AFTER DOING THIS blogging since May, 2006, writing things, sometimes long things day after day, I've found that I'm often stuck in how to find new things to write about. This spring, especially, has been difficult in that regard, or maybe it's the horrendous allergy season we're having or maybe it's finding it especially difficult to get my garden established - I have always depended on my garden for a good part of my economic survival, it's not just a hobby. Maybe it's being old.
Anyway, that's my problem, not yours. In lieu of finding out yet another thing to say about the shocking failure of English language liberal-democracy to withstand the degenerate effects of media deregulation and the removal of the safeguards that were put into place exactly to protect democracy from an unregulated media owned by billionaires and millionaires, that kind of moral degeneracy that is inherent in a secular legal culture that actually has no inclination to acknowledge the right to tell the truth and that there is no right to lie that should have legal protection, I've decided to do another transcription with some commentary of one of the most interesting things I've heard in a long time.
This time it's not a lecture but of what I believe is a recent conversation between the scientist Rupert Sheldrake and the philosopher David Bentley Hart on a topic chosen by Rupert Sheldrake, his recent thinking about fields and how they don't fit into the classical notions of science. It's not only a good example of Sheldrake's continuing and creative curiosity about the phenomena of the world around us but of the relevance of philosophical thinking to science. It also proves how bad for science it is that so few scientists can really engaged with philosophical thinking on the level that Sheldrake can. And also how, far from it being religion that impinges on science, for which scientists are always on guard against, they allow materialist-atheist even scientistic ideology in with welcoming arms. Sheldrake and Hart talk about things they've been thinking about a lot recently, I have to say that I've been thinking ever more about how the motive of atheism, even more than its associated ideologies of materialism and scientism has become for academia and academic culture what the Articles of Anglican faith used to be for places such as Oxford, something you must proclaim to work within if you're to be allowed in to it.
Note: This is a working transcription, not a verbatim one of every sound on the video. There are one or two words either I'm not hearing clearly or which are neither in my vocabulary nor the dictionaries I've got at hand. I'm working off-line on this so I don't have the access to online resources that I've become used to using when I have a working internet connection. I'm posting the video so you can hear it for yourself and see the demonstration that Rupert Sheldrake shows. Please let me know if there are any major inaccuracies. I might have more to say about it as after thinking more about it.
Rupert Sheldrake: Well, welcome David. I'm very pleased that you're here in Hampstead, England, and it's wonderful that we can actually meet in person.
David Bentley Hart: Thank you.
Rupert Sheldrake: I do have an agenda, there's a question I'm burning to discuss with you and whether or not you think it has any value or not I haven't the faintest idea.
But I've been thinking a lot about the basic principles of physics recently. And trying to think about them without the fog of mathematics that normally occludes all discussion and prevents all thought on the subject. And what I'm really interested in is the question of fields, the fields of nature which include the gravitational field, the electromagnetic field, quantum-matter fields, the strong and weak nuclear fields, and, in my own hypothesis, morphic fields. The fields as causes. But the things you and I and many people have discussed, that the mechanistic revolution in the seventeenth century, formal and final causes were amputated from nature, and we were left with just material and efficient causes. Or material and moving causes.
But when field theory was introduced into science in the 1840s by Faraday, it was a profound revolution that in many ways went beyond mechanistic understanding. And although fields have been crammed into a kind of classical science in the physics textbooks and all that kind of thing they don't follow the rules.
And I've got this illustration that I thought I might try out on you if you're up for it.
DBH: Oh, I'm always in.
[The Illustration]
RS: So, this is, obviously, a white plate and what I have here are a series of small bar magnets [very small, maybe a few centimeter or so, each]. There's one. And each one has a north and a south pole. And, now, normally when we're told about magnets, you know the North pole repels other North poles and attracts South poles. And it sounds as if repulsion and attraction are equivalent. You know, they attract or repel in equivalent ways. But, actually, what happens is there's a formative process going on. And what I'm going to do is just throw individual bar magnets down and if attraction and repulsion were equal you'd end up with a kind of random melee of magnets. That's not what happens.
[As he throws the magnets on the plate, they join up in first two lines of magnets and then the two lines join into one longer line of bar magnets and not fall separated in a random pattern.]
You see they. . . although attraction-repulsion, like poles repel, different poles attract, sounds as if it's equivalent, in practice attraction dominates. And what's happening is a formative effect, here. What happens is kind of a formative process. A kind of formative process where there's a kind of causation involved here which is not material causation because the magnetic field isn't material. And it's not really energetic in the sense that I have to throw them in with a certain amount of energy, what's pulling them together is force, a magnetic force. But that force is not moving energy it's something else. It pulls them towards an end. They're attracted, But when the magnet, each of those magnets when it attracts another magnet, it loses no energy when it attracts it. There's no expenditure of energy. And if you have a magnet on your fridge door and it's holding up a piece of paper on the fridge door, against the power of gravity, It can do it for years on end and it's not expending any energy to defy the power of gravity.
And so, when a magnetic field or a gravitational field is operating it's not expending energy.
Take the Earth's gravitational field, to look at another formative field. The formitative effect of gravitational fields is usually to create spheres, the moon the Sun the Earth. But say there's a meteor heading through empty space with a particular velocity. If it's attracted towards the Earth's gravitational field and zooms down and hits the Earth, with a big bang, , , the meteorite hasn't gained any . , , well, it's gained potential energy from the Earth's magnetic field which gives it kinetic energy, which makes it hit the Earth, but the Earth has expended no energy whatsoever in making that happen. In fact, when the meteorite arrives at the Earth the mass of the Earth increases a little bit and its gravitational pull increases. So, what I'm suggesting is that the gravitational field, or magnetic fields are acting as formal and final causes. You know, when Aristotle said a stone falls to Earth because it's seeking its proper place and it's a final cause, actually that seems to be the case. So, I wondered, I've never seen this discussed in philosophy of science anywhere.
DBH: It's very attractive, though, isn't it. Well, of course, when formal and final causes were banished from scientific language progressively in the seventeenth century, they had already, in a sense, been converted in the minds of many into extrinsic physical , , They were still being thought of in terms of mechanical energy, mechanical relations, push and pull but that's not what they actually are in Aristotle's thought, There they really are a set of rational relations that are logically prior to the actions that obey them. And are indiscernible from them.
But, actually, I'd never thought of this before. No energy expended.
Of course, that's always been the issue with fields, hasn't it. We don't really know what gravity is.
RS: No, Newton was baffled by it and he never came up with, his ultimate answer was in terms of the divine will. He thought matter, itself, couldn't have the power to act on all other matter through the universe at a distance.
DBH: The very notion of a formal cause is a thing that had been so utterly altered by the early modern period, in peoples' imagination. It was already a sort of tacit mechanism, that it had come into scientific, or natural philosophy, as early as the 14th century and I think that by the 17th century it was fairly established as a misreading the Aristotelian tradition. But what you're saying makes, I have to say, a surprising kind of sense to me. Because, of course, what a formal cause really is in Aristotle's thought is a rational relation of order that explains the possibility that doesn't merely seem to be inherent merely in matter and motion. A set of ordered relations that are dictated by an antecedent finality that things aren't necessarily aiming at but the perfectio, the complete, expression of their potentials. It's an entirely different understanding of causality than the mechanistic picture. And you might be right, maybe one of the reasons that we find fields so baffling, trying to define them, is because we are using a truncated causal-etiological language . . . see, you've taken me off-guard here. . .
RS: That's all right, I mean that may be all right for me, but maybe not for you, it's, the thing is, well, it's only recently that I've got excited about this, because I've always thought my whole hypothesis of morphic or formative causation, morphic fields is all about morphic fields as formative causes, as formal causes. But it's only very recently that I've come to realize that all fields have that property. And that if you say that, what you're saying about Aristotle, it's not just contained in the matter of the movement, then these magnets we just looked at lining up is a formal pattern that's to do with rational relations and stuff, it has nothing to do with the matter. Because the matter of the iron magnets, if you demagnetize an iron magnet by heating it up, the actual amount of iron is still the same, the weight is still the same, the molecular, the atomic constitution in crystalline form is much the same, all that's happened is it's lost its magnetism. And so there is a kind of - it's not a material cause, the iron that's giving this effect and it's not the way that I threw them on the plate that's causing this effect because if I'd thrown little pieces of ordinary iron, say demagnetized they wouldn't have lined up like that.
My guess would be that people who are entirely caught up in materailist-atheist devotees of scientism who are always making the most extreme leaps from observations or, even more so, complete speculations by scientists about physical phenomena to the most attenuated arguments for their ideology would pooh-pooh this based on the simplicity of the illustration with the bar magnets - ignoring the fact that the entire basis of especially modern science rests, ultimately, on observations as simple or even more mundane than the one Rupert Sheldrake uses as a motivation to thinking about what is, as both of them say, something that seems to never have been addressed before in the literature of science or natural philosophy. The reality, though, couldn't be more widespread as those fields which Sheldrake lists permeate the entirety of physical existence and, so, everything we perceive of it. If he is correct then the dogma of non-teleology in conventional science is not only not always valid, it is entirely invalid on the most basic of levels. What implications that would have for those things that we all leap to about the ultimate meaning of things not physically demonstrable could be, one of the things that would have to be imperiled by it is one of the cornerstones of materialist-atheist-scientistic ideology.
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