Are we beginning to see a major paradigm shift, steadily moving away from the prevailing physicalist, materialist.mechanistic mindset?
Integral theory is one attempt to move beyond any narrow,exclusive views of reality proclaimed by representives of science, religion, philosophy, spiritual traditions or whatever. Jennifer Gidley writes about integral thinking and the evolution of consciousness here
There are periods in human and cultural evolution when humanity passes through such fundamental transformations that our reality shifts and new patterns of thought are required to make sense of the unfolding human drama . . . The profound transformation we are now witnessing has been emerging on a global scale over millennia and has matured to a tipping point and rate of acceleration that has radically altered and will continue to alter our human condition in every aspect. We must therefore expand our perspective and call forth unprecedented narrative powers to name, diagnose, and articulate this shift… Integral philosopher Ashok Gangadean in the opening quotation encapsulates what many integral theorists have been voicing over the past decade. It is this integral research on emergent movement(s) of consciousness that I am referring to as the evolution of consciousness discourse This research points to the emergence of a new structure,stage(s) or movement of consciousness that has been referred to by various terms, most notably, post-formal integral and planetary.
Jude Currivan says that instead of big bang we have the big breath. The “outbreath” that gives rise to the physical unverse. Matter and energy are the products of information. The physical universe is in-formed as she puts it.
She discusses her views here in “Restating and reunifying reality: Our in-formed and holographic universe”.
This is part of an annual Mystics and Scientists conference promoted by The Scientific & Medical Network
The metaphor of the big bang conjures up images of a destructive explosion leading to chaos. But we should imagine the universe as a birth of order and organisation and this is more in keeping with a breathing process by which we communicate compositions of song, poetry and prose. Evolution is the creation of order out of chaos.
So are we seeing a movement to a more integrated, holistic understanding of reality where, rather than being a mere by product of a particular arrangement of matter, consciousness plays a primal, central role? The cosmos is breathed into existence, the out-breathing Word, the Logos, creates the living universe. Consciousness is the alpha and omega.
Science is useful as long as it doesn’t promote gullibility by promoting magic i.e. scientism…
And then he keeps thinking, completely detached from reality, making shit up as he goes along, with no way or intention to assess his claims for validity
Charlie: everything we do habitually is the result of outcomes or consequences.
Science flourishes because it supports civilization.
Bad science and pseudoscience exist in the same relationship to science as counterfeit money to money.
Dead ends and incorrect theories are not necessarily bad science. All ideas exist in a population of ideas, and all are subject to selection. This might sound like meme theory, but I am not proposing it as a formalism.
I just think that there will never be a formal definition of science. The methods will evolve as they produce results.
CharlieM,
I have I question for you, Charlie. Have you followed Steiner’s instructions to apprehend those higher realities and succeeded at it?
If you were to produce some specific criticisms from his theory of knowledge then i might be able to give a worthwhile response.
Do you think that judging against Mertonian norms are a reasonable way of determining good from bad science?
CharlieM,
Do I need to explain what’s wrong with this?
Do you think that judging against Mertonian norms are a reasonable way of determining good from bad science?
Only to a very limited extent. It requires self discipline, dedication and, according to Steiner, every step forward you take in this acquisition of knowledge should be accompanied by an equal improvement in your moral standards. that is probably where I fall down. That’s as much as i would like to say on that here.
Yes. Do you think that humanity is the highest form of life?
The obvious problem with the above quote is that Steiner wants you to believe there’s a higher reality before you’ve even started the process by which you’re supposed to discover such higher reality. Patently absurd.
What does your question have to do with any of that? My answer would be, it depends on what you mean. I prioritize humans when it comes to morals. So for example, if I had to choose to rescue a man or his dog, I would pick the man. Is that the kind of answer you’re looking for?
Perhaps you haven’t been reading what I have said. There is no formal way to distinguish good from bad science.
We engage in science and spend tons of money on it because it is useful. We spend on pure research because historically, it produces useful ideas. Who thought, a hundred years ago, that quantum theory would evolve into the foundation of the world economy. Everything electronic depends on it.
I doubt if you, or anyone else has paid attention to my posts, but I have been saying for about ten years, that my objection to ID is not that it is wrong, but that it suggests no useful lines of research. To the extent that IDists have done research, it has been pedestrian and dead end.
In medicine, for example, new molecules are evolved by producing vast numbers of variants and testing them for usefulness. There is no first principles approach to design.
Charlie,
I think you’d have to specific what you mean by higher or highest form of life…
Humans are the only species who kill their own kind for flimsy reasons…
Should mankind be even considered the highest form of life when this is taken into account?
https://qz.com/796087/meerkats-most-murderous-mammal/
Just a warning about made up facts.
Yep
“Evolutionary biologists, led by José María Gómez from the University of Granada in Spain, conducted the study in order to understand human violence in an evolutionary context. They found that when Homo sapiens first came into existence, roughly one in 50 of us were killed by members of our own species. This made us typically violent for a primate, though around six times more murderous than an average mammal.
Evolutionary biologists conducting studies…a story like that has gotta be true…😉
The assertion that humans are the only species that kill their own kind for flimsy reasons is false. This is not a statement about evolution.
Research into what?
That flimsy reason could be evolution. Or survival of the fittest…
Evolutionary speculations… Or, in other words, the so called scientific fables of evolutionary biologists with vivid imagination that can’t be questioned because, you know, their inference is as good as if they were there…😉
Or a pair of tennis shoes or a disagreement about sports.
You can question all you want, but questions which are based is some form of logical argument are more highly regarded.
Sorry could not find a reference, do you have one? So you accept that the 1919 eclipse did provide support for Einstein’s theory?
Do you mean why is light affected more the closer it passes to the center of mass?
Because it is a model constructed with the available tools and knowledge, as those change models are revised or discarded.
Just off the top of my head, how is it correct to say Sun orbits around the Earth when the barycenter between the Earth and the Sun is close to the Sun’s center?
Neither of which ,I would bet, propose another model the would work is the Sun and the Solar system orbiting around the earth.
Hints the something might “work just as well “ hardly seems to justify rewriting physics books. At some point they may.
Yes, it was regarded as a failure, it did not show what they proposed.
newton,
First of all, were you able to access the full text of this article?
Why would relativity need to be saved by aether, if apparently aether was not detected due to the instrument contraction? If relativity is incomplete, or dead wrong, then in Michelson–Morley experiment the instruments didn’t contract and aether was detected…
“In an astonishing twist of fate, the key to relativity’s salvation could lie in the aether”
Or
“Einstein didn’t prove that the aether couldn’t exist, merely that there was no need for it”
Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24432543-300-einstein-killed-the-aether-now-the-idea-is-back-to-save-relativity/#ixzz69ryQVLXy
Right, he is saying the problem he has with ID is that it doesn’t do enough research into evolutionary biology as evolutionary biology does.
To that I would reply, why should they, evolutionary biology doesn’t do enough research into ID.
If someone begins on the path laid out by Steiner it is because that is what they want to do, not because of what you think Steiner wants them to believe.
I am just trying to get an understanding of your beliefs. Such as, are you open to the possibility that there are aspects of living beings that we may be unaware of with the current state of consciousness that we are accustomed to using at present?
If Steiner writes that it is advantageous to start with the feeling that there is something higher then surely that will dissuade anyone who does not have this feeling from contemplating the path. That without this attitude maybe this path is not for you.
Steiner wrote the book, not to persuade anyone, but to give advise to those already seeking.
What evolutionary biologist are going to do if they have not enough time in the age of the universe to support their claims for ” billions, or millions of years of natural selection”?
They are not only going to have to find a new mechanism for their speculations but also a mechanism that works faster than the speed of light… 😉
So do you think that Mertonian norms have any value?
I’m not interested in defending ID. Modern observation techniques are revealing sophisticated designs and processes used by the natural world that have inspired human innovations. We can marvel at these natural designs without concerning ourselves with origins or with the ID movement, but you’d need to be pretty unfeeling not wonder about these things.
The reasons why one would want to follow Steiner’s method is irrelevant. My point was that his demand that you believe beforehand is a dead giveaway that whatever follows is bullshit.
I’m open minded but of course, also skeptic. You said that you’ve only followed Steiner’s method to a very limited extent. Was that enough to convince you that there are higher realities? Or do you believe just because rule #1 in the manual says that you must first believe in order to be convinced?
That makes no sense to me. If he had a good argument and good evidence, the fact that one starts with whatever feelings should not matter at all. All this simply confirms that you’re primed to believe this stuff without evidence.
snort. Books like this are written to an audience not seeking advice, but rather seeking ratification for their foregone conclusions.
I doubt that scientists find value in them. But philosophers of science might.
Every existing modern physics books acknowledges that one can you use different reference frames. One of the reasons for the fancy math of GR is that Einstein wanted a theory of gravity that satisfied that constraint.
So you can use whatever reference frame is convenient. Regardless, the calculated spacetime tractories are those you’d expect from heliocentric model.
I believe that result does depend on everything we know about cosmology. If one were to instead accept the cosmology of eg an untrained theologian then maybe the result would differ.
So it comes down to how one decides what is science and what is a crackpot’s YT video.
Yes I admit to being a bit vague.
The natural sciences concern themselves, quite rightly, with the physical world as experienced through human physical senses and our thinking based on what we perceive through these senses.
But should reality be judged on our limited awareness? For example, from a higher perspective the plant kingdom may have aspects that give it an innate wisdom that far surpasses human wisdom.And of course if physical life has a higher aspect to it then there is the possibility that there are beings that have this higher aspect but do not manifest in forms accessible to our physical senses.
Most cultures have in there myths and religions acknowledged belief in higher realms and the highest would be the idea of god or gods in some respect.
The question was my attempt to stimulate conversation.
I expect that we judge as we judge. We are all different. We all think differently.
I have no objection to people stretching their imaginations to wonder about whatever. Just don’t call it science.
Similarly, I have no objections to ID as philosophy. My problem with ID, is that the ID proponents are trying to peddle it as science.
This is a material for a separate OP.
People have tortured and murdered, or are responsible for, thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people in wars, ethnic cleansing and so on. After the conflict was over, they moved on as if nothing happened… They became great fathers, husbands, employees or employers, neighbors etc…
What had made them the monsters prior?
🙂
Same can be easily said about the origins of life, evolution, peddled as sciences…
Scientists value behaviour that accords with the norms. For example
– blinded peer review
– public communication via journals and conferences
– censoring of scientific fraud
– movement to provide open access to data and pre-registering of studies, esp psychology
– favoring of open access rather than ownership of copyright by publishers
The survey that CharlieM linked above also illustrates that scientists value the norms and are unhappy that others seem to get away with violating them (at least in the opinion of the respondent)
But I do agree that scientists are not interested in formalizing the norms or in studying the actual behavior of scientific communities with respect to the norms. Those activities are instead of interest to philosophers of science and sociologists of science (like Merton).
How do you even begin the research?
Let’s say, I would like to test how photosynthesis in green sulfur bacteria evolved light-harvesting energy system superimposed on two molecules simultaneously…
What evolutionary mechanism should I be looking for? Quantum, natural selection?
How about enzymes using quantum tunneling in the tadpole metamorphosis?
I don’t know how widely true this is, but my impression is that Karl Popper is the favorite philosopher of science of most scientists. Among philosophers of science he is regarded as a bit sloppy, and that’s unfortunate — because that dismissal prevents philosophers of science from asking “why is Popper so popular?”
It may be because he’s easier to read that others — maybe! — but I think it’s also because what he calls “falsificationism” really does look like a description of what practicing scientists are doing (or implicitly take themselves to be doing): not trying to confirm what they think is true, but trying to refute it.
Most philosophers of science are interested in broad, sweeping questions about scientific progress or theory choice. That’s cool & all but it’s a macro-level debate, and it doesn’t get to the micro-level issues about what practicing scientists actually do on a daily basis. Popper addresses that.
Right.
But do the scientists study the norms and then decide what to value? Or are the norms based on what scientists are observed to already value?
I think it is mostly the latter.
I completely agree. In fact, I would say that it is all of the latter, if one is doing good philosophy.
That is what I mean by saying
– science is what successful scientific communities do
– philosophy cannot dictate norms for science, only try to understand and formalize practices of successful scientific communities
Good but gets a bit into the weeds.
No, We Still Can’t Use Quantum Entanglement To Communicate Faster Than Light
Scientists putting norms ahead of loyalty to Trump and his cronies (NYT paywall):
Science Panel Staffed With Trump Appointees Says E.P.A. Rollbacks Lack Scientific Rigor
I would say that scientists learn to conform to the relevant epistemic norms in the process of becoming scientists, and do not need explicit instruction as to what the norms are — although some graduate schools require a research ethics seminar.
Perhaps being able to explicate the norms would be useful in some cases — in Brandom’s terms, being able to say what one is doing when one is conforming to a norm. But being able to say what the norm is that one is following is not necessary for being able to follow it.
Kantian Naturalist,
I mostly agree with that.
I’ve also found that most philosophers of science think that Popper is the most well-known philosopher among scientists. But I associate this more with the demarcation problem — falsification being supposedly the way to separate science from non-science.
My bias is that Kuhn’s idea of problem-solving is on the right track as a description of what most scientists do. Perhaps philosophers of science put more emphasis on the nature of theories and in what happens to them in paradigm changes, whereas sociologists of science are more interested in day-to-day practices of problem solving, since that is what scientists mostly do. That’ would be my caricature of the nature of the two fields.
On the norms of science: I think scientists go through an apprenticeship during PhD and post doc time. As part of that, they learn “proper” scientific behavior , analogously (in a rough sense) to how children learn how to behave in accordance with social norms. Neither studies philosophy.
You’ve referred to process metaphysics in posts, and I notice Lee Smolin is professing something with that name in this Quanta interview. Name drops some philosophers, starting with Leibniz.
“[Smolin’s theory is a ] theory about processes, about the sequences and causal relations among things that happen, not the inherent properties of things that are.”
https://www.quantamagazine.org/were-stuck-inside-the-universe-lee-smolin-has-an-idea-for-how-to-study-it-anyway-20190627/
He makes no demands on those who do not believe or those who are indifferent. What he does say is that if someone is sincere in wishing to follow a path, here is one way to go about it. Where does he demand that anyone and everyone who picks up the book should believe in the contents? In fact he is at pains to say, “Do not believe anything on my authority, but just take what I say as an indication and then test it for yourselves”
As it is an ongoing endeavour I’ll amend your use of the past tense and say that I still try to follow his advice. Of course there are higher realities. By means of thinking the reality that we are aware of is ever expanding. I have the same five senses as a four year old child, but my experiential reality is far richer and fuller than the average four year old.
So it is not a case of there is this everyday reality of which we are all familiar but there is also a separate reality sitting above and beyond this. Expansion of reality is a gradual process. IMO higher reality is immanent not transcendent. As Jesus is purported to have said, “The kingdom of God is within you”.
And how are you able to judge that those who follow the book do not have some experiential evidence before they have ever heard of Steiner? Are you claiming that you have enough knowledge to know the experiences of others? You do not have the evidence and therefore nobody else does! That seems to be your claim.
The book was aimed at those who already seeking the path, not to prime people into believing in anything. You are welcome to read the book and then to criticise the methods. What do you think of the eightfold path of Buddha? Do you believe that it is geared to prime people into believing in higher realities? The book is not an argument, it is a description of a path that has been followed and we are left free to use it as we wish.
Don’t trust the book How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method, by G. Polya, It aim is to prime those with no interest or past experience of mathematics to follow a path that claims to show how they can solve mathematical problems 🙂
What other “books like this” have you read? Have you read any of the exercises proposed in the book? I’d like to establish if you are criticising from a position of knowledge or a position of ignorance about the subject. You will need to be more explicit in your criticism to convince me that it’s the former.
Do you they give good advice as to how science should be conducted?
Do you think that Goethe was doing science when he was studying plants and animal anatomy? Does his book, The Metamorphosis of Plants count as science?