American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - Meet The Scientist BANNED By TED Talks | Rupert Sheldrake

Episode Date: October 5, 2024

Rupert’s staring app: https://www.sheldrake.org/participate/an-app-for-testing-the-sense-of-being-stared-at Join us for a captivating conversation with renowned biologist and author, Rupert Sheldrake. In this thought-provoking interview, we delve deep into Sheldrake's groundbreaking theories on morphic resonance, the nature of consciousness, the sense of being stared at, and the limitations of conventional science. Discover how his controversial and heretical ideas within academia challenge mainstream scientific thinking and open up new possibilities for understanding reality and our place within it. Whether you're familiar with Sheldrake's work or new to his ideas, this interview offers valuable insights into the mysteries of life, mind, and the cosmos. Don't miss out on this chance to explore the cutting edge of science and consciousness research with one of its most original luminaries! Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 6:25 - Consciousness & Vision 15:00 - The Sense of Being Stared At & Causation 19:47 - Dreams & Precognition 26:20 - Stigma & Academic Orthodoxy 34:30 - Is The Sun Conscious? 50:11 - Morphic Fields 1:07:07- Inheritance & Evolution 1:17:00 - Scopaesthesia Trials 1:21:55 - Extraocular Vision & Non-Local Cognition 1:24:00 - Angels & Pan-Psychism 1:29:31 - UFO's 1:31:47 - Psychics & Academic Dogma 1:33:35 - Electro-Magnetism 1:45:27 - Terrence McKenna, Fungi, Human Biology 1:50:43 - AI 1:55:10 - The Next Scientific Breakthrough *** AMERICAN ALCHEMY is an original series hosted by Jesse Michels that explores the frontier of science and tech. Each week, we bring you exclusive interviews with some of the leading thinkers of our time. INSTAGRAM ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichels TWITTER ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican EMAIL/BOOKINGS ➤ [e-mail] SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7eOJzNRWY4l2UTDvIquxYg?app=desktop original music: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LlLRudDi60Uy4jcmOSEs1 #rupertsheldrake #psychic #consciousness #paranormal #telepathy #tedtalk #ted #banned #censored #terencemckenna #dawkins #shermer #heretic #MorphicResonance #angel Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week's guest is Rupert Sheldrick, a brilliant scientist in the worlds of parapsychology, consciousness, and biological systems. His work has been widely criticized as pseudoscience by people too lazy to look into his protocols and too dogmatically mired in materialist reductionism to be open to its profound implications. Sheldrach has spent decades showing that humans and animals can learn things from their surrounding information fields, or as he calls them, more fields, that babies can sense when their mothers are near, that 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 intuit 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-Darwinians, like Dawkins, aren't even true followers of Darwin. He shows that the physical constants in physics, are 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 intelligentsia 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 experiments. In 2013, Rupert Sheldricks' 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, Shell-Drake'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 Shermer in Italy, and so I was extra fired up to speak to a fellow heretic in Sheldrick. In this conversation, we discussed the truth behind 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 Terence 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 to be a bit more than.

Tomorrow's scientific hero, Rupert Sheldrick. I'm here with one of my heroes, Rupert Sheldrake. You know, my show is sort of known for actually exploring phenomena like UFOs, but 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, you know, I have you to thank for. And we met six years ago, and, you know, it was a...

an honor to meet then and it's an honor to do this now and you have traditional academic credentials and that's why I think you piss off academia so much because you've really gone off on your own path and explored all sorts of exciting phenomena that lay outside of kind of conventional models and so I'm excited to be here and the final thing I'll say is actually I have you to thank for my job because in my first conversation with Peter, Peter Thiel who I ended up working for, I brought you up. And he was like, I think you remember, I remember him kind of looking at me 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 Rupert Cheldrick. He's a little weird, like, in a good 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 Rupert Chaldrick. Well, that's 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, 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, 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. Good. Well, thank you for having us. And I guess, 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 as consciousness. Would that describe your sort of worldview? No, I'm not, I'm not, I 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 image or the exact opposite of materialism. Materialism says everything's matter. And even when you get consciousness like in human brains, it's basically just matter and it's not really doing anything. Whereas idealism says everything's consciousness and matter is sort of dumbed down mind.

So, materialism has a problem explaining consciousness, and I think idealism has a problem explaining matter, because it's not exactly clear how consciousness could give rise to electrons and atoms and salt crystals and trees and things. So I don't think that it's, I don't find either of those philosophies particularly helpful. I spend a lot of time thinking about how consciousness might be related. 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, everyone agrees that this depends on the electromagnetic field. You know, when I see you now, the light that's coming into my eyes is traveling through the electromagnetic field. It is electromagnetic radiation. Somehow, I'm forming an image of you sitting there 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 retinners, changes in the ganglia, up the optic nerve, changes in the visual regions of the brain.

And then all that's clear enough, it's been studied, and 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 a three-dimensional, full-color, virtual reality display inside my head, 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've known as ever seen a virtual reality display inside the head. What I'm saying is that that bizarre theory that is all inside the brain 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, including children under the age of 10. What everyone else believes is that when light comes in, changes happen in the 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 colour, but it's located right where you're sitting. And it overlaps with you, as it were. So everything 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? Well, that's why I do them. Partly because I'm interested in the feeling of being stared at in its own right, as an unexplained phenomenon. And if you were to pull nine people out of ten 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 who's looking at me or something.

And it's just this thing. Or like when you're crossing your crosswalk, you almost look off the car. Like your awareness of the car coming at you somehow will block it. And you can say that's superstition. But I think everybody has that sort of instinct. And maybe it's actually an adaptive instinct. And so you're saying that your mind is almost a transceiver and it's emitting? Yes.

Yeah. That when I project an image of you to where you are, my mind has this image in it. It's going in 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 product of holography of your mind? Well, no, you're the neuroscientist, Anil Seth, here in Britain, calls it a controlled hallucination. that our perceptions are controlled hallucinations.

I'm perfectly happy with that idea 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 your light comes in, say, here's the mirror, the light's bent by the mirror and comes into my eye, but I project out images that go along with the light coming into the eye, but when it gets the mirror, the mirror acts like a kind of beam splitter. And the virtual image produced that I'm projecting out goes 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, are 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 omitted from your eyes in this case, or is it that you'd have to look

for a candidate there? Well, that's, I spend a lot of time thinking about this. Because, you know, one way would be to say that you have something is 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. 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 quantum entanglement, quantum theory called

the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics due to John Kramer. Yeah. And develop... It's a 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 your t-shirt, red light leaves your t-shirt,

it comes into my eye absorbed by a cone cell in my eye. At the very moment that pigments in the eye absorb that photon, they send out a reverse, as it were antifotone 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, is 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 maybe the light rays are connecting me with your back. And if no one knows how, if you can somehow detect that, then the sense of being stared at, 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 scopesthesia, from scop as in microscope, seeing, ashthia, feeling as in anesthesia, synesthesia. My most recent paper on the subject is called directional scopesthesia and its implications for theories of vision. 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. It emerges that in real life, this happens almost always in a directional manner. So say you look at somebody from an upstairs window, this is a typical example in my

case history collection, looking at someone walking past from an upstairs window, if they feel you're being stared at, 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. And I think 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. If you look at the number of people in the world investigating scarpesthesia, I think the total number is probably around three at the moment. I'm one of them. And 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 to be. but the brain, all your thoughts are inside your head. So if you look at someone from behind, there's no way these thoughts that are just electrical changes inside your brain could influence them 100 yards away. So therefore the official scientific position is this doesn't exist, it's non-existence, it's a superstition, it's pseudoscience, it can't possibly exist, therefore it doesn't, 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 perception is you're sort of flowing something back onto the object,

and then your perception of it is somehow dependent on that backwards flow as well. Or there's maybe kind of a retro causal model. 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's, say, four light years away, when you see the star, I think not only the light's coming to say 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 in 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. And you see, our minds are concerned, they're primarily conscious minds, are primarily concerned with possibility. All the possible things you could do or say, our minds, contents of consciousness are possibilities. This is extremely clear in dreams where there are nothing but possibilities. 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, And as soon as you do that, there's like the collapse of the wave function, the collapse of these possibilities is something you actually do. And when you actually do it, it becomes a physical fact that can be measured. But possibilities are not physical facts. They're possibilities. They're real, but they're not physical. And the realm of consciousness is what's happening in consciousness is real but not physical

because it's about possibility. And consciousness is about forming intention. 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 us formed an intention to be talking here right now. And the, 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, it's an objective physical fact.

But before it happened, we have. had this date and time that existed only in the future. And our directs, our activities were directed towards it. You came here and travel here and find your way here on the underground railway and that kind of thing. So 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. been shown in quantum computations, you can reverse cubit positions. And there's temporal 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 there are levels of mind or something, if you are literally experiencing shards of the future at some point, 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, I mean, pre-cognicities, you know, like, is that sort of a... Well, synchronous is by definition of things that happen at the same time. But I think

what you're talking about is sort of like a like a deja vu experience, 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 precognitive dreams. And lots of people have pre-cognitive dreams. You dream of something a day or two, It's usually only a few days before it happens. But precognitive dreams are much more common than most people think, partly because we forget most of our dreams. As soon as you start writing your dreams down and remembering them, then I've done it myself.

You start noticing precognitive aspects to these dreams. It's happening all the time. Sometimes more spectacular than others. When the 9-11 World Trade Center disaster occurred in New York, it occurred to me that this would be a fantastic research opportunity. So within three days, I had posters up in Washington Square and I ran a series of ads in the Village Voice asking, did you dream of the World Trade Center? And I have a collection of more than 75 dreams that people sent me.

Wow. of, 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 were the Sears 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 sky scraper that's on fire.

And the third category were walking down city streets with an eerie sense of doom and vast clouds of dust rolling down the street. All of these things, of course, happened, and all of them were widely seen on TV. 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 happened. It's like a pre-memory. A pre-memory. Yeah. And some people who do research in this area in psychic research suggests that things like this could be called pre-call as opposed to recall.

Yeah. Yeah, there was a story of a resident artist in one of the towers, actually, because they had some artistry program. And he did a rendition of him as a Tuskegee Airman with like old, you know, XP40 fighter jets. all flying into him. And this was 12 days before 9-11. I have to look up his name, but it's just wild. You can't attribute that to chance, I think. It's this kind of thing. And then there were some people who just didn't go into work that day because they had premonitions. They had a weird feeling. There was a whole article about it in the Washington Post. I mean, this wasn't just some obscure psychic researcher. There was an article called Lucky to be alive in the Washington Post and 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 book, I think, in the early 20th century, 10-ish 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 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 that begets noticing it even more or something.

So I think there's no doubt that precognitive dreams happen. And, you know, they've been known throughout all history. And 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 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, there are actual skeptic organizations

like the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, publishers of the Skeptical Inquirer. I just debated Michael Shermer, who I know you've debated before. And it's just, it's bad Bayesian reasoning because you just have this bucket of like impossible and you place all these things like all your experiments you just placed 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 it's a priori disinterest i know it's basically it's defending a worldview by rejecting things that don't fit in explaining them away yes and long long ago Thomas coon 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 orthodoxy of the anomalies is to ignore them or deny them, or explain them away. 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 from government funding aid, National Science Foundation, that kind of thing. Yeah, 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 Hadron colliders, like $15 billion or something. They just, all of parapsychology research, probably $30 million over the last 100 years. I'm just throwing out a number, but it's like, pale.

It's not amazing. The biggest funding agency for parapsychology is the BL Foundation in Portugal, B-I-A-L. 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. Yeah. You know, National Institutes of Health is, what, $35 billion a year?

And it's this bizarre phenomena where a lot of elite universities in the U.S. had parapsychology departments, whether it was Duke with the Rhine Center or Princeton Parasic Paralab or SRI at Stanford. And almost all of the people involved in the programs came out of these researching random event generators or remote viewing or whatever saying there is something here. Like none of the people who were involved came out or very few of them came out being like, you know what, I found nothing. And this was this bizarre thing where we just decided to sort of wholesale discount all of this stuff. And there are issues with parapsychology, at least in its present state, in that I think it's hard to instrumentalize and scale up. I think it's more bound up with a person's moral development and character progression or a 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, under Bob John. And I think he would say that, you know, so you have a random event generator,

you take this binary computer, produces ones and zeros on a graphical interface, but it's tied to something that we think of as random and 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. But what John would say is that your sort of internal alignment or coherence, which sounds kind of woo-woo is actually affects your sort of z score or you know this statistical distribution that you would get as a result and i think that just breaks too many priors for uh you know conventional materialist reductionist 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 and 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 interested in these things. And, you know, because 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, in the drinks reception or the tea. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed

sponsored jobs. It gives your job posts the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored job. So T reception, they look at both ways. And they say, you know, I'm really interesting. You're work.

I've had these experiences, you know, these telephone telepathy, or I've been interested in morphic resonance and so. 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 by the time four or five at times, 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 aren't.

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 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 99% are pro-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 tip-toeat. around it, they're kind of epistemically constrained at the start, and it's this sort of publish or perish. 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, you know, there's this professor, and we've had some early conversations, you know, four or five years ago. And, you know, I've been interested in this. kind of time travel hypothesis or the idea that 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 with him at some conference and we're like by the bar and I'm like I'm like if you actually use inductive logic these things are probably 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 would just be so bearish academia on a go-for basis and bullish people like yourself especially if we can get more patronage out there for you know serious work and what are considered fringe areas because you You have to tiptoe around and dance around. You have to posture constantly. You can't engage in earnest real thinking.

Yes, it's a shame. In certain areas of academia, that's definitely true. 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. The reason I'm interested in it is partly because in many traditional societies, it's always assumed that the sun is conscious.

The Japanese think the sun is a goddess. The Greeks thought the sun was a god. But in our disenchanted modern world view, it's just a physical object obeying mathematical laws. The nuclear fusion reactor. Yes. So I was interested in this conflict. between the older views, which was also in medieval Europe. It was generally taken for granted

that the sun 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 Mercury. The context for writing this paper was the upsurge in academic philosophy of panpsychism, the idea there's consciousness throughout nature, that consciousness is not just confined to human brains. And the reason that panpsychism 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 view within institutional science is mechanistic materialism. The idea that 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 electrical or chemical patterns in human brains. So there's nothing out there. 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, but the whole of the rest of the the universe, utterly unconscious, except perhaps for little green men or sort of science fiction type beings on other planets. So within the philosophy of mind, people have made entire careers out of professors in universities 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,

So some professors believe it or not have actually made a career out of saying that we're not really conscious at all. 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 say consciousness is a meaningless epiphenomenon like a 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? They don't have an answer for that.

And then perhaps one of the more common positions is that consciousness is an 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 in terms of this frame. work 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, 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 does one understand its own mind? Well, exactly. I mean, you need to be conscious in order to do physics. or science. So it's a whole thing's 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 life 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 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, collapse or of the way of function at points in their career. But going back to your paper on the sun. Well, yes, well, I just to finish that bit about the hard problem.

You see, one group of philosophers, the panpsychists, have revived an ancient idea that there's consciousness throughout nature. Pan means everywhere. So what they are saying is, well, if there's a tiny little bit of consciousness in electrons, a little bit more in atoms, a bit more in molecules, a 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 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's the case and panpsychism's 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. A kind of childish thing that people grow out of by the age of 10 or 11. So, but now it's, you know, taken seriously. But what these philosophers do is when they get 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 the sun as a conscious being of some kind, what would it look like to take panpsychism seriously and apply it to the sun? That was the purpose of my paper. 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 that they're affecting the electromagnetic field. These are correlated with consciousness, and most people would feel they have something to do with it. 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. You know, where in the solar wind, the magnetosphere of the earth is 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, 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 because it was cloudy, but where people were in less cloudy places in southern England, it's very unusual to 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 if the sun's conscious, then the electromagnetic field of the sun provides a very good interface for it. And then the next question, well, if it's conscious, then what does it think about? You know, what does it do with its consciousness? There's no point in having a 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 affecting the direction in which solar flares or coronal mass ejections take place. It has this 11-year cycle of activity, and in the middle of that cycle, there's a lot of sunspots and solar flares and things. So the direction in which they shoot out 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. 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 big outage as a result of it. And we're seeing, as you mentioned,

an upsurge of activity right now with the magnetosphere of the Earth weakening. Absolutely. Well, 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 own activity, which immediately influences the entire heliosphere. Around the entire solar system, there's a kind of membrane, electromagnetic membrane, called the helipause. And the whole of the solar system is within an arm of the galaxy where there's 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, the electromagnetic field. 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? There's stars and solar systems are like cells and the body of the galaxy. 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, 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. whole universe might be conscious and it might have this interface with electromagnetic phenomena throughout the entire universe. That's fascinating. Are you familiar with the work of Dr. Michael

Levin at Tufts by any chance? Yeah, I know Michael Levin. 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 the Schumann resonance of Earth is actually essential for bodies to grow 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

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 this super under-explored, now you're exploring it, area. Well, I mean, all this, of course, is speculative, but it's also speculative that the sun's unconscious. I mean, no one's ever proved that. It's just been assumed.

So to my mind is an open question. And I think that nature becomes much more interesting, the whole of nature, when we take a panpsychist view. Is it speculative, though? 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 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 Mike Levin, of Gary Becker before him. And so is it, you know, there's some sort of finely tuned thing. We don't know that there's some creator behind it or its 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. Yeah, we don't know. 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. Own it all.

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But I think that moving away from the idea that consciousness has to be located in brains, what I call the cerebrocentric view of consciousness, is quite helpful. for. And then of course, this isn't saying that everything in nature is super conscious all the time. Most of our own mind is unconscious. All our habits are unconscious. And as Freud and Jung 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,

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. Do you want to describe what they are and maybe one seminal experiment? There are two parts of my hypothesis, really, morphic fields and morphic resonance. The idea of morphic fields is that all self-organizing systems are organized by a field which shapes their form and organization. The word morphic means form in Greek. So they're fields of form. 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. describes is the field of the proton, of the nuclear particles, the nucleus itself, and all the electrons around it. That together makes up a vibratory pattern of activity, which is, everyone agrees, underlained 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, whizzing around the outside, and like a kind of membrane of an organic molecule.

And then in cells you have the membrane, you've got all the structures within them, all the molecules 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 coherent whole. That's what I think morphic fields do. I think they're what give the wholeness 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. These things are not just protein molecules. They're much more complex patterns of organization. So you 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.

So this is the second part of my proposal that this happens through a kind of of memory 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 a, 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'll 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 vowels, making those strings all vibrate, and that gives off this sound, and that's acoustic resonance.

And radio and television and cell phones all work on resonance too. When you tune in a radio set to a particular frequency, the aerial of the radio set resonating with the frequency at which the transmission is happening, which is why each transmission has its own frequency. So that's a well-known form of resonance. It happens across this space and this room's full of radio and cell phone and television transmissions. We can't see them. What would you say is the seminal, I mean, there are various seminal experiments, you know,

around rats and riverbanks and, you know, other sorts of scenarios. But 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 simplest example. of morphic resonance, the easiest to understand is the rat 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. And that should happen without any normal means of communication, it would happen by morphic

resonance. They're confronted by a similar problem. The rats are similar. should be able to do it quicker. Now, there's actually evidence from a long series of experiments with rats that actually happens. Also, if you make a new chemical compound for the first time and you crystallize it, that crystal form won't 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 count. that new compounds are very difficult to crystallize. You maybe wait years before you get the first crystal. But thereafter, it gets easier to crystallize all around the 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, it's that much easier because you have more data in the repository or 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.

Rightly so. I mean, it's important in science to have skepticism. With athletics, one of the skeptics arguments is, well, you're now tapping into a huge, much expanded pool of contestants. And, you know, before any of 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 for 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. We're math reductionists, and it breaks the existing paradigm. 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 does make sense.

And then you sort of need the quantum revolution to explain that or something. And so, yeah, can you turn it into an equation? Well, I don't know. The thing is right now, one has to say that almost everything in biology can't be turned into maths. And almost everything in psychology can't be. There's no one who could write an equation for your mind or for your thinking processes right now. I mean, 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 of the leaves and the flowers, and if you want to know which species is, you consult an expert. If they're not sure, they go to queue gardens to the herbarium, look up a press specimen and compare it. And the ultimate reference is a press specimen of a plant, not very mathematical. Well, 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 a radio or you're a TV or something, it's like clearly, it's like 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 a la mind and biology, which I think is very tethered to the mind. But, you know, 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. its 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 a simple question like, what's the speed of gravity? It turns out no one knows. The usual assumption is the speed of light, but it takes eight minutes for the sun's light to get to the earth. And if you're calculating where to send probes and rockets, and you assume the sun's where it was eight minutes ago, or at least the gravity is taking eight minutes to get here, all the calculations don't work.

They only work if you assume that it's instantaneous. And so some people, there's a physicist called Van Flanden, argues that the speed of gravity is at least two billion times the speed of light. But in practice, physicists assume it's instantaneous. That's the only way 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 ten rats, and you can do graphs that show its relationship to quantity, 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 morphic fields. The French mathematician René Tom made mathematical models which were in a branch of mathematics called topology and differential topology. Now most mathematicians don't understand differential topologies, a specialized branch, 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 or biological systems are attracted towards morphic attractors. So there are actually mathematical models. So the thing is about mathematical models, people write to me with mathematical models of morphic resonance, 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.

You know, and if somebody said to me, you know, where's a mathematical model of morphic resonance, I could forward them some of these things, say, okay, here's one, I don't know. it's right or wrong because I can't understand it myself. 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. But they just want a rhetorical ploy. Yes, yes, that's right. For ignoring. That's right. Or 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. They're saying. They don't want to look at the math. But as I say, most things in biology can't be reduced to maths. I mean, you can say flowers have three, four,

four or five petals, and there's a Fibranacci series in sunflower heads. But once you've said a few things like that, maths 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 Erwin Schrodinger's What is Life, you know, that 1944 lectures, where he talks about biology as being, again, very coupled with the mind and mental processes. I mean, we use placebo like it's this dirty word, right? Like, it's like, oh, they took a sugar pill and it was just as effective as, you know, some other experimental protocol. But it's just placebo, as if that's not this like miraculous, you know, insane sort of thing. Yeah, do you think there's a tie there

between consciousness and biology? Well, I think mind-like activities underlie all 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 own habits. So I think they're basically habitual, but they're mind-like. But I think something similar would be, well, I think it's, I've already said, of non-biological

systems like the Sun and the galaxy, and even molecules and crystals, you see you have an ordering principle as a structure, a form. And you can't predict that from basic quantum physics. I mean, if you start with the shredding or equation of quantum physics, the whole thing peters out by the time you get to the helium atom. Yeah. So, you know, it's not as if this is a very much. is giving us 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 it not really important to choose which morphic fields you interact with so that you are, you know, engaging in the right goals? Like, is that not somehow really essential to the life you're leading? Well, to answer, to have to step back a little bit. I think that our habits are influenced by morphic resonance from lots of people in the past. And I think that those morphic resonance or collective memory, a bit like what Jung 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 a language, I think a lot of that's happening by morphic resonance. The linguist Nome Chomsky talked about an innate language ability, innate grammar. 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 to learn to speak English or French and vice versa. And there's a big difference between the genetic backgrounds. So it's not if it's hardwired in the genes, 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 morphic field. And what we tune into, well, if we take up a hobby, say like building model airplanes, then you'd sort of tune into the field of model airplane builders and you'd learn how to sort

of glue the balsa wood together and stuff more quickly than you might otherwise have done. I think you mentioned Darwin even touching on something that was 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. That's outside of just, you know, pure, he didn't have DNA at the time, but this pure kind of material model. Well, Darwin was very interesting, the inheritance of acquired characters. You know that the offspring could inherit adaptations or behavior from their parents,

sometimes called Lamarckian inheritance. Well, Darwin was a Lamarckian. Neo-Darwinians, like Richard Dawkins, reject that aspect of Darwin. But since the beginning of the 21st century, Lamarckian inheritance is really back in fashion, having been rebranded epigenetic inheritance. So I think that a lot of epigenetic inheritance is in fact a result of morphic resonance. It's usually assumed it's all a matter of molecular changes in methylation of the DNA or changes in histones 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. The question is open. So I think that 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 butchers had been inherited by these dogs. But you see, he couldn't, that was just telling the story. I mean, Darwin, like me, it was interested in what people actually observed. He didn't just say this is a mere anecdote, it has no relevance or those of no interest. He thought this was a data point that was worth taking seriously. And now, recent research in epigenetics with mouse behavior has shown something very similar in laboratory experiments. I don't know if you followed the mouse fear experiments.

No. Well, when they were published in nature, there was the title was inheriting the fear of fathers. And in these experiments, the researchers, this was at some university in the US, I've forgotten which one. I mean, this is quite well-known mainstream research. They took male mice and they made them frightened of a smell called acetophonone. bit like cherries, it's a synthetic chemical. So they exposed the mice to the smell and they

gave them a mild electric shock through their pores and this is kind of classical, aversive conditioning type thing. So after a few times when the mice smelt acetophenone, they were petrified and when mice are frightened, they simply freeze. You can measure the freeze response. So they trained these mice to be terrified of acetophonone. Then they bred from them with mothers who'd never been exposed to acetophenone and then tested the children and the grandchildren and they were terrified of acetophenone. In a single generation, a fear of a particular chemical had been inherited by these mice 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 in vogue to say, I'm healing my ancestral trauma, and everybody is talking about DNA methylation and epigenetics. Yeah. And you were talking about morphic resonance and morphic fields far before. Like organ donor recipients 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 pick up the skill from the person that's given you the organ. Yes.

I mean, the best documented of the heart transplant cases. 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 And 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. There's a somewhat similar experiment of Michael Levins with flatworms and learning. I don't know if you're familiar with that experiment. No, what's the experiment? Well, I'm a big fan of Michael Levine. And I think he's the most inventive biologist working at present. I agree.

And he did these experiments with flat worms, which are small worms, which are flat, which are flat. That's why they're called flat worms. They have a head with a region with little eyes and a tail region. And they don't have much of a brain, but they do have a sort of cerebral ganglion in the head. He trained these flatworms 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.

And the flatworms regenerated new heads. And when he tested the flatworms, they could still remember what they'd learned before. Wild. So you see, one possibility would be that the memory had been stored all over the body and in the cells of the flatworm, that would be the conventional explanation of Levins' experiments. My explanation would be that it was morphic resonance with the previous form of, the intact form of the flatworm. They're resonating with themselves in the past.

Now the experiments don't enable you to decide between those two interpretations, and most people would go with the cellular memory interpretation. The point is about Michael Levin, he's really pushing the boundaries of biology, but he remains fairly noncommittal 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 tightrope 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 no longer employed as a prestigious professor in a top university and that sort of thing. 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 a proto layer in biology and parapsychology. And I think he spent time in Tibet with some monks out there. and I get this sense that he's far more heretical in his private belief. Not loving your AT&T or T Mobile Bill? Yeah, we've been hearing that a lot. Good news.

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That's Verizon. Best Network based on Route Metrics, Best Overall Mobile Network Performing with U.S. second half, 2025, all rights reserved. It must provide a recent consumer mobile bill. My name of the person, regained me the deal, additional terms, conditions, and restrictions apply. Leaves, then what meets the eye, he has to kind of walk the tightrope. But are you familiar with a scientist at actually University of Surrey named John Joe McFadden? Yes, yes, I know him, yes.

Because that would be one example of kind of a non-local theory of consciousness, you know, but in this case it would be electromagnetism would be the kind of conduct. it for information transfer, but 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 John Joe McFadden not only argues that the conscious activity of our brains is linked to the electromagnetic field. He argues that it is the electromagnetic field. The electromagnetic field seen from within, as it were, is conscious. And on the, the

the McFadden principle, then you could say that the electromagnetic field of the sun is the consciousness of the sun when it's experienced from within. 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, which are 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, I'm just releasing an app at the moment which works on cell phones

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 because 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 does it work? How does the app work? Yeah. It's just a very simple test. So if I were doing it with you, we'd both have our cell phones tuned in. There'd be a QR code on mine.

You'd take the thing on yours so they'd linked up together. Then mine, in a random sequence, you'd sit with your back to me, 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 a trial. And within five or ten 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, who the trial begins, say yes, and it records that guess and then the 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. 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, 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 an informal session where we just had nothing else to do and you sat with your back to me and And I said, I'm going to look at you now, Jesse. I'm looking at you. And I'd say, I've stopped looking at you. No, I'm not looking at you. And you would like biofeedback. You don't need to understand it consciously.

Buy 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 the logical sequence. It's learning unconscious cues implicitly. And so I think that this system, which I'm just launching now, this app, and 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 description, yes. 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. 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. And then 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. As soon as you start that kind of thinking, it's gone.

So it's a matter of tune into your thoughts. And then because this is a citizen science and people are doing it at home, then they can find that does meditation affect it? Are you more sensitive if you've been meditating? Does it work better under cannabis or MDMA? You know, you couldn't do this in a university with, you know, imagine ethics of approval committees, 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. What's it called? Staring app. Staring app. Download it now. What about blindsight? So this phenomena where somebody's visually 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 treacherous terrain or whatever. And there's just, 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 two different things. Blind sight is where monkeys or things or people that have 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 extra ocular vision beyond seeing without the eyes where blindfolded people can tell what they're.

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 eight-year-old children, who are the best subjects for this kind of thing. 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 U.S. or Britain. 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 feel. 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 reassembles so that you're like totally functional and you don't even realize it for like a long time. Like there are 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 with suggestive evidence for all this. Extra-ocular vision, though, is a great puzzle. I don't pretend to understand how it works.

I mean, I'm interested in it because in a sense, the scoppathesis, the 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 your eyes. So they're vaguely related and I wish I knew how. So, I mean, these are things I spend a lot of time thinking about. And I talk to colleagues in parapsychology, in physics, in other subjects, and nobody understands these things. We really are on the frontiers of what we, of the unknown, with all these phenomena.

Let's talk about, it's a good segue because you brought up Thomas Kuhn, so he wrote the structure of scientific revolutions, but he was friends with actually John Mack, who was ahead of the Harvard Psychiatry Department, and who spent the end of his life studying this sort of alien abduction phenomena. wrote a book, I didn't even realize this until recently, called The Physics of Angels, 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 Posulka, and there's a guy named Jacques Belay, this French UFOologist, 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 human heuristic to this stuff? It's probably that. So what motivated you to write that book and 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. 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. And because the climate has changed within science. science, you know, pan-psychism is now a live topic of debate.

And I wouldn't have sort of chance of publishing a paper in a scientific journal on this, you know, 20 years ago. So, you know, when I was thinking about, you know, the idea that stars are conscious and the planets may be conscious too, I became aware that in the Middle Ages and in standard thought, in Christian universities, influenced by, you know, St. Thomas Aquinas and all the great theologians and philosophers of the time, it was taken for granted that the universe was alive. It was taken for granted that nature, animals and plants were beings with souls, that they were animate. That's why we call animals animals, because anima means soul in Latin.

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. There were other angels that were, as it were, the intelligence. is guiding or organizing process on Earth.

And there were others that were kind of cosmic archetypes of consciousness. So there were nine levels of angels based in three areas. Is this in Aquinas' hierarchies? This is in Aquinas. The Ariopagite, who was a sixth century Syrian monk, who had a huge influence on Christian theology. As did Eamblicus, also Syrian neoplatonists who had his own angel hierarchy. Well, Dionysus, the Aureopagite was a neoplastinist.

And so what, because I was interested in the idea of intelligences 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 Olds and the New Testament. 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 the idea of lots of intelligences beyond the human level. Is it relevant today? Of Dionysius, the Ariopagite, St. Thomas Aquinas and Hildegard of Bingon, the visionary medieval abyss in Germany. who was a mystic and a poet. And we chose the most interesting passages 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 human level. 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 Aquinas' angel hierarchy or Eamblicus or I'm sure Dionysus, you see these specific attributes 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, sort of electromagnetic, you know, now, you know, they wouldn't use the word electromagnet, it's like irradiated light or whatever. So the lingering

effects as a result of that. And so it does, it's, it's very interesting. But 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? I haven't. No, I, you know, I investigated a lot of different things. Yeah. But there's a limit to how much I can look at. And I'm an experimental scientist by nature. And I love doing experiments. And things that attract me in science are things where I can do. actual experiments. Ufoes are very hard to do experiments with.

You basically is observational and you have to wait for them to come along. Yes. 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 cover-ups and all that kind of thing. So I'm not very interesting conspiracy theories and all that stuff. What I prefer to do 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 even children, but it's totally unexplained. And then telepathy, like telephone telepathy, thinking of someone who's about to call or knowing who's calling on the phone rings. Virtually everyone is about 85% of the population. You can do experiments on that. I've done lots, and I'm pretty sure it's real. 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 Home, where I have a lot of investigations

of unexplained powers of animals, which not only about telepathy, which dogs that know when they're going home, the eponymous theme of the book, is about telepathy, but also So things like animals giving warnings of earthquakes and tsunamis and feeling the future. Is there something about, because I think about what is adaptive in mankind and it's like prefrontal cortex or what would proverbially be known as kind of a left brain or like rational thinking? And that 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, kind of, you. marginalized, sometimes destitute, sometimes physically impaired in your account. Maybe this was sort of your own anecdotal belief.

But then, you know, if it's like that in 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 of university professors and students and so on. You know, the academic world is the most hostile world, not only theoretically, but also in

practical terms for these things, because you're dealing with a subpopulation that excessively developed on verbal left-brain-type thinking. You're so out of touch with your instincts. You're just, it is the modern religion. 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. And just not what have ever engaged me as much as these things which are so much more central to our everyday life and our concerns.

You said you were reading Faraday. 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 very nature of electromagnetism and light, 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 the actual of physics and 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? And he said, well, physics isn't about, consciousness about physical things. You know, psychologists and maybe biologists study 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 they can't be any anywhere else either. And 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. And if it's not in physics, it can't exist. Right. And you get the hard problem. You know, it ought not to exist at all. Yeah, it's weird because it all came

from Descartes, but really Descartes is saying consciousness is all that exists or something. but it turns into this radical doubt of your own kind of epistemological view or something and you're just a brain in a vat and, you know, is radical skepticism applied to everything when in fact it's really all you can presuppose as consciousness or take a priority as consciousness? Well, what Descartes did was just split the world into consciousness, which is God, angels, and human minds and matter or nature, which is unconscious and follows mechanical law. And so from the 17th, 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. And science could go on looking at nature and ignoring consciousness. But then in the 19th century of the rise of materialism and atheism, and atheism and materialism are more or less the same thing, because materialism says there's only unconscious matter in the universe. Then God and angels were just sort of rubbed out, you know, just eliminate God and angels. Then all that's left to consciousness is the human mind. And then that has then to become the matter of the brain.

So Descartes actually had God and angels in 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. And so the mind is outside space and time, and so is consciousness. So let's go back to the fair day. Where do you think the consensus is off on light and electromagnetism? And I realize you'd be sort of speculating here, but 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, there's something about electromagnetism and light which are related to consciousness. And as you mentioned earlier, John Joe McFadden thinks that the conscious, the fields of our brains, the electromagnetic fields of our brains, are the basis of our consciousness. He thinks electromagnetism is consciousness. I don't go that far. I don't agree with that. I think it's the interface.

I think there's sort of quantum processes, electromagnetic process, and morphic fields and mind and consciousness here. magnetisms, the bridge between them. And you see, Faraday was not a materialist. Faraday believed that the ultimate reality in the universe is force, that the whole fields of force, the whole of space is filled with fields of force. He thought matter arose from these fields might be a sort of concentrated fields in particular points or places.

But fields were primary for Faradena. And he thought of 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 force, the lines of force as like tubes with spiraling vortex of activity. Well, Faraday thought the lines of force were physical, that you see them. When you scatter iron findings around a magnet, you actually see lines.

And 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, it says, but these lines of force are, of course, only imaginary and are 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 Faraday 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 of 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 the equations work equally well if when I see you, the light moves from you

to me or whether the something moves from me to you. The equations work. That was the basis of the transactional theory. Richard Feynman in 1945 wrote a key paper with Wheeler, who was a key figure in astronomy and gravitational theory. And they dealt with the roots of the transactional interpretation, the bidirectionality, from future to past and past to future. And in the famous Feynman diagrams, you know, you have lines of particles interacting.

You can have lines going backwards in time. A positron, according to Feynman, a positively charged electron, isn't an electron going backwards in time. So Feynman's thinking was shot through with this, that can go both ways in time. And I think that the lightened electro-magnetism have this quality. And I think the bit that goes from future to past is probably related to consciousness because of this reverse causal flow of consciousness. And that is somehow the interface with consciousness.

So, if you look in a modern physics textbook, within sort of two lines, you're into a kind of wall of equations which create a kind of fog, which stops you thinking about it. So you can't follow the equations, you think, oh, I'll just leave this to physicists, thinking about magnetism or matter or something. But I'm trying to think about it without the fog of equations and see what's actually really going on. And Faraday was not approaching this mathematically. He didn't know any maths.

He was approaching it as phenomena that actually interact. How does light interact with magnetism? He did experiments and he found that magnetic fields changed the polarization of light and that tells you that 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? spaces, in fact, empty or full. You know, this is obviously a debate between Bergson and Einstein,

and you have the Michelson-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've always thought, you know, the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. And people like Feynman later, you know, like, you could, you could take, you can boil all of the world's oceans with just a single cup of coffee. And so like maybe there is actually a lot of energy and 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 Feynman was 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, you know, special relativity denied it. Well, it depends what you mean by it, you see, because the thing is that different People, is the quantum vacuum field, the ether, is the Higgs field of which Higgs bosons couple to the ether, which is separate from the quantum vacuum field, is there a fluid

flowing through magnetic lines of force, the ether, as Maxwell thought? You see, the particular theory that Einstein, that Mikkelson-Mawley 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 if the Earth's moving in one direction relative to another, 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 Mickelson-Mawley. And I'm not sure how helpful they are, or something's going on, whether it's

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 I want to get to two topics before we end here. One is your son, Merlin-Sheldrake, has written a fantastic book about fungi and fungal intelligence. It's called Entangled Life. And do you look at that at all? Are you interested in that at all? Oh, certainly I am. Yes. I mean, he's, I think it's an amazing book. 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 parapsychology stuff through botany, is that right? Am I making that up? I started out working in plant science in botany. Yes, I worked on plant development.

And I spent years in India working in an agricultural research institutes on breeding chick-better chickpeas and pigeon peas. I mean, my title there was principal plant physiologist. So I was working with plant breeders in developing improved crops for not just India, but for the semi-arantropics 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. And Merlin, well, his is fungi, not plants, and as he'd be the first to point out,

are separate and different from plants, they're not the same at all. Or are the animal kingdom? They're a separate kingdom, fungar, as the fungal kingdom as opposed to plant kingdom or the animal kingdom, the microbial world. Well, no, I think Merlin's, what he does in his book is really remarkable scientifically and also in a literary way because it's incredibly well written. Well, Melon and I are quite close and, you know, we get on well together with his interest in sciences, as he says in that book himself, you know, obviously influenced by my own.

And you were friends with Terrence McKenna. You were fairly close with him, right? Oh, very close, yes. And so I think fungi 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 humans. So they're really bioavailable. Humans are susceptible to fungal disease. Everybody has a microbiome associated with their microbiome. And he was having some two-week trip in the Amazon, McKenna,

and he said that 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 hyper light drives. And so it's this crazy idea that mushrooms are extremophiles. And you even have Francis Crick, who I know is also a former associate of yours in 1973 writing a paper about, you know, directed panspermia 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 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 cortisept 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 fascinating heuristic. Yeah, well, Merlin discussed that in his book, of course, the fungi taking over minds and to what degree they affect our minds.

And I think Terence was, McKenna was a factor in Merlin's development. I mean, after all, Terence was all my really good friends. Whenever he was in London, he stayed with us here. There was some hermetic wisdom transfer. Well, Merlin was fascinated by Terrence and listened to a lot of his tapes and things and knew him personally. 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, without the need for all this sort of space hardware and hyper-drives.

and walks and things. So, you know, and there are people who claim that they get thoughts from other dimensions and stuff and some of them could be on other planets. Who knows? 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'd certainly be cheaper. And we might find out more.

Which is really interesting because most astronauts will come back from space and the work that they will be doing will be consciousness related, not at all hard science or figuring out how we can get further. Yes. It entirely turns their inward. Well, Edgar Mitchell was an astronaut who'd been to the moon and interspace at least, and he founded the Institute of Neuatic 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 I guess the 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 me. He's kind of an intellectual in his own right as well. And he was saying, you know, he thinks out, you know, these limited language models have all these local limits. It's not real conscious. All this stuff that we would probably say.

But as far as kind of Turing passable, you know, intelligence, it's going to approach, you know, our abilities. And so the last bastion, the last sort of safehold for mankind is self-identification, 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, 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 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, I mean, the one that interests me most is the deep. mind thing on alpha fold for protein structure. And you 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 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 goes to one of those rather than the others. They had to manually hard code the bond angles of the protein to make it work. Well, they find it really hard to do anything 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 on first principles. It just looks at thousands and thousands and thousands of proteins and then finds an unknown one with a amino acid sequence that's similar to some of the others and sort of figures out what it might be based on lots of others. facial recognition software doesn't understand the embryology of the face and how the muscles work. 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 go zero, 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 amazing what it can do.

It's sort of the alpha-fold thing is particularly amazing because people have tried predicting protein structure for years and now they can predict them on an industrial scale as software. But it's not a fundamental understanding. It's not real intelligence and the computer is not conscious of what it's doing. And so, I don't think it has very much to tell us about consciousness. The Turing test, in my opinion, is a silly test anyway. And so if a computer can simulate, you know, behave and respond to questions a bit like a person, I don't think this is, you know, if Turing were alive today, I think he'd move

on. And he proposed this in, what, 1950s or something, when computers could barely do what an ordinary calculator, desktop calculator can do today. That would have seemed a very advanced level of computation then. It is an advanced level of computation, but it certainly doesn't prove their conscious. 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 to do with a deeper under

understanding of the extended mind, the way minds work, the way they're related to light and electromagnetic fields, 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 I think that 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's an honor to speak with you. I really appreciate it, Rupert. A pleasure, Jesse.

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