Scientific Openness

Transcript

I’d like to talk about scientific openness.

There’s this quote in Maslow’s Toward a Psychology of Being. He’s talking about how traditionally and this is true today even though it was written 50 years ago, traditionally scientists see themselves focusing on the objective questions and the quote is about subjective experience about art or creativity.

These are things somewhat excluded from science. He writes this quote: We must help the “scientific”psychologists to realize that they are working on the basis of a philosophy of science, not the philosophy of science, and that any philosophy of science which serves primarily an excluding function is a set of blinders, a handicap rather than a help. All the world, all of experience must be open to study. Nothing, not even the “personal”problems, need be closed off from human investigation. Otherwise we will force ourselves into the idiotic position that some labor unions have frozen themselves into; where only carpenters may touch wood, and carpenters may touch only wood. New materials and new methods must then be annoying and even threatening, catastrophes rather than opportunities. I remind you also of the primitive tribes who must place everyone in the kinship system. If a newcomer shows up who cannot be placed, there is no way to solve the problem but to kill him.

It makes me think about a few things he has a rather cleric personality and rather interesting ideas and likes to use this phrase intellectual yet idiot.

I think we all know this archetype a bit. Someone who has studied all the books and knows all the theory but may not know something about real life.

In my interview with my friend Kenny he said he was very intelligent with book smarts. He had this moniker like I know all, I know everything but he only had a certain kind of intelligence. Just the book smarts and the theory but he didn’t know a lot about life.

When he realized that, then he could explore the world with some intellectual honesty and do experimentation in his own life to find out for himself what his experience meant.

I remember as well on the same thing intellectual yet idiot, there’s the saying from the adaptation of Gulliver’s Travels and I think it’s Ted Danzen in the starring role and he’s in this floating city that stays in the air because of giant magnets.

The emperor or mayor of the city and Gulliver says to his wife “Oh, your husband is so intelligent, so intelligent.”

She said “He’s a fool”.

“Yes but a fool of great intellect!” In some sense this was a satire of British society at the time where academics were revered even if they were fools. And in a sense we can still see that today.

Of course there’s a lot more to intellect than book learning.

I’ve noticed that some people use their intelligence to build walls around them.

Great minds naturally perhaps with creativity and a lot of logic they use that to form a sort of rigid structure of things where they won’t even allow themselves to entertain certain ideas.

As a great man once said it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain ideas without accepting them. I don’t remember who said that, it might have been Aristotle.

There was a case with a Nobel Laureate Luc Monagnier he was visiting a fellow French man Jacque Beneveniste. He attended this conference and Beneveniste was presenting these ideas really outside of the accepted ideas of the time and talking about these experiments he had done which seemed to lend some evidence to hypothesis he had come up with.

And I don’t know if they ended up being true but he said there was a certain attitude among scientists at the time. He summed it up like this “It’s not true, even if it was true I wouldn’t believe it.”

Now if you listen to the episode on Eric Weinstein’s Portal podcast called the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex. Weinstein talks about how academic institutions do smother ideas that don’t fit within their framework and so as Maslow talks about in the Philosophy of Science there is a tendency to kind of think that the scientific method or process is a certain way today with for example with peer reviewed studies there’s the tendency to believe that has always been the process and is the only way in fact.

There are many ways to ascertain truth. In fact as many was as there are human beings on planet earth. The peer review method Weinstein points out is relatively new. Maybe 60 years old or more and there were cases in the past like with Walter Krick’s experiments with DNA when the publications received Krick’s paper “Krick et al” and they said it was so important and fascinating that they weren’t going to review it or make notes.

He definitely wasn’t going to get a peer of Kricks to critique it so he could go over it again. Let’s put it out there because it’s that important, fascinating and inspiring to wonder.

So Weinstein makes all these points very eloquently talking about the scientific process or the scientific community is kind of stifled at this point because perhaps they are working a bunch of assumptions that are unable to be questioned by anyone in the community.

People who do question them for example, I don’t think Weinstein would say but Super Sheldrake probably too far out for even Weinstein but he questions the ideas of science in his book Science Set Free.

The dogmas of science.

People like Sheldrake who do question these established rules of the game are not treated seriously by academic institutions and that’s fine. The point of this all is, the reason I bring this up is because I think many have been sold this vision or idea as someone wrote more than a hundred years ago that science more or less holds the world down and it’s only these things in the 5th decimal place that needed to be examined.

I don’t think that’s true then and I don’t think that’s true now. The world is open to wonder and you can find out so much of the world through our own experience and own experimentation.

Maybe we can get a glimpse of what’s really going on. Maybe we can get a glimpse into the great mystery.

Thank you for using your powers of discernment to figure out what’s goin on with the world and thanks for being open to wonder of new interpretation, wonder, possibilities and ways of looking at the world.