Fringe or frontier: Is our current scientific paradigm still the best fit?

“I think we’ve got much too narrow a picture of reality,” Rupert Sheldrake tells me in this week’s Mini Philosophy interview. “What we need is a larger, more inclusive model of reality, which includes all these anomalies in the Universe, and the biggest anomaly of all, from the point of view of conventional mechanistic materialism, is consciousness itself.”

“If you have a Universe, by definition, made up of unconscious matter, and our brains are made of unconscious matter, how come we’re conscious?”

Sheldrake, an author and parapsychology researcher, has been variously referred to as a “fringe scientist,” “a free-thinker,” and a “heretic.” There’s certainly something fringe and heretical about what he says. Sheldrake is not some anonymous username on the internet selling Chinese homeopathic remedies. He’s a PhD-carrying scientist who still publishes regularly in respectable scientific journals — journals he thinks are too narrowly focused.

One of Sheldrake’s main points — across his life and across our interview — is that the existing scientific paradigm is too narrow, too rigid, and too inadequate. According to Sheldrake, we need to challenge, dismantle, and reconstruct a worldview that is far more ambitious.

The paradigm we live in

The word “paradigm” refers to any pattern or framework behind something; a language or a design can have a paradigm. But in 1962, the philosopher Thomas Kuhn used it almost exclusively in reference to science, and since then, that’s how the word is most often understood. A scientific paradigm is the set of assumptions, principles, and methods that define the science of an era. It’s what establishes “normal science” and “fringe” or “pseudo” science. A paradigm needs to be elastic enough to accommodate new scientific discoveries and comprehensive enough to explain most of how the world works.

Sheldrake argues that our existing paradigm fails on both counts. He refers to our current scientific paradigm as “mechanistic materialism,” which is characterized by three main elements. First, everything can be reduced to some smaller component — tissues are made of cells, which are made of molecules, which are made of atoms, which in turn are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Second, everything in the world is physical or “real.” Third, and most importantly, this physical matter is unconscious and purposeless.

The weight of change

In his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn talked about the process of “paradigm shifts.” Paradigms are normally so well-established by millions of experiments over hundreds of years that it takes a lot to shift them. Sometimes, when a freak anomaly or mysterious data point turns up, the paradigm will accommodate it by “mopping up” or will mostly ignore it and throw it into the “To Be Explained Later” pile. Very rarely, though, a weight of data or argument will be so vast and so unignorable that the paradigm will have to shift, as with Einstein’s special relativity or quantum particle physics.

Sheldrake argues that our current paradigm can no longer ignore two things. First, dark matter and dark energy. As he puts it, “So we’ve now reached the point where 95% of reality is supposed to be dark matter and energy, about which we know nothing and for which there’s not a shred of independent evidence.”

“That’s the state of play in proper, real, hard-nosed, hard-core, no-nonsense science. Ninety-five percent of reality is nothing like the physics you learned about at school, in physics classes, or that people study at university. It’s utterly unknown to us.”

Second, though, is the presence of consciousness. How can consciousness exist in an entirely unconscious paradigm? Philosophers either have to pretend we’re not conscious or that it’s an illusion produced by the brain, Sheldrake says.

The former is “the task of the eliminative materialists who try to pretend we’re not conscious and that the consciousness we’re talking about is just what they call ‘folk psychology.’ We’re swept away, and when neuroscience is advanced far enough, we can just talk in terms of nerve impulses and brain activity.”

“They don’t convince many people. I don’t suppose they even convince themselves in their private lives. Then there is the view that consciousness is a kind of illusion produced by physical activity in the brain — either an active phenomenon, something that’s produced by the brain but which doesn’t do anything, or simply an illusion that accompanies brain activity.”

“The problem is that critics point out that illusion is itself a mode of consciousness. So, to try to explain consciousness as an illusion actually begs the question. It presupposes consciousness, and that’s why the very existence of consciousness is called the ‘hard problem’ in the philosophy of mind.”

Sheldrake has a point, to an extent, but he is at risk of creating a straw man. Blanket statements about “scientists” and “science” will always lose the nuance of a complicated debate. It’s not entirely fair to say that all scientists ignore or dismiss consciousness. Many treat the “science of consciousness” seriously, and there are books devoted to the subject. The question that still remains, though, is whether science, as it currently exists, can ever hope to make progress or accommodate the “hard problem” of consciousness.

The tricky second album

There are two points to Sheldrake’s argument, the first of which is perhaps easier than the second. First is the point that the existing scientific paradigm is insufficient. It can only explain, at best, 5% of the Universe and tries to behave as if consciousness either doesn’t matter or doesn’t exist. I suspect many people will have sympathy for this position. It does seem hard to explain how consciousness can “emerge” in an entirely unconscious mechanistic materialism.

The second point, though, is what to replace it with. Sheldrake suggests we need “a larger, more inclusive model of reality, which includes these anomalies” rather than ignoring them. He proposes, for example, that the so-called “laws of nature” be seen “more like habits, and that they’ve evolved along with nature,” instead of being fixed constants imposed at the moment of the Big Bang. This means shifting from a reductionist worldview to “a more holistic approach of seeing things at different levels of organization,” and where “consciousness is a fundamental reality,” not just “an illusion produced by brain activity.” Rather than continuing to “sweep under the carpet 95% of reality,” Sheldrake argues for expanding the scope of science to include the study of consciousness, memory in nature, and other excluded phenomena — while remaining grounded in empirical research.

It’s this second part of Sheldrake’s argument that’s harder to swallow. It’s one thing to say the current map is flawed; it’s quite another to confidently sketch out a better one. Even with Sheldrake’s insistence on empirical data, his alternative model risks drifting into metaphor, speculation, or mysticism.

Paradigm shifts are rare for good reason: They require extraordinary evidence, not just extraordinary ideas. While Sheldrake’s critique of mechanistic materialism is lucid and provocative, his proposal of a new framework — however intriguing — still leaves much in need of proving. In the meantime, perhaps his most important contribution is not the new paradigm he outlines, but the simple reminder that science, when at its best, should remain open to being challenged. Even by heretics.