Innovation (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, May 04, 2013, 11:26 (4222 days ago) @ BBella

BBELLA: I wasn't sure where to insert this article but figured here was as good as any. Although this is an older article, what I really like about it is it hits on almost every subject, except first cause, that has been recently discussed here. I've always felt that Sheldrake is manifesting the bridge between the materialist and the mystic on the road toward the theory of everything... -http://dandrasincom.ipage.com/Newscience/Newscience/Sheldrake_2.html-DAVID: I've been fascinated by Sheldrake and his ideas since I ran across him in Wim Kayzer's book, A Glorious Accident, which I have mentioned before. Sheldrake expounds at length on the ideas in the article you found. I put a number of his thoughts in my book. Sheldrake believes in species consciousness and I do also. He thinks of memory as occurring in a brain like a radio receiver picking up past signals. He may well be right.-It is indeed a fascinating article, and it makes me wonder why David is so opposed to panpsychist ideas, which are very similar. (Whitehead was a panexistentialist AND a panentheist!) Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields may not be quite the same as "intelligent energy", but clearly they are the source of information that passes not only between living organisms but also between particles of inanimate matter, as follows:-QUOTE: However, during the past 50 or 60 years a new approach has been under development -- largely among people who've actually worked on living embryos rather than disconnected bits of tissues in laboratories. This is the "holistic" or "organismic" approach put forward in the west by Alfred North Whitehead and others. In this view, nature is seen as composed of hierarchies of autonomous levels of wholeness and organization, or "holons", to use Arthur Koestler's term. For example, cells inside a tissue, inside an organ, inside a whole organism. In the inorganic realm you would have subatomic particles, atoms, molecules and crystals. In the holistic approach, a morphogenetic field governs each of these wholes.-QUOTE: I'd particularly look for these fields in social insects such as termites, who perform incredible cooperative feats of morphogenesis such as building complex mounds, and tunneling from both ends to meet precisely in the middle.-This is a perfect parallel to the manner in which cells may cooperate to form new organs.-Q: What are M-fields "made of"? Are they a new kind of energy? 
A: They relate to energy, but I don't think of them as being energetic in the usual sense. You could just as well ask what gravitational fields are made of. The most common answer would be "curved space". The whole concept of fields in general is a very difficult thing to grasp.-During our discussions we have had the same difficulty! David quite rightly challenged me on what I meant by "intelligence", and although Sheldrake doesn't think of his fields as "intelligent energy", that seems to me no more and no less nebulous than his "morphogenetic fields".-
QUOTE: When we come to the question of the creation of new fields, we're right back on the borderline of science and philosophy where you'll never get clear agreement anyway. The materialists will say all innovation must be due to chance mutations and the nonmaterialists would say there's a creative factor underlying nature and guiding these things. Natural science -- and this includes my own hypothesis -- deals with regularity or repetition in nature, not originality or creativity, so from a scientific point of view this will always remain a wide-open question.-Again he has hit the nail on the head. Innovation is the key issue. The "creative factor" is what David identifies as God, materialists as chance, and my particular panpsychist hypothesis as "intelligent energy".-Q: ... how long has it taken you to develop your theory to its present stage? -A: I started thinking along these lines as an undergraduate at Cambridge. It seemed to me basically implausible that plants and animals were nothing but complicated machines.-Good for him! "Intelligent energy" may be the X factor! BBella is right, Sheldrake covers all aspects of our discussion except first cause, which he understandably steers clear of. However, I'd still like to take the concept one step further back. In my particular panpsychist hypothesis I'm suggesting that first cause non-conscious energy first gained consciousness from WITHIN matter, and this conscious energy remains there, manipulating it until it disintegrates, whereupon the energy is released. Just like the hypothetical souls of dead people, this energy is still present in the manner Sheldrake indicates ... creating a tiger field, a crystal field, a human field. But these are individual intelligences that link up ... they are not a single entity. Extra-sensitive human individuals may link up with other individuals in the human field through so-called psychic phenomena, while living plants and our fellow animals do not have the mental barriers that we have, and can link up instinctively. All speculation, of course, but it has a certain pleasing coherence.