Science's delusion

Let's start by taking a look at Sheldrake's case.

It may seem odd casting the august notion of science into the guise of religion, but it appears that this is precisely what has happened. As Sheldrake points out, challenging these articles will ensure that you receive no funding for your research. You will be excluded from conferences, you won't get your papers published, and if you insist on pursuing this heretical path, you will eventually be excluded from the community ... what the Church called Excommunication.

The institution that perpetuates this belief, that is the Keeper of Its Keys, of course, is the modern university. Godwin (1986) has drawn a poignant parallel between the role played by the Church in the Middle Ages and the role played by The Academy today, complete with rites, rituals and regalia that reflect the pomp and power of those deemed worthy to go forth into the world to be "experts"; that is, purveyors of the True Faith.

Some of you will take this for an exaggeration, but try obtaining grants for your research without the right papers and credentials, try gaining acceptability and respectability without the proper sigils and seals. You might have the cure for cancer in your head, but without the proper documents, authorizations and blessings of the Key Keepers, you will remain a non-descript, unknown novice, who will long have been forgotten before you were ever really known. Yes, there are vested interests involved, and they broach no rebellion.

It would be worthwhile, I believe, to at least list these ten Articles, for while I will not have time to deal with them individually in detail, they do establish a reasonable and comprehensible starting point for uncovering their true nature. On pages 7 and 8 of Sheldrake's book, he lists them (and discusses them in detail throughout the rest of the text), and I'll state them only briefly here:

1. Everything is essentially mechanical.
2. All matter is unconscious.
3. The total amount of matter and energy is always the same.
4. The laws of nature are fixed.
5. Nature is purposeless and evolution has no goal or direction.
6. All biological inheritance is material.
7. Minds are inside heads and are nothing but the activities of brains.
8. Memories are stored as material traces in brains and are wiped out at death.
9. Unexplained phenomena such as telepathy are illusory.
10. Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.

Two things are immediately apparent. First, Sheldrake, being a biologist and chemist by trade, has focused on what we would call the "natural sciences", not necessarily science in general. Second, the philosophy of science that he is challenging is called "materialism". The idea is that everything ... absolutely everything ... can be explained in terms of the laws of physics and chemistry, for the most part. If it isn't anchored in matter, it can be ignored. Genes are responsible for heredity, mutated genes are responsible for differences over generations, everything happens by random chance, and that's it. Unfortunately, that's not it at all.

And that's where we'll pick up next time.

References
Godwin, Joscelyn (1986) "Priests, Professors, & Gurus: When the Academy is a Church the Hermetic Professor becomes a Heretic", Gnosis Magazine, No. 2, Spring/Summer, pp. 35-38.

Sheldrake, Rupert (2012) The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry, Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., London.

Seeds of delusion

The observant reader will have noticed that over the last few posts, a certain theme continually recurs, namely that too often we only think we know things when in fact we merely believe that things are a certain way. This error is much more widespread than we generally assume. The reason for it, however, is rather simple and straightforward, and I have been stating it in various ways throughout these posts as well. To put it another way, we fall into the belief trap when we fail to question our own "givens", when we do not question the assumptions we make. Whatever we take for granted, we think is, well, just however it is, that it is clear, obvious, even commonsensical, when, truth be told, it is none of these things.

Let me make myself perfectly clear. All of us assume that certain things are simply a certain way. We don't think about them, we don't question them, we just pick them up and run with them. I am convinced that in our current state of development as human beings, there are some things we just can't know. We can only assume, but the difference between the masses and the thinking individual is that the latter has taken the time, expended the energy and become aware of what it is that s/he is assuming, believing, identifying as their own starting point for their point-of-view. In other words, what is needed more and more is that we make ourselves aware of just where it is we ourselves are coming from. It may not be an easy task, but it is a worthwhile one, to be sure.

On this particular note, I was recently, reading Rupert Sheldrake's insightful critique, The Science Delusion (published in the USA as Setting Science Free). He advances the thesis that the current edifice of "science" is built upon the foundation of ten unchallengeable "dogmas" that establish the framework and the ground rules for what is acceptable and legitimate. Rather than being incontrovertible facts, or truths, these are in fact, assumptions lacking basis in fact. They are, if you will, the "givens" which form the starting point of all inquiry. They must be accepted, they may not be challenged, for doing so relegates the perpetrator to the fringes of the scientific establishment. In a word, they are Modern Science's Ten Articles of Faith. (Sounds famililar, doesn't it?)

Well, what I would like to do over the course of the next few posts is to pick up on Sheldrake's critique but extend it to the so-called science of economics. This particular "science" has taken over center stage in all of our lives. We are now living in a thoroughly economized world. Economics and economic thought permeate every aspect of our existence. The economic argument is the killer argument, regardless of the topic, and the currently accepted school of thought, neoliberalism, has, like science itself in more general terms, turned itself into something of a religion. There are certain doctrines that they hold to be true and inviolable, even if, at bottom, they are mere assumptions masquerading as fact. They are not only beliefs, they are unconscious beliefs. My goal will be to explore the parallels and perhaps seek some possible solutions for the future.

We'll get down to business, so to speak, next time.

Reference
Sheldrake, Rupert (2012) The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry, Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., London.

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble

That line from Shakespeare (Macbeth) popped into my head today. I was coming home from the grocery store, I had already been to the barber, the baker, and dry cleaner. Just all part of an everyday grind, nothing special, but it was a lot of interaction with a good number of my fellow citizens, and I'm sure you can imagine that the "toil and trouble" part was more than apparent. Truth be told, I was thinking about this blog and it was that which brought be to the bubble and, ultimately, Macbeth. I've always liked that line. I always thought the witches in that play were smarter and more insightful than most of the other characters. At least they gave some thought to what was coming down the road.

The idea of using an advanced medium to enhance one's capabilities has been around for some time. Yes, managing fire to heat a vessel of fluid to achieve some kind of end took on a different form during the Industrial Revolution, but using technology for communication purposes has a rather long history as well. For the witches it was a cauldron. For us, it's the Internet.

Macbeth was about the deeds willing to be done on the way to kingly power. We democratized ourselves in the meantime (or at least we like to tell ourselves we have), and it was the Internet -- for those of your old enough to remember -- that was going to shift the balance of power from top to bottom. The Internet leveled hierarchies. We were all in it together, and no one single entity or person was in charge. True equality had been achieved. At least that was the theory.

My first excursion into this realm was in the late 80s, early 90s. You had to type in commands on a black screen to do anything: get your modem going, login to a provider, move to other computers to get files, or negotiate your way to the myriad forums on what was then called Usenet. It was a dark, anonymous realm, but the interactions were serious, sometimes intense, often fun. Not responding to what someone else said was considered unacceptable. If you had nothing to contribute, you were told so. Communication was most often short, direct, to-the-point. Of course, being humans, netizens of the day many discussions degenerated into flame wars (hostile, insulting, often profanity-laced interactions), which were certainly not for the faint of heart. But often ended in some reference to Nazis or Hitler, oddly enough (see Godwin's Law).

No, these were not the "good old days", they were just the "old days". What was different from today, however, is two-fold: it was interactive and heterogenous. By interactive, I mean simply that statements were taken seriously, challenged and responded to. There was give-and-take, back-and-forth. By heterogenous, I mean that the participants were from diverse cultures and backgrounds, with varying interests and intellectual capabilities. As everything transpired via text (no picture, no visuals at all), there were also oddities like full sentences, questions, and not a few well-turned phrases.

This all changed in the mid-90s though with the coming of the Web. The visualizations and the ability to put everything into bright, blinking, colors did its part to kill discussion, but with the rise of so-called social networks and specialized communities, it is too easy these days to simply find one's own kind and retreat. Both the intellectual interaction and the heterogeneity have been eliminated. We can find, or create, our own little bubbles in which to exist and which will not be disturbed by the big, bad world "out there". And it is those bubbles that are at the root of too many toils and trouble.

Flawed in our thinking?

You may be getting the impression that I'm suggesting we humans are basically flawed in our thinking. This is not the case at all. I have little to present against how we think, but I'm fairly certain that we are not as aware of our own (and others') thinking as we should be. A little awareness can go a long way.

And that, I believe, is our most fundamental, general problem: we're simply unaware of too much, above all who we ourselves are, what we believe and, most importantly, why we believe whatever that is. There are a lot of things that seem like a good idea at the time. How many of us have awakened one morning full of regret for doing "what seemed like a good idea at the time"? How many of us have looked back at our past and realized when it was that we took that less than optimal turn in life and realize that, well, "it seemed like a good idea at the time"? One of our advantages (evolutionary and otherwise) as human beings is that we can imagine. We can play out different scenarioes in our heads, we can envision consequences of actions and decisions. We can also reflect on our own wishes and desires, and we can learn about others' as well and reflect on how they work with, or against, our own. But, we don't do that very often. Instead, we tend to be impulsive, reactive, knee-jerking actors in a drama whose plot is completely unknown to us. Too often our decisions are being made in our spinal columns, not in our brains.

This is unfortunate, not only for the actor but also for whomever else is affected by those actions. Part of this comes from the fact that we are constantly bombarded with the means and motivation to seek instant gratification. We think we've got to have this or that now, when in fact, not only don't we need it now, we probably don't need it at all. Too often we believe that things ... possessions ... are what we need (or at least want), but shortly thereafter the thrill of the purchase is gone, it all becomes mundane again, and we're no better off than we were before. I believe a primary reason for this, for the perpetual dissatisfaction that so many of us endure, is simply because we're not so much flawed in our thinking, but rather that we simply don't think enough.

Thinking is not just about solving problems, it is also about reflection, as I have said, but it is also, I believe most importantly, about awareness ... of the world around us, ourselves, and, particularly, our own thinking. We need to stop and think about why we think the things we do. We need to explore our thoughts to their roots to see what they are based upon. We need to be honest with ourselves and identify our own prejudices (and, yes, we all have lots more of them than we might like to admit). We also need to ask ourselves why others do think like we do. It's not just because they're not as smart as we are. Maybe, just maybe, we're not as smart as we think we are.

All of this gets complicated, though, when we find ways to isolate us from those who perhaps think differently than we do. There is a great danger these days of isolating oneself to such a degree that the otherness of others can simply be eliminated. When that happens, though, we opt out of thinking altogether and we descend to the realm of pure belief. Oh, there is nothing wrong with belief per se, but pure belief is unaware belief. And being unaware is as good as being unconscious.