Limits of the Scientific Approach

The Limits of the Scientific Approach

So on and on my investigation went as I read dozens and eventually several hundred books following the literary train of thought. Over time I have discovered many things I hadn't expected.

One was something the famous physicist Richard Feynman illustrated on many occasions. He found that even the most seemingly mundane things turn out to be unimaginably complex upon close enough inspection. Like a fractal: the closer one looks at anything, the more mystery is uncovered, which invites closer inspection, which uncovers still deeper complexity and mystery. The cycle has no end. It turned out that nearly anything on which you might choose to focus your attention, can draw you down Alice's intellectual rabbit hole as long as your mind is curious enough to want to discover the deeper truth, and is open enough to accept it.

Through reading and by investigating these things further on the web my curiosity has lead me to learn a bit about a wide range of topics like:

• What are dreams?
• Time: does it even exist?
• The nature of the very small (to understand the most fundamental building blocks of things).
• The nature of the very large (to understand the overall structure of the universe).
• Was there a beginning to the universe? An end?
• Are there other dimensions? And what does that even mean?
• What is the nature Extra Sensory Perception
• The search for life outside of Earth, and more broadly the origins of life.
• What is consciousness?
• What is reality?

The list goes on, but you get the idea. I was truly astounded that, as I looked at these and many other subjects, I found that science, which had always been the bedrock of my belief system, had little to say about many of these topics. Oh, at a cursory level for the casual investigator a reasonable “scientific” explanation would always be at hand. But on deeper investigation one invariably finds that the experts run out of steam, and often resort to convoluted mathematics and esoteric mumblings at best, jeers and name calling at worst.

Given my experience with lucid dreaming, I had opened my mind to the possibility that science can be wrong and further it can actually work hard to maintain the illusion of rightness, rather than to admit its limited ability to fully understand, explain, and predict the behavior of our world.

For the record, my firm belief is that if you can't explain a principal to an average person using non-technical language, you really don't fully understand what you are talking about and therefore what you are saying is suspect. I have found that on a wide variety of topics, especially those I have listed above, the scientific responses often fit that description.

On Time

Let's take for example the topic of time: and more specifically the “arrow of time”.

For a period of a few weeks during the 1990s I investigated time. I mostly played with mind experiments on the topic. Here is a brief review.

One such mind experiment is to start by sitting quietly and experiencing time. How do you perceive it? How does it feel?

I found that time is experienced through two basic mediums: physical senses and change. I see the cat here. Then I see it there. First I hear nothing, then I here a car go by outside. So we have a combination of sensing something, and then sensing something else while comparing it to data from our memory.

So a fundamental requirement to experience time might be in the sensing. What would happen if I we eliminated all senses? Then would we experience time?

Think about it. You are floating in space far from any light source, any sound, with no ability to sense anything. Would time still exist for you? Would it have any meaning?

I concluded, yes it would. You could still think of sequences of memories. There would still be a first thought, a second and so-forth.

So the experience of time, it seems, may involve as a primary component, memory.

Imagine the floating in space experience without the ability to remember. What would it feel like then? There is no sensation of any kind, but there IS mental function: thought. Your brain/mind can think a thought, but a moment later it would think a different thought, however the two couldn't be linked or compared without memory. There would be no sequence of action since you couldn't recall earlier events to compare against.

Hmmm. Maybe memory is the key thing?

So now let's re-introduce our senses.

You are sitting at your desk, with the cat in the chair beside you and car going by outside on the street. All of your senses are working just fine but still without the capacity of memory.

You might look at the cat asleep on the chair. The cat then wakes up and walks out of the room. What is your perception? You would be ever in the present without memory. You would experience the cat in whatever state it is currently in but you would have no way to measure or even experience changes, and therefore, time.

So, somehow you decide that perhaps you could capture the “now” with a picture and a note. Would that work? Well no, because although you could read the note and understand it, as soon as you observed the cat in its new position, all the info about the picture and the note would already be lost to you. It would be like the movie Memento: where you would be chasing your tail trying to make sense of the whole, but really only being able to see the immediate now.

So the mental exercise goes on and on, and I don't want pull you the reader through the whole process, as we have lots to cover here. In the end, the understanding I reached is that time may be like the canvas on which a painting exists. At most it is a scaffold on which reality is draped. Perhaps it doesn't exist at all but is merely an artifact, a shadow, an impression left by the other things that exist in our 3D experience such as objects, senses, thoughts and memory.

What I really wanted to get into is the related question about whether time has a direction. Why for instance do things happen but never “unhappen”. Why do eggs never “unbreak”? Why do cars never “uncrash”.

Well, according to the mathematics which describe classical Newtonian physics, time can run in either direction. The equations such as s=d/t (speed equals distance divided by time) are perfectly happy running in reverse. But the world doesn't work that way. Why?

The best explanation that science has to offer is to point to the law of entropy. As freshmen in college we learned there are 4 laws of thermodynamics: 0,1,2 and 3. The second law states that the entropy (state of randomness) of a system will increase over time as long as it is not acted upon from the outside. This “law” matches all the data we have ever observed, so it must be correct. Right?

The idea here is not to prove or disprove this statement, but just to point out the following- a scientist would simply tell you that time has a particular direction because it “must”. It is forced to have a direction by the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

This logical sequence of thought is based on the time honored principal in science of building conclusion on fundamental rules that are not in question. This method is a key enabler for science to progress as far as it has. If a=b and b=c then c=a, right?

Think of it: if a young scientist had to continually re-prove all of the foundational assumptions on which their new work was based, there would way less time for new work to be accomplished. The approach works, but it also fosters a state of arrogance and close-mindedness that just might be the great inhibitor of revolutionary new concepts.

A huge body of assumptions now exist in science that simply are not questioned and are not subject to open debate. This is partially why the history of science is replete with stories of whole generations of scientists holding fast to “beliefs” and core concepts beyond the time where they have been proven obsolete. Often the science elite defend what they believe is correct partly because in order to accept the new, they must discard the entire scaffolding of their mental model of the world. There are layers of defense mechanisms and personal motivations for this behavior, but let's save that for later on.

Perhaps the reason entropy works in a certain way is related to the fact that time seems to move only in one direction, but why? How? Wouldn't it be nice to understand the actual causality of why time acts this way? The mechanism of it?

Causality IS important as the following story illustrates.

While I was a young bench engineer at Computervision in Bedford MA in the 1970s I was analyzing chip failures on CAD system boards. The company needed answers and was providing an almost unlimited budget, so I had a huge array of equipment at my disposal. My tool chest included toys like: high speed oscilloscopes, multi-channel digital logic analyzers, thermo stress ovens, shock and vibration tables with arrays of stress sensors and instruments. I even employed a state-of-the-art (in 1979) infrared thermal imaging system powered by liquid nitrogen costing nearly $100,000 (almost 10 times my annual salary at the time!).

After weeks of work, the answer to the failures still eluded me. One day at lunch I discussed my findings with one of the crusty older techs and he muttered the answer between bites of his meatloaf: “we let the smoke out” he said. “What are you talking” about I inquired. With a wry smile he reminded me that in each and every case of a failure a small wisp of smoke was emitted from the chip: which was true enough. He explained that according to his observation, the boards ALWAYS worked up to the time of the smoke being seen. Ergo he informed, the problem was quite obvious: the all-important smoke was being “released”, without which the chips could not function. We needed to come up with a way to keep the smoke inside the chip, and our problem would be solved.

Of course the whole story of the “magic smoke” is an old inside joke used by electrical engineers and techs, but interestingly there was a odd semi-truth in what he said: after all, it did conform to the observational data. Unfortunately of course, causality was left completely out of the discussion. The smoke was not the source of the failure but a result of the failure. It was not the cause, but the effect.

If one pays cursory attention to observed data, one might argue the Sun revolves around the Earth. Our scientific arrogance has moved beyond that fallacy but I fear that it continues today in other forms.

Recently particle physicists have “proven” that a special tiny object called a Higgs Boson (or “God Particle”) gives other tiny objects the property of mass. Actually we can't directly see these things so we must infer their presence, and since the indirect observational data confirms that they exist we take it as proven. That's how science ends up building it's understanding of the universe. On the other hand, tell one of these same scientists that there may be an actual dimension or aspect of reality that you experience in a dream state, they will deny it due to lack of evidence. It seems like there is a certain scientific arrogance, a double standard at play.

The illusive nature of psi

The “scientific method” is the main driver behind the advancement of our current understanding of our world. It uses the principal of starting with known data and theorizing something new. Then by constructing a test and analyzing its the results one can determine if the theory is valid. The ability for others to repeat and obtain the sames results is a critical part of the method. This approach has served mankind well for hundreds, perhaps a thousand years or more.

The problems is, there are aspects of our existence that aren't repeatable on demand. In these cases this approach, that requires consistent replication of the test results doesn't work.

Psi is shorthand for the range of subjects called the “paranormal”. Quite literally we define the paranormal as those experiences that lie outside the range of normal. In practice this would include those things that are outside sciences ability to measure. Things like ESP, precognition, seeing auras, communicating with the dead, near death experiences (NDE), out of body experiences (OBE) are all examples.

Before going any further, it is first important to look at whether psi even exists in the first place. It has been decades since the offer by the once popular magician and skeptic, James Randi (“The Amazing Randi”) made his famous offer to pay anyone $1,000,000 to prove a case of psi. The fact that the prize has never been claimed is proof to many that psi is a hoax. Most inquirers however will find however that the case for psi has been long settled.

James Randi and others like him have long insisted that if a phenomena could not be demonstrated, on demand, in a controlled laboratory setting then it was not “real”, that it did not conform to the rigorous demands of proof imposed by science. Well perhaps these people are half right: these things may not conform to the rigid rules imposed by science, but perhaps this is a failing of science and not of the phenomenon.

Randi has never paid anyone the prize, but most open minded observers have seen more than enough examples to warrant a payout. Randi, like most in the skeptical community use the demand for more and more controls to be added to an experiment until it becomes impossible to reproduce. It is then claimed debunked.  

At one point in scientific history the claim that meteorites fell from the sky was refuted by science. Even when provided the actual physical object, science scoffed. After all, the assertion went, "it is implicitly obvious that rocks don't fall from the sky". Of course, what is implicitly obvious now, is not what was obvious then. We have seen this play out many times in history when the impossible became possible only through the discovery of deeper understanding of our world. The examples are too numerous and obvious to mention but of course the most illustrative case would be whether our world is round or flat, and whether Earth orbits the sun or the other way around.

The case for the proof of psi goes beyond this however. It goes to whether a particular thing can be demonstrated on-demand. Can a home run be hit on-demand? Of course not. Is it not however real? Do plane crashes happen? Have you ever personally seen one occur? Some things simply occur in such unpredictable ways it is nearly impossible to prove they exist despite the fact that reasonable people agree that they do.

And finally beyond the two factors of: growth in scientific understanding, and the difficulty of demonstrating rare occurrences, we have the fact that some processes in existence may just be too delicate to measure: too ethereal to put under the bright lights of rigid scientific inquiry and expect conclusive results. Sorry, but that just might be the way the world works.

Too touchy-feely for you? Well you might want to get used to it, because 100 years ago the delicate and truly mysterious nature of how our world really works was uncovered. It is an intrinsic part of everything that happens all around us every minute.

Ever heard of quantum mechanics?