Is science, or at least how you conceptualize science, essentially physicalism/scientific materialism?
Or, to perhaps put it a better way, is this discussion about science as a practice or about science as an ideology? If it’s the latter, I can understand why some people would find that worldview reductive. As you yourself mention, there is the sublime or numinous experience that at least sometimes seems incommensurate with scientific reductionism.
I’d also add that in many cases, what people are pushing back against is better described as scientism than as science — the kind of attitude that devalues philosophy as useless abstraction and dismisses any kind of spirituality or even discussion of consciousness as “spooky” or “woo-woo.”
I’d say yes to your first question, but keeping in mind that science should have some humility about the kinds of questions it can address. As one of the characters in my novel says, science is great at addressing 4 of the 6 journalistic questions (5 Ws and and H): What, When, Where, and How, but not Why or Who (if there is a Who). I haven’t delved too much into the science of mind. What do they think, consciousness is just a hallucination going on in the machines of our brains?
The essay was really just a way to express my own view of science and how it informs my worldview, which is inevitably incomplete and partial. As I said in the essay, as a novelist I’m just picking up bits along the way. And I also wanted to explore why I’ve had such an “allergy” to what seem like anti-science statements in the essays I’ve been reading, mostly from nature writers I agree with. That allergy has to do with the writing of my novel, for which i became immersed in the world of flat-earthers who believe science is just a sham keeping us sheeple in the dark.
Thanks for your comment and questions! I hope you’ll check out Ship of Fools.
Really enjoyed reading your article! As a former physicist and a Christian believer, I’ve always found the sense of wonder and awe in both science and faith to be mutually reinforcing and the deeper I go, the more the wonder increases! A friend of mine has actually written a book about it, “God in the Lab”, by Ruth Bancewiecz.
Thanks for this! My essay for next week features Christian geologists and their debates over the Grand Canyon. There are a lot more varieties of belief than I ever knew! I’ll check out your friend’s book.
Hi Larry, and thanks for the mention! Good to know someone out there reads my stuff!
The world is decidedly not flat, vaccines are in principle beneficial in most cases, and yes science gives us amazing insights into our cosmos.
I think you come close to misrepresenting me as anti-science, which is not the case, though you could be excused given the full title of ‘The Re-enchantment’ was “A Defence of Magic and a Re-enchantment of the World”. Sets off alarm bells perhaps. I certainly lost a few subscribers on that one. But picked up others…so, swings and roundabouts.
My position on science is complex. As a system of thought and investigation it is powerful and has done a lot for humanity. Science has given us the tools to manipulate our world in extraordinary ways, and to harness the ‘resources’ of our planet to…to…to our own ends. Whether the upshot of that is ‘good’ or not might be better judged by history. But for now, its not looking good. One simple fact: no wealthy, industrialised culture is happier than any vaguely intact indigenous culture. So power and wealth and stuff really don’t count for much in the end.
I do have ‘issues’ with science. Where to start? For a thought system supposedly dedicated to discovering reality or truth, it too often operates in service to one accepted orthodoxy. Your example of the connected forest is apposite: forest ecologist Suzanne Simard was hounded and vilified for her theory of the ‘wood-wide-web’. But my real issue is rather deeper: it is, as you will know from ‘Re-Enchantment’, that materialism is a priori the only acceptable basis for understanding the cosmos. Everything else is ‘woo’. This position is not just a matter of mean reviews. It decides careers. It constrains and channels thought. And it precludes serious investigation of many, many ideas, relegating them to the New Age etc. Science is supposed to hold its prizes lightly, because they will almost certainly be taken away in time.
The Gordian knot of science, technology and Empire is indeed the problem….and as you say, it is a problem too big for this space. Science is an institution of society, and as such is subject to many of the failings of society, so a good many failings of science are really just the failings of humans (protecting ego, career or orthodoxy). And yet, it has to be said that science in Australia (and I’ll bet you its ten times worse in the US), is utterly in thrall to the demands of Empire. Science has to lead to economic outcomes. Science has to lead to exciting new technologies which then lead to economic outcomes. That’s how we measure it’s worth. Amongst the threads in that Gordian knot you will find the story of progress, and the story of unbounded economic growth. Ideas powerful enough to destroy a planet.
Knowledge is not wisdom. Knowledge is not even knowledge if it is built on false foundations. And if that ‘false knowledge’ is ploughed back in to the field of human endeavour - perhaps to solve a problem we prepared earlier – then we are almost certainly laying the groundwork for the next problem, and the next.
At this point in time, we need wisdom, and a part of that is to feel wonder. Actually, a part of that is just to feel, something we industrialised post-moderns have gotten very poor at. Why feeling? Because only feeling can lead us to the heart-level realisation that something other than our miserable selves matters! Science may yet help us save the world in small ways, but only feeling will make the future worth living in.
Haven’t read your whole comment yet, but I’m sorry if I misrepresented your position. That’s part of the “allergy” I mentioned in the essay. I too have a complicated, but probably not well enough informed, view of science.
Now that I’ve read your full comment, I agree with everything you say. In a capitalist society, everything depends on money and funding, and that will inevitably distort what science gets done. And I didn’t know how Simard was treated, which is terrible. It’s a bit like how Avi Loeb has been treated since stepping outside the consensus view on the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life. It’s no wonder scientists are tempted to just keep their heads down and not rock the boat. (But on the other hand, in some areas they go too easy on each other in peer review.) Carl Sagan, one of my scientific heroes, would be appalled.
According to some reductionist theories of mind, there’s actually no such thing as subjective experience; the proponents of these theories certainly think that this is the most scientific explanation.
As a scientist myself, I maybe take an upside-down view on these things. I'm not surprised by people who say that science diminishes their sense of wonder: if your wonder sits on top of a vast tapestry of beliefs and assumptions -- a rich picture of the world -- then of course it is damaged when someone tells you that your picture is incorrect. In the same way, if I was hiking in the Grand Canyon and experiencing sublime feelings that sat amongst my scientific worldview, I expect my experience would be ruined if hiking behind me was a spiritualist blabbering about the wonder of God.
On the other hand, in some ways I'm more confused by scientists trying to argue that they really do experience nature just as profoundly as "normal" people. (There's a famous example from Feynman, which you've probably read.) I understand the urge -- it's a bit frustrating to be treated as an unfeeling alien -- but how do you quantify the strength of your feelings compared to someone else? Some people are routinely moved by nature and some people couldn't give a damn. Whether they're scientists or not has nothing to do with it.
One last thing. I want to put my hand up as a defender of scientific Truth. This is not a religion or a belief or a faith. The people who call science a religion do not understand the scientific worldview. You can call it an emotional disposition. I hope that there is an objective reality, and if there is one, I think it's worthwhile to try to uncover as many details as possible about what it is. Maybe that's not correct, but so far this view has taken us a very long way, and there is no compelling evidence to the contrary. A lot of people find this view embarrassing these days. What kind of alternative are they thinking of? How could you take pleasure in the thought that the universe is otherwise? Ugh.
counterpoint: the people who think that Science (the contemporary institution, not the methodology) is *not* a religion take their onotological priors as much for granted as religionists, and pursue heresy with at least as much zeal.
i'd even go so far as saying that Science taught contemporary religion everything it knows about orthodoxy.
Wait, if we’re talking about Science the institution vs Science the methodology. Don’t we need to be very clear about what we mean by both terms; and accepting that there are differences between the two, make it very clear which are referring to whenever we use the word ‘science’?
That in itself seems like a massive project which won’t get resolved BTL…
And given that there’s a likelihood that the two are already being conflated might that explain some of the disagreement?
On reflection, I’m not sure that we can make the I/M distinction in any clear cut way. This is because the feedback loops that arise from social/institutional/political (etc) endeavour are part of ‘the science loop’.
The institutions (etc) may corrupt (eg rent seeking), just as methodologies may also be flawed (eg not truth seeking). I’d assume that the science produced by corrupted processes is going to be less ‘useful’.
How would we know that?
I guess, that evidence of corruption will manifest in the inability to produce/explain effective* technologies.
If the argument is that science is corrupted at an ontological level rather than an epistemological level… That raises the question of how we can do science without doing harm. In that light, I guess we’re screwed.
*this will ultimately be a value judgment, and the question of ‘whose values’ is highly salient.
all good points. the main issue for me is that there is no attention paid to this distinction, and in fact, it often seems to be obscured. we're encouraged to believe that Science always represents the work of selfless geniuses motivated by a pure search for truth, and that this is indistinguishable from the pure form of the scientific method, always striving for elegant proof. Thus, we should Believe The Science, and Trust The Experts, without much care for *which* science and *which* experts (let alone who they're funded by, and why). we've entered the monotheistic phase, where there is a monolithic entity called Science, in which we should put all our faith and hope for a better future. if anyone needs proof, i'd be happy to photograph one of the many yard signs in my neighborhood holding up Science as an article of faith.
you're absolutely correct that there is an important distinction to be made. but that seems to make people uncomfortable, because it troubles the appeal to purity that Science relies on. unlike science-as-methodology, which succeeds or fails on the merits of each individual experiment, and has done for the past three million years or more.
And of course science is community, a series of institutions where some people have more power than others, an economy where some research is funded and other research is not, a series of relationships between flawed human beings.
Nice to talk about these things. I’m interested in how we develop a personal sense of ontology (onto-epistemologies)and whether these disparate onto-epistemologies are necessarily incommensurable.
As Bayes Theorem tells us, our ontological priors can be a real pain in the posterior!
I don't know what you're talking about. The history of science is packed with revolutionary shifts in worldview. The "establishment" always resisted the change (as they should), but reality could not be denied. As for heretics, I'm not aware of any scientific institutions burning anyone to death, or locking them in a dungeon, or assassinating them. On that topic, you're sure to enjoy my little fantasy of a scientist trying to do just that: https://fictionalaether.substack.com/p/catch-up-and-odds-and-ends?r=cohn5
This has been a gripping conversation, to say the least. I’m over here trying to practice non-attachment, as Dawa Tenzing encourages Liz to do in last Friday’s chapter of Ship of Fools. I think part of the stuckness of the conversation comes from its either/or nature, which tends to happen in any debate, especially through these electronic channels. I’m looking for the both/and.
Coincidentally, I’m continuing my reading of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. This is what I found, as she’s describing why goldenrods and asters go well together: “Why are they beautiful together? It is a phenomenon simultaneously material and spiritual, for which we need all wavelengths, for which we need depth perception. When I stare too long at the world with science eyes, I see an afterimage of traditional knowledge. Might science and traditional knowledge be purple and yellow to one another, might they be goldenrod and asters? We see the world more fully when we use both.” I only wish I could make my thoughts both that plain and that eloquent!
But just to be agreeable, how about anything that pretends to be science, but if actually subjected to a scientific test, e.g., a repeatable experiment, is found to be false? For example, astrology. (I looked up a list of pseudoscientific topics on wikipedia, and that was one of them.)
indeed. there's quite a bit to unpack there—"pretends to be science" is doing a great deal of heavy lifting—but it's interesting that there is a middle category between "scientific" and "unscientific".
from what i can tell, "pseudoscientific" is something that has been tested with repeated experiments and produced some significant results, but doesn't meet the standards of proof for Western, materialist science, either through misunderstanding, misrepresentation, or sheer obstinance.
astrology is a great example. for many geographically disparate cultures throughout history, it was an enormously important science that was extensively tested with repeatable results. what Wikipedia thinks of as astrology is a pale shadow of the incredibly detailed and nuanced calculations of astrologers who are still practicing the same art, from ancient times to the present day. good astrologers have a vocabulary for talking about historical cycles that are more predictive than material science would allow. but because Western science grew out of a Christian ontology, in which divination was heretical, it's more important for serious, grown-up, rational science to *disprove* astrology than to look for the ways in which it could be valid.
you can see the same story repeated with many different kinds of "pseudoscience." there are a whole range of phenomena—clairvoyance, psi abilities, subtle energies, spirit contact—that Western science either willfully misunderstands, or completely lacks the ontological tools to evaluate effectively, because our entire civilization has been built on the premise that those things don't exist. capital-S Science isn't a pack of earnest nerds motivated by some pure, starry-eyed search for The Truth: it's a global power structure that sustains livelihoods, reputations, economic systems and political complexes through the careful management of reality.
how is that substantively different from a religion, in which individual priests can claim to be innocently spreading the Good Word to save the souls of nonbelievers, when they're actually the sharp end of the spear for an ontological project bent on remaking the world, according to its own culturally-contingent diktats?
This is a perverse misrepresentation of modern science.
Of course a large organised structure leads to examples of inertia, bad behaviour, and unjust exertion of power. But despite all the usual human problems, science does provide a mechanism through which real knowledge can emerge, and *does* emerge, in vast indisputable quantities over the last three or four centuries. There have been many good-faith attempts to test clairvoyance or spirit contact or whatever else, and they have come to nothing. What is this talk of "material science"? If a non-material phenomena can impact an object in the material world, isn't it in fact also a material phenomena? If not, there is some mechanism by which they interact. Can we not understand that and codify it? Any scientist who could prove that these effects are real, and identify entirely new phenomena for science to study, would be the most celebrated scientist alive. And yet, over centuries of people claiming that these phenomena are real, and they have the knowledge and skill to harness them, nothing has been found. We might agree that there are two conclusions: the claims are being suppressed by a vast global conspiracy of the science establishment, or the claims are pure bullshit.
I have an open mind that any day now I will see conclusive telekinesis results published in Nature (or even a reliable journal!), but until then my money is on the latter.
I agree with much of this. I don't know how one would compare the strength of one's feelings with someone else's, of course. I just don't know why knowing more about how nature or the universe works reduces its awe or mystery. Sometimes it makes it more awesome! I certainly wouldn't say everyone should respond the same way, and I meant that passage as a personal expression.
I really liked your piece; I should have said that first! I wish I was able to convey my feelings so well. I am at a conference in the Pyrenees right now and it’s so beautiful and all I’m able to do is walk around saying “wow!” over and over again. In my comment I was mostly activated by the other comments, which reminded me of this whole line about science being a tool of capitalism and colonialism and so on. This is such a weird take. *Everything* is deeply wound up with that stuff, but science is one of the few tools we have to get beyond the nonsense and uncover bits of reality. We know that the Earth is round (sorry, oblate spheroid) and orbits the sun because of science. Those are facts. If capitalists and colonialists had their way, the Earth would go on forever, and we could explore and exploit it until the end of time. But they can’t believe that. They are constrained by reality. Being able to unravel and clarify that reality is what science does, despite all the political and economic and ideological and careerist forces both outside and inside every scientist.
Some comments have been along the lines of, “I’m not anti-science, but…” and in the “but” things get very close to “it’s all just your opinion”. A lot of science is uncertain and *is* just opinions, but a huge amount is unequivocal. Maybe everyone here knows that, but I thought there’s no harm in doing a bit of finger wagging.
Thanks! I agree it’s hard to untangle any institution from the forces of capitalism and colonialism, and putting all of those evils down to science is extreme. And science has evolved over time along with the rest of our society.
thanks for the shout-out, Larry! i'll try not to write a whole post in the comments.
right off the top—if you're able to see the Grand Canyon/Colorado River matrix as a living being, you might be more of an animist than you realize.
beyond that, it's important for us to make a distinction between "science" as a methodology and (modern, dualist, reductive-materialist) "Science" as an ontological project.
modern people like to pretend that the scientific method was a recent development—something that set us apart from primitive savages—but this is clearly false. we've been doing science throughout human history. the only difference, in recent centuries, is in how experiments are conducted, and what counts as evidence. grimoires are scientific records of hypotheses being repeatedly tested through experimentation; the only reason they're considered "unscientific" is because the entities being summoned are incorporeal, and therefore not real, according to a reductive-materialist paradigm. going back even further—Paleolithic shamans developed trance, journeying, and spirit-contact techniques through experimentation. but they didn't write their notes down; they also accepted polyphasic consciousness as a valid source of proof, whereas the monophasic consciousness of modernity is the only acceptable standard for contemporary science. humans have been doing science for a very, very, very long time.
we're discouraged from making a distinction between the scientific method and Science as an ontological-epistemological project, because Science benefits from portraying itself as a transparent window onto objective reality. religious fundamentalists try to maintain their cultural hegemony by claiming that their paradigm is *not* culturally contingent—not equally subjective, along with all other human-created symbolic interfaces—but a flawless, unambiguous representation of ultimate Truth. the modern institution of Science tries to pull the same parlor trick: hiding all its preconceptions as "just the way things are," while tarring its critics as ignorant, superstitious heretics.
the pandemic revealed the extent to which Science has been corrupted by political and economic expediency. very few people are questioning science-as-methodology; many people are now questioning whether Science-as-institution is faithfully representing the results of its findings. there's ample evidence (speaking of evidence) that Science is all too willing to juke the stats for commercial or political gain (e.g. overstating the safety and efficacy of the Covid vaccine in a rush to market for maximum profits; Fauci arbitrarily changing guidance around social distancing and mortality rates in order to manipulate public response.)
much like Noam Chomsky's quip about free market capitalism ("We should try it sometime")—humanity would benefit enormously from more and better science, motivated in the direction of responsible, cooperative, interspecies stewardship of a living cosmos. but that would mean following the evidence wherever it leads, instead of trying to fit the facts to a particular narrative about human dominance and "progress". we'd have to compel Science to take its thumb off the ontological scale and stop conducting itself like the medieval Church.
the first step is seeing the difference between science (the methodology) and "Science," the increasingly corrupt institution.
Points well taken. I tried to include some caveats about the corruption of science as an institution. It’s certainly been shooting itself in the foot lately. But I guess generally I’m running against the current vibe by speaking up for science right now.
of course! with that in mind, it's worth asking—which parts of science are you speaking up for, and why?
i would submit that many of the things you're crediting science with in this piece are misappropriated. that awe you feel when you look at canyons and forests and galaxies is *in spite of* the Story of Separation, which Science has been busily spinning up for the past few centuries. the only reason we needed Darwin's proof that we are interrelated with the rest of the Animal Kingdom is because of an impoverished reading of the Book of Genesis. what we call "Science" was a continuation Abrahamic dualism: God set us apart from the rest of Creation and gave us dominion over it. According to Descartes and his contemporaries, God then bestowed the (Western, materialist) sciences on us as a way to better understand His Work, even though humans had been successfully using their own science to understand the (living, interrelational, magical) cosmos for millennia.
i was just reading an article the other day about scientists have "proved" panpsychism, which is nonsense: every other indigenous culture in human history had already recognized it. modern scientists did nothing but build an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine to talk themselves out of their own ignorance.
once we realize that "proof" is just as much an ontological cudgel as it is a means of promoting knowledge, most of Science's efforts begin to look self-interested and misleading.
It sounds Iike you’re saying science has contributed nothing to human knowledge. That just seems a bit extreme. Science confirming older wisdom is a good thing, not a bad thing.
depends on how you look at it. the only reason those confirmations were necessary in the first place is because Science discredited the original certainty.
modernity's epistemological project has drastically overstated the importance of Science. its foundational myth is incrementalism: the idea that human knowledge was an empty vessel for most of our history, which Science has gradually filled with more and better things as time goes on. it's heresy to suggest that our ancient ancestors probably had a more complete understanding of reality than we do today. from that perspective, Science is not a steady upward climb to ever-greater heights, but a painfully slow process of unlearning all the bullshit that we invented to justify our domination of the world.
which of these is a more significant truth about reality: the measurable distance from here to the nearest star, or the understanding that the physical universe is made of the same stuff as Thought, and can be related to in ways that transcend spatiotemporal distance? humans have understood the latter truth for thousands of years; now that quantum physics is finally catching up with that reality, Science holds it up as evidence of progress—after spending several hundred years justifying the murder and exploitation of millions of people who built entire cultures around that foundational understanding, on the grounds of their primitive ignorance. it's impossible to separate one from the other. science as a methodology is as old as humanity; Science as an ontological project can never wash its hands of the crimes committed in the name of "progress".
I thought I was trying to meet you half way, but I guess we're never going to agree. You can believe what you want to believe, and I would never tell you you were wrong in the way you did with my expression of belief in your previous comment.
well, i didn't mean any disrespect to you personally, and i'm really sorry if it came across that way.
i get passionate about this stuff because i can draw a straight line between the world that Science built and the very real possibility that large areas of the planet will be uninhabitable in my kids' lifetimes. this stuff keeps me awake at night. in my mind (speaking generally, not about you specifically) it's too soon for apologetics: we're staring down the barrel of a very dangerous future because we created a rapacious system according to the ethos of modernity, under the auspices of Science. the only way we can mitigate the worst of the damage (which we can't avoid entirely) is through an urgent process of truth and reconciliation. if we allow this shell game to continue—were the politicians to blame? was it the capitalists? did the ecological activists not try hard enough?—we're going to end with some very unpleasant lessons in accelerated evolution. the people who are lucky enough to make the jump into whatever future comes next will be the ones with a clear understanding of where the old paradigm betrayed us.
that said, i'm very sorry if my tone was too contentious. you're doing good work out here and i wouldn't want to devalue any of it.
Driving across the Mackinac Bridge at sunset in March when snow and ice were wherever was a sublime experience for me. Ditto seeing Lake Michigan for the first time. I've gone camping in the UP and around the Lower Peninsula and the star gazing has been awe-inspiring.
That's when I fell in love with Michigan and started traveling all around the state and discovering wonderful things like the small towns Ludington and Manistee on Lake Michigan, the historic district of Marshall, and much more. It's not a place I every thought Id end up in but I've spent hale my life here.
Yep, we should have bought up north before the pandemic. It’s all getting pretty expensive now. I think Michigan’s secret is out. (A friend from LA posted a pic from his place somewhere on or around Torch Lake. Someone asked, “Where are you, Hawaii?”)
Is science, or at least how you conceptualize science, essentially physicalism/scientific materialism?
Or, to perhaps put it a better way, is this discussion about science as a practice or about science as an ideology? If it’s the latter, I can understand why some people would find that worldview reductive. As you yourself mention, there is the sublime or numinous experience that at least sometimes seems incommensurate with scientific reductionism.
I’d also add that in many cases, what people are pushing back against is better described as scientism than as science — the kind of attitude that devalues philosophy as useless abstraction and dismisses any kind of spirituality or even discussion of consciousness as “spooky” or “woo-woo.”
I’d say yes to your first question, but keeping in mind that science should have some humility about the kinds of questions it can address. As one of the characters in my novel says, science is great at addressing 4 of the 6 journalistic questions (5 Ws and and H): What, When, Where, and How, but not Why or Who (if there is a Who). I haven’t delved too much into the science of mind. What do they think, consciousness is just a hallucination going on in the machines of our brains?
The essay was really just a way to express my own view of science and how it informs my worldview, which is inevitably incomplete and partial. As I said in the essay, as a novelist I’m just picking up bits along the way. And I also wanted to explore why I’ve had such an “allergy” to what seem like anti-science statements in the essays I’ve been reading, mostly from nature writers I agree with. That allergy has to do with the writing of my novel, for which i became immersed in the world of flat-earthers who believe science is just a sham keeping us sheeple in the dark.
Thanks for your comment and questions! I hope you’ll check out Ship of Fools.
Really enjoyed reading your article! As a former physicist and a Christian believer, I’ve always found the sense of wonder and awe in both science and faith to be mutually reinforcing and the deeper I go, the more the wonder increases! A friend of mine has actually written a book about it, “God in the Lab”, by Ruth Bancewiecz.
Thanks for this! My essay for next week features Christian geologists and their debates over the Grand Canyon. There are a lot more varieties of belief than I ever knew! I’ll check out your friend’s book.
Hi Larry, and thanks for the mention! Good to know someone out there reads my stuff!
The world is decidedly not flat, vaccines are in principle beneficial in most cases, and yes science gives us amazing insights into our cosmos.
I think you come close to misrepresenting me as anti-science, which is not the case, though you could be excused given the full title of ‘The Re-enchantment’ was “A Defence of Magic and a Re-enchantment of the World”. Sets off alarm bells perhaps. I certainly lost a few subscribers on that one. But picked up others…so, swings and roundabouts.
My position on science is complex. As a system of thought and investigation it is powerful and has done a lot for humanity. Science has given us the tools to manipulate our world in extraordinary ways, and to harness the ‘resources’ of our planet to…to…to our own ends. Whether the upshot of that is ‘good’ or not might be better judged by history. But for now, its not looking good. One simple fact: no wealthy, industrialised culture is happier than any vaguely intact indigenous culture. So power and wealth and stuff really don’t count for much in the end.
I do have ‘issues’ with science. Where to start? For a thought system supposedly dedicated to discovering reality or truth, it too often operates in service to one accepted orthodoxy. Your example of the connected forest is apposite: forest ecologist Suzanne Simard was hounded and vilified for her theory of the ‘wood-wide-web’. But my real issue is rather deeper: it is, as you will know from ‘Re-Enchantment’, that materialism is a priori the only acceptable basis for understanding the cosmos. Everything else is ‘woo’. This position is not just a matter of mean reviews. It decides careers. It constrains and channels thought. And it precludes serious investigation of many, many ideas, relegating them to the New Age etc. Science is supposed to hold its prizes lightly, because they will almost certainly be taken away in time.
The Gordian knot of science, technology and Empire is indeed the problem….and as you say, it is a problem too big for this space. Science is an institution of society, and as such is subject to many of the failings of society, so a good many failings of science are really just the failings of humans (protecting ego, career or orthodoxy). And yet, it has to be said that science in Australia (and I’ll bet you its ten times worse in the US), is utterly in thrall to the demands of Empire. Science has to lead to economic outcomes. Science has to lead to exciting new technologies which then lead to economic outcomes. That’s how we measure it’s worth. Amongst the threads in that Gordian knot you will find the story of progress, and the story of unbounded economic growth. Ideas powerful enough to destroy a planet.
Knowledge is not wisdom. Knowledge is not even knowledge if it is built on false foundations. And if that ‘false knowledge’ is ploughed back in to the field of human endeavour - perhaps to solve a problem we prepared earlier – then we are almost certainly laying the groundwork for the next problem, and the next.
At this point in time, we need wisdom, and a part of that is to feel wonder. Actually, a part of that is just to feel, something we industrialised post-moderns have gotten very poor at. Why feeling? Because only feeling can lead us to the heart-level realisation that something other than our miserable selves matters! Science may yet help us save the world in small ways, but only feeling will make the future worth living in.
Pete
Haven’t read your whole comment yet, but I’m sorry if I misrepresented your position. That’s part of the “allergy” I mentioned in the essay. I too have a complicated, but probably not well enough informed, view of science.
Now that I’ve read your full comment, I agree with everything you say. In a capitalist society, everything depends on money and funding, and that will inevitably distort what science gets done. And I didn’t know how Simard was treated, which is terrible. It’s a bit like how Avi Loeb has been treated since stepping outside the consensus view on the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life. It’s no wonder scientists are tempted to just keep their heads down and not rock the boat. (But on the other hand, in some areas they go too easy on each other in peer review.) Carl Sagan, one of my scientific heroes, would be appalled.
Oh, and a thousand times yes to the importance of feeling and subjective experience.
According to some reductionist theories of mind, there’s actually no such thing as subjective experience; the proponents of these theories certainly think that this is the most scientific explanation.
That just seems crazy to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism#Illusionism
https://keithfrankish.github.io/articles/Frankish_Illusionism%20as%20a%20theory%20of%20consciousness_eprint.pdf
As a scientist myself, I maybe take an upside-down view on these things. I'm not surprised by people who say that science diminishes their sense of wonder: if your wonder sits on top of a vast tapestry of beliefs and assumptions -- a rich picture of the world -- then of course it is damaged when someone tells you that your picture is incorrect. In the same way, if I was hiking in the Grand Canyon and experiencing sublime feelings that sat amongst my scientific worldview, I expect my experience would be ruined if hiking behind me was a spiritualist blabbering about the wonder of God.
On the other hand, in some ways I'm more confused by scientists trying to argue that they really do experience nature just as profoundly as "normal" people. (There's a famous example from Feynman, which you've probably read.) I understand the urge -- it's a bit frustrating to be treated as an unfeeling alien -- but how do you quantify the strength of your feelings compared to someone else? Some people are routinely moved by nature and some people couldn't give a damn. Whether they're scientists or not has nothing to do with it.
One last thing. I want to put my hand up as a defender of scientific Truth. This is not a religion or a belief or a faith. The people who call science a religion do not understand the scientific worldview. You can call it an emotional disposition. I hope that there is an objective reality, and if there is one, I think it's worthwhile to try to uncover as many details as possible about what it is. Maybe that's not correct, but so far this view has taken us a very long way, and there is no compelling evidence to the contrary. A lot of people find this view embarrassing these days. What kind of alternative are they thinking of? How could you take pleasure in the thought that the universe is otherwise? Ugh.
counterpoint: the people who think that Science (the contemporary institution, not the methodology) is *not* a religion take their onotological priors as much for granted as religionists, and pursue heresy with at least as much zeal.
i'd even go so far as saying that Science taught contemporary religion everything it knows about orthodoxy.
Wait, if we’re talking about Science the institution vs Science the methodology. Don’t we need to be very clear about what we mean by both terms; and accepting that there are differences between the two, make it very clear which are referring to whenever we use the word ‘science’?
That in itself seems like a massive project which won’t get resolved BTL…
And given that there’s a likelihood that the two are already being conflated might that explain some of the disagreement?
On reflection, I’m not sure that we can make the I/M distinction in any clear cut way. This is because the feedback loops that arise from social/institutional/political (etc) endeavour are part of ‘the science loop’.
The institutions (etc) may corrupt (eg rent seeking), just as methodologies may also be flawed (eg not truth seeking). I’d assume that the science produced by corrupted processes is going to be less ‘useful’.
How would we know that?
I guess, that evidence of corruption will manifest in the inability to produce/explain effective* technologies.
If the argument is that science is corrupted at an ontological level rather than an epistemological level… That raises the question of how we can do science without doing harm. In that light, I guess we’re screwed.
*this will ultimately be a value judgment, and the question of ‘whose values’ is highly salient.
all good points. the main issue for me is that there is no attention paid to this distinction, and in fact, it often seems to be obscured. we're encouraged to believe that Science always represents the work of selfless geniuses motivated by a pure search for truth, and that this is indistinguishable from the pure form of the scientific method, always striving for elegant proof. Thus, we should Believe The Science, and Trust The Experts, without much care for *which* science and *which* experts (let alone who they're funded by, and why). we've entered the monotheistic phase, where there is a monolithic entity called Science, in which we should put all our faith and hope for a better future. if anyone needs proof, i'd be happy to photograph one of the many yard signs in my neighborhood holding up Science as an article of faith.
you're absolutely correct that there is an important distinction to be made. but that seems to make people uncomfortable, because it troubles the appeal to purity that Science relies on. unlike science-as-methodology, which succeeds or fails on the merits of each individual experiment, and has done for the past three million years or more.
And of course science is community, a series of institutions where some people have more power than others, an economy where some research is funded and other research is not, a series of relationships between flawed human beings.
Nice to talk about these things. I’m interested in how we develop a personal sense of ontology (onto-epistemologies)and whether these disparate onto-epistemologies are necessarily incommensurable.
Thanks for commenting and subscribing! You might be interested in the Prologue of my novel, which is all about epistemology. https://larryhogue.substack.com/p/ship-of-fools-prologue
As Bayes Theorem tells us, our ontological priors can be a real pain in the posterior!
I don't know what you're talking about. The history of science is packed with revolutionary shifts in worldview. The "establishment" always resisted the change (as they should), but reality could not be denied. As for heretics, I'm not aware of any scientific institutions burning anyone to death, or locking them in a dungeon, or assassinating them. On that topic, you're sure to enjoy my little fantasy of a scientist trying to do just that: https://fictionalaether.substack.com/p/catch-up-and-odds-and-ends?r=cohn5
This has been a gripping conversation, to say the least. I’m over here trying to practice non-attachment, as Dawa Tenzing encourages Liz to do in last Friday’s chapter of Ship of Fools. I think part of the stuckness of the conversation comes from its either/or nature, which tends to happen in any debate, especially through these electronic channels. I’m looking for the both/and.
Coincidentally, I’m continuing my reading of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. This is what I found, as she’s describing why goldenrods and asters go well together: “Why are they beautiful together? It is a phenomenon simultaneously material and spiritual, for which we need all wavelengths, for which we need depth perception. When I stare too long at the world with science eyes, I see an afterimage of traditional knowledge. Might science and traditional knowledge be purple and yellow to one another, might they be goldenrod and asters? We see the world more fully when we use both.” I only wish I could make my thoughts both that plain and that eloquent!
here's an interesting question: how would you define the term 'psuedoscience'?
I would of course evade the question and pass on my favourite clip of Karl Popper, explaining how much he dislikes definitions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfbRAN2OxM8
But just to be agreeable, how about anything that pretends to be science, but if actually subjected to a scientific test, e.g., a repeatable experiment, is found to be false? For example, astrology. (I looked up a list of pseudoscientific topics on wikipedia, and that was one of them.)
indeed. there's quite a bit to unpack there—"pretends to be science" is doing a great deal of heavy lifting—but it's interesting that there is a middle category between "scientific" and "unscientific".
from what i can tell, "pseudoscientific" is something that has been tested with repeated experiments and produced some significant results, but doesn't meet the standards of proof for Western, materialist science, either through misunderstanding, misrepresentation, or sheer obstinance.
astrology is a great example. for many geographically disparate cultures throughout history, it was an enormously important science that was extensively tested with repeatable results. what Wikipedia thinks of as astrology is a pale shadow of the incredibly detailed and nuanced calculations of astrologers who are still practicing the same art, from ancient times to the present day. good astrologers have a vocabulary for talking about historical cycles that are more predictive than material science would allow. but because Western science grew out of a Christian ontology, in which divination was heretical, it's more important for serious, grown-up, rational science to *disprove* astrology than to look for the ways in which it could be valid.
you can see the same story repeated with many different kinds of "pseudoscience." there are a whole range of phenomena—clairvoyance, psi abilities, subtle energies, spirit contact—that Western science either willfully misunderstands, or completely lacks the ontological tools to evaluate effectively, because our entire civilization has been built on the premise that those things don't exist. capital-S Science isn't a pack of earnest nerds motivated by some pure, starry-eyed search for The Truth: it's a global power structure that sustains livelihoods, reputations, economic systems and political complexes through the careful management of reality.
how is that substantively different from a religion, in which individual priests can claim to be innocently spreading the Good Word to save the souls of nonbelievers, when they're actually the sharp end of the spear for an ontological project bent on remaking the world, according to its own culturally-contingent diktats?
This is a perverse misrepresentation of modern science.
Of course a large organised structure leads to examples of inertia, bad behaviour, and unjust exertion of power. But despite all the usual human problems, science does provide a mechanism through which real knowledge can emerge, and *does* emerge, in vast indisputable quantities over the last three or four centuries. There have been many good-faith attempts to test clairvoyance or spirit contact or whatever else, and they have come to nothing. What is this talk of "material science"? If a non-material phenomena can impact an object in the material world, isn't it in fact also a material phenomena? If not, there is some mechanism by which they interact. Can we not understand that and codify it? Any scientist who could prove that these effects are real, and identify entirely new phenomena for science to study, would be the most celebrated scientist alive. And yet, over centuries of people claiming that these phenomena are real, and they have the knowledge and skill to harness them, nothing has been found. We might agree that there are two conclusions: the claims are being suppressed by a vast global conspiracy of the science establishment, or the claims are pure bullshit.
I have an open mind that any day now I will see conclusive telekinesis results published in Nature (or even a reliable journal!), but until then my money is on the latter.
I agree with much of this. I don't know how one would compare the strength of one's feelings with someone else's, of course. I just don't know why knowing more about how nature or the universe works reduces its awe or mystery. Sometimes it makes it more awesome! I certainly wouldn't say everyone should respond the same way, and I meant that passage as a personal expression.
I really liked your piece; I should have said that first! I wish I was able to convey my feelings so well. I am at a conference in the Pyrenees right now and it’s so beautiful and all I’m able to do is walk around saying “wow!” over and over again. In my comment I was mostly activated by the other comments, which reminded me of this whole line about science being a tool of capitalism and colonialism and so on. This is such a weird take. *Everything* is deeply wound up with that stuff, but science is one of the few tools we have to get beyond the nonsense and uncover bits of reality. We know that the Earth is round (sorry, oblate spheroid) and orbits the sun because of science. Those are facts. If capitalists and colonialists had their way, the Earth would go on forever, and we could explore and exploit it until the end of time. But they can’t believe that. They are constrained by reality. Being able to unravel and clarify that reality is what science does, despite all the political and economic and ideological and careerist forces both outside and inside every scientist.
Some comments have been along the lines of, “I’m not anti-science, but…” and in the “but” things get very close to “it’s all just your opinion”. A lot of science is uncertain and *is* just opinions, but a huge amount is unequivocal. Maybe everyone here knows that, but I thought there’s no harm in doing a bit of finger wagging.
Thanks! I agree it’s hard to untangle any institution from the forces of capitalism and colonialism, and putting all of those evils down to science is extreme. And science has evolved over time along with the rest of our society.
thanks for the shout-out, Larry! i'll try not to write a whole post in the comments.
right off the top—if you're able to see the Grand Canyon/Colorado River matrix as a living being, you might be more of an animist than you realize.
beyond that, it's important for us to make a distinction between "science" as a methodology and (modern, dualist, reductive-materialist) "Science" as an ontological project.
modern people like to pretend that the scientific method was a recent development—something that set us apart from primitive savages—but this is clearly false. we've been doing science throughout human history. the only difference, in recent centuries, is in how experiments are conducted, and what counts as evidence. grimoires are scientific records of hypotheses being repeatedly tested through experimentation; the only reason they're considered "unscientific" is because the entities being summoned are incorporeal, and therefore not real, according to a reductive-materialist paradigm. going back even further—Paleolithic shamans developed trance, journeying, and spirit-contact techniques through experimentation. but they didn't write their notes down; they also accepted polyphasic consciousness as a valid source of proof, whereas the monophasic consciousness of modernity is the only acceptable standard for contemporary science. humans have been doing science for a very, very, very long time.
we're discouraged from making a distinction between the scientific method and Science as an ontological-epistemological project, because Science benefits from portraying itself as a transparent window onto objective reality. religious fundamentalists try to maintain their cultural hegemony by claiming that their paradigm is *not* culturally contingent—not equally subjective, along with all other human-created symbolic interfaces—but a flawless, unambiguous representation of ultimate Truth. the modern institution of Science tries to pull the same parlor trick: hiding all its preconceptions as "just the way things are," while tarring its critics as ignorant, superstitious heretics.
the pandemic revealed the extent to which Science has been corrupted by political and economic expediency. very few people are questioning science-as-methodology; many people are now questioning whether Science-as-institution is faithfully representing the results of its findings. there's ample evidence (speaking of evidence) that Science is all too willing to juke the stats for commercial or political gain (e.g. overstating the safety and efficacy of the Covid vaccine in a rush to market for maximum profits; Fauci arbitrarily changing guidance around social distancing and mortality rates in order to manipulate public response.)
much like Noam Chomsky's quip about free market capitalism ("We should try it sometime")—humanity would benefit enormously from more and better science, motivated in the direction of responsible, cooperative, interspecies stewardship of a living cosmos. but that would mean following the evidence wherever it leads, instead of trying to fit the facts to a particular narrative about human dominance and "progress". we'd have to compel Science to take its thumb off the ontological scale and stop conducting itself like the medieval Church.
the first step is seeing the difference between science (the methodology) and "Science," the increasingly corrupt institution.
great conversation, thanks for including me!
Points well taken. I tried to include some caveats about the corruption of science as an institution. It’s certainly been shooting itself in the foot lately. But I guess generally I’m running against the current vibe by speaking up for science right now.
of course! with that in mind, it's worth asking—which parts of science are you speaking up for, and why?
i would submit that many of the things you're crediting science with in this piece are misappropriated. that awe you feel when you look at canyons and forests and galaxies is *in spite of* the Story of Separation, which Science has been busily spinning up for the past few centuries. the only reason we needed Darwin's proof that we are interrelated with the rest of the Animal Kingdom is because of an impoverished reading of the Book of Genesis. what we call "Science" was a continuation Abrahamic dualism: God set us apart from the rest of Creation and gave us dominion over it. According to Descartes and his contemporaries, God then bestowed the (Western, materialist) sciences on us as a way to better understand His Work, even though humans had been successfully using their own science to understand the (living, interrelational, magical) cosmos for millennia.
i was just reading an article the other day about scientists have "proved" panpsychism, which is nonsense: every other indigenous culture in human history had already recognized it. modern scientists did nothing but build an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine to talk themselves out of their own ignorance.
once we realize that "proof" is just as much an ontological cudgel as it is a means of promoting knowledge, most of Science's efforts begin to look self-interested and misleading.
It sounds Iike you’re saying science has contributed nothing to human knowledge. That just seems a bit extreme. Science confirming older wisdom is a good thing, not a bad thing.
depends on how you look at it. the only reason those confirmations were necessary in the first place is because Science discredited the original certainty.
modernity's epistemological project has drastically overstated the importance of Science. its foundational myth is incrementalism: the idea that human knowledge was an empty vessel for most of our history, which Science has gradually filled with more and better things as time goes on. it's heresy to suggest that our ancient ancestors probably had a more complete understanding of reality than we do today. from that perspective, Science is not a steady upward climb to ever-greater heights, but a painfully slow process of unlearning all the bullshit that we invented to justify our domination of the world.
which of these is a more significant truth about reality: the measurable distance from here to the nearest star, or the understanding that the physical universe is made of the same stuff as Thought, and can be related to in ways that transcend spatiotemporal distance? humans have understood the latter truth for thousands of years; now that quantum physics is finally catching up with that reality, Science holds it up as evidence of progress—after spending several hundred years justifying the murder and exploitation of millions of people who built entire cultures around that foundational understanding, on the grounds of their primitive ignorance. it's impossible to separate one from the other. science as a methodology is as old as humanity; Science as an ontological project can never wash its hands of the crimes committed in the name of "progress".
I thought I was trying to meet you half way, but I guess we're never going to agree. You can believe what you want to believe, and I would never tell you you were wrong in the way you did with my expression of belief in your previous comment.
well, i didn't mean any disrespect to you personally, and i'm really sorry if it came across that way.
i get passionate about this stuff because i can draw a straight line between the world that Science built and the very real possibility that large areas of the planet will be uninhabitable in my kids' lifetimes. this stuff keeps me awake at night. in my mind (speaking generally, not about you specifically) it's too soon for apologetics: we're staring down the barrel of a very dangerous future because we created a rapacious system according to the ethos of modernity, under the auspices of Science. the only way we can mitigate the worst of the damage (which we can't avoid entirely) is through an urgent process of truth and reconciliation. if we allow this shell game to continue—were the politicians to blame? was it the capitalists? did the ecological activists not try hard enough?—we're going to end with some very unpleasant lessons in accelerated evolution. the people who are lucky enough to make the jump into whatever future comes next will be the ones with a clear understanding of where the old paradigm betrayed us.
that said, i'm very sorry if my tone was too contentious. you're doing good work out here and i wouldn't want to devalue any of it.
Driving across the Mackinac Bridge at sunset in March when snow and ice were wherever was a sublime experience for me. Ditto seeing Lake Michigan for the first time. I've gone camping in the UP and around the Lower Peninsula and the star gazing has been awe-inspiring.
Yes, Up North is great.
That's when I fell in love with Michigan and started traveling all around the state and discovering wonderful things like the small towns Ludington and Manistee on Lake Michigan, the historic district of Marshall, and much more. It's not a place I every thought Id end up in but I've spent hale my life here.
Michigan has a lot to recommend it! We’ve thought about moving even farther north, maybe Marquette, but so far that hasn’t happened.
The population is expanding rapidly in Traverse County and Benzie County and both are becoming more diverse.
Yep, we should have bought up north before the pandemic. It’s all getting pretty expensive now. I think Michigan’s secret is out. (A friend from LA posted a pic from his place somewhere on or around Torch Lake. Someone asked, “Where are you, Hawaii?”)