[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 Kraków, 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.

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 seems to be made more convincing by the tremendous triumphs of technology, modern medicine, jet planes, the internet, and modern technologies like 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 says that matter is the only reality and that everything is 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 ten basic dogmas on which modern science is based. I'm going to list the ten; 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 whole 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 about 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 is 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 of the Big Bang.

The fourth assumption is that the total 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 arise from nothing in a single instant at the moment of the Big Bang.

The fifth assumption is that nature is purposeless.

The universe is a machine; it has no purpose. Evolution has no purpose. We're here as a result of blind forces of nature selection and chance mutations.

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.

This fits very well with the materialist argument, which is 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 after 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.

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. Of course, surgery has made astonishing improvements there.

There are many amazing drugs, and we all depend upon them. But this view of medicine, which deals only with the physical and the chemical, is a very limited view. However, 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 they're 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 is 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.

As soon as galaxies were discovered in the 20th century, it became clear that the stars in the galaxies were being held together much more than they ought to be if it all just depended on gravitational forces.

on the amount of matter in the stars, in perhaps dark matter, in planets, in gas clouds, the gravity in the galaxy has much more gravitational effect on its stars than it ought to have.

If you just had the amount of ordinary matter, the galaxies would fall apart; the stars would be flung out; they wouldn't cease going around in orbit.

Moreover, 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.

However, we increasingly often accepted it 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, simply 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.

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 stop the universe from 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 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, simply put, 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 if regular matter and energy can turn into dark matter and energy, in which case they would not; it would just disappear.

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 had 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 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 who was one of the first people to put forward the idea of the universe as a giant unconscious machine: animals and machines, plants and machines, and we're machines.

Descartes made a famous di stinction between the world of matter, which is unconscious and exists 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, immortal and timeless.

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 while the body is material, and nobody could explain how this immaterial spirit could influence the body.

It led to a radical split between the realms of science and religion. Religion encompassed God, angels, and human minds, along with human morality, while science encompassed the entire physical universe, including human bodies and brains.

God was, as it were, withdrawn from the universe; the universe became automatic machinery that worked by itself, with no need for God.

God's realm was confined to human minds, angels, and the spiritual realm.

This is totally different from the view in the Middle Ages, where God was both within nature and beyond it, and where all nature was alive. The whole universe was thought to have a kind of soul; the Earth was seen as 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 didn't want two things—matter and spirit—two's too many; we just want one thing.

Some philosophers said spirit is the only reality—that's the idealist school of philosophy.

But many philosophers said no, matter is 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 shifted the philosophy from dualism to materialism—mechanistic materialism, the current orthodoxy of science 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 centuries scientists just ignored consciousness.

They didn't think it was worth talking about; 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 engaging in practices that deal with the very basis of consciousness itself.

Rupert Sheldrake - The Science Delusion

Scripts