that it is the electromagnetic field the electromagnetic field see from within as it were is conscious um and on the mcfaden principle then you could say that the electromagnetic field of the sun is the consciousness of the sun it when it's experienced from within um I myself don't think that electromagnetic fields are themselves conscious I think they

interface with Consciousness I think they're the bridge or the interface between morphic Fields uh which uh the fields of the Mind as it were that interact with the electromagnetic fields so when it comes to these psychic phenomena for example the sense of being stared at which we just talked about um I'm just releasing an app at the moment which works on cell phones uh where you can train yourself to get better at it

and now I know it's possible to train yourself because in the martial arts there are various martial arts programs where they train people to know when they're being looked at from behind cuz it's useful for self-defense you know if someone's sneaking up from behind planning to attack you if you can feel them coming you'll survive and if you can't you won't so it's worth training and so they already have training programs but this app works on cell phones so anyone can try training themselves to get better at it how do it

worked how does the app work yeah um it's just a very simple test so if I were doing it with you we'd both have our cell phones T tuned in there would be a QR code on mine you'd take the thing on yours so they linked up together then mine in a random sequence would you'd sit with your back to me uh with a blindfold on probably it's best with a blindfold and mine would then say you know first trial look and so I'd stare

at the back of your neck you'd hear a noise that indicates the beginning of trial and within 5 or 10 seconds you have to say whether you're being looked at or not yes or no you can just say yes or no it recognizes voice so you can have the mobile phone there so you hear the sound the trial begins say yes and it records that guess and then next trial begins you know might be no I might be told not to look at you I look at the

floor and think of something else or close my eyes um so that's my basic test for the sense of being stared at and when you do that test most people score above chance but not very much above chance um about 55% compared with 50% but some people can get 60 or 70% or 80% so in this app what I want is for people to try it out doing it with feedback you know if you're told whether you're right or wrong every time or even

if you just have a informal session we were just had nothing else to do and you sat with your back to me and I said I'm going to look at you now Jesse I'm looking at you and I'd say i' I've stopped looking at you and I'm not looking at you um and you would like by a feedback you don't need to understand it consciously bu a feedback where people can learn to regulate their heartbeat and so on and blood pressure it's not conscious learning do this do that in a logical sequence it's learning

unconscious cues implicitly and so I think that this with this system um which I'm just launching now this app in fact anyone who's listening to us who wants to try it can go to my website I'll put the link in the Des yes um because when people have found out you know whether they can improve what I want to find out is first of all what works for people I don't know what works that's why it's a

citizen science project M and then even better if someone can find out what works for them and can develop a system where they can train other people to get better at it it's basically it's a matter of tuning into your feelings as opposed to rational thoughts the minute you start thinking about it well it was meant to be random it was not looking last time so it should be looking this time you know as soon as you start that kind of thinking it's gone but so it's a matter of tuning into your thoughts and

then because there citizen science and people are doing it at home then they can find out does meditation affect it are you more sensitive you've been meditating does it work better under cannabis or MDMA you know you couldn't do this in a university with you imagine ethics approval committies years of deliberation and stuff but the fact is you don't need all that people can just do it it doesn't cost anything and people can do it at home and the system then gives feedback on how your scores getting on and you can see if you're

improving or not and I'm asking people if they can routinely get up to about 75% which is very significantly above chance to write to me email me and let me know so I'm hoping that I'll get feedback on this experiment from people who do experiments with their family and friends me what's it called staring app staring app download it now um what about blind sight so this phenomena where somebody's visual

impaired in the traditional sense and then they can sort of in certain cases actually literally artificially visually impair themselves like be blindfolded but they can somehow know when somebody's in front of them or navigate some you know treacherous terrain or whatever and there's I think a site in Texas that teaches people to kind of develop these senses how does that comport with your vision model I don't know there's there's two different things blind sight is where monkeys or things that have or people that had damage to the visual cortex of

the brain can behave as if they're recognizing objects but they're not consciously aware of it that's how it's usually used in science but there's this other thing which is often called Vision Beyond seeing without the eyes where blindfolded people can tell what things are and as it were see things that they couldn't possibly be seeing with their eyes and there are methods that train children to do this that is most successful with seven or eighty old

children uh who are the the best subjects for this kind of thing uh there's the whole group's training children to do this in Mexico and in Spain and I don't know whether there's much happening in the US or Britain but I know about it from Spain because I have a colleague in Spain who's working on this it's definitely more evidence for morphic field and all the brain injury stuff too where it's like you have like 44% of your brain because of some bizarre injury and then it's sort of reassemble so that you're like totally functional and you don't even realize it for like a long like there

all these examples of that and so it's semantic information does not seem like it's locally stored no I mean there's lots of suggestive information uh suggestive evidence for for all this extra ocular Vision though is a a great puzzle I don't pretend to understand how it works um I mean I'm interested in it because in a sense the scof of SE sense of being stared at is a related thing because you can detect when someone's looking at you from behind and you're not doing it with

head of the Harvard Psychiatry department and who spent the end of his life studying this sort of alien abduction phenomena you wrote a book I didn't even realize this until recently called the physics of angels with was it Matthew Fox with your co-author and I find that to be a very interesting frame when studying kind of UFOs and aliens there's a religious studies Professor named Diana Pula and there's a guy named jacqu Val this French ufologist both of whom believe that aliens are sort of the Contemporary version of Angels and

Demons which if you apply a sort of Lindy like what's the most tried and true humanistic to this stuff it's probably that so what what motivated you to write that book and what what are the physics of angels well what really motivated me was the idea that there are forms of intelligence or Consciousness above the human level beyond the human level like the sun and the stars and I've been interested in the idea of conscious sun and stars for a long time I mean my

paper on the subject was much more recent um and because the climate has changed within science you know pan psychism is now a live topic of debate and I wouldn't have stood a chance of publishing a paper in scientific journal on this know 20 years ago um so I you know when I was thinking about you know the idea that the stars are conscious and the the the the planets may be conscious too um I I became aware that in the Middle

Ages and in standard thought in universities influenced by you know St Thomas aquinus and all the great theologians and philosophers of the time it was taken for granted that the Universe was alive it was Tak taken for granted that nature animals and plants were beings with Souls that they were animate that's why we call animals animals because animal means Soul in Latin um and you know this was before

the 17th century the machine theory of nature medieval Christianity was essentially animistic and treated all of nature as alive and they thought that each star or Planet had its own intelligence it was not only alive but intelligent and its guiding Angel so there was a whole category of angels which were organizing or being the intelligences of the heavenly bodies um there were other angels that were the is it where the

intelligences guiding or organizing process on Earth and there others that were kind of cosmic archetypes of Consciousness so there were nine levels of angels based in three areas is this an aquinus this is in ainus it's in Dionysus the areopagite who was a sixth Century Syrian monk um who had a huge influence on Christian theology as did amus also Syrian neoplatonist his own Angel hierarchy

well dionis the areopagite was a was a neoplatonist um and so what because I was interested the idea of intelligence is beyond the human level there was no need to reinvent this because that's what our ancestors you know because Jewish philosophers and Islamic philosophers all have angels and the Bible is full of angels both the Old and the New Testament um um so in the whole judeo-christian and Islamic tradition

you have these beings at different levels and Matthew Fox is a friend of mine he's a theologian and so when I was discussing it with him I said well you know what about these medieval theories of angels they've already got idea of lots of intelligences beyond the human level is it relevant today of dionis the arop St Thomas aquinus and Hilgard of bingan the Visionary medieval abis in Germany who was a Mystic and a poet um and we chose

the most interesting passages in in their books about angels the most relevant ones and then we discussed each short passage as a dialogue and that's what the book is really and it's looking at the traditional ideas of Angels in the western tradition and how these ideas might be relevant today as we think about Consciousness beyond the level so it's not that we're saying there's sort of beings with colored

wings as seen in stained glass windows flying around in the universe I mean people may experience them that way but that would be their own subjective projection onto them it is fascinating though when you look at St Thomas aquinus Angel hierarchy or amus or uh I'm sure diasis you you see these specific attributes uh that they tie to specific Angel categories yes and some do actually comport with the modern alien

phenomena so you'll see like irradiated light you know electromagnetic you know now you know they wouldn't use the word electromagnetic IR radiated light or whatever m lingering effects as a result of that and so it does it's it's very interesting that like you know maybe maybe we're just seeing this sort of age-old thing with a modern Motif or analytical overlay that we're kind of imposing on you know the past do you investigate any of the UFO stuff or

the alien stuff at all or I haven't no I know there I investigate a lot of different things but there's a limit to how much I can look at um and I'm an experimental Scientist by nature and I love doing experiments and things the things that attract me in science are things where I can do actual experiments EOS are very hard to do experiments with you basically is observational and you have to wait for them to come along and stuff um so it's not an area that I've

ever felt drawn to because it's so elusive from experimental point of view and also it's so clouded with conspiracy theories and coverups and all that kind of thing so I'm not very interested in conspiracy theories all that stuff I what I prefer to do is is focus on what I call the mysteries of everyday life like the sense of being stared at which as you said at least 90% of the population have experienced it it's common everyone knows about it even

children um but it's totally unexplained and then telepathy like telephone telepathy thinking of someone who who's about to call or knowing who's calling virtually everyone is about 85% of the population that you can do experiments on that have done lots and I'm pretty sure it's real um and then animals that have these abilities better than humans and that was the subject of my book dogs that know when their owners are coming

thinking and that seems seems to get in the way of this like instinctive like I remember when we met with you six years ago you were talking about psychics generally being like kind of marginalized sometimes destitute sometimes physically impaired in your account maybe it was this was sort of your own anecdotal belief but then you know if it's like that and and animals or something it's like you're more tapped in if you're not you know engaged in this kind of heady ego thing yes and

children yes I mean what inhibits these things is Extreme left brain type rational activity therefore the very worst kind of people for these experiments are subjects are University professors and students and so on you know the academic world is is is the most hostile world not only theoretically but also in tone practical terms for these things because you're dealing with a a subpopulation that excessively developed verbal left brain

type thinking you're so out of touch with your instincts you're just it's really it is the modern religion like I think about cosmology itself and it's like just patches upon patches of Like Making Stuff work whether it's like gravity which doesn't make any sense dark matter which is undetectable like we're probably just way off on everything I think we're way off on lots of things yeah and just not what have ever engaged me as much is these things which are so

much more Central to our everyday life and our concerns you said you were reading Faraday uh which you know you're going way back to the beginning of magnetism what inspired you to read Faraday and what have you learned or uncovered in that process I'm trying to understand the um the very nature of electromagnetism and light and because I think they're so closely related to Consciousness as we discussed earlier I think they're the interface with Consciousness where do you and I realize

you'd probably be speculating here but let's demarcate this as speculation where do you think the consensus is possibly off on our conventional understanding of electromagnetism or light well I think the consensus is off on VIR the whole of physics in so far as it ignores Consciousness totally you know if you look at physics textbooks or physics there's nothing whatever about Consciousness there and sometimes you can ask an intelligent physicist you know why isn't there he

said well physics isn't about Consciousness it's about physical things you know psychologists maybe biologists studi Consciousness we don't it's not our area but that's true and it's a reasonable response but the thing is that biologists in mechanistic biology the dominant kind say that what we want to do is reduce all life and mind to chemistry molecular biology and then to physics and once we've reduced it to physics we've explained it and since there's no consciousness in physics then

they think there can't be any anywhere else either and um so we've got this ridiculous situation where physicists don't have Consciousness in it because they're not studying Consciousness then everyone else thinks physics is the foundation of the whole of science if it's not in physics it can't exist right that's then you get the hard problem you know it ought not to exist at all yeah um yeah it's weird because it all came from decart but really decart is saying Consciousness is all that exists or something but it came from the it turns into this radical doubt of your own kind

epistemological view or something and you're just a brain and a vad and you know is radical skepticism applied to everything when in fact it's really all all you can presuppose is consciousness or take a priority as Consciousness well what dayart did was just split the world into Consciousness which is God angels and human minds and matter or nature which is conscious and follows mechanical laws and so for the from the 17th in the 18th century most people

went along with that and it meant that it divided the realm of Science and religion so you could still have religion about God angels morality human Minds Etc um and science could go on looking at nature and ignoring Consciousness but then in the 19th century with the rise of materialism and Atheism and Atheism and materialism are more or less the same thing um because materialism says there's only unconscious matter in the universe um then Garden Angels were just sort of

rubbed out you know you know just eliminate Goden Angels then all that's left of consci is the human mind and then that has then to become the matter of the brain so decart actually had God and angels and the whole Realm Of Consciousness but he said it's not in space and time it's supernatural and it's not extended in space um and so the mind is is outside space and time and so is consciousness so let's go back to the farad where where do you think uh the consensus is off on light and

electromagnetism and I realize you'd be sort of speculating here but if you were to if you were to just take a guess well I think that I don't think it's exactly off I think it's what's that there's something about electromagnetism and Light which are related to Consciousness and as you mentioned earlier John Joe mcfaden thinks that the conscious the fields of our brains the electromagnetic fields of our brains are the basis of our Consciousness that that he thinks electromagnetism is

consciousness I don't go that far I don't don't agree with that I think it's the interface I think there sort of quantum processes electromagnetic processes morphic fields and mind and Consciousness here electromagnetism do bridge between them um and you see Faraday uh was not a materialist Faraday believed that the Ultimate Reality in the universe is force that the whole of fields of force the whole of space is

filled with fields of force and he thought matter arose from these fields by being sort of concentrated fields in particular points or places but Fields were primary for Faraday and he thought of Mag magnetic fields as having lines of force and he thought the lines of force were like tubes through which the ether flowed or some fluid flowed so did Maxwell in his original equations of electromagnetism treated the fields of the fields of of

force the lines of force as like tubes with a spiraling Vortex activity well parad thought the the the lines of force were physical that you see them when you scatter iron fings around a magnet you actually see lines and um if you want to compute magnetic field intensity it's the number of lines going through a particular area the number of lines of Force if you look in a modern textbook it has the lines of

force and it has the field intensity based on the number of lines of force but then it says after it's described and explained everything in terms of these lines of Force he says but these lines of force are of course only imaginary and a convenience for thinking about this so they use them their whole Theory depends on they say well they don't really exist and yet um parad was convinced they do exist that they're the physical basis of these phenomena so I'm

trying to understand you know how magnetism and electricity are related he thought it was The Ether and flows fluid what are lines of force what is it that's flowing through these lines of force and if it's flowing which directions it flowing in from the future to the past or from the past to the future or both because I think light you see Maxwell's equations for light which were influenced by Faraday's thinking

show that light uh the equations work equally well if when I see you the the light moves from you to me or whether the the something moves from me to you the equations work that was the basis of the transactional theory Richard feineman in 1945 wrote a key paper with wheeler who was a key figur in uh um astronomy and gravitational Theory um and in they dealt with this the the the the roots of

the transaural interpretation the bidirectionality from future to past and past to future and in the famous Fineman diagrams uh you know you have lines of particles interacting um a line you can have lines going backwards in time a positron according to F Fineman a positively charged electron is an electron going backwards in time so fineman's thinking was shot through with this it can go both ways in time and I

think that the light and electromagnetism have this quality and I think the bit that goes from future to past is probably related to the to Consciousness because of this reverse causal flow of Consciousness and that is somehow the interface with Consciousness so I'm if you look in a modern physics textbook within sort of two lines or into a kind of wall of equations which create a kind of fog which stops you thinking about it

because if you can't follow the equations you you think oh just leave the physicist thinking about magnetism or matter or something um but I'm trying to think about it without the fog of equations and and and see what what's actually really going on and Faraday was not approaching this mathematically he didn't own any Mass he was approaching it as phenomena that actually interact how does light interact with magnetism he did experiments he found that magnetic fields Chang the polarization

of lights and that tells you the light is magnetic or has a magnetic aspect and he discovered that empirically by looking at what changed it do you think we need to resuscitate The Ether or that um space is in fact empty or or full you know this is obviously a debate between bergon and Einstein and you have the Michaelson Morley experiments of the 1890s where you know they did a set of these sort of optical detections and they're like you know we're not detecting The Ether but I I've always

thought you know the the uh absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence and people like Fineman later you know like you know you could you could take uh you could boil all of the world's oceans you know with just a single cup of coffee and so like may maybe there is actually a lot of energy in empty space well that's the standard view in quantum theory the so-called zero point field or Quantum vacuum field is supposed to be full of energy and virtual particles pop out of it and go back into it all the time and I mean that's part of quantum

electrodynamics which feinan was you know an expert in and Quantum electrodynamics is often said to be the most accurate Theory that's ever been devised I agree with you but general relativity would you know and there's even actually a paper I think in 1923 where Einstein says general relativity is in fact compatible with The Ether so he sort of goes back on you know his Deni you know special relativity denied it and then depends what you mean by it you see because the thing is that different people is the Quantum vacuum

field The Ether is the higs field which hix bosons couple to The Ether which is separate from the quantum vacuum field are is the is there a fluid flowing through magnetic lines of force uh the ether as Maxwell thought you see the particular theory that Einstein the Mickelson mly experiment was about was a theory that there's a uniform ether spread out equally through space and time like a framework for the whole of

the universe and that um if the Earth's moving in One Direction relative to another you know it should affect the light and so forth that was a particular theory of the ether as the carrier of light uniformly distributed but you see these other theories of The Ether are completely different theories and aren't refuted by Michelson moley um and I'm not sure how helpful they are or you know something's going on whether it helps to call it the ether I don't know

right maybe it's more of a field variable or you can have vacuum polarization or something but um I want to get to two topics before we end here uh one is your son uh uh Merlin sheldrake has written a fantastic book about fungi and fungal intelligence it's called entangled life and um do you look at that at all are you interested in that at all oh certainly I am yes I mean I think is an amazing book um because he weaves together so many different

philosophical ideas History of Science field ecology you know modern electrophysiology and so forth and you got into some of the Paras pychology stuff through botony is that right am I making that up I started out working in plant science in botony yes I worked on plant development and then I spent years in India working in an agricultural Research Institute on um breeding chick better chick peas and pigeon peas I my title there was principal plant

physiologist so I was working with plant breeders um in developing improved crops for not just India but for the semian tropics in general and some of the varieties we developed are in widespread use and have made a major difference and so on so my own background really is working with plants um and Merlin well his is fungi not plants and as he'd be the first to point out fungi are separate and different from Plants they're not the same All Animal Kingdom they're a

separate Kingdom um funga as the fungal Kingdom as opposed to plant kingdom or the animal kingdom or the microbial um well no I think mens what he does in his book is is really remarkable scientifically and also in a literary way because it's incredibly well written um well M and I quite close in in you know we get on well together we his interest

in Sciences as he says in that book himself you know obviously influenced by my own and and you were friends with Terence McKenna you were fairly close with him right oh very close yes and so I I think I think Fung guy are so interesting and this is really me ripping off McKenna here but I think they're really interesting because of how similar they are to to humans so they're really bioavailable humans are susceptible to fungal disease everybody

has you know microbiome associated with microbiome and he was having some like two week trip in the Amazon McKenna and he said that the the mushroom spoke to him and I think it's called the song of the mushroom or something the mushroom spoke to him and he said within my memory exists the knowledge for hyperlight drives and so it's this crazy idea that mushrooms are extremophiles and you even have Francis Crick and who I know is also a former associate of yours uh in 1973 writing a paper about

you know P directed pans spermia in 1981 he wrote what is life kind of developing that this idea that if you had a kardashev four scale you know Intergalactic civilization it probably wouldn't look like hominids like us you would have this Spore of knowledge or memory it would be able to travel the cosmos and uh withstand extreme radiation and then it would merge with life forms like us and like direct our thoughts and behaviors I mean I'm sure

you've seen videos of bullet ants in the Amazon Corp mushrooms that literally like take over their bodies and direct them up a tree and our microbiome you know affects the way we think our microbiome obviously does too so I find that just this like fascinating herur istic yeah well I discusses that in his book of course the the fungi taking over minds and where to what degree they affect our minds and um I think Terren was McKenna was a factor in Marin's

development I mean after all Terence was one of my very good friends whenever he was in London he stayed with us here there's some hermetic wisdom transfer well ter you know Mar was fascinated by Terren and and listened to a lot of his tapes and things and and knew him personally so but I don't think thoughts I don't think we necessarily need spores traveling around an actual fungi to transfer thoughts if telepathy happens it's possible that beings on other planets could

communicate with us telepathically you know without the need for all this sort of space hardware and hyperdrives and walks and things U so uh you know and there are people who claim that they're they get thoughts from other dimensions and stuff and some of them could be on other planets who knows um so my own approach if I were doing space exploration would be to concentrate on telepathy rather than on

sort of heavy engineering and it certainly be cheaper um and we might find out more which is really interesting because most astronauts will come back from space and the work that will that they will be doing will be Consciousness related not at all hard science or figuring out how we can get further it turns it entirely turns inwards but well Edgar Mitchell was a astronaut who'd been to the moon and into space at least and and he founded the Institute of netic Sciences of which

I'm a fellow and which is one of the main organizations in the United States involved in Consciousness research so that in a sense does tie in with experience in space absolutely and uh I guess final thing you know AI is all the rage now people are worried about what it means for mankind and I was actually with a founder of a pretty prominent company I really respect him he's kind of an intellectual in his own right as well and he was saying you know he

thinks you know these limited language models have all these local limits it's not real Consciousness all the stuff that we would probably say but as far as kind of Turing passible you know it's going to approach you know what our abilities and so the last Bastion the last sort of uh safe hold for mankind is self-identification is is literally figuring out we have this impulse to figure out who we are and so I know you've pointed out sort of you know

other limits of AI around you know um how it's it doesn't have kind of a creative principle we sort of direct it to do things and then you know that kind of reflects in the output but yeah what what do you think there what do you think about Ai and are we just AI oh I don't think we're AI at all I mean how AI actually works is is accumulating vast amounts of data and and um I mean the the one that interests me most is is the Deep Mind thing on Alpha fold yes uh for protein

structure and see what's interesting there is that it's not possible to predict the structure of protein molecules given their primary sequence of amino acids from first principles you know people have tried for years and you know they think it can all be explained just in terms of regular physics and chemistry but if you try doing it that way from first principles you don't get anywhere if you if you try calculating the minimum energy structure to which your thing would go according to normal

physics with a complex protein you have hundreds or thousands of minimal energy structures that are almost the same and yet it gets to one of those rather than the others they had to manually hardcode the bond angles of the protein to make it work well they well they they they find it really hard to do anything that that gives you a correct prediction and it's called the multiple minimum problem but what AI does what Alpha fold does it doesn't even attempt to predict how they fold up from the beginning and and um on

first principles it just looks at thousands and thousands and thousands of proteins and then finds an unknown one with a Amo acid sequence that's similar to some of the others and sort of figures out what it might be based on lots of others like facial recognition software doesn't understand the embryology of the face and how the muscles work and so it just Compares millions of photos of people's faces it's pattern matching it's pattern matching and it's pattern matching that's always based on an initial subset

of human supervised learning or usually outside of certain cases of reinforcement learning like Alpha gozero which are rare and require very rule bound games it's almost all based on these sort of manually supervised learning models yeah so I mean I think it's it's it's amazing what it can do it's sort of the alpha fold things particularly amazing because people have tried predicting protein structure for years and now they can predict them on an industrial scale this software

um but it's not a fundamental understanding it's not real intelligence and the computer's not conscious of what it's doing um and so I don't think it has very much to tell us about Consciousness and the teering test in my opinion is a silly test anyway and and so if a computer can simulate you know behave and respond to questions a bit like a person um I don't think this is know if churing were alive today I think

he'd move on when he proposed this in what 1950s or something when computers could barely do what an ordinary calculator desktop calculator can do um that would have seemed a very advanced level of computation then and it is an advanced level of computation but it certainly doesn't prove their conscious and it's a very poor test for trying to prove someone's conscious if you had to predict the next big scientific breakthrough what area do you

think it would be in in Consciousness studies and and to do with a deeper understanding of the extended mind the way minds work the way they're related to light and fields um and the way that memory and nature Works through morphic resonance these would be my favorite candidates and they're the ones I work on because because I think that there this is where the next really big change in science is going to come and which

will totally change our Paradigm from the way it is now well it was an honor to speak with you I really appreciate it rert a pleasure Jesse