Morphic Resonance- The Presence of the Past

They are the organising fields of self-organising systems. The habitual blueprints of pattern and form and the inherent collective memory strung across space and time. Morphic resonance remains a hypothesis of formative causation, one where the field concept is extended upon the biological realm and presents an evolutionary account of instincts and behaviors. One where the laws of nature become manifestations of acquired habits, where developing embryos become products of an architectural, morphogenetic plan and one where flocks of birds and schools of fish orient themselves in a seamless fashion via morphic fields. Just as a bar magnet can be split into infinitely many smaller magnets, each with their respective north and south poles; the holistic rather than mechanistic nature of living systems, especially in their developmental stages is reminiscent of the field. Matter is not fundamental to such fields but rather conversely fields are fundamental to matter.Take the embryonic development of species from flat and nematode worms to dragon flies and newts; terminating the growth of one half of the embryo will allow the other half to grow independent of it as if a mechanism beyond bilateral gene expression and modulation is vested. Willow tree cuttings and amputated newts grow readily as if a morphology in the form of a field, where nested hierarchies of holons centered on lower level systems govern their self-organising behavior. Morphic resonance is the inference from similar patterns of form acting on subsequent patterns of activity, a kind of collective unconscious comparable to that proposed by Jung. If rats in San Francisco learn a new trick then rats in London should learn such a trick more readily and with ease; similarly, the synthesis of a new crystalline compound more often yields easier crystallisation rates in the future. Such phenomena may be deduced from the presence of the past, a sort of collective-rat memory, a morphic field rather than coincidence or fragments travelling on the beards of migrant chemists. Homoeotic mutations in Drosophila fruit flies produces extra wings in the place of halteres, such a tuning into the morphic field of the fly revisits the heresy of heredity whereby acquired traits may have the potential to be inherited. Indeed the anthropocentric notion of physical laws or constants are somewhat outrun by the idea of habits, verily human laws evolve and change with time and so could the laws of nature arise via habitual means of non-local reinforcement of similarity and natural selection. Similarly, the same means by which a magnetic field stretches beyond the horizon of a magnet and the gravitational field of the sun reaches out to keep the planets in orbit; the extended mind reaches out beyond the vicinity of the physical brain, a morphic field between minds and thoughts. But in the long run, the ascent of alternative hypotheses rather than merely mechanistic truisms spells a resonance of morphic proportions.