1. The metaphysical translation problem
Sheldrake’s language of fields and resonance came from physics, but his intuition came from life. The problem was not that his claims were unscientific, but that they were cast in a metaphysics that could only imagine influence as causal propagation through space.
To speak of morphogenetic fields as causal agents is to remain trapped in the ontology of things acting on other things. Yet what Sheldrake meant to name was not an acting, but a holding — a patterned coherence within which form unfolds. His field was not a force; it was an order of possibility.
To repair the theory, we must shift its ground: from energetic causation to relational potential.
2. Field as structured possibility
An instance is not a copy of the system; it is the system’s perspectival actualisation in event form.
When we describe an embryo developing from a zygote, we are not watching a field act upon matter. We are watching a potential actualising itself through constraint. The “field” is the relational configuration that makes those constraints coherent — a topology of possible alignments.
Thus, field does not denote a force in space, but a grammar of becoming: the logical structure of possible differentiations and continuities that a living system can enact.
3. Resonance as reflexive alignment
In a relational reframing, resonance becomes reflexive alignment: the coherence of construals across scales and instances within a shared potential.
No information crosses time; no signal travels from one organism to another.
Resonance, then, is not transmission but mutual participation in the same relational topology. Form echoes form because both are actualisations of the same field of potential.
4. Morphogenesis as actualisation, not assembly
To see morphogenesis relationally is to stop imagining development as construction.
Each local interaction — cell signalling, migration, folding — is an event of actualisation. It is the system’s own construal of its potential, from a given perspective. Morphogenesis, then, is the self-alignment of potential: life’s reflexive actualisation of form.
5. The memory of form without mysticism
In this frame, Sheldrake’s “memory in nature” ceases to be an anomaly.
When a fern unfurls or a heartbeat stabilises, the system is not “remembering” its past; it is construing its own possibility again.
6. The repaired intuition
| Sheldrake’s Concept | Relational Reframe |
|---|---|
| Morphogenetic field as a region of influence | Field as structured potential (theory of possible instances) |
| Morphic resonance as causal memory | Reflexive alignment across shared potential |
| Memory in nature | Persistence of relational structure |
| Recurrence of form | Actualisation of the same ontological topology |
| “Transmission” across time | Coherence within a system of potential |
This translation preserves the heart of Sheldrake’s insight — the world’s continuity of form — while freeing it from the metaphysics of hidden forces. The field is not an explanation of life; it is life, understood relationally: the patterned potential of its own becoming.
Next: The Embryo as Reflexive Event
The next post applies this reframe directly to embryonic development, showing how the embryo can be understood as the evental actualisation of a field of relational potential — not as matter instructed by code, but as form becoming aware of itself through differentiation.
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