 I messaged you about this and it seems to be one of the most pressing questions around the question of metaphysics in the sense of how is it possible that a pattern of activity like a seed contains all of the trunk, the branches, the leaves, the fruits, and then it is also recursive as it has more seeds. How does a zygote contain the embryo, the baby, the child, the adult, and the potential for more humans, recursion? How does the Big Bang contain all the matter, stars, planets, civilizations, and the potential for more Big Bangs, recursion? There's no DNA during cosmogenesis that dictates this morphological development. So the question we ask is what is the information? What is the pattern, the underlying habits unfolding across these examples? How does it work, Rupert? How does it relate to more thick resonance? Well, there are many forms in nature, atoms are forms, molecules are forms, crystals are forms, plants and animals, planets, stars, galaxies. All of these are forms in the sense that they're organised, self-organising structures of activity. And clearly at the moment of the Big Bang there were no forms, the universe was totally amorphous. So all these forms have come into being as the universe has evolved. And the same is true of an egg. I mean, the Big Bangs like the hatching of cosmic egg. It's kind of mythic, the modern scientific myth. But if you think of an embryo, zygote, a fertilised egg, that doesn't contain much form either. And yet you and I have eyes and legs and arms and spleens and levers and so on. None of those are in the fertilised egg, more forms appear. So both in individual development, ontogeny and in phylogeny, the evolution of life and indeed of the entire cosmos. More forms appear from less. Now, in the case of living organisms like us, then the forms that appear are repetitions of what's happened before. Every time an oak tree grows, it's like previous oak trees. You and I are like previous humans in many respects. Every time a new star forms, it's like lots of other stars. So there's one aspect of formation which is repetition and morphic resonance is really a theory of repetition and habit. It says that once new forms have appeared, the more often they appear, the more likely they are to appear again. So that helps to explain form, the appearance of repetitive forms and after all most things we see are repetitive. It doesn't explain the first time an oak tree appears, the first time there's a feather, the first time there's an eye, the first time there's a star or galaxy or a zinc atom or a hemoglobin molecule. So there has to be in evolution as well a principle of creativity, a creative principle whereby new forms, new patterns can appear. We know they do appear. Now how we explain creativity is a big metaphysical question and there are several alternative answers to it. We leave it open because it depends very much on people's worldview. If you're a materialist and you think there's nothing but matter and chance giving rise to the universe, then there's no higher purpose in anything, it's just chance. But if you think there's a guiding consciousness underlying the whole of nature, the whole of the universe, then there could be creative mind or minds at work in this process. I'm not talking about a kind of intelligent design where it's all done in a kind of like an engineer on a drawing board. I'm thinking more of a creativity that spontaneously takes place that makes things up as it goes along. Anyway, that's another theory of creativity. But basically morphic resonance is a way of explaining repetition of forms. And what I'm suggesting is that the DNA that's inherited in the zygote has a limited role in inheritance. It doesn't do everything. Most people assume that genetic is synonymous with hereditary. It isn't. What the DNA does is enables organisms to make particular proteins that specifies the sequence for amino acids and proteins, like in your hemoglobin or in the keratin in your skin and so on. You need proteins and all the enzymes we have. DNA explains that kind of inheritance or at least the primary structure of these proteins. There's also epigenetic inheritance, the inheritance of acquired characters, which affects the expression of DNA of genes. But most of the inheritance of form and of instincts, I think is working through morphic resonance through this kind of collective memory principle. Excellent. Okay, so let's play off of where we, in a sense, it feels as though it's a little bit like Plato's theory of forms and ideas to a certain extent. And also it feels as though there is a deep connection between that and what you were mentioning regarding creativity and imagination and also the, as John von Neumann called the universal constructor. So there's something that is inherent in the cosmogenesis that then downstream creates these mutations in the tape that then, which we as co-creators, we influence those mutations. At one moment, the imaginative idea of seeing birds and then thinking we should fly across oceans too, and then all of a sudden every generation after that has access to flying across an ocean in half a day. So we make these mutations along along the way, and it's almost as though it's a it's a forms and ideas and imagination and creativity that caused that. Yes. Okay. Well, you see, I think what Plato was saying is that there's a realm of forms or ideas that gives rise to everything in this world. They're a reflection of ideal archetypes or forms. However, he thought those archetypes were totally transcendent in a kind of mind beyond the universe. What I'm saying is closer to what his student Aristotle thought. Aristotle thought that the forms were actually within nature. They were the souls of living things. So for Plato, every horse is a reflection of an eternal horse idea beyond space and time. And Aristotle, every horse has an invisible horse soul, which shapes its body as it grows as an embryo and underlies its instincts. And so all the selects not outside nature is in nature. And for him, soul was a natural causal organizing principle. Every living thing had a soul and he thought that many things were alive, including magnets and the earth and the stars. So what Aristotle was saying is closer to what I'm saying is within nature. And it's, but he liked Plato didn't think in terms of evolution. This is a much more recent idea. So the idea that there's, they didn't think in terms of a memory in nature, they didn't need a memory in nature if you've got an eternal forms outside nature or inside nature that are fixed already. You don't need a memory. You just take that for granted. But if things are changing as time goes along as the evolutionary model suggests, indeed, it's basic to it. Then the idea of memory becomes much more important because these forms are not just manifestations of eternal ready made forms. They're based on adaptations to what actually happens organisms are shaped by their environment and they can inherit adaptations. And so it's not just an eternal principle.