Rupert Sheldrake: My underlying question really concerns the nature of life. The conventional view is the mechanistic theory, that living organisms are nothing but complex machines. I became dissatisfied with that view at quite an early stage in my biological career. I think I became disillusioned with it at an emotional level through dissection, and through the fact that we killed all the animals we studied.

I did biology because I loved animals. So the personal experience of finding that I was studying animals because I liked animals, and then finding that the kind of biology I learned involved killing everything first, and cutting it up–that was a kind of emotional shock...

At first, I worked at Cambridge for ten years on plant development, plant morphogenesis, which is where I came across the idea of morphogenetic fields, the form-shaping fields. It seemed to me that we really needed a field theory in biology...

[Morphic fields] are probabilistic in the way they work, they’re within and around the systems they organize. They have attractors in them. You can model many of their properties in terms of attractors, things which draw the system towards a particular form or goal or end state or end cycle or end structure. The morphic resonance is non-local in the sense that I’m suggesting that some of their systems come in from another one’s cross-space or turn. The fields organize systems in a nested hierarchical way...

Sometimes watching flocks of birds flying in the sky and seeing they way they all turn together, it was almost as if I could see a field around them...

The reason that I think there may be an influence in the future is simply empirical. There seems to me to be good evidence for precognitive dreams, for various kinds of presentiment or precognitive premonition... The morphic resonance theory explains patterns, habits, and memories, but it’s not a theory that explains influences of the future...

I think that the way new fields come into being can be explained in several different ways. One is a bottom/up model that as newer creativity wells up from a lower level, a higher lever emerges. This is a kind of imagined synthesis from lower levels by a kind of upwards leap. The materialists will always say that this is due to chance.

The other kind of model, the top/down model, where the new fields emerge either from the higher level may have a field which helps originate new species within it...

The whole society’s like an organism, or a superorganism. This is also used in biology in relation to insect societies, like wasps and bees. So if you have an organism, the whole society is like an organism, or the family is like an organism, or the nation is like an organism, or the team is like an organism, or corporation is like an organism. The very name, corporation, implies it’s a whole body. Then I would say that the morphic field concept is a theoretical basis for understanding... and because of morphic resonance, it means that each social group has a kind of memory. It means there’s an invisible presence of the past in any social group...

I think the field concept is more than a metaphor. I think it involves actual invisible connections... It suggests that fields are real in the sense that some kind of interconnectedness exists, which could even work at a distance.

The term attractor or attraction has always had this finalistic ring to it, and I think the way in which attractors have been reinvented, it’s the end towards which something moves. It’s essentially the same things as what Driesch meant by entelchy, that which has the end within itself, which draws things towards the whole. So in modern science essentially, if you read Driesch on entelechy, just change the work entelechy to attractor and it’s the same thing...

Morphic fields are local; morphic resonance is non-local...

I think the mind is not confined to the brain, but it extends around the brain. The direction in which the mind reaches out from the brain to touch things in the environment depends on the intention, the kind of directional part of the mind...

Sheldrake’s work concerns morphic fields. Like the known fields of physics, morphic fields connect things at a distance. "Morphic fields are regions of influence in space-time, located within and around systems they organize." They guide the systems under their influence towards characteristic goals or end-points. The British biologist Waddington gave the name chreode to the canalized pathways of change organized by morphogenetic fields. The mathematician Rene Thom has made mathematical models of morphogenetic fields in which the end-points towards which systems develop are defined as attractors. In the branch of mathematics known as dynamics, attractors represent the limits towards which dynamical systems are drawn. They provide a scientific way of thinking about ends, purposes, goals, or intentions.

The most controversial feature of this hypothesis, says Sheldrake, is the proposal that morphic fields themselves evolve. "The means by which information or an activity pattern is transferred from a previous to a subsequent system of the same kind is called morphic resonance... Any given morphic system, say a giraffe embryo, ‘tunes in’ to previous similar systems, in this case previous developing giraffes. Through this process each individual giraffe draws upon, and in turn contributes to, a collective pool of memory of its species. In the human realm, this kind of collective memory is closely related to what the psychologist C.G. Jung called the ‘collective unconscious’."