in principle, leaving only the details to be filled in. This is a very widespread belief

in our society. It's the kind of belief system of people who say "I don't believe in God,

I believe in science." It's a belief system which has now been spread to the entire world.

But there's a conflict in the heart of science between science as a method of inquiry based

on reason, evidence, hypothesis and collective investigation, and science as a belief system

or a world view. And unfortunately the world view aspect of science has come to inhibit

and constrict the free inquiry which is the very lifeblood of the scientific endeavour.

Since the late nineteenth century, science has been conducted under the aspect of a belief

system or a world view which is essentially that of materialism; philosophical materialism.

And the sciences are now wholly owned subsidiaries of the materialist world view. I think that

as we break out of it, the sciences will be regenerated. What I do in my book The Science

Delusion, which is called Science Set Free in the United States, is take the ten dogmas,

or assumptions of science, and turn them into questions. Seeing how well they stand up if

you look at them scientifically. None of them stand up very well.

What I'm going to do is first run through what these ten dogmas are. And then I'll only

have time to discuss one or two of them in a bit more detail. But essentially the ten

dogmas, which are the world view of most educated people all over the world are:

First, that nature's mechanical or machine-like. The universe is like a machine, animals and

plants are like machines, we're like machines. In fact, we are machines. We are lumbering

robots, in Richard Dawkins' vivid phrase. With brains that are genetically programmed

computers. Second, matter is unconscious. The whole universe

is made up of unconscious matter. There's no consciousness in stars, in galaxies, in

planets, in animals, in plants, and there ought not in any of us either, if this theory's

true. So a lot of the philosophy of mind over the last hundred years has been trying to

prove that we're not really conscious at all. So the matter's unconscious, then the laws

of nature are fixed. This is dogma three. The laws of nature are

the same now as they were at the time of the big bang and they'll be the same forever.

Not just the laws; but the constants of nature are fixed, which is why they are called constants.

Dogma four: The total amount of matter and energy is always the same. It never changes

in total quantity, except at the moment of the big bang when it all sprang into existence

from nowhere in a single instant. The fifth dogma is that nature's purposeless.

There are no purposes in all nature and the evolutionary process has no purpose or direction.

Dogma six, the biological hereditary is material. Everything you inheret is in your genes, or

in epigenetic modifications of the genes, or in cytoplasmic inheritance. It's material.

Dogma seven, memories are stored inside your brain as material traces. Somehow everything

you remember is in your brain in modified nerve endings, phosphorylated proteins, no-one

knows how it works. But nevertheless almost everyone in the scientific world believes

it must be in the brain. Dogma eight, your mind is inside your head.

All your consciousness is the activity of your brain, nothing more.

Dogma nine, which follows from dogma eight, psychic phenomena like telepathy are impossible.

Your thoughts and intentions cannot have any effect at a distance because your mind's inside

your head. Therefore all the apparent evidence for telepathy and other psychic phenomena

is illusory. People believe these things happen, but it's just because they don't know enough

about statistics, or they're deceived by coincidences, or it's wishful thinking.

And dogma ten, mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works. That's why governments

only fund research into mechanistic medicine and ignore complementary and alternative therapies.

Those can't possibly really work because they're not mechanistic. They may appear to work because

people would have got better anyway, or because of the placebo effect. But the only kind that

really works is mechanistic medicine.Well this is the default world view which is held

by almost all educated people all over the world. It's the basis of the educational system,

the national health service, the medical research council, governments and it's just the default

world view of educated people. But I think every one of these dogmas is very, very questionable.

And when you look at it, they fall apart.I'm going to take first the idea that the laws

of nature are fixed. This is a hangover from an older world view, before the 1960s, when

the big bang theory came in. People thought that the whole universe was eternal, governed

by eternal mathematical laws. When the big bang came in, then that assumption continued,

even though the big bang revealed a universe that's radically evolutionary, about fourteen

billion years old. Growing and developing and evolving, for fourteen billion years.

Growing and cooling and more structures and patterns appear within it. But the idea is

all the laws of nature were completely fixed at the moment of the big bang like a cosmic

Napoleonic code. As my friend Terrence McKenna used to say, modern science is based upon

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.

Well, in an evolutionary universe, why shouldn't the laws themselves evolve? After all, human

laws do, and the idea of laws of nature is based a metaphor with human laws. It's a very

anthropocentric metaphor; only humans have laws. In fact, only civilised societies have

laws. As C.S. Lewis once said, to say that a stone falls to earth because it's obeying

a law makes it a man, and even a citizen. It's a metaphor we've got so used to we forgot

it's a metaphor. In an evolving universe, I think a much better idea is the idea of

habits. I think the habits of nature evolve; the regularities of nature are essentially

habitual. This was an idea put forward at the beginning of the twentieth century by

the American philosopher C.S. Pierce, and it's an idea which various other philosophers

have entertained, and it's one which I, myself have developed into a scientific hypothesis;

the hypothesis of morphic resonance, which is the basis of these evolving habits. According

to this hypothesis, everything in nature has a kind of collective memory, resonance occurs

on the basis of similarity. As a young giraffe embryo grows in its mother's

womb, it tunes in to the morphic resonance of previous giraffes. It draws on that collective

memory, grows like a giraffe, and it behaves like a giraffe, because it's drawing on this

collective memory. It has to have the right genes to make the right proteins. But genes

in my view are grossly overrated. They only account for the proteins that the organism

can make, not the form or the shape or the behaviour. Every species has a kind of collective

memory. Even crystals do. This theory predicts that if you make a new kind of crystal for

the first time, the very first time you make it, it won't have an existing habit. But once

it crystallises, then the next time you make it, there'll be an influence from the first

crystals to the second ones, all over the world by morphic resonance, it'll crystallise

a bit easier. The third time, there'll be an influence from the first and second crystals.

There is, in fact, good evidence that new compounds get easier to crystallise all round

the world, just as this theory would predict. It also predicts that if you train animals

to learn a new trick, for example rats learn a new trick in London, then all round the

world rats of the same breed should learn the same trick quicker just because the rats

had learned it here. And surprisingly, there's already evidence that this actually happens.

Anyway, that's my own hypothesis in a nutshell of morphic resonance. Everything depends on

evolving habits not on fixed laws. But I want to spend a few moments on the constants

of nature too. Because these are, again, assumed to be constant. Things like the gravitational

constant of the speed of light are called the fundamental constants. Are they really

constant? Well, when I got interested in this question, I tried to find out. They're given

in physics handbooks. Handbooks of physics list the existing fundamental constants, tell

you their value. But I wanted to see if they'd changed, so I got the old volumes of physical

handbooks. I went to the patent office library here in London - they're the only place I

could find that kept the old volumes. Normally people throw them away when the new values

(volumes) come out, they throw away the old ones. When I did this I found that the speed

of light dropped between nineteen twenty-eight and nineteen fourty-five by about twenty kilometres

per second. It's a huge drop because they're given with errors of any fractions of a second/decimal

points of error. And yet, all over the world, it dropped, and they were all getting very

similar values to each other with tiny errors. Then in nineteen fourty-eight, it went up

again. And then people started getting very similar values again. I was very intrigued

by this and I couldn't make sense of it, so I went to see the head of metrology at the

National Physical Laboratory in Teddington. Metrology is the science in which people measure

constants. And I asked him about this, I said "what do

you make of this drop in the speed of light between nineteen twenty-eight and nineteen

fourty-five?" And he said "oh dear", he said "you've uncovered

the most embarrassing episode in the history of our science."

So I said "well, could the speed of light have actually dropped? And that would have

amazing implications if so." He said "no, no, of course it couldn't have

actually dropped. It's a constant!" "Oh, well then how do you explain the fact

that everyone was finding it going much slower during that period? Is it because they were

fudging their results to get what they thought other people should be getting and the whole

thing was just produced in the minds of physicists?" "We don't like to use the word 'fudge'."

I said "Well, so what do you prefer?" He said "well, we prefer to call it 'intellectual

phase-locking'." So I said "well if it was going on then, how

can you be so sure it's not going on today? And the present values produced are by intellectual

phase-locking?" And he said "oh we know that's not the case."

And I said "how do we know?" He said "well", he said "we've solved the

problem." And I said "well how?"

And he said "well we fixed the speed of light by definition in nineteen seventy-two."

So I said "but it might still change." He said "yes, but we'd never know it, because

we've defined the metre in terms of the speed of light, so the units would change with it!"

So he looked very pleased about that, they'd fixed that problem.

But I said "well, then what about big G?" The gravitational constant, known in the trade

as "big G", it was written with a capital G. Newton's universal gravitational constant.

"That's varied by more than 1.3% in recent years. And it seems to vary from place to

place and from time to time." And he said "oh well, those are just errors.

And unfortunately there are quite big errors with big G."

So I said "well, what if it's really changing? I mean, perhaps it is really changing."

And then I looked at how they do it, what happens is they measure it in different labs,

they get different values on different days, and then they average them. And then other

labs around the world do the same, they come out usually with a rather different average.

And then the international committee of metrology meets every ten years or so and average the

ones from labs all around the world to come up with the value of big G. But what if G

were actually fluctuating? What if it changed? There's already evidence actually that it

changes throughout the day and througout the year. What if the earth, as it moves through

the galactic environment went through patches of dark matter or other environmental factors

that could alter it? Maybe they all change together. What if these errors are going up

together and down together? For more than ten years I've been trying to persuade metrologists

to look at the raw data. In fact I'm now trying to persuade them to put it up online, on the

internet. With the dates, and the actual measurements, and see if they're correlated. To see if they're

all up at one time, all down at another. If so, they might be fluctuating together. And

what would tell us something very, very interesting. But no-one has done this, they haven't done

it because G is a constant. There's no point looking for changes. You see, here's a very

simple example of where a dogmatic assumption actually inhibits enquiry. I, myself think

that the constants may vary quite considerably. Well, within narrow limits. But they may all

be varying, and I think the day will come when scientific journals like Nature have

a weekly report on the constants, like stock-market reports in the newspapers. You know, "this

week, big G was slightly up, the charge on the electron was down, the speed of light

held steady, and so on." So that's one area where I think thinking

this dogmatically could open things up. One of the biggest areas is the nature of

the mind. This is the most unsolved problem as Graham just said, that science simply can't

deal with the fact we're conscious. And it can't deal with the fact that our thoughts

don't seem to be inside our brains. Our experiences don't all seem to be inside our brain. Your

image of me now doesn't seem to be inside your brain, yet the official view is that

there's a little Rupert somewhere inside your head. And everything else in this room is

inside your head; your experience is inside your brain. I'm suggesting actually that vision

involves an outward projection of images, what you're seeing is inside your mind but

not inside your head. Our minds are extended beyond our brains in the simplest act of perception.

I think that we project out the images we're seeing, and these images touch what we're

looking at. If I look at you from behind, you don't know I'm there. Could I affect you?

Could you feel my gaze? There's a great deal of evidence that people can. The sense of

being stared at is an extremely common experience, and recent experimental evidence actually

suggests it's real. Animals seem to have it too, I think it probably

evolved in the context of predator/prey relationships. Prey animals that could feel the gaze of a

predator would survive better than those that couldn't. This would lead to a whole new way

of thinking about ecological relationships between predators and prey.

Also about the extent of our minds. If we look at distant stars, I think our minds reach

out in a sense to touch those stars, and literally extend out over astronomical distances. They're

not just inside our heads. Now it may seem astonishing that this is a topic of debate

in the twenty-first century. We know so little about our own minds that where our images

are is a hot topic of debate within consciousness studies right now.

I don't have time to deal with any more of these dogmas, but every single one of them

is questionable. If one questions it, new forms of research, new possibilities open

up. And I think as we question these dogmas that have held back science so long, science

will undergo a reflowering, a renaissance. I'm a total believer in the importance of

science. I've spent my whole life as a research scientist, my whole career. But I think by

moving beyond these dogmas, it can be regenerated. Once again, it can become interesting, and

I hope, life-affirming. Thank you.