This is a rich and necessary conversation. The convergence between morphic resonance, bioelectricity, and evolutionary Platonism is not just an academic curiosity. It is a description of the living field. The forms are not passive templates outside space and time. They are active realities seeking to ingress into nature, learn from their incarnations, and modify themselves through the history of their actualization.
What lingers with me is the distinction between repetition and creativity. Morphic resonance explains the repetition of patterns. But the origin of genuinely new wholes requires another account. Bergsonian creativity, Platonic ingression, or Whiteheadian prehension, the language may differ, but the intuition is the same. The cosmos is not a machine. It is a living organism.
The theological dimension is unavoidable. If forms have agency, if they function as lures and attractors, then we are already asking questions of final cause, value, and divine ordering. The world-soul is not a relic of an older cosmology. It is the ground of the field.
What struck me most in this conversation is not only the possible convergence between morphic resonance, Michael Levin’s work on bioelectric organization, and Whitehead’s process philosophy. What struck me even more is that the dialogue opens a space for a deeper question:
What concept of causality are we actually using when we speak about life?
The conversation moves convincingly beyond a purely mechanistic worldview. Life no longer appears as a collection of molecules shaped solely by chance and selection. Instead, there is room for organization, form, habit, fields, purposiveness, and development as genuine properties of living systems. That is an important step.
Yet I have the feeling that an even deeper layer is beginning to emerge.
Even within this post-mechanistic perspective, the explanatory direction remains largely historical. First, living systems arise; then patterns, fields, bioelectric organization and resonance emerge, contributing to further development and stability.
But what if the fundamental question begins somewhere else?
What if consciousness is not a late product of evolution, but a primary dimension of life itself?
And what if the senses are not merely biological sensors collecting information, but the very means through which consciousness discloses reality?
This may seem like a subtle shift in wording, yet its implications are profound.
Perception would no longer be understood as the passive registration of an already existing world. Reality would instead emerge through the encounter between consciousness and the world. From that encounter arises meaning. Meaning makes alignment possible. From alignment comes energy. From energy emerge organization, creativity, and ultimately new forms of life.
In that perspective, our understanding of causality changes as well.
Not only:
variation → selection → adaptation → propagation*
but also:
consciousness → sensory disclosure → meaning → alignment → energy → organization → creation.*
This shift has consequences that extend far beyond biology.
For more than a century, concepts such as competition, selection, fitness, scarcity and reproductive success have shaped not only biological science, but also economics, education, healthcare, labour, and even the way we assign value to human lives.
In human societies, reproductive success is rarely a neutral biological measure. The number of children people have is profoundly influenced by culture, religion, economic conditions, access to education, women's autonomy, healthcare, power structures and social expectations. When such complex cultural realities are summarized under the concept of "fitness," there is a risk of presenting historical and social arrangements as if they were simply natural facts.
Perhaps this is precisely why the evolutionary framework should reconsider its position as the dominant interpretive lens through which life is understood. This does not mean that every biological observation or mechanism loses its value. Just as Newtonian mechanics remains extraordinarily useful within its domain without providing a complete ontology of reality, evolutionary mechanisms may continue to be valuable within their own domain.
But usefulness is not the same as ontological completeness.
Perhaps the next scientific revolution requires not only a richer theory of form, bioelectricity or resonance, but a different point of departure altogether. Rather than understanding life primarily through competition and survival, we might begin from the way consciousness discloses reality through perception, creates meaning, enters into relationships, and thereby brings genuinely new possibilities into existence.
If that is true, it changes not only our understanding of biology, but also our understanding of economics, education, health, cooperation, and ultimately what it means to be human.
For me, that may be the most profound question emerging from this conversation.
Such a profound relief and encouragement to know that folks are talking about this. Thank you all who are taking up the gauntlet of new awareness and thinking.
This recording is excellent and thank you for providing the transcript.
"Darwin is the master of chance and contingency in terms of his explanations, then I think your… your idea of forms becomes a little bit too static. And so you need that element. But Darwinism and then neo-Darwinism became so obsessed with, deterministic, a deterministic account of form, and then the play of chance, you know, Jacques Monod’s Chance and Necessity is the only relevant factors in evolution that biologists became completely blind to the magic of development, not to mention, you know, macroevolution, I think, shows a kind of creativity in the discovery, invention, or ingression of form that it’s hard to just explain that as, you know, filtering of what happened to survive."
This is so well-said. It aligns perfectly in my imagination with the work of mcgilchrist. There certainly is an (irrational) obsession with a deterministic account of form; one that would appeal to a certain kind of bias that would prefer everything to be counted and sorted. This obsession speaks to me of insecurity. Insecurity as it crosses domains of experience to become in part the filter by which we choose to view circumstances so as to prevent panic. ("The backward look behind the assurance of recorded history, the backward half-look over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.", the dry salvages - t.s. eliot).
Not to dismiss the creative zest with which new discoveries are so often pursued into error. There's always such a pressure to be the first to the top of the mountain.
This is exactly right - we have these evolutionary platonic forms or archetypes but for everything from physics to psyche. Jung and Pauli were also on to this.
An inhereted pattern that underpins all physical form - holonic and fractal. Explaining both complexity and emergence.
More and more it seems that the living field we're in is the meeting ground for our explorations. The idea of morphic resonance is like a drop of ink, or perhaps living blood, in a container. Once introduced it filters through the entire medium. A very resonant idea itself.
This is a rich and necessary conversation. The convergence between morphic resonance, bioelectricity, and evolutionary Platonism is not just an academic curiosity. It is a description of the living field. The forms are not passive templates outside space and time. They are active realities seeking to ingress into nature, learn from their incarnations, and modify themselves through the history of their actualization.
What lingers with me is the distinction between repetition and creativity. Morphic resonance explains the repetition of patterns. But the origin of genuinely new wholes requires another account. Bergsonian creativity, Platonic ingression, or Whiteheadian prehension, the language may differ, but the intuition is the same. The cosmos is not a machine. It is a living organism.
The theological dimension is unavoidable. If forms have agency, if they function as lures and attractors, then we are already asking questions of final cause, value, and divine ordering. The world-soul is not a relic of an older cosmology. It is the ground of the field.
"That this could bring some change in theology" would be a delight in me.
What struck me most in this conversation is not only the possible convergence between morphic resonance, Michael Levin’s work on bioelectric organization, and Whitehead’s process philosophy. What struck me even more is that the dialogue opens a space for a deeper question:
What concept of causality are we actually using when we speak about life?
The conversation moves convincingly beyond a purely mechanistic worldview. Life no longer appears as a collection of molecules shaped solely by chance and selection. Instead, there is room for organization, form, habit, fields, purposiveness, and development as genuine properties of living systems. That is an important step.
Yet I have the feeling that an even deeper layer is beginning to emerge.
Even within this post-mechanistic perspective, the explanatory direction remains largely historical. First, living systems arise; then patterns, fields, bioelectric organization and resonance emerge, contributing to further development and stability.
But what if the fundamental question begins somewhere else?
What if consciousness is not a late product of evolution, but a primary dimension of life itself?
And what if the senses are not merely biological sensors collecting information, but the very means through which consciousness discloses reality?
This may seem like a subtle shift in wording, yet its implications are profound.
Perception would no longer be understood as the passive registration of an already existing world. Reality would instead emerge through the encounter between consciousness and the world. From that encounter arises meaning. Meaning makes alignment possible. From alignment comes energy. From energy emerge organization, creativity, and ultimately new forms of life.
In that perspective, our understanding of causality changes as well.
Not only:
variation → selection → adaptation → propagation*
but also:
consciousness → sensory disclosure → meaning → alignment → energy → organization → creation.*
This shift has consequences that extend far beyond biology.
For more than a century, concepts such as competition, selection, fitness, scarcity and reproductive success have shaped not only biological science, but also economics, education, healthcare, labour, and even the way we assign value to human lives.
In human societies, reproductive success is rarely a neutral biological measure. The number of children people have is profoundly influenced by culture, religion, economic conditions, access to education, women's autonomy, healthcare, power structures and social expectations. When such complex cultural realities are summarized under the concept of "fitness," there is a risk of presenting historical and social arrangements as if they were simply natural facts.
Perhaps this is precisely why the evolutionary framework should reconsider its position as the dominant interpretive lens through which life is understood. This does not mean that every biological observation or mechanism loses its value. Just as Newtonian mechanics remains extraordinarily useful within its domain without providing a complete ontology of reality, evolutionary mechanisms may continue to be valuable within their own domain.
But usefulness is not the same as ontological completeness.
Perhaps the next scientific revolution requires not only a richer theory of form, bioelectricity or resonance, but a different point of departure altogether. Rather than understanding life primarily through competition and survival, we might begin from the way consciousness discloses reality through perception, creates meaning, enters into relationships, and thereby brings genuinely new possibilities into existence.
If that is true, it changes not only our understanding of biology, but also our understanding of economics, education, health, cooperation, and ultimately what it means to be human.
For me, that may be the most profound question emerging from this conversation.
Interesting conversation. Sheldrake’s talks, interviews and conversations are always interesting
www.panthevita.org
Such a profound relief and encouragement to know that folks are talking about this. Thank you all who are taking up the gauntlet of new awareness and thinking.
Brilliant. Thanks.
I loved this conversation very much.
This recording is excellent and thank you for providing the transcript.
"Darwin is the master of chance and contingency in terms of his explanations, then I think your… your idea of forms becomes a little bit too static. And so you need that element. But Darwinism and then neo-Darwinism became so obsessed with, deterministic, a deterministic account of form, and then the play of chance, you know, Jacques Monod’s Chance and Necessity is the only relevant factors in evolution that biologists became completely blind to the magic of development, not to mention, you know, macroevolution, I think, shows a kind of creativity in the discovery, invention, or ingression of form that it’s hard to just explain that as, you know, filtering of what happened to survive."
This is so well-said. It aligns perfectly in my imagination with the work of mcgilchrist. There certainly is an (irrational) obsession with a deterministic account of form; one that would appeal to a certain kind of bias that would prefer everything to be counted and sorted. This obsession speaks to me of insecurity. Insecurity as it crosses domains of experience to become in part the filter by which we choose to view circumstances so as to prevent panic. ("The backward look behind the assurance of recorded history, the backward half-look over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.", the dry salvages - t.s. eliot).
Not to dismiss the creative zest with which new discoveries are so often pursued into error. There's always such a pressure to be the first to the top of the mountain.
This is exactly right - we have these evolutionary platonic forms or archetypes but for everything from physics to psyche. Jung and Pauli were also on to this.
An inhereted pattern that underpins all physical form - holonic and fractal. Explaining both complexity and emergence.
I discuss the missing pieces - both the mechanisms and mathematics - in my own 'Arche Resonance Theory', which attempts to unify various models such as whiteheads actual occations, Jung's theory of psyche and morphic resonance: https://www.arche-resonance.com/artok/life-nature/morphic-fields-synchronicity
Very good conversation!
Great discussion!
Welcome to Asia, Matt ❤️
More and more it seems that the living field we're in is the meeting ground for our explorations. The idea of morphic resonance is like a drop of ink, or perhaps living blood, in a container. Once introduced it filters through the entire medium. A very resonant idea itself.
Wondering about memory and new wholes. Does a new whole know it is new?
Retinavir crystallization = Kurt Vonnegut's Ice Nine ???
Matt, have you actually read the Vonnegut book that has ICE Nine??
Cat's Cradle right? I read it in high school so barely remember but remind me!