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What if there are some things where scientific objectivity and scientific method breaks down, and is incapable of exploring? It's ok if you feel that what I sa

by hosh 7y ago

What if there are some things where scientific objectivity and scientific method breaks down, and is incapable of exploring? It's ok if you feel that what I said was irresponsible. I know that is the mainstream view of things, and I expected a lot of backlash for posting a comment on this. I usually hang out with the crowd where the experience and reality of subtle energy is not in doubt. Among them are the people for whom ... let's just say, something in then turns on (or something), and they are experiencing a number of phenomenas which includes subtle energy. Some of it are triggered by psychedelics, and some of it is not. For them, they experience what you feel: cognitive dissonance, anxiety, fear, anger. They freak out. Among them are both people who actively sought it out ... and people who are open-minded skeptics. At that point, they are lost. The responsible thing at that point is to provide a framework to help them make sense of it. The ones who are skeptical appreciate it. They have the opportunity to explore and test out the claims for themselves.

zarmin 7y ago
>"The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence." - Nikola Tesla Material reductionism has really done a number on Western civilization. The notion that existence is limited to what can be measured, and all claims to the contrary get painted with the brush of pseudoscience, to me, embodies the hubris that is holding science back. Not to diminish the achievements of science and academia – they just have one eye covered. See the work of Dean Radin for a series of studies on nonmaterial phenomena, that I hope are the start of a wave of discovery.
- wpietri 7y ago
  This strikes me as deeply ahistorical in two ways. One is that there are always Dean Radins. In the 1970s we had a wave of interest in ESP and other paranormal phenomena. In the 1920s it was spiritualism and seances. And there are many other, smaller excitements. We're always at the start of a wave of discovery around the mystical. Somehow it never comes! Anybody suggesting it will be different this time really needs to grapple with the other waves. The other is that overliteral reductionism, definitely a force in science [1], has quite regularly been beaten back. When that happens, it comes through data. Look at the rise of quantum mechanics, which seemed so weird that Einstein talked about "spooky action at a distance". Eventually everybody was like, "Yes, turns out reality is just that weird," and now we're building things with it. Like any force, reductionism can be harmful when overapplied. But it's a useful balance to other forces. The human mind is an extremely fertile place, where ideas rapidly grow and branch and flower. But all gardens need pruning, so we must assiduously apply Occam's razor lest we be overwhelmed with nonsense. [1] To the point where it's a joke: https://xkcd.com/793/ https://xkcd.com/793/
SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
You're basically describing emotions as though they are somehow more than just emotions. We understand them, they effect things, but they are just emotions. We know that mood can effect someone's physical responses, but we don't assume that's in any way special, unless you can show evidence of those "subtle energy" experiences affecting the world in a different way than regular emotions or placebos.
- hosh 7y ago
  There is no objective evidence, nothing that I think would be convincing to you. There are plenty of experiences, which many skeptics dismiss as anecdoptal. I can say, here, take this psychedelic, but it would easily be explained as the effects of the psychedelic acting upon the brain. I can say, hey, meet this person, or try this technique ... but it wouldn't matter. Our civilization is simply just not ready for this stuff. The thing is, there are a lot of phenomena that are difficult to show evidence, even in a laboratory setting. There was one parapsychology experiment that was interesting: a skeptic and a non-skeptic both collaborated and created an experimental protocol. They then watched each other conduct the experiment. The idea being that, each of them have a vested interest in proving or disproving the hypothesis. Somehow, the skeptic had experimental results showing nothing beyond chance, and the non-skeptic had experimental results showing there is a statistical significance beyond random chance for the phenomena under study. That can be taken as that, there were some bias that were missing. But what if, for example, it could be as simple as, neither experimenters were truly neutral, and it affected what happened? Anyways, I'm in the point of my life that I simply don't care enough to try to convince people to believe in one way or another. That emotions behave more than "just" emotion is not something that is special or extraordinary for me. Sometimes, I encounter people for whom they start experiencing this. I help them when I do.
wpietri 7y ago
Just as background, I've been doing yoga and meditation for decades. I think the phenomena that people experience as "subtle energy" are interesting and are worth investigating. But my best guess is that these are purely internal phenomena. As eusocial primates with poor internal perception, it's easy for us to mistake internal phenomena as objective. For example, people who think they know what God wants -- who are great in number! -- turn out to be perceiving aspects of their own minds: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/creating-god-in-ones-own-image https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/creating-god-i... With that, to your question: > What if there are some things where scientific objectivity and scientific method breaks down, and is incapable of exploring? Then that's a thing you can demonstrate. People are quite regularly proving that existing methods break down. Look at relativity, for example. The Michelson–Morley experiments started in the 1880s. Einstein didn't publish key work until 1905, and the revolution he started took a long time to play out. You can find similar things happening with germ theory, which forced a revolution in medical practice. Or more recently, with figuring out the true cause of ulcers. Sure, there were a lot of nominally objective jerks who pushed back against these things, defending a failed orthodoxy. That approach does break down. But that's not the only thing going on. If it were, Einstein and the ulcer guy wouldn't have ended up with Nobel prizes. Science isn't some incomprehensible activity. It's just a formalization of what we do every day, which is come up with ideas about how the world works and then put those ideas to the test. In fact, you're doing it now. If you want to propose a framework that makes sense of phenomena, as you're doing here, then you don't get to stop half way. "Subtle energy" is one way to explain it. It's clearly useful to people in certain contexts. But there are all sorts of things like that. For example, people naively expect light things to fall slower than heavy things. Feathers fall slower than bowling balls, for example. There are all sorts of principles in naive physics [1] that are honestly not that bad. The same is true for folk medicine. An apple a day doesn't keep all doctors away, but it isn't a bad place to start. So my issue with what you said isn't that you talk about "subtle energy". It's that you are casting a locally useful approximation as a universal truth. And you're doing that without acknowledging the gap or being willing to do the work. Our understanding of, say, thermal energy is the result of many lifetimes of dedicated, thoughtful work. If you want the power of objective fact, you have to earn it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_physics

by hosh 7y ago

zarmin 7y ago

>"The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence." - Nikola Tesla Material reductionism has really done a number on Western civilization. The notion that existence is limited to what can be measured, and all claims to the contrary get painted with the brush of pseudoscience, to me, embodies the hubris that is holding science back. Not to diminish the achievements of science and academia – they just have one eye covered. See the work of Dean Radin for a series of studies on nonmaterial phenomena, that I hope are the start of a wave of discovery.

wpietri 7y ago
This strikes me as deeply ahistorical in two ways. One is that there are always Dean Radins. In the 1970s we had a wave of interest in ESP and other paranormal phenomena. In the 1920s it was spiritualism and seances. And there are many other, smaller excitements. We're always at the start of a wave of discovery around the mystical. Somehow it never comes! Anybody suggesting it will be different this time really needs to grapple with the other waves. The other is that overliteral reductionism, definitely a force in science [1], has quite regularly been beaten back. When that happens, it comes through data. Look at the rise of quantum mechanics, which seemed so weird that Einstein talked about "spooky action at a distance". Eventually everybody was like, "Yes, turns out reality is just that weird," and now we're building things with it. Like any force, reductionism can be harmful when overapplied. But it's a useful balance to other forces. The human mind is an extremely fertile place, where ideas rapidly grow and branch and flower. But all gardens need pruning, so we must assiduously apply Occam's razor lest we be overwhelmed with nonsense. [1] To the point where it's a joke: https://xkcd.com/793/ https://xkcd.com/793/

SketchySeaBeast 7y ago

You're basically describing emotions as though they are somehow more than just emotions. We understand them, they effect things, but they are just emotions. We know that mood can effect someone's physical responses, but we don't assume that's in any way special, unless you can show evidence of those "subtle energy" experiences affecting the world in a different way than regular emotions or placebos.

hosh 7y ago
There is no objective evidence, nothing that I think would be convincing to you. There are plenty of experiences, which many skeptics dismiss as anecdoptal. I can say, here, take this psychedelic, but it would easily be explained as the effects of the psychedelic acting upon the brain. I can say, hey, meet this person, or try this technique ... but it wouldn't matter. Our civilization is simply just not ready for this stuff. The thing is, there are a lot of phenomena that are difficult to show evidence, even in a laboratory setting. There was one parapsychology experiment that was interesting: a skeptic and a non-skeptic both collaborated and created an experimental protocol. They then watched each other conduct the experiment. The idea being that, each of them have a vested interest in proving or disproving the hypothesis. Somehow, the skeptic had experimental results showing nothing beyond chance, and the non-skeptic had experimental results showing there is a statistical significance beyond random chance for the phenomena under study. That can be taken as that, there were some bias that were missing. But what if, for example, it could be as simple as, neither experimenters were truly neutral, and it affected what happened? Anyways, I'm in the point of my life that I simply don't care enough to try to convince people to believe in one way or another. That emotions behave more than "just" emotion is not something that is special or extraordinary for me. Sometimes, I encounter people for whom they start experiencing this. I help them when I do.

wpietri 7y ago

Just as background, I've been doing yoga and meditation for decades. I think the phenomena that people experience as "subtle energy" are interesting and are worth investigating. But my best guess is that these are purely internal phenomena. As eusocial primates with poor internal perception, it's easy for us to mistake internal phenomena as objective. For example, people who think they know what God wants -- who are great in number! -- turn out to be perceiving aspects of their own minds: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/creating-god-in-ones-own-image https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/creating-god-i... With that, to your question: > What if there are some things where scientific objectivity and scientific method breaks down, and is incapable of exploring? Then that's a thing you can demonstrate. People are quite regularly proving that existing methods break down. Look at relativity, for example. The Michelson–Morley experiments started in the 1880s. Einstein didn't publish key work until 1905, and the revolution he started took a long time to play out. You can find similar things happening with germ theory, which forced a revolution in medical practice. Or more recently, with figuring out the true cause of ulcers. Sure, there were a lot of nominally objective jerks who pushed back against these things, defending a failed orthodoxy. That approach does break down. But that's not the only thing going on. If it were, Einstein and the ulcer guy wouldn't have ended up with Nobel prizes. Science isn't some incomprehensible activity. It's just a formalization of what we do every day, which is come up with ideas about how the world works and then put those ideas to the test. In fact, you're doing it now. If you want to propose a framework that makes sense of phenomena, as you're doing here, then you don't get to stop half way. "Subtle energy" is one way to explain it. It's clearly useful to people in certain contexts. But there are all sorts of things like that. For example, people naively expect light things to fall slower than heavy things. Feathers fall slower than bowling balls, for example. There are all sorts of principles in naive physics [1] that are honestly not that bad. The same is true for folk medicine. An apple a day doesn't keep all doctors away, but it isn't a bad place to start. So my issue with what you said isn't that you talk about "subtle energy". It's that you are casting a locally useful approximation as a universal truth. And you're doing that without acknowledging the gap or being willing to do the work. Our understanding of, say, thermal energy is the result of many lifetimes of dedicated, thoughtful work. If you want the power of objective fact, you have to earn it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_physics