# SIG-MRG 2026-10-22 — Session Notes Participants: - Kei 🗝 | UTC-4 - Sebastián Aristizábal | UTC+2 - Jeremiasz Rzenno | CET - Mark Elder - Ben --- ## 📖 The Reading A short paper by **Rupert Sheldrake** on **morphic resonance**, written for a psychology journal in connection with the idea of the collective unconscious (described by Kei as a condensed form of Sheldrake's book *The Presence of the Past*). Kei distributed a PDF with some sections redacted to shorten reading time. The session built on prior readings, especially Michael Levin's "Ingressing Minds" paper. ## 🧭 Overview The group read and discussed Sheldrake's hypothesis of morphic resonance — the idea that memory and form are not simply stored in material substrates but "tuned into" from fields that carry reference to the past. The conversation moved from an opening round on habit versus the unchanging, through silent reading, into a wide-ranging discussion of memory as relational and non-localized, the limits of mechanistic/computational metaphors, and connections to platonism, immanence, and the collective unconscious. The session closed with each participant naming where they most agreed or disagreed with the hypothesis. ## 💡 Key Points & Themes **Framing (Kei):** - Sheldrake, originally a Cambridge plant biologist, developed morphic resonance while thinking about how plants develop from seeds. Kei asked the group to read with "creative projection," keeping an open mind while noting this is a contested hypothesis, not established science. - The reading connects to the prior session on Levin's "Ingressing Minds," which posits a platonic-like realm whose forms ingress into material reality. Kei noted many biologists are "formalists in their professional lives and then secret platonists" — the unsettled, millennia-old question of how things come into being and how memory relates to that. - Opening prompt: where is the line between a *habit* and something *unchanging* in your life, and where is the negotiation of agency between them? Kei's example: waking without an alarm (a programmable habit) versus the underlying cortisol mechanism (relatively unchanging biology). **Opening-round reflections:** - **Mark:** Cited Anders Ericsson's view that genetics may not determine intelligence but may shape *what we're interested in*. Felt his own interests (e.g. his youthful anarchism, which his father proudly encouraged) often felt "more predetermined than a choice." - **Sebastián:** Explored agency in reactions to conflict. Despite understanding the hormonal/chemical/psychosocial workings, that knowledge "doesn't fulfill this modern promise of control" — sometimes a habit cannot be broken, raising the question of whether it is a habit at all. - **Kei** affirmed Sebastián's point, critiquing the inherited idea that social action is fully malleable through self-awareness, which can work against "allowing what arises to arise." **Discussion of the text:** - **Kei:** Valued how Sheldrake exposed unquestioned "givens" — the tension between physics' static natural laws (speed of light, thermodynamics, Newtonian gravity) and Darwin's incessantly evolving universe that carries reference to past and future. Seeing these two taken-for-granted frames clearly changed his perception. - **Ben:** The piece resonated with ideas he'd held for ~1.5 years. He thinks of memory as something that "returns in context rather than something that gets queried or stored and retrieved" — meaning is contextual and relational, so it isn't really "stored." Used analogies of gas expanding to fill space or water flowing to find its level. The holographic idea (parts containing the whole) connects directly to his work building AI systems that align local and global context to improve intelligence via "resonance." - **Mark:** Via Robert Anton Wilson's radical skepticism (trying on different worldviews, e.g. living under different calendar systems), he avoids taking beliefs for granted. Offered his "radio pi" thought experiment: since pi is infinite and contains every digital sequence, any digitally representable memory — past or future — exists somewhere in pi, giving a representation of memory "baked into the universe" independent of experience. He stressed this is only a thought experiment. - **Jeremiasz:** Noted the irony that Sheldrake fights the mechanistic view yet reaches for mechanistic analogies. Connected this to Levi Bryant's expanded definition of "machine," suggesting it's hard to escape mechanistic metaphors when discussing organic matters. - **Sebastián:** Drew on the Berlin School for Neuroscience and AI, where leading researchers admitted they "don't have a clue" how the brain works, often merely correlating regional activation with function. Argued each era describes the brain using its state-of-the-art technology (old codexes depicting the brain as watch cogs; today's "storage/saving/files" computer vocabulary) — the same pattern appears in this paper. His biggest positive takeaway: the paper treats memory as **relational**, fitting a broader zeitgeist of relational ontologies that reject single-entity materialism (referencing the Protocol Institute framing and Hartmut Rosa's sociology of resonance). - **Kei:** Cited Michael Nielsen on materialism vs. non-materialism. Agreed the "spot-on" critique is that Sheldrake decries mechanism yet offers a mechanistic account (fields substituting for genes). Proposed that memory may have a not-yet-known material medium — analogous to how electromagnetic fields were once "woo." Linked to Ted Chiang's "Exhalation": memory is dynamic and morphing, so "why wouldn't something dynamical have a dynamical substrate?" Called this his own "reality tunnel." - **Ben:** Reading *Diagrammatic Immanence* (on Spinoza), where everything is constituted by effective relations — rhyming with memory as relational. Noted Spinoza's immanence would refute both a transcendent memory field and Levin's separate platonic world; perhaps that separation need not exist. - **Kei:** The more a thought is thought (or a memory recalled), the more it crystallizes/becomes "true" — suggesting the hypothesis is itself born from intuition. ## 🔀 Questions & Disagreements - **Sebastián:** Main disagreement — the paper argues well what memory *is not* but leaves what it *could be* intangible and "a bit wooey" without background in relational ontology. - **Mark:** Uncomfortable with the collective unconscious implying one could "tune into someone else's memories." - **Jeremiasz:** Expected the receiver to have *more agency* over input, rather than tuning into a pre-existing form that precedes reception. - **Ben (open questions):** Is there really a difference between cognition and memory, or are they parts of the same thing? Suggested a "collective subconscious" might simply be the resonance of language/meaning through exposure — i.e. memetic spread (observable quickly with AI adopting new framings). - **Kei:** Acknowledged much of Sheldrake's cited data is "questionable from science's perspective" and that he overstates the extent to which memory isn't localized (some brain/cell correlates do hold up). Invited disagreement from anyone who found one. - Tension throughout: can one critique mechanistic metaphors without smuggling them back in (Jeremiasz, Sebastián)? ## 🔗 References Mentioned - Rupert Sheldrake, *The Presence of the Past* (and his later work on "telepathy tapes" / telepathy) - Michael Levin, "Ingressing Minds" (prior session reading) - Anders Ericsson (educational/expertise researcher) - Robert Anton Wilson (radical skepticism, worldview experiments) - Michael Nielsen (quantum scientist; work on mnemonic mediums) - Ted Chiang, "Exhalation" - Levi Bryant (expanded definition of "machine") - Baruch Spinoza; *Diagrammatic Immanence* (book Ben is reading) - Hartmut Rosa, theory of resonance (sociology) - Rick Rubin, *The Creative Act* (creativity as "antenna") - Berlin School for Neuroscience and AI / Mind and Brain Institute, Berlin - Protocol Institute (mentioned re: high modernity / materialism) ## ✅ Action Items & Next Time - **Next reading:** An excerpt from a book by **Nikolay Kukushkin** (NYU scientist) on memory in cells (kidney/liver) and in sea slugs — "rigorous science meets mind-expanding hypotheses." - Kei encouraged participants (especially new joiners) to continue the conversation and post further thoughts in the memory research group channel, and to keep in touch given the overlapping interests. ## ⭐ Memorable Quotes - **Ben:** "Memory is something that returns in context rather than something that gets queried or stored and retrieved." - **Sebastián:** "Knowing the hormonal, knowing the chemical taking place… doesn't fulfill this modern promise of control." - **Kei:** "Why wouldn't something dynamical have a dynamical substrate?"