Morphic Resonance

Zusatztext "Sheldrake's theories continue to gain verification! and this book is particularly important because its implications affect the way we view the natural world! as well as ourselves! as one small part of it. Morphic Resonance is therefore strongly recommended to anyone interested in understanding current thought about what may lie behind the formation of all natural systems." Informationen zum Autor Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D., is a former research fellow of the Royal Society and former director of studies in biochemistry and cell biology at Clare College, Cambridge University. He is the author of more than 80 technical papers and articles appearing in peer-reviewed scientific journals and 10 books, including The Presence of the Past, The Rebirth of Nature, and Seven Experiments That Could Change the World. Klappentext In this updated edition of A New Science of Life, Rupert Sheldrake presents further evidence for his controversial theory of morphic resonance--the observation that past behavior influences present organisms, unconfined by time and space. Chapter 1 THE UNSOLVED PROBLEMS OF BIOLOGY 1.6 Minds In psychology, the science of the mind, there are different schools of thought about the relationship between mind and body. The most extreme materialist solution is to deny the reality of the mind and to assume that only the body is real. This was the approach of the behaviorist school, which dominated academic psychology for much of the twentieth century. Behaviorists confined their attention to objectively observable behavior and ignored the existence of consciousness. But behaviorism was not a testable scientific hypothesis; it was a methodology. It is now out of fashion within academic psychology and has largely been replaced by cognitive psychology. Like behaviorism, cognitive psychology rejects introspection, but it admits the existence of internal mental states, such as belief, desires, and motivations. Its dominant metaphor is the computer. Mental activity is thought of as information processing. The mind is the software running the hardware of the brain. But the limitations of the computer metaphor are becoming increasingly apparent, not least through a new recognition of the role of the emotions and an acknowledgment that minds are embodied and actively related to the environment. In the 1990s the philosopher David Chalmers made a distinction between what he called the easy problems of consciousness, like finding neural correlates of sensation--for example, which parts of the brain become active during the visual perception of moving objects--and the hard problem of Why does awareness of sensory information exist at all? There is a radical distinction between the biology of the brain and mental experience, which includes the experience of qualities, such as red. (Philosophers of mind call these subjective experiences qualia.) Chalmers argues that to take consciousness seriously, it is necessary to go beyond a strict materialist framework. Unlike the materialist psychologies that predominate within academic institutions, other schools of psychology accept subjective experience as their starting point and also recognize that not all mental activity is conscious: many aspects of behavior and subjective experience depend on the subconscious or unconscious mind. The unconscious mind may also have properties that defy mechanistic explanation. For example, in Carl Jung's development of this concept the unconscious is not confined to individual minds but provides a common substratum shared by all human minds, the collective unconscious. In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix) there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, a...

"Sheldrake's theories continue to gain verification, and this book is particularly important because its implications affect the way we view the natural world, as well as ourselves, as one small part of it. Morphic Resonance is therefore strongly recommended to anyone interested in understanding current thought about what may lie behind the formation of all natural systems."

Auteur

Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist, a former research fellow of the Royal Society at Cambridge, a current fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences near San Francisco, and an academic director and visiting professor at the Graduate Institute in Connecticut. He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from Cambridge University and was a fellow of Clare College, Cambridge University, where he carried out research on the development of plants and the ageing of cells. He is the author of more than eighty scientific papers and ten books, including Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home; Morphic Resonance; The Presence of the Past; Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness; The Rebirth of Nature; and Seven Experiences That Could Change the World. In 2019, Rupert Sheldrake was cited as one of the "100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People in the World" according to Watkins Mind Body Spirit magazine.

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NEW SCIENCE / BIOLOGY "Books of this importance and elegance come along rarely. Those who read this new edition of A New Science of Life may do so with the satisfaction of seeing science history in the making." --Larry Dossey, M.D., author of Recovering the Soul and Reinventing Medicine "For decades, Rupert Sheldrake has been at the leading edge of highly innovative and controversial ideas about the organization of biological systems. Morphic Resonance poses a serious challenge to traditionalists and is a most welcome book about how we see the world and how we should head off into the future." --Marc Bekoff, author of The Emotional Lives of Animals and Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals "Morphic Resonance is destined to become one of the landmarks in the history of biology. It is rare to find so profound a book so lucidly written." --Bruce H. Lipton, Ph.D., cell biologist and bestselling author of The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles When A New Science of Life was first published the British journal Nature called it "the best candidate for burning there has been for many years." The book called into question the prevailing mechanistic theory of life when its author, Rupert Sheldrake, a former research fellow of the Royal Society, proposed that morphogenetic fields are responsible for the characteristic form and organization of systems in biology, chemistry, and physics--and that they have measurable physical effects. Using his theory of morphic resonance, Sheldrake was able to reinterpret the regularities of nature as being more like habits than immutable laws, offering a new understanding of life and consciousness. In the years since its first publication, Sheldrake has continued his research to demonstrate that the past forms and behavior of organisms influence present organisms through direct immaterial connections across time and space. This can explain why new chemicals become easier to crystallize all over the world the more often their crystals have already formed, and why when laboratory rats have learned how to navigate a maze in one place, rats elsewhere appear to learn it more easily. With more than two decades of new research and data, Rupert Sheldrake makes an even stronger case for the validity of the theory of formative causation that can radically transform how we see our world and our future. RUPERT SHELDRAKE, Ph.D., is a former research fellow of the Royal Society and former director of studies in biochemistry and cell biology at Clare College, Cambridge University. He is the author of more than 80 technical papers and articles appearing in peer-reviewed scientific journals and 10 books, including The Presence of the Past, The Rebirth of…