Morphic resonance relates to the phenomenon of “pattern
completion” observed in complex dynamical systems such as attractor neural
networks. And this apparently technical
observation leads to a different way of thinking about the evidence for an
“afterlife” – cases of apparent reincarnation, ghosts and poltergeists,
near-death experiences, mediumistic séances, and so forth. (For good reviews of this evidence see
Leslie Kean’s book Surviving Death, or Stephen Braude’s more academic book
Immortal Remains.)
Recall from above that morphic resonance is a dynamic in
which, as Charles Peirce put it, “the tendency to take habits” rules. Once a pattern is established, it tends to
continue itself and get more and more intense – though it may be slowed down or
halted when its expansion conflicts with other patterns, in a situation of
limited scope. Morphic resonance can
occur in various complex systems due to consequences of ordinary physics;
Sheldrake proposes it as an additional dynamic in our universe, going beyond those
identified in standard “physical laws.”
So why do I claim that morphic resonance is related to (and
is one cause of) the phenomenon of pattern
completion. Suppose a certain
system of patterns tends to occur together according to a particular overall pattern. If part of that system goes away, then
according to morphic resonance, the remaining parts will tend to cause new
versions of the missing parts to grow back.
This occurs to a significant extent in living systems such as cells and
organisms; it is what Maturana and Varela call “autopoiesis.” It also occurs in neural networks designed
to implement associative memory, such as Hopfield networks or the Economic
Attention Networks component of my OpenCog Artificial General Intelligence
platform. If you present such a neural
network with part of a memory, it will automatically do pattern completion and
retrieve the rest. Human episodic
memory seems to largely work this way; once we remember one portion of an
episode, the rest tends to come flooding back vividly into memory. Some parts of a memory item may be better
pattern completion cues than others, as with the semantic cues in the
tip-of-the-tongue phenomena discussed above.
How might this line of thinking synergize with “survival”
type phenomena? The core idea that pops
to mind is: Perhaps an individual human mind should be viewed as existing as a
pattern in the broader eurycosm, not just in our physical spacetime
continuum. The body associated with
that mind is part of this pattern; specifically part of the projection of this
pattern into the portion of our spacetime continuum existing in a certain
interval of time. An individual human
mind, as a pattern, may also exist elsewhere in the eurycosm, tangled up in all
sorts of different dynamics, including many that may be incomprehensible to us
with our limited experience-bases and our cognitive restrictions.
This gives a natural high-level framework for thinking about
reincarnation-type dynamics. When an
individual human mind becomes somehow correlated with a portion of our
spacetime continuum, corresponding to an interval of time in which that mind is
not associated with any body, then pattern completion kicks in. Landing in a different body provides a way
for that mind to complete the pattern that it previously realized in our
spacetime continuum, during a different interval of time.
How would this sort of pattern completion process be
guided? What are the dynamics of the
allocation of attention, in the “near eurycosm” – the region of the wider space
that is nearby to our spacetime continuum and its patterns? Some aspects of this dynamics are evident,
e.g. it seems that emotionally salient negative events with implications for
the self-structure of an individual mind – such as being killed, as one example
– are often able to trigger pattern completion events. This is interesting in the context of the
cognitive theory of emotion, which associates positive emotion with surprising
fulfillment of expectations, and negative emotion with surprising UNfulfillment
of expectations. In this theory, a
negative emotion tends to correspond with a pattern that expected to be
completed in a certain way, not getting completed. Hypothetically, morphic resonance might then
cause the completion of this pattern in some form or another to get a high
amount of attention, which might cause other things associated with that
pattern to get a high amount of attention.
For instance, if a child is murdered, this is a surprising incompletion
of a pattern, which may mean that especial attention in the near eurycosm gets
paid to completing some of this child’s dangling mind-patterns, perhaps via
reincarnation; and some of this attention may flow to the child’s death wound,
resulting in it appearing on the body of the person receiving the reincarnation
of the child.
When a medium makes contact with a mind associated with a
deceased person, what kind of pattern completion is occurring? Is there some sort of complex dynamic,
different from what happens in our spacetime continuum but still involving that
deceased person’s mind, that the medium mind connects with – thus triggering an
on-the-fly process of pattern completion, in which the medium’s mind and
fragments of the deceased person’s mind come together to trigger formation of
an entity resembling a persisting version of the deceased person’s mind? In what circumstances is this process more
do-able? Are the more abstract parts of
the deceased person’s mind (e.g. semantic memory) more amenable to being drawn into
this pattern completion process than less abstract parts (e.g. phonological
memory), thus contributing to tip-of-the-tongue phenomena in mediumship?
The difficulty of talking to the dead, or carrying out psi
feats generally, may be viewed as tied to the powerful morphic resonance
displayed by the laws of physics and the associated structures and dynamics of
chemistry, biology and so forth. These
are extremely intense patterns, which may have evolved in the early physical
universe in competition with other physical-law systems. The morphic resonance pushing toward pattern
completion of fragmentary human minds in the near eurycosm, has to compete with
the awesomely strong morphic resonance keeping the laws of physics in place!
One thing that is clear from this line of thinking is that the
notion of “survival” can be developed in many directions. If one posits a wider containing universe
that goes beyond the one-dimensional time-axis of our 4D spacetime continuum,
then “survival after death” is less the point than “existence of the individual
mind in some broader space beyond the spacetime continuum,” which in a sense
naturally implies existence of the individual mind beyond a particular
time-interval within our spacetime continuum.
This sort of exploration is very far from compelling at this
point – but it’s fair to note that there are also hundreds of complex
mathematical theories aiming to unify quantum theory and relativistic
gravitation, and so far none of them is meaningfully empirically substantiated. Sometimes science needs to explore a lot
before conclusions emerge.
References
Amit, Daniel (1992). Modeling Brain Function: The World of
Attractor Neural Networks. Cambridge
Press
Deutsch, David
(1986). On Wheeler's notion of “law
without law” in physics. Foundations of
Physics 16 (6):565-572
Fuchs, Christopher
(2006). On Participatory Realism. Information and Interaction, The Frontiers
Collection pp 113-134
Goertzel, Ben, Cassio
Pennachin and Nil Geisweiller (2014).
Engineering General Intelligence, vol. 1 and 2. Atlantis Press.
Maturana, H.R. and F.J.
Varela(1980). Autopoiesis and Cognition:
The Realization of the Living. Reidel
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