Which brings me to Rupert Sheldrake and ‘The Science
Delusion’. I haven’t read the book, I
just watched the TED Talk (Banned! ZOMG!).
Sheldrake starts by defining ‘The Science Delusion’ as ‘the belief that
science already understands the nature of reality in principle, leaving only
the details to be filled in.’ This is indeed a delusion; and a dangerous one.
Making overblown claims for science, like making overblown claims for
dialectical materialism or the healing power of turtle gall bladder extract, is
going to make science look stupid when it turns out that reality is different
from what we said it was. This will lead people to distrust science and more
readily embrace the alternative, which is usually to believe all sorts of dumb
things just because everyone else does. I was heartened by this first statement
of Sheldrake’s and would have been very happy if he had gone on to explain what
science is and how it works; and how science does not, and cannot, understand
the nature of reality in principle. This would be a very valuable thing to do
in a TED talk and might just be possible in 18 minutes.
But instead, ah, Sheldrake first accuses science of being a
wholly owned subsidiary of the materialist worldview, which has never been
true, but was much more true in the late 19th century than now; then
lists ten ‘dogmas’ of science which he thinks would be better phrased as
questions; and then explores - sort of - a few of these in detail by expounding
his own bizarre idiosyncratic theory of ‘morphic resonance’ and talking about
evidence for variations in fundamental physical constants.
The ten dogmas Sheldrake quotes are:
1.
Everything is like a machine.
2.
Matter is unconscious.
3.
The laws of Nature are fixed.
4.
The total amount of energy and matter in the
universe is constant.
5.
Nature is purposeless.
6.
All heredity is material.
7.
Memories have a material existence in the brain.
8.
The mind is inside the head.
9.
Psychic woo is impossible.
10.
Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that
really works.
I’ll take each of these in turn, rephrase it as a question,
and see if I can find anything valuable in doing so.
1.
Is everything – the universe, animals, plants,
us – like a machine? Well yes, and no.
This depends on what we mean by ‘machine’ and what we mean by ‘like’. The human
mind operates on metaphor and analogy and imperfect simplified models for
complicated things, so it is quite right to say that all of these things are
‘like a machine’ in the same way as it is right to say that the planet Earth is
‘like a grapefruit’ or an electron is ‘like the planet Earth orbiting the sun’;
they are imperfect analogies that fit some properties of the object or
phenomena, and it is important to remember that this is to some extent true of
every model we use, no matter how complicated and beautiful . Every model will
be shot through with metaphors and analogies that carry emotional baggage for
good or evil, and every model will fail to correspond adequately to reality
under some conditions. These conditions may be near and common, and we might stick with our
model simply because it is the best rule of thumb we have; or they may be far
and few, and we may be misled into thinking that our model is the true picture
of reality. So yes, all these things are like machines, in that like machines,
there are conditions where simple inputs give simple outputs where we can
follow all the intermediate steps of cause and effect. We press the green
button, it engages lever C, which turns cog B, and some flap opens and we get a
can of Coke. Using the analogy of a machine for all sorts of things can be
incredibly useful. Of course, we know that living systems often rely on
complex systems with lots of inputs that surf the interface between chaos and
order (to hand wave around a lot of things that have a solid mathematical
basis) where we would be mad to design machines that work that way. And we know
that as far as we can tell, when we drill down towards more fundamental
building blocks of all the things we see, we get to the quantum world, where
particles behave less like machines than anything we can imagine.
All
in all, thinking of things in the universe as being like machines is usually going to be a
fruitful way to think about them; but we must remember that this is an analogy,
while at the same time not falling into the hippy-dippy trap of imparting
quantum weirdness to the macroscale.
2.
Is matter unconscious? I would answer not ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or ‘yes and
no’ but ‘meh’. My take on the
(un)importance of consciousness is here. I think it is quite clear that we are
part of a continuum of entities, and that a dog, for instance, has an inner
life the same as we do; and that a moth probably does, and that in some sense
so does any system that is taking in impressions from the outside and reacting to
them. It does not seem to me that the
fact that we are conscious is of any great importance for our understanding of
the universe. I feel quite strongly that setting up consciousness as something
distinct from the material world would be a retrograde step that would impede,
rather than improve, our understanding of reality; I am one of those materialists
who believe it is exhilarating and wonderful that everything is made of matter,
this fantastic and mysterious stuff.
As far as sentient galaxies and conscious
electrons – well, matter is strange. I have no evidence one way or another. Why
not? If these hypotheses can explain things otherwise unexplained, I see no reason
not to entertain them.
3.
Are the laws of nature fixed? This is a question
that is amenable to observation. Looking at rocks laid down billions of years
ago, and out into space at places billions of light years away, show things
that are consistent with the laws of nature being the same, or very, very, very
similar, everywhere and everywhen that is observable, until we get to these messy
‘singularities’. So in practical terms, the laws of nature are fixed, with the
exception of things that physicists are well aware of and worry about a lot.
This of course has nothing to do with the nature of reality in principle. The
laws of nature may not be fixed of necessity over the extent of time and space
over which we see them fixed, any more than the endless streams of traffic we
might watch from an overpass are necessarily going to stay in their right
lanes. Maybe it is just electrons obediently following Schrödinger’s equation
the way commuters are obediently following the road rules. We don’t know. But
for any practical purpose, sure. The laws of nature are fixed.
4.
Is the total amount of energy and matter in the
universe constant? This is a really a subset of 3. This is undoubtedly one of
those key laws of nature that are fixed for all practical purposes. So far,
every time we have thought this law wasn’t true, we have found another source
of energy to balance it out. But ‘continuous creation’ was a viable
cosmological hypothesis within living memory. And we know particles can ‘wink
into existence’ in the vacuum. But again,
like 3, *for any practical purpose* the answer is ‘yes’. I would be very, very,
very wary of postulating ‘maybe matter and energy aren’t conserved here’ as a
hypothesis to explain any macroscopic phenomenon. Experience has taught us that such a
hypothesis is very, very, very likely to be wrong.
5.
Is Nature purposeless? The only answer to this is ‘we don’t know’. We
cannot know without information about whatever larger reality our universe is
embedded in, information which we cannot obtain by any conceivable observation
made within our universe. It may be as futile and purposeless as a Quentin
Tarantino movie on the inside, and have been crafted for some purpose that makes sense on the outside with the same meticulous care, like a Quentin Tarantino movie has the purpose of making oodles of money.
6.
Is all heredity material? Trivially, the answer
is ‘no’, because culture is non-material heredity, and lots of social ‘higher’ vertebrates
have culture. New cultural behaviours have been observed being
developed and inherited in baboons, whales, probably magpies, and of course, us.
Less trivially, all the inherited features of organisms can be explained
perfectly well by material causes – recombination of genes, horizontal gene
transfer, maternal effect genes, environmental effects on gametes and
developing young, etc. There is *no need* to postulate an alternative
explanation based on some kind of mysterious woo that has no plausible
mechanism, to explain phenomena that are already well-explained in terms of
well-understood mechanisms. This
mysterious woo in Sheldrake’s case is what he calls ‘morphic resonance’ and his
explanation of the evidence for it is as unconvincing as twenty-seven
unconvincing things found in a viral list of ‘The Twenty-Seven Least Convincing
Arguments of 2015’.
7.
Are memories stored as material traces within
the brain? Well, you can erase memories by destroying bits of brain. Not feet, or eyeballs, or
sections of colon, or paperclips in a desk drawer, or trees in Africa, or
mountains on the dark side of the moon. This is good prima facie evidence that
memories are indeed localised in the brain, and again there is *no need* to
postulate an alternative mechanism based on mysterious woo.
8.
Is the mind inside the head? Well, yes, see #7.
9.
Is telepathy, etc., illusory? Probably. There is
no evidence for it that is screaming out to be explained. Like this paper about gender bias in physics teachers in the German-speaking world, it is just humans seeing
patterns in noise. IMHO. If evidence for telepathy or whatever emerges that screams out to be explained,
my patient conservative biases would lead me not to discount it out of hand,
but to seek explanation for it in terms of the physical science we already
know, rather than embracing the mother of all paradigm shifts into a brave new
world of woo. And I am confident that 'in terms of the physical science we already know' is where the explanation would be found.
10.
Is mechanistic medicine the only kind that
really works? Here again it depends on our definitions. There is absolutely no
compelling evidence that any treatment for anything is effective unless it affects
the physicochemical status of the human body. Do we understand the mechanism of
every treatment that is effective? We don’t. Modern medicine is still (scarily,
to me) very much a matter of ‘take this cocktail of drugs that have been
statistically shown to be effective’. Does
this mean treatments whose mechanisms are unknown will turn out to depend on
crazy new principles unrelated to existing science? Experience suggests the
answer to this is ‘no.’ Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that works, even
if we don’t understand the mechanisms yet.
So expressed with a bit of humility and nuance, there is
something in most of Sheldrake’s questions. He probably is a crazy ideologue
pushing a daft agenda (like Richard Dawkins); but a lot of what he is actually
saying is worth thinking about (again, like Richard Dawkins).
