Questioning Science's Core Assumptions: A New Perspective

Science is trapped in dogmatic beliefs that limit exploration and understanding of consciousness and reality.

### Questioning the Assumptions of Modern Science: A Call for Radical Skepticism
* 🌍 The speaker expresses pleasure in visiting Krakow and acknowledges the audience's effort in learning English, highlighting a **cultural exchange**.
* 🔬 He critiques the widespread belief in the "**science delusion**," which posits that science **fully understands reality**, attributing this belief to technological advancements that seem to **validate scientific doctrines**.
* 📜 The speaker outlines ten fundamental assumptions of modern science, starting with the notion that **nature is mechanical** and likening living beings to machines, a metaphor that **lacks empirical testing**.
* 🧠 He discusses the assumption that matter is **unconscious**, tracing its roots to **Cartesian dualism**, which separates the material world from a **spiritual realm**, leading to a **mechanistic view of life**.
* 💡 The speaker emphasizes the need for **radical skepticism** towards these assumptions, asserting that many are **deeply questionable and not adequately supported by evidence**, which **constrains scientific progress**.
* 🌌 He highlights the problematic nature of dark matter and dark energy, noting that **95% of the universe remains mysterious and unobservable**, challenging the assumption of a **closed system of matter and energy**.
* 🔮 The discussion extends to consciousness, proposing that it cannot merely be a byproduct of brain activity, suggesting instead a **panpsychist view** where consciousness is a **fundamental aspect of all matter**.
* 📈 The speaker concludes by urging a **reevaluation of these dogmas**, suggesting that such questioning could lead to a **more expansive and exciting future** for scientific inquiry.

[Music] It's a great pleasure to be in this beautiful city, and I've had a chance to look at some of the old city today. It's also a great pleasure to be able to speak to you here in Krakow, where I've

never been before. In English, you've gone to all the time and trouble to learn English, and it makes it much easier for me, and I really appreciate the fact you've done that. I can assure you this would not work reciprocally if anyone went from Poland and gave a talk in

London; no one would understand it except other Poles, of course. The science delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality in principle, leaving only the details to be filled in. This is a very widespread belief in our society, and it's supported, it seems, it's made more

convincing by the tremendous trailer triumphs of technology: modern medicine, jet planes, the internet, modern technologies, smartphones—all these things make it look as if science must be right, because it underlies all these completely transformative things that are happening in our world. Very few

people question the underlying doctrines of science. And yet, what's happened in the sciences is that the method of scientific inquiry—critical discussion, hypothesis, empirical evidence—the scientific method is very powerful and continues to be essential. But the sciences have become trapped in a kind

of dogmatic belief system or worldview, which has been in place since the late 19th century. It's not really science; it's a set of assumptions which are part of a philosophy of nature—the philosophy of materialism. The materialist philosophy says that matter is the only

reality and that everything's made of matter and that matter is fundamentally unconscious. We live in an unconscious, machine-like universe. So that's the basic assumption of materialism. There are 10 basic dogmas on which modern science is based. I'm going to list the 10. I won't have time

to discuss them all this evening, but to start with the first of them is that nature is mechanical. Nature is like a machine. The universe is like a machine. Our animals are like machines. Plants are like machines, and we're like machines. Our brains are computers. Our eyes are

cameras. Our hearts are pumps. In the words of Richard Dawkins, we are lumbering robots. We are just machines. That's the first assumption, and of course this isn't really a testable theory. It's just a metaphor. The old metaphor, which everyone in Europe believed until the

17th century, was that nature was like an organism. The home universe was like an organism. Animals and plants were organisms. The earth was a living organism. The stars were organisms with a consciousness of their own. It was a completely different way of thinking of

nature. The mechanistic revolution in science replaced the idea of an animate organism with the idea of inanimate machinery. The second assumption, which I've already mentioned, is that everything's made up of matter or physical substance, which is unconscious. The third assumption is that all of this

is governed by eternal laws of nature that were already there at the moment of the Big Bang. The mathematical laws of nature are fixed. They've always been the same. They always will be the same, and they were there at the moment at the Big Bang. The fourth assumption is the total

The amount of matter and energy in the universe is always the same, at least since the Big Bang, when it all suddenly came into being. As my friend Terence McKenna used to say, modern science is based on the principle, give us one free miracle and we'll

explain the rest. And the one free miracle is the appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it from nothing in a single instant at the moment of the Big Bang. The fifth assumption is that nature's purposeless. The universe is a

machine. It has no purpose. Evolution has no purpose. We're here as a result of blind forces of natural selection and chance transmutations. The sixth assumption is that memories are stored inside the brain. Everything you remember is stored somewhere inside your head. No one quite knows how. Attempts to

find these memories have failed, but the assumption is that it must all be inside the head. If everything's material, memory must be material and therefore it must be in your brain. And this fits very well with the materialist argument, which was essentially atheistic because if all

your memories are inside your brain, when you die and your brain decays, all your memories will be wiped out. Everything to do with your personal identity will be destroyed. So all religious ideas about survival of bodily death must be untrue if you believe this materialist theory.

The seventh assumption is that biological inheritance is material. Everything you inherit is inherited materially in your genes or in epigenetic modifications of the genes. Of course, there's also cultural inheritance, but biological inheritance is thought to be material. The eighth assumption is that minds are nothing but the activity

of brains, your mind is your brain. Minds are what brains do, as many materialist philosophers express it. Your entire conscious mind is the activity of your brain. It's inside your head. The next assumption is that psychic phenomena like telepathy are illusory.

They can't possibly exist because the mind is in the brain, therefore your thoughts or intentions can't possibly influence other people many miles away because it's all inside your head. And the tenth assumption is that mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really

works. The body's a machine, you're a machine, the brain's a machine. Therefore, the only ways to treat it are physical, through surgery, or chemical, through drugs. And of course, surgery has made astonishing improvements. There are many amazing drugs and we all depend upon them. But this view of medicine is

dealing only with the physical and the chemical is a very limited view. But nevertheless, from the point of view of the mechanistic medicine assumption, that's the only kind that really works. All alternative and complementary therapies, all miraculous healings, all healings through prayer or through

pilgrimage must be illusory or if they happen at all, they're nothing but the placebo effect. But of course, the placebo effect is itself unexplained because what it shows is that our expectations and hopes affect our medical recoveries. Well, these are the ten basic assumptions

which are not usually taught as a series of doctrines. They're simply absorbed by people as they go through the educational system by a kind of intellectual osmosis. If they were spelled out more clearly, it would be easier to look at them skeptically, but

most people don't even realize they're making these assumptions. They don't think their assumptions, they just think they're the truth. And so the kind of atheistic skeptics that all of us encounter from time to time who say, "I don't believe in God, I believe in"

science," don't think that what they have is a belief system. They think they know the truth. Everyone else has belief systems - Catholics, Protestants, Hindus, Muslims, etc. - but what they know is the truth. Well, what I'm arguing is it's not the truth, it's a set of assumptions. And what we

need to do is apply the spirit of radical skepticism to look at these assumptions on which contemporary science itself is based. It's a thoroughly scientific thing to do, to look scientifically at assumptions. When we do that, we find that very few of these assumptions are supported by

evidence at all. Every single one of them turns out to be deeply questionable. And when we question these assumptions, when we look at the alternatives, all sorts of new possibilities open up. I think that these assumptions constrict science and stop it from expanding and growing

in a way that it could. I'm going to start with the assumption that the total amount of matter and energy is always the same. This is something all of us learn at school - the principle of conservation of matter and energy. It applies to closed systems, but the whole

universe is supposed to be a closed system, and so therefore the total amount in the universe is supposed to be the same. Now, most people never dream of questioning this assumption. I didn't question it myself until a few years ago, having had a scientific education, I

questioned most of the others, but this is the last one that I thought of questioning. But when you actually look at it, it turns out that it's not at all as simple as it first seems. Physicists themselves are much less intimidated by the so-called laws of nature than the

rest of us. They, after all, are the people who codify the laws of nature. Only when, as soon as galaxies were discovered in the 20th century, it became clear that the galaxies, the stars in the galaxies, were being held together much more than they ought to be if it

all just depended on gravitation based on the amount of matter in the stars, in perhaps in dark stars, in planets, in gas clouds. The gravity, the galaxy has much more gravitational effect on its stars than it ought to have if you just had the amount of the ordinary matter. 

The galaxies would fall apart. The stars would be flung out. They didn't cease going round in orbit and more ever, different galaxies attract each other in a way that's more than they ought to if it's just a matter of the known amount of matter in them. This was a big problem

for physicists and it was proposed first in the 1920s and 30s, but no one took it that seriously then, but we're increasingly often until it became mainstream in the 1980s, that there must be an extra kind of matter in galaxies

which we couldn't see, which we know nothing about, but which has to be there to explain the behavior of galaxies. The assumption is that the existing scientific theories of gravitation must be correct, and if they don't fit the facts, then there must be more matter

there than we knew about how much more matter well simple you just work out how much more matter you need to balance the equations and titrate in that amount of matter that's the amount of dark matter there is if the equations show the galaxies ought to be behaving

differently put in a bit more dark matter add in some here take away some there since no one knows what it is and can't observe it it's entirely up to physicists to tell us how much there is and they can adjust the amount at will

they've created something like four or five times more matter than ordinary matter at the stroke of a pen having created all this extra dark matter the mass of the universe became much greater than it was thought to be before so much so that there ought to be extra

gravitation would've stopped the universe expanding until it finally stopped expanding and began to contract again and it would all end in the opposite of the Big Bang known as the Big Crunch well around around 1999 it was discovered that the universe is not in fact expanding slower and slower

it's expanding faster and faster contrary to the expectations of physicists based on the amount of dark matter in the universe so how do we explain that well simple there must be another form of energy called dark energy that pushes the universe apart how much is the just

the right amount to explain the facts so we now have a situation where 95% of the universe is made up of dark energy and dark matter and we haven't a clue what they are we don't know what they do apart from the things they're supposed

to do to make the equations work we don't know if they can be converted into regular matter and energy or regular matter and energy can turn into dark matter and energy in which case they would not, it would just disappear. So this is an extraordinary situation. Physics has shown us that we literally

know nothing or next to nothing about 95% of physical reality. So how can we be sure that the total amount of dark matter and dark energy is always the same? But actually, we can't. The equations of dark energy say that the amount per unit volume is constant, so as the

universe expands, the amount of dark energy increases. The universe is now a perpetual motion machine. Well, these are extraordinary aspects of physics. They completely change the old view that we were brought up with, that we thought we knew about matter and energy and what

they were. We don't know, and it may be they don't even exist. It may be that if we had a different theory of gravitation or a different theory of galactic organization, it wouldn't be necessary to suppose that these unobserved materials and

actually exist. Well, that's one area where there's a huge amount still unknown, and this is relatively uncontroversial. This is pretty standard physics nowadays. What I want to turn to now is the assumption that matter is unconscious. This is one of the most

fundamental assumptions of the materialist worldview. To understand how we got to our present situation, it's helpful to look at the history. In the 17th century, when the Scientific Revolution took place, the view of matter that we now have was first formulated by

René Descartes, the French philosopher, was one of the first people to put forward the idea that the universe is a giant unconscious machine. Animals are machines, plants are machines, and we're machines. Descartes made a famous distinction between the world of

matter – matter is unconscious and it's in space and time. The whole universe is made of matter – but there was another reality, spirit, which was not in space and time, not physical, and basically immortal, timeless. And this was not part of the realm of science, the

realm of spirit in Descartes' view included three basic components: God, angels, and human minds. Those were outside space and time. And there was this radical dualism between unconscious nature and conscious minds. So this led to an extreme split. It meant that humans were totally different from all other

animals, so it's okay to vivisect them or factory farm them because they're just machines, whereas we have this rational spirit. It led to a radical split between mind and body, because the mind is immaterial, the body's material, and nobody could explain how this immaterial spirit could

influence the body. And it led to a radical split between the realms of science and religion. Religion got God, angels, and human minds, together with human morality. Science got the entire physical universe, including human bodies and brains. And God was, as it were, withdrawn from the universe. The universe

and I became automatic machinery that worked by itself, with no need for God. And God's realm was confined just to human minds, angels, and the spiritual realm. This is totally different from the view in the Middle Ages, where God was within nature as well as beyond it, where

All nature was alive; the whole universe had a kind of soul. The earth was a living organism. The philosophy of nature that gave us the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe was radically different from this mechanistic philosophy that we've grown so used to in the 19th

century. A lot of people thought, "We don't want two things: matter and spirit. Two's too many. We just want one thing." Some philosophers said, "Spirit's the only reality." That's the idealist school of philosophy. But many philosophers said, "No,

matter's the only reality. There's no such thing as spirit. God and angels simply don't exist, and human consciousness is just something to do with the brain." So at one stroke they had shifted the philosophy from dualism to materialism, mechanistic materialism, the current

orthodoxy of science. It has been since the late 19th century and got rid of God and angels, the whole spiritual realm. All spirits disappeared, but human consciousness remained. And the continued existence of human consciousness is what is causing this mechanistic materialist

worldview to break up. It's happening before our very eyes because for sentiment for decades scientists just ignored consciousness. They didn't think I'll talk about it. They assumed it was nothing but brain activity. So all you need to do is just look at brains and study nervous systems

in more detail, and finally you'll understand consciousness. But in the last 20 or 30 years there's been a growth of an area of science called consciousness studies, where scientists have started looking at the nature of consciousness itself, not just ordinary psychology, but

mystical experiences, out-of-body experiences, psychedelic experiences, near-death experiences, and a whole range of religious and spiritual experiences. Meanwhile, there's been an enormous growth of spiritual practices like meditation in which many people are doing practices which deal with the very

basis of consciousness itself. So the situation has changed and there's now a debate about consciousness. Is it just the brain, the very, and if it is just the brain, why should unconscious matter in the brain give rise to conscious minds? That's why in the philosophy of mind the

very existence of human consciousness is called the hard problem. It's the hard problem because you cannot solve this problem within materialist terms. Some materialist philosophers of mind argue that consciousness doesn't really exist. It ought not to exist in a materialist world and in fact, it doesn't exist or if

it does, it doesn't do anything. It's just a kind of epiphenomenon of what goes on in our brains, like the kind of shadow that doesn't do anything or as some of them suggest that consciousness is an illusion produced by brains. The trouble with that of course

is it doesn't solve the problem because illusion is a mode of consciousness. You can't have an illusion unless you're conscious. So it presupposes consciousness. So this debate has gone round and round in circles around the hard problem and one of the things that happened has

happened is that some materialist philosophers have said okay, we've got to get a way out of this, and the best way out of it is to abandon old-style materialism and adopt a philosophy called panpsychism. Pan means everywhere, psyche means mind or soul or spirit or

or my mind or soul and so the idea is that there's some kind of mind even in electrons or atoms that everything in nature has not just bodies but some kind of mind and therefore the emergence of consciousness in humans is not a difference of kind, something totally

different emerging from inanimate machinery but a difference of degree, a more complex form of consciousness emerging from less complex forms of consciousness. This philosophy of panpsychism is not new, it's basically a modern version of what used to be called animism, the belief that there are

psyches or souls throughout nature. Philosophy in Christian Europe in the Middle Ages was essentially animist. The philosophy of Aristotle modified based on Thomas Aquinas taught that all animals have souls or plants have souls. The soul is the form of the body and in

fact the word animal in English and in Latin comes from the Latin word 'animal' which means soul. So this panpsychism is a rediscovery or a repopulation of a kind of mind throughout nature. There were two famous panpsychism philosophers in the 17th century, both of

them reacting against Descartes. One was Leibniz who suggested that all self-organizing units have bodies and minds that each reflects the universe from its own endpoint of view. He called them monads. The other was Spinoza who

thought that the whole of nature was essentially the body of God and God was the mind of nature. It was a kind of pantheist philosophy. The most interesting animist or panpsychism philosopher in the 20th century was Alfred North Whitehead who was

Writing in the 1920s, a British philosopher who talked in terms of the philosophy of organism, the universe is not a machine, it's an organism. Whitehead was a mathematician as well as a philosopher and was one of the first

people to appreciate how radical quantum theory was in the 1920s. He got it. Most people took decades to get that what a radical break this was from traditional physics. Quantum theory says that electrons and atoms and protons are not just little bits of stuff. They're not

solid bits of matter like small billiard balls. They're waves. They're waves. They're processes in time. And a wave cannot exist at an instant because it takes time to wave. It can't exist at a point in space because it takes space to wave in. It cannot have an instantaneous

wave. That's at root the reason for the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics. Whitehead realized that if electrons and protons and atoms were waves, they were processes in time, they were processes, not things. And if they were processes, they had a past and a

future. There was this gain from the past towards the future. He then came up with an extremely interesting idea which still hasn't been fully worked out. It's just begun to be discussed again. And that is that this nature of matter as time in time gives us a new way of

thinking about the relation of mind and body. Old views of mind and body relationship are that the mind is somehow inside the body, and the outer world is out there. We talk about the inner life and the outer world. These are spatial metaphors, but he thought the relation of mind and

The body was a relationship in time, not space. The mind, he thought, was the future pole, like in a polarity between the past and the future. The mind was the future pole, and the body is the past pole. The mind is concerned with possibilities, and these possibilities are not actual

because they don't become actual until there's a decision and one of them has become actual. As soon as it becomes actual, it's measurable, it's a fact, but it's in the past. For example, in the case of an electron, if you want to know what

an electron will do, you work out the Schrodinger equation of quantum mechanics, which tells you all the possible things that electron could do. It's a description of possibilities, that's like the mind of the electron. It's got all these possible things when

the mind, in turn, when the electron interacts with a physical measuring instrument or with something, a photographic film or an atom or molecule, when it interacts with anything, these possibilities collapse down and become an actual action. This is sometimes called the collapse of the wavefunction.

These possibilities collapse down and become an observable fact, but that's instantly in the past, and now a new set of possibilities open up. Now, our minds are like that too. Our minds are concerned with, our conscious minds are arenas of possibility. Thoughts, images, plans, intentions are

possibilities in our minds. Dreams are accounts of possibility. A lot of our conscious activity is considering alternative possibilities and choosing among them. For example, all of us chose to be here tonight. The fact we're here now, we made that decision and put it into practice, means it's an observable

Objective fact that we're in this room, we can be seen, measured, photographed, etc. There was a time when we were making up our minds, we could have done other things, we could have been elsewhere. There's evening, there were other possibilities for this evening, but when we made the

decision among all those possibilities to do this, well then this is what happens. It's an observable fact, but it's now in the past, and our minds are opening again to new possibilities, which after all is what this talk is about. So the role of consciousness is about

choice and possibility. Our habits are largely unconscious because we don't need to make choices. So this idea of mind-body relations gives us a completely different view of the way nature works. The mental causation is a stream of causation working from the future towards the past, whereas physical

causation of the kind we're familiar with from physics works from the past towards the future. Again, in the Middle Ages, in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas and in the philosophy of Aristotle, to explain everything you had to have not just the physical

cause, on the matter of which something's made, you also had to have the goal or the intention towards which something was attracted. Everything in nature was attracted towards a goal according to Aristotle. A growing animal or plant is attracted towards the goal of reaching

its mature form. A hungry dog is attracted towards the goal of eating some meat and finding a bone. It's goal-directed behavior, and this purpose of or teleological activity involves a kind of stream of causation from a virtual future towards the present. So this way

of thinking about the mind fits with a quite sophisticated, well-developed philosophy which has been rejected in favor of the mechanistic theory of just matter and energy, but which makes much more sense of mind and consciousness. I want to turn now to the doctrine that

the mind is nothing but the activity of the brain because what this doctrine tells us is that our minds are just inside our heads—it's all in the brain. Instead, I think that it makes more sense to think of minds as being like fields which are spread out in space and time.

We're used to the idea of a magnet being a physical object with an invisible field around it—a region of influence, the magnetic field. We're used to the idea of the Earth having a gravitational field inside it and stretching out invisibly far beyond the Earth, keeping

the moon in its orbit. We're familiar with mobile phones which have electromagnetic fields inside the material phone, but they stretch out invisibly far beyond the telephone. So fields are an accepted part of modern physics, but they're not exactly matter. They're physical but not material.

Materialists expand their view, say, 'OK, we'll include fields as well.' They used to think they were material, made of matter—the ether—now they don't. But anyway, I'm not discussing that particular point. What I'm discussing is that how the best to think of our minds—

are they just material things like mechanical systems, just based on contact, or are they field-like systems, which means they could stretch out far beyond our brains just like many purely physical systems like magnets and mobile phones do? Well, I think they stretch out beyond our brains. I think our minds are

extended far beyond our brains. The easiest way to understand this is to think about the nature of vision. What happens when you see me standing here now? You all know the standard answer: light reflected from me, it goes through the electromagnetic field, enters your

eyes, goes through the lens, inverted images on your retinas, changes in the cone cells, impulses up the optic nerve, and activity in various regions of the brain. And we now know which regions become active in more detail than ever before thanks to brain scanners. But does that explain vision?

Well, no, it doesn't. It just describes what happens in the brain when you're seeing something. It doesn't explain why you're conscious of what you see. There's nothing in neurophysiology that tells you this is conscious. It doesn't tell you that you can't work while you're

conscious of what you see. And that, in fact, is an aspect of the hard problem. Consciousness itself is unexplained, but the second question is the one I want to focus on. Where is this happening when you see me now? Where is your image of me? The official view is that it's inside

Rupert Sheldrake - The Science Delusion

ASPIRE Poland

Speaker expresses pleasure at being in Krakow and speaking to the audience.

Speaker appreciates the audience's effort in learning English.

Introduces the concept of 'science delusion' - the belief that science fully understands reality.

Technological advancements reinforce this delusion, despite underlying assumptions needing questioning.

Scientific method is powerful, but science is trapped in a dogmatic belief system.

First dogma: Nature is mechanical (like a machine).

Second dogma: Everything is made of unconscious matter/physical substance.

Third dogma: Universe governed by eternal, unchanging laws of nature since the Big Bang.

Fourth dogma: Amount of matter and energy in the universe is constant since the Big Bang.

Sixth dogma: Memories are stored inside the brain.

Challenging the Dogma of Constant Matter and Energy

Discussion of the principle of conservation of matter and energy, questioning its applicability to the universe.

Galaxies' behavior suggests more matter than observed (dark matter).

Universe's accelerating expansion points to dark energy.

95% of the universe is composed of unknown dark matter and dark energy.

Challenging the Dogma of Unconscious Matter and the Rise of Panpsychism

Historical context: Descartes' mechanistic view of the universe.

Shift from dualism to materialism, excluding spirit and God.

Growth of consciousness studies and spiritual practices challenges materialism.

Introduction to panpsychism: the idea that everything has some form of consciousness.

Quantum theory and Whitehead's philosophy of organism challenge the materialistic view.

Challenging the Dogma of the Mind as Brain Activity and Extended Mind Theory

Minds as fields extending beyond the brain, using the analogy of magnetic and electromagnetic fields.

Neurophysiology doesn't explain consciousness; it only describes brain activity.

Visual perception as a projection, not a display inside the brain.

The phenomenon of feeling stared at from behind, challenging the mind-in-the-brain theory.

Discussion of intention and its effects, using the example of telepathic phone calls.

Experimental evidence supporting telepathic communication.

Telepathy in animals, particularly the example of pets knowing when their owners are coming home.

The mind's extension into spiritual and psychic dimensions.

Summary: Questioning scientific dogmas opens up new possibilities and a more exciting future for science.