Rupert Sheldrake

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

Rupert Sheldrake is considered by most scientists a benign 'crackpot' who has interesting theories on "morphic" fields. Before the 20th century, most scientists with radical ideas were historically considered crackpots for some period of time before their ideas achieved wide acceptance, however. One can take the position that such a reputation is likely to aid in ensuring serious peer review, if however one can find scientists willing to admit they are in fact peers.

Wikipedia says: In particular most scientists consider his view that the mind projects a field of attention or perception, to be pseudoscience. This view however is simply a way of stating an aspect of cognition, which is, light comes into the eye and stimulates rods and cones, but there is no account of how the conscious image in the so-called "mind" is formed and why one would so strongly believe that the object so formed is out in the world exactly as "seen". In effect, the idea that vision was a two-way process, was held by a great many minds in the past: In the 5th century BC, the atomist philosophers believed that vision was in fact 'catching' particles let off by the objects. The Pythagorean school had similar theories. Plato proposed that a single extended medium existed between the eyes and the soul. Aristotle emphasized this 'transparent' medium but rejected both the intromission and extromission - no material passed in nor out of the eye. Light was to him a 'state of the transparent', not really a substance. Light required no time for propagation. These schools of thought coexisted for a thousand years. From the 9th century to the 13th century, there was a great interest in this in early Muslim philosophy. Al-Kindi adopted Euclid's theory of visual power, and like Ptolemy thought it was a continuous beam of radiation, some transformation of medium - this radiation of power or force: "It's manifest that everything in this world produces its own rays like a star... emits rays in every direction." This view is of course the modern view of fields. Even words, though, in his view, could extend beyond the mind and have the same kind of projected power. But Kepler first stated the view that the eye was merely a receiver of light rays, not in any sense a projector. This among other things simply fixed the status of human as observer without assuming effects on what was observed - a theory that, despite some ferocious challenges launched by George Berkeley, held to the 19th century only to fall apart with quantum physics in the 20th century - to not yet be replaced.

The proliferation of forms, cultures and technologies, in the view of some theorists such as Liane Gabora, is evidence of creative energies at work in both nature and man, negentropic process that, in the simplest analysis of thermodynamics, conserves energy by adapting form to the local conditions. In Sheldrake's view, the existence of a form is itself sufficient to make it easier for that form to come to exist somewhere else. In the 1920s, embryo regeneration and the capacity for willow shoots to grow whole new trees, were thought (before the emergence of the gene theory) to imply some such fields or knowledge or memory in the environment. This Sheldrake called in 1973 morphic resonance based on the view of Henri Bergson that there was no account of memory whatsoever based on biology. In this view, nature may be a set not of laws, but of habits.

Morphogenetic field describes his theory and its relation to other ideas.

Morphogenetic Fields And Beyond has an interview with the man. And a sample of his BBC TV experiment.