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Rupert Sheldrake and Morphogenetic Fields (The following is excerpted from The Presence of The Past, Times Books 1988, by Rupert Sheldrake) "In spite of the profound revolutions it has passed through, physics is still pervaded by the reductionist spirit that it inherited from the atomistic philosophy. Most physicists still believe that there are fundamental entities in the atomistic sense, even though these are now thought of as quarks or as superstrings, rather than atoms themselves. Hence the fields of these ultimate entities are regarded as fundamental fields, and together with gravity and electromagnetic fields, are the fundamental fields of nature. The fields of systems at higher levels of complexity are not fundamental in the same sense, but derivative. By contrast, the hypothesis of formative causation, in the spirit of the philosophy of organism, regards the morphic fields of systems at all levels of complexity as fundamental rather than as derivative from the known fields of physics. From this point of view, the matter fields of quantum physics could be regarded as the morphic fields of particles, nuclei, and atoms. But just as the different kinds of subatomic field cannot be reduced to each other, neither can the morphic fields of holons such as cells, plants, and societies be reduced to each other and still less to the fields of subatomic particles. Rather, there are nested hierarchies of fields: the fields of molecules contain those of atoms, nuclei, and subatomic particles; the fields of cells contain and embrace those of molecules; and so on. (...) A natural extension of the morphic field approach would be to regard living ecosystems as complex organisms with morphic fields that embrace the communities of organisms within them, and indeed to regard entire planets as organisms with characteristic morphic fields, and likewise planetary systems, stars, galaxies, and clusters of galaxies. Certainly, stars, galaxies, and galactic clusters can be classified into types or species. From the present point of view, the individual examples of each type are organized by morphic resonance from previous similar systems. Their development can be thought of as following chreodes: the various kinds of stars, for example, are thought to undergo a more or less predictable progressive development, some ending up as exploding supernovae, others collapsing into themselves and becoming black holes. And perhaps the string theory of galaxy formation from closed, vortical, vibratory loops of cosmic strings is already pointing towards a conception of the morphic fields of galaxies." . . . .
excerpted from The Presence of The Past
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