> [Any thoughts on Ian Stevenson's work? Specifically in relation to reincarnation?] I don’t know much about his work, but about 60 years ago I read about people who had detailed knowledge of preceding lives. Since I am always starting from the radical empirical awareness of complexity constantly changing in meaningful ways, I am also always considering ways to understand the meanings of the regularities. I think a quality of coherence in things, covering situations that used to be explained by a luminiferous ether, can be thought of as a “formative ether,” with resonant processes that span spaces and times. We can resonate in the same time with organisms in different places, affecting our complex developmental processes. Substances are always participating in particular situations or fields, and are never merely random. The “orthogenetic” theory of evolution described a developmental inertia, in which the existence of a structure leads to more of the same structure. A structure in one organism affects its interactions, so that a functional (or eco-) system tends to develop its own inertia. Within a certain society, these functional systems could span generations, eliciting “phenocopies” transgenerationally. Lancelot Whyte’s “formative principle” and Rupert Sheldrake’s “formative causation” just need a more concrete physical substrate, that I think exists in fragments, from Leibniz to Bose to Polanyi, to Horace Dudley and J.L. Anderson, etc. The idea of [[resonance]] needs a better understanding of substance as/incorporating its fields—and nothing has private independent fields. > > J.L. Anderson, "Non-Poisson Distributions Observed During Counting of Certain Carbon-14 Labeled (Sub) Monolayers," Journal of Physical Chemistry, Vol. 76, No. 4 (1972). (Nuclear decay isn’t random and depends on its environment) > > Dayton Miller's Ether-Drift Experiments