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The science delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality
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in principle, leaving only the details to be filled in. This is a very widespread belief
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in our society. It's the kind of belief system of people who say "I don't believe in God,
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I believe in science." It's a belief system which has now been spread to the entire world.
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But there's a conflict in the heart of science between science as a method of inquiry based
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on reason, evidence, hypothesis and collective investigation, and science as a belief system
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or a world view. And unfortunately the world view aspect of science has come to inhibit
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and constrict the free inquiry which is the very lifeblood of the scientific endeavour.
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Since the late nineteenth century, science has been conducted under the aspect of a belief
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system or a world view which is essentially that of materialism; philosophical materialism.
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And the sciences are now wholly owned subsidiaries of the materialist world view. I think that
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as we break out of it, the sciences will be regenerated. What I do in my book The Science
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Delusion, which is called Science Set Free in the United States, is take the ten dogmas,
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or assumptions of science, and turn them into questions. Seeing how well they stand up if
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you look at them scientifically. None of them stand up very well.
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What I'm going to do is first run through what these ten dogmas are. And then I'll only
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have time to discuss one or two of them in a bit more detail. But essentially the ten
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dogmas, which are the world view of most educated people all over the world are:
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First, that nature's mechanical or machine-like. The universe is like a machine, animals and
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plants are like machines, we're like machines. In fact, we are machines. We are lumbering
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robots, in Richard Dawkins' vivid phrase. With brains that are genetically programmed
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computers. Second, matter is unconscious. The whole universe
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is made up of unconscious matter. There's no consciousness in stars, in galaxies, in
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planets, in animals, in plants, and there ought not in any of us either, if this theory's
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true. So a lot of the philosophy of mind over the last hundred years has been trying to
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prove that we're not really conscious at all. So the matter's unconscious, then the laws
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of nature are fixed. This is dogma three. The laws of nature are
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the same now as they were at the time of the big bang and they'll be the same forever.
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Not just the laws; but the constants of nature are fixed, which is why they are called constants.
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Dogma four: The total amount of matter and energy is always the same. It never changes
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in total quantity, except at the moment of the big bang when it all sprang into existence
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from nowhere in a single instant. The fifth dogma is that nature's purposeless.
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There are no purposes in all nature and the evolutionary process has no purpose or direction.
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Dogma six, the biological hereditary is material. Everything you inheret is in your genes, or
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in epigenetic modifications of the genes, or in cytoplasmic inheritance. It's material.
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Dogma seven, memories are stored inside your brain as material traces. Somehow everything
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you remember is in your brain in modified nerve endings, phosphorylated proteins, no-one
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knows how it works. But nevertheless almost everyone in the scientific world believes
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it must be in the brain. Dogma eight, your mind is inside your head.
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All your consciousness is the activity of your brain, nothing more.
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Dogma nine, which follows from dogma eight, psychic phenomena like telepathy are impossible.
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Your thoughts and intentions cannot have any effect at a distance because your mind's inside
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your head. Therefore all the apparent evidence for telepathy and other psychic phenomena
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is illusory. People believe these things happen, but it's just because they don't know enough
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about statistics, or they're deceived by coincidences, or it's wishful thinking.
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And dogma ten, mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works. That's why governments
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only fund research into mechanistic medicine and ignore complementary and alternative therapies.
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Those can't possibly really work because they're not mechanistic. They may appear to work because
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people would have got better anyway, or because of the placebo effect. But the only kind that
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really works is mechanistic medicine.Well this is the default world view which is held
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by almost all educated people all over the world. It's the basis of the educational system,
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the national health service, the medical research council, governments and it's just the default
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world view of educated people. But I think every one of these dogmas is very, very questionable.
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And when you look at it, they fall apart.I'm going to take first the idea that the laws
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of nature are fixed. This is a hangover from an older world view, before the 1960s, when
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the big bang theory came in. People thought that the whole universe was eternal, governed
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by eternal mathematical laws. When the big bang came in, then that assumption continued,
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even though the big bang revealed a universe that's radically evolutionary, about fourteen
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billion years old. Growing and developing and evolving, for fourteen billion years.
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Growing and cooling and more structures and patterns appear within it. But the idea is
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all the laws of nature were completely fixed at the moment of the big bang like a cosmic
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Napoleonic code. As my friend Terrence McKenna used to say, modern science is based upon
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the principle "give us one free miracle, and we'll explain the rest". And the one free
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miracle is the appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe and all the laws
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that govern it, from nothing, in a single instant.
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Well, in an evolutionary universe, why shouldn't the laws themselves evolve? After all, human
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laws do, and the idea of laws of nature is based a metaphor with human laws. It's a very
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anthropocentric metaphor; only humans have laws. In fact, only civilised societies have
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laws. As C.S. Lewis once said, to say that a stone falls to earth because it's obeying
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a law makes it a man, and even a citizen. It's a metaphor we've got so used to we forgot
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it's a metaphor. In an evolving universe, I think a much better idea is the idea of
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habits. I think the habits of nature evolve; the regularities of nature are essentially
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habitual. This was an idea put forward at the beginning of the twentieth century by
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the American philosopher C.S. Pierce, and it's an idea which various other philosophers
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have entertained, and it's one which I, myself have developed into a scientific hypothesis;
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the hypothesis of morphic resonance, which is the basis of these evolving habits. According
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to this hypothesis, everything in nature has a kind of collective memory, resonance occurs
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on the basis of similarity. As a young giraffe embryo grows in its mother's
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womb, it tunes in to the morphic resonance of previous giraffes. It draws on that collective
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memory, grows like a giraffe, and it behaves like a giraffe, because it's drawing on this
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collective memory. It has to have the right genes to make the right proteins. But genes
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in my view are grossly overrated. They only account for the proteins that the organism
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can make, not the form or the shape or the behaviour. Every species has a kind of collective
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memory. Even crystals do. This theory predicts that if you make a new kind of crystal for
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the first time, the very first time you make it, it won't have an existing habit. But once
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it crystallises, then the next time you make it, there'll be an influence from the first
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crystals to the second ones, all over the world by morphic resonance, it'll crystallise
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a bit easier. The third time, there'll be an influence from the first and second crystals.
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There is, in fact, good evidence that new compounds get easier to crystallise all round
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the world, just as this theory would predict. It also predicts that if you train animals
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to learn a new trick, for example rats learn a new trick in London, then all round the
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world rats of the same breed should learn the same trick quicker just because the rats
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had learned it here. And surprisingly, there's already evidence that this actually happens.
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Anyway, that's my own hypothesis in a nutshell of morphic resonance. Everything depends on
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evolving habits not on fixed laws. But I want to spend a few moments on the constants
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of nature too. Because these are, again, assumed to be constant. Things like the gravitational
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constant of the speed of light are called the fundamental constants. Are they really
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constant? Well, when I got interested in this question, I tried to find out. They're given
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in physics handbooks. Handbooks of physics list the existing fundamental constants, tell
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you their value. But I wanted to see if they'd changed, so I got the old volumes of physical
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handbooks. I went to the patent office library here in London - they're the only place I
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could find that kept the old volumes. Normally people throw them away when the new values
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(volumes) come out, they throw away the old ones. When I did this I found that the speed
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of light dropped between nineteen twenty-eight and nineteen fourty-five by about twenty kilometres
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per second. It's a huge drop because they're given with errors of any fractions of a second/decimal
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points of error. And yet, all over the world, it dropped, and they were all getting very
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similar values to each other with tiny errors. Then in nineteen fourty-eight, it went up
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again. And then people started getting very similar values again. I was very intrigued
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by this and I couldn't make sense of it, so I went to see the head of metrology at the
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National Physical Laboratory in Teddington. Metrology is the science in which people measure
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constants. And I asked him about this, I said "what do
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you make of this drop in the speed of light between nineteen twenty-eight and nineteen
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fourty-five?" And he said "oh dear", he said "you've uncovered
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the most embarrassing episode in the history of our science."
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So I said "well, could the speed of light have actually dropped? And that would have
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amazing implications if so." He said "no, no, of course it couldn't have
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actually dropped. It's a constant!" "Oh, well then how do you explain the fact
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that everyone was finding it going much slower during that period? Is it because they were
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fudging their results to get what they thought other people should be getting and the whole
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thing was just produced in the minds of physicists?" "We don't like to use the word 'fudge'."
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I said "Well, so what do you prefer?" He said "well, we prefer to call it 'intellectual
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phase-locking'." So I said "well if it was going on then, how
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can you be so sure it's not going on today? And the present values produced are by intellectual
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phase-locking?" And he said "oh we know that's not the case."
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And I said "how do we know?" He said "well", he said "we've solved the
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problem." And I said "well how?"
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And he said "well we fixed the speed of light by definition in nineteen seventy-two."
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So I said "but it might still change." He said "yes, but we'd never know it, because
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we've defined the metre in terms of the speed of light, so the units would change with it!"
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So he looked very pleased about that, they'd fixed that problem.
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But I said "well, then what about big G?" The gravitational constant, known in the trade
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as "big G", it was written with a capital G. Newton's universal gravitational constant.
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"That's varied by more than 1.3% in recent years. And it seems to vary from place to
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place and from time to time." And he said "oh well, those are just errors.
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And unfortunately there are quite big errors with big G."
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So I said "well, what if it's really changing? I mean, perhaps it is really changing."
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And then I looked at how they do it, what happens is they measure it in different labs,
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they get different values on different days, and then they average them. And then other
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labs around the world do the same, they come out usually with a rather different average.
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And then the international committee of metrology meets every ten years or so and average the
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ones from labs all around the world to come up with the value of big G. But what if G
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were actually fluctuating? What if it changed? There's already evidence actually that it
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changes throughout the day and througout the year. What if the earth, as it moves through
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the galactic environment went through patches of dark matter or other environmental factors
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that could alter it? Maybe they all change together. What if these errors are going up
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together and down together? For more than ten years I've been trying to persuade metrologists
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to look at the raw data. In fact I'm now trying to persuade them to put it up online, on the
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internet. With the dates, and the actual measurements, and see if they're correlated. To see if they're
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all up at one time, all down at another. If so, they might be fluctuating together. And
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what would tell us something very, very interesting. But no-one has done this, they haven't done
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it because G is a constant. There's no point looking for changes. You see, here's a very
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simple example of where a dogmatic assumption actually inhibits enquiry. I, myself think
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that the constants may vary quite considerably. Well, within narrow limits. But they may all
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be varying, and I think the day will come when scientific journals like Nature have
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a weekly report on the constants, like stock-market reports in the newspapers. You know, "this
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week, big G was slightly up, the charge on the electron was down, the speed of light
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held steady, and so on." So that's one area where I think thinking
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this dogmatically could open things up. One of the biggest areas is the nature of
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the mind. This is the most unsolved problem as Graham just said, that science simply can't
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deal with the fact we're conscious. And it can't deal with the fact that our thoughts
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don't seem to be inside our brains. Our experiences don't all seem to be inside our brain. Your
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image of me now doesn't seem to be inside your brain, yet the official view is that
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there's a little Rupert somewhere inside your head. And everything else in this room is
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inside your head; your experience is inside your brain. I'm suggesting actually that vision
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involves an outward projection of images, what you're seeing is inside your mind but
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not inside your head. Our minds are extended beyond our brains in the simplest act of perception.
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I think that we project out the images we're seeing, and these images touch what we're
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looking at. If I look at you from behind, you don't know I'm there. Could I affect you?
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Could you feel my gaze? There's a great deal of evidence that people can. The sense of
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being stared at is an extremely common experience, and recent experimental evidence actually
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suggests it's real. Animals seem to have it too, I think it probably
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evolved in the context of predator/prey relationships. Prey animals that could feel the gaze of a
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predator would survive better than those that couldn't. This would lead to a whole new way
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of thinking about ecological relationships between predators and prey.
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Also about the extent of our minds. If we look at distant stars, I think our minds reach
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out in a sense to touch those stars, and literally extend out over astronomical distances. They're
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not just inside our heads. Now it may seem astonishing that this is a topic of debate
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in the twenty-first century. We know so little about our own minds that where our images
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are is a hot topic of debate within consciousness studies right now.
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I don't have time to deal with any more of these dogmas, but every single one of them
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is questionable. If one questions it, new forms of research, new possibilities open
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up. And I think as we question these dogmas that have held back science so long, science
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will undergo a reflowering, a renaissance. I'm a total believer in the importance of
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science. I've spent my whole life as a research scientist, my whole career. But I think by
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moving beyond these dogmas, it can be regenerated. Once again, it can become interesting, and
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I hope, life-affirming. Thank you.