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Kehlan Morgan on the Philosophy of Science, Scientific Reasoning, Morphic Resonance, and so much more!
385 Plays1 year ago
This week, we had Kehlan Morgan on to talk about the philosophy of science. Science has lost touch with philosophy, and in turn, it has lost touch with reasoning, the metaphysical, true empiricism, and reasoning. Kehlan gives an amazing take on health as a sort of cohesion.
We delve into the psyche, touching on Jung's work, which leads us into a conversation about Lamarck, evolution, and morphic resonance.
This quickly turns into a discussion on the scientific method. We touch on the need for presumptions and rationalism in the seemingly empirical scientific method. We also discuss ideas of falsification, true scientific reasoning, and problems with the scientific method. Interestingly, we touch on scientific constants and why mathematical constants might not be the true constants of nature. We talk about ideas from Goethe, Whitehead, British empiricism, and many other phenomenal philosophers.
We finish by talking about the structure of science as problematic (Scientistry) and the need for true science (Scientody). We also discuss the need for the reintegration of the individual in nature and of the sciences in general.
This was a mind-blowing episode that will leave you thirsty for knowledge.
Get your notes ready and enjoy.
Transcript
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Transcript
Introduction and Setup
00:00:01
Speaker
Everybody welcome to another episode of the Beyond Training podcast. New mic, new room, new setup.
Guest Introduction: Keelan Morgan
00:00:08
Speaker
And we got a great guest today. Guys, this is going to be a great episode. I know you guys are going to love it. Uh, we have Keelan Morgan on. Um, yeah, we got the blackboard in the back here. I was just recording a little Instagram video for you guys. Uh, you can see circular reasoning. I didn't do it justice in my last video. So we're gonna, we did, we went better. We did better on this one. So you guys will like that a little sneak peek there too. So.
00:00:31
Speaker
All right, we're going to get right into this one here. I'm very excited for this. Keelan, thank you so much for coming on today. Thanks for having me on, man. Yeah, definitely. Great to be here. Great to be here. Good. Yeah.
Philosophy of Health
00:00:42
Speaker
Yeah. So like I said, I ask all my guests of the introductory question, what is health? This gives us a great basis of just a little foundation of what we can work off of. I want to know your perspective on that. I think we're going to get more into, it's going to be a little more philosophical today for sure, but
00:01:00
Speaker
I think that's very important, especially in this discussion that we're having here. So yeah, I wanna ask you, what is health? All right, yeah, so yeah, this is definitely a question that I'm gonna answer in a very abstract way because health sciences are not necessarily my realm of expertise, but yeah, I think this is a totally important question because I think it also relates to all kinds of other things we can talk about with health.
00:01:30
Speaker
with vitality. I think we're really talking about something like cohesion, this idea that really any kind of organism, any kind of system is a multiplicity which is attempting to achieve and maintain and elaborate
00:01:55
Speaker
kind of wholeness which through which the Different aspects of the system the different cells in your body the different organs or organ systems are being brought together into a kind of cohesive meta system and so yeah, this is something where
00:02:18
Speaker
I feel like this isn't just a concern with regards to help sciences. This is actually a concern for science in general because I think that that kind of
00:02:31
Speaker
cohesion, these kind of dynamics of dissonance and consonance in cohesion and cohesion, disorder and order are really fundamental to the way that nature itself operates, the way that animacy itself operates, and by extension, the way that consciousness itself operates. And so, yeah, there's all kinds of things that we could say here
00:02:57
Speaker
and kind of branching out from that idea and then relating things back to this idea of human physiological health or human mental health or wherever we want to go with it. So yeah. Cool. Awesome answer. Yeah. And I think I liken it to when you were saying a wholeness, right? That's certainly a topic that's come up a few times. And I've read a lot of young and I just think of a psychological wholeness of the
00:03:26
Speaker
integration fully of the self, right, to integrate all parts of the mind. And that was something I thought of. And I think Jung was on the right track, for the most part, of course, but, you know, I think I liken it to health as well, right? It's just the wholeness, it's an integration of all parts of integration into nature. You know, what is what is true, what is true to human beings, you know, like, not necessarily that our technologies are untrue, but they're, they're
00:03:56
Speaker
They were, we created them, right? So, you know, we created these technologies and obviously we take the stance here that a lot of these technologies come with harmful side effects, right? They come with their benefits and they come with more comfort and they come with so many benefits, but there are, there, there is an opposing force there too. So I think that's important to consider. And, you know, a thought that just popped in my mind is, was alchemy.
00:04:24
Speaker
And I don't know if you have any thoughts surrounding the study of alchemy,
Alchemy and Health
00:04:28
Speaker
but I'd love to hear what you think. You know, I was just thinking how within the alchemical teachings, there's kind of these, this underlying principle that you can apply to many factors in life, you know, whether it comes to health, you know, you have this sort of transmutation that's always occurring, this circular cyclical way forward in life.
00:04:48
Speaker
I don't know if you have any thoughts there, if you could relate that to what you're saying at all, but please. Yeah, yeah. So let's start with Jung and then move into alchemy, because Jung was very interested in alchemy, right? So yeah, within Jung's psychodynamics, he really orients everything around this idea of the self. Sometimes people refer to it as like the higher self, or they'll even just say the soul.
00:05:15
Speaker
And within Jung's framework, what that amounts to is something like a potentiality, right? And it's what it is, is it's it's you can think of it as kind of being a form, right? Because it's not
00:05:34
Speaker
your body at any given moment. It's not necessarily the history of your body up to a given moment. It's kind of everything. He says that its censure is nowhere and its circumference is everywhere, right? So it's
00:05:51
Speaker
this possibility of self cohesion itself, which then serves as a kind of center of gravity, something that the human psyche and presumably the human body as well, if we want to really extend it in that direction, is kind of orbiting around. It's this center of
00:06:14
Speaker
narrative gravity to borrow a term from Daniel Dennett, where there's this cohesion of the psyche, which the psyche is trying to achieve. And so really, we can think of that higher self as kind of like almost like a platonic
00:06:35
Speaker
form of what that ultimate cohesion would be like, but it's not just a platonic form, right? It's not just a mathematical object or something. It's kind of like an ideal of the self or all the different aspects of the self being woven together into a whole.
00:06:56
Speaker
So then we can start to step over into the world of alchemy here by looking at what Carl Jung saw in the alchemical tradition. Now the alchemists are really interesting because in a way they're continuing forth with this kind of platonic tradition. They're working within these kind of archetypal systems that they're
00:07:20
Speaker
inheriting from the Hellenic tradition, from the astrological tradition, from the Platonic tradition, from the Hermetic tradition. And what they end up coming up with, though, is really interesting. They start looking
00:07:36
Speaker
to matter itself, the natural world, as something that could provide them with clues, with an insight into how to achieve this kind of Christian notion of theosis, of the salvation, redemption, the spiritualization of the body, right? And so this is very different than
00:08:02
Speaker
a lot of the the mystical traditions that we see really across the board
Critique of Neo-Darwinism and Epigenetics
00:08:08
Speaker
in the the whole proto-indo-european diaspora which is this idea that the bodily realm is this kind of veil of maya it is illusory it's just kind of something that we're stuck in as it were and we need to somehow figure out a way to
00:08:29
Speaker
escape or transcend and we do that through kind of receding into the soul away from the world. So kind of using pure reason or the stillness of pure consciousness and the Indic traditions to get away from our situatedness within the flow of becoming within nature.
00:08:57
Speaker
And so the alchemical tradition is very, very different. And you can see how it begins to... I am so sorry. Girlfriends cooking in the kitchen. We'll cut that out. So where was I? Alchemy. Yes. So what they're doing is very different in that they are...
00:09:15
Speaker
looking to the natural world as a way of achieving a kind of transcendence instead of just going into their own mind. So they're not just sitting in their armchairs or meditating in a cave or whatever. They're actually in their weird little laboratories
00:09:33
Speaker
playing with sulfur and mercury and trying to figure out what phlogiston is or the ether. This is really important. Let's relate it back to Young. The significance that Carl Young saw in that kind of archetypal
00:09:52
Speaker
framework that the alchemists were operating within, this idea of transmuting lead into gold. So gold is associated with the sun, it's associated with higher ideals, it's associated with the personal will, with the self, and then lead is associated with Saturn, it's associated with weight and gravity and solidity, concretion, the world of hard, solid,
00:10:22
Speaker
materiality. And so what's interesting there and what Jung saw in this is that the aspiration of the alchemist to discover a way to transmute lead into gold and really all the different things that they were trying to do were about trying to enact this archetypal dynamic that they were looking for by which the bodily is spiritualized and Jung saw a kind of mirroring there
00:10:51
Speaker
between his own ideas of the archetypal self and what the alchemists were trying to do and so that's Super interesting because it does seem like there's there's a correspondence there Yeah Yeah, and I mean even kind of in the field that we're in here like in the health field I've always likened it to
00:11:12
Speaker
the process of healing as well. Like when we look at disease, we don't really look at them as diseases, right? We kind of look at it all as healing processes or even you could have disease processes as well, which lead to a deterioration. But in essence, it's a process. The symptoms are the healing process, right? When you have a fever, your body's trying to achieve a goal and move towards this divine purity, which we may call health.
00:11:42
Speaker
That's something that I've always kind of liked about the alchemical tradition and how I relate it back to health. Um, but yeah, I mean, I think, uh, I, you know, I've heard a few people speak on that topic. Um, like people like bear Lando, uh, definitely does a great job if you want to check out that, uh, a little bit further into that, but, um, yeah, like just relating it to the, to this process, to this underlying
00:12:13
Speaker
process of reality. And, um, you know, we talked a little bit about evolution and maybe we could talk a little bit about this, um, because I know you're, uh, well fond of the morphic resonance theory, which is not something that we've spoken about too, too much. So, um, maybe you could give us the gist of that. Um, but we've talked a lot about, uh, Lamarck and how, you know, this, how there's this sort of cyclical process.
00:12:39
Speaker
how, you know, we do adapt to our environments. We do adapt to our environments. Uh, we may not have been created at random, right? He doesn't necessarily address that. Um, obviously there's a lot of speculation involved in that, whether it's creation or whether it's this neo evolution of we evolved from monkeys or whatever, but I don't know too much there, but, um, I'd love to hear your thoughts on, on maybe morphic resonance, how
Evolution: Lamarck vs. Darwin
00:13:05
Speaker
it fits in. Uh, obviously Darwin.
00:13:08
Speaker
had some great ideas. But this neo-Darwinistic movement, I think, falls short quite a bit. And maybe I can open up discussion there.
00:13:18
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So well, let's start with Lamarck, then. So Lamarck's idea of evolution, first of all, predated Darwin's. And this is, for those who aren't aware, the idea of evolution as an inheritance of acquired characteristics, this idea that organisms actually alter themselves, whether consciously or unconsciously, or due to interactions with their environment or what have you, and then
00:13:44
Speaker
Those alterations then might be able to be passed down to offspring and lemark theorize this as being a potential mechanism i don't like that word mechanism potential process by which a biological evolution can occur.
00:14:03
Speaker
And Darwin comes along, and the thing about Darwin though is Darwin really doesn't contradict Lamarck. If you really look at, I mean, on the origin of species, I mean, there's really nothing in there that says Lamarck was wrong. Darwin just brings this idea of natural selection into the picture, which is a great idea. It's the idea that the pressures of the environment itself, the actual situatedness of the organism
00:14:34
Speaker
in relation to the kind of metaprocesses of the biome and the other organisms and its situatedness in time with these kind of fanning out of reproduction and things like that are
00:14:52
Speaker
really significant factors in determining how organisms come to shape themselves over time so that's a brilliant idea but where things went wrong i think we can probably agree on this is with the neo darwinian revolution because that really changed the game that was during,
00:15:11
Speaker
I believe the 1950s when the double helix structure was discovered by Watson and Crick and that other lady who I do not remember her name. But she's always ignored because of course she is and that's a whole thing we could talk about. But anyway, even though I've learned about her in every single one of my genetics classes, I still don't remember her name.
00:15:37
Speaker
It's Francis something I don't know, whatever. People can look it up. But either way, yeah, yeah, double helix is discovered. And and the conclusion that evolutionary theorists started coming to was like, Oh, well, now we know what genes are up to that point, the idea of a gene was just the idea of a heritable trait. There was there was really
00:16:07
Speaker
no theory of like genes as a kind of code that was stored inside of cells or anything like that. It was rather abstract and rather neutral idea up to that point. But then with the discovery of the double helix structure,
00:16:27
Speaker
And the realization that that double helix structure was responsible for protein synthesis, evolutionary theorists started saying, aha, well, this is how it actually works down at the mechanical level. We have this kind of squishy computer code that codes for the organisms and then
00:16:48
Speaker
Maybe random alterations due to radiation or whatever can cause these slight alterations and the natural selection can act on those because they code for phenotypic traits in this really bizarre, indirect way that we don't really understand, but we'll figure it out eventually, right?
00:17:10
Speaker
And that became the paradigm. I mean, that became the paradigm with people like Robert Tribbers and Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Pinker. I mean, really anybody who was talking about evolutionary theory in the 90s and early 2000s when I was first getting into this stuff, that was just the facts, right? And it was like either you believed in that or you were a young earth creationist. You know, that was their foil that they set themselves up against.
00:17:38
Speaker
when, of course, in reality, there was actually a lot of contesting going on beneath the surface of that rather theatrical framing of the issue. Later on, what we would begin to see, and I believe this really began in the 90s and certainly picked up in the 2000s,
00:18:01
Speaker
The field of epigenetics, and scientists actually start to realize actually Lamarckian inheritance is very real, and we can actually prove this. Well, I shouldn't say prove, but we can show this to be the case in laboratory conditions in numerous different ways. The field of epigenetics has exploded over the past couple of decades.
00:18:24
Speaker
And this is a bit of a problem for the neo Darwinians, because you know, even if you go back and read something like Darwin's dangerous idea, which is Daniel Dennett's kind of theoretical text on evolutionary biology, he's like, well, Lamar can't be right, because for Lamar to be right, there has to be some
00:18:41
Speaker
means by which alterations to the organism are able to recursively and Selectively alter the
Epigenetics and Morphic Resonance
00:18:50
Speaker
the DNA sequences such that those can be passed down and we don't know of any way that that could happen So it must be baloney But lo and behold it happens anyway, so that's interesting, right? Mm-hmm
00:19:03
Speaker
And within the field of epigenetics, too, there's been this kind of desire, I think, to hang on to the neo Darwinian paradigm as much as possible so that a lot of them have come up with
00:19:17
Speaker
these rather elaborate and in my opinion rather unconvincing mechanisms by which epigenetic inheritance is thought to occur so they're like oh well maybe it's like prions that like you know are in the body and then they somehow go to the germline cells and like start fiddling with things
00:19:37
Speaker
And this really calls to bigger issues in science, is sometimes those explanations are presented as like, oh, this is the fact. We know that's how it works. No, we do not. That is pure speculation at this stage. And in fact, I think it's probably incorrect, at the very least incomplete, but probably just nonsense, frankly. Now, bringing this into the realm of morphic resonance then,
00:20:08
Speaker
Rupert Sheldrake developed this idea of morphic resonance as basically the idea that the formative fields of organisms
00:20:24
Speaker
should actually be treated as kind of things in themselves. That these fields are actually able to perpetuate themselves, they're able to inherit their own pasts directly without needing any kind of mediation by DNA or proteins or anything like that really. And that the interactions between these fields can first of all be passed down through inheritance but can also
00:20:55
Speaker
be inherited in a kind of horizontal way between organisms that are not even necessarily directly related, that there's a kind of non-local co-informing which occurs between these fields.
00:21:16
Speaker
And this is a really interesting idea to me for a number of reasons. First of all, because of the way that it relates to parapsychological phenomenon, or phenomena rather, and that's a whole thing we can talk about. But also with regards to the way it lines up with these ideas developed by certain philosophers prior to Sheldrake, people like Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson,
00:21:45
Speaker
and even David Bohm and Arthur M. Young, all of these guys, these process philosophers started developing these ideas really about metaphysics, about what the nature of reality and consciousness are. And Whitehead in particular came to the conclusion that, you know, it's essentially
00:22:11
Speaker
I think the exact same as the conclusions that Schaldreich came to, but he came to it for very different reasons and he kind of languages it in a different way. But it's the same basic ideas, this idea that the possibility spaces which are being navigated by organisms, their fields or underlying forms or whatever you want to call it,
00:22:34
Speaker
or should be able to interact independently of direct physical contact. They should be non-local in some sense. So this is something that's been really fascinating to me and something I've talked about on my channel, ad nauseam. So yeah, there's a lot here though. Before I finally stop talking, I want to at least lay the groundwork for you to pick up because
00:23:04
Speaker
This is definitely something that we can relate back to health sciences for sure, because it has all kinds of implications. If we look at something like the obesity epidemic, for example, a lot of the science around this has suggested that
00:23:28
Speaker
one's predilection towards obesity is heritable, and therefore, following the neo Darwinian logic, it must be genetic. And if it's genetic, that means you don't have any control over it. It's just something that happens to you that you have to deal with. But if we're thinking in terms of
00:23:50
Speaker
inherited characteristics, which can be passed down, habits that can actually form that can then inform offspring, then this starts to look like a very different scenario. First of all, it looks like your genes might not really have much to do with it at all. The exact DNA sequences you happen to inherit might be at best slightly relevant. It could rather be the case that
00:24:19
Speaker
These are predilections that we have inherited that we actually have much more kind of responsibility towards because they're not just a code that we're born with that we don't have any control over. These are habits.
00:24:37
Speaker
And not just habits in the sense of behavioral habits, but also bodily morphological habits that could be altered over time. And then if we lean into particular bad habits, obesity is just one of them, but there's all kinds of different examples of this we could look at.
00:24:58
Speaker
then that could be something where we're not just harming ourselves, but potentially harming our children too, because it's not just the genes we don't have control over that we're passing on. There actually are things that our agency is directly involved with that we could be passing on to our children. And so that really changes the game. It really changes the framing of how we look at obesity, but really all kinds of different issues within the health sciences. Yeah.
00:25:30
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I think, um, yeah, we, it's totally related, 100% related. Um, and I think that's why I love the topic so much. And well, Rupert Sheldrake was one of the first people that I started to read kind of when I, my, my consciousness was shifting, right? He kind of really opened up my eyes to not only just, uh, morphic resonance, but the entire field of science, even before I picked up my first terrain.
00:25:58
Speaker
book, um, and that was the inventing the AIDS virus by Peter Duesberg. But, uh, Sheldrake certainly opened my eyes so that I could see moving forward. But, you know, we talk about, uh, heritable diseases a lot. And I think the distinction, I think they feed us a half truth here because your kids do look like you, right? You, you can inherit these traits.
00:26:27
Speaker
I think, you know, there's a great, it seems rather obvious, you know, you, you inherit the eyes, your mother's eyes or your dad's hair color, skin color, right? You know, these are things that are undeniable. Where the, that's, and that's the half truth. Now the half lie is that you can inherit these diseases that are genetic origin and truly epigenetics really throws all of this out the window.
00:26:54
Speaker
Um, that our genes actually adapt to our environment. Uh, obviously our gene, maybe our genes do code these proteins, which do end up leading to these traits that we have. But for that to happen with a disease, I kind of placed the disease, the disease is in two categories and it's birth defects versus something that comes later in life. Right. So West and a price did some great work where.
00:27:22
Speaker
The health of the parents seemed to affect the health of the child. So if they were malnourished parents, and I'm really paraphrasing his work here quickly, but most of the listeners are familiar with Weston A. Price's work there. You know, malnourished parents leads to dental deformities in children, and this is crooked teeth and smaller jaws and poor facial development. Now he talked a lot about cavities.
00:27:51
Speaker
Now, cavities are not something that he thought were heritable. That was due to direct diet. So if the children were eating a poor malnourished diet, they would have high cavities. But if these children with deformities in their face ended up consuming a more native diet, because he studied natives, of course, a more nutrient dense diet, their children would have perfectly straight teeth.
00:28:19
Speaker
So it would only take one generation, right? So I'd always distinguish disease. If you're born with it, it's much different than developing it. Things like autoimmune diseases, they say are caused by genetics, right? And in a lot of it, it is speculation, like you mentioned, um, because there are no, there are no studies that actually utilize a scientific method that prove this phenomenon. But, you know,
00:28:45
Speaker
autoimmune disease that develops later in life. So they, they have this idea of a latent gene that just gets triggered and comes about eventually. It just, uh, to me it's nonsense and definitely there's no scientific basis for these claims whatsoever. So when I was in my undergrad, I took biochemistry and molecular biology and it was a large emphasis on genetics. I probably took six or seven genetics courses and you know,
00:29:14
Speaker
We were taught all of these things as fact, you mentioned these prions and all of these, these proteins that have these effects and they're essentially what they're trying to do is they have their conclusion and they're working backwards. They're trying to create this theory to explain their results to fit within their, their narrative already. Um, which you were alluding to there earlier, you know, it was interesting whenever you would press the professor, they would just say, yeah, you know,
00:29:41
Speaker
Really it's just an emerging field you know where we like we just discovered epigenetics and you know this could have late you know so we have these textbooks full of facts.
00:29:50
Speaker
And then when you press them, they're like, yeah, there's actually no evidence for this. This is just the theory. And then they will guess like the hell out of you. Because you'll be like, well, okay, if this is this is all just speculation, then why are you presenting it as though it's true? And they're like, Oh, well, if you actually understood the science, then you would know this is just because you're ignorant that you think we're presenting these as facts. But if you really understood the field, you would know this is all speculation. Like, come on, bro. Like, really?
00:30:19
Speaker
Just like my professors, just like them. Yeah. Yeah. That happened to me. Actually we were in a zoom once and I was pressing my genetics professor about the polymerase chain reaction test. And she, uh, I asked her, I said, okay, well you're, you're telling me right here that we can't run a PCR test over 33 cycles. So why do I have a CDC document that says that we should run the cycles at 45 cycles? And she was like,
00:30:47
Speaker
She lit me up in front of the class. Like, that's a fake document. I'm like, I just downloaded off the CDC website. Like, it was really, really something else. But anyways, oh, the CDC are known for publishing a lot of fake things. So, I mean, you never know, right? Right. Yeah, that's it. That's it. I think we should shift the conversation maybe towards the scientific method now.
Epistemology and the Scientific Method
00:31:10
Speaker
Maybe I'll just open it up with.
00:31:12
Speaker
uh, hearing your thoughts generally on epistemology, how we go about knowing things, um, which, and we could circle into empiricism or rationalism and how the scientific method obviously is more empiricism based model of course. Um, but yeah, I just want to kind of open up. I know you have some really great ideas too on German idealism. Um, and yeah, so anyways, I want to give you the floor a little bit and we'll, we'll take it from there. Yeah. So this is a topic where.
00:31:43
Speaker
I'm really in the process right now of trying to formulate something like a big picture bird's eye view of where we are and where we're going, which is to say that I do not have a nice neat little thesis I can present, but there's all kinds of things we could talk about here that are really interesting. So we'll just kind of survey things a little bit.
00:32:14
Speaker
So in one of the videos that you did recently, you talked about how science is, it's not very good at dealing with theological topics, topics of morality, topics of spirituality, teleology, consciousness. And what's interesting here is that if you kind of
00:32:45
Speaker
Start tracing of threads backwards through the history of science. I think what you find is that that quarantining of science off as though it's this just completely isolated thing separate from all these other different very imminent human concerns.
00:33:04
Speaker
is actually a rather novel idea, actually. In fact, I don't think it really took its modern form until after World War II, which is very recent. If you go back to, of course, like the medieval alchemists, obviously they saw an absolutely no distinction whatsoever between what they were doing and their theological beliefs. But the same goes for Isaac Newton. The same goes for
00:33:31
Speaker
Johann von Goethe, who was one of the German idealists, who was also a very prolific scientist. And even going into the early 20th century, where these kind of more materialistic ideas had already begun to gain a lot more traction, if you look at some of the most prominent, most ingenious scientists of that time, people like Max Planck or even Albert Einstein,
00:34:01
Speaker
Lots of these people were very heavily involved in philosophy. And a big part of that is because at that time, the center of gravity of science in general was Germany, which meant that the scientists who were at the cutting edge saw themselves as carrying on a tradition that was continuous with Kant and Fichte and Schelling and Hegel and Goethe. And they were, you know,
00:34:31
Speaker
Not all of them were extremely well versed in the philosophical tradition, but all of them saw what they were doing as, in many ways, continuous with philosophy, including Einstein. Einstein was probably, I would say, the least philosophically illiterate out of that whole gang, as it were. But even for him, he saw himself
00:34:59
Speaker
as continuing the tradition of Barkspanosa, the pantheist philosopher. And so moving forward from that, then we can see that there was this kind of severing which occurred or which was attempted to be done
00:35:27
Speaker
around this kind of World War II period, and it really happened with this guy named Carl Popper, who you've probably heard of before. If you've ever, well, you're into the sciences. You have definitely heard the term falsification before. That all goes back to Carl Popper. And this idea of critical rationalism, which he developed in a book called The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Now, Popper, what he was essentially doing was he
00:35:56
Speaker
was taking this earlier idea of science as verification and kind of flipping it upside down. And here's why. The verificationist idea of science is seemingly pretty common sense. It's like, okay, you have a scientific hypothesis and for it to be a scientific hypothesis, for it to be a claim about nature, it has to say something that we can check, we can look and see whether it's true or not.
00:36:26
Speaker
But the problem that Popper saw was that the Humian problem of induction was still there, which is to say that whenever we're actually creating scientific theories, we're never just talking about the things that we can see. We're always extrapolating beyond that which we actually have in front of us, even if we're just
00:36:50
Speaker
doing something as simple as saying, well, the sun rose yesterday, so it'll rise tomorrow. You've got to have some kind of idea of a uniformity to nature, a coherence, a cohesion to nature in order to justify that claim. But in order to believe in nature having a certain kind of order or cohesion or universality,
00:37:16
Speaker
You've got to be doing metaphysics. You've got to be thinking about what the nature of reality is, per se, before you can start developing scientific theories. Karl Popper did not like that. He did not want science to be dependent on philosophy. He didn't want that codependence. He wanted science to be its own thing, doing its own
00:37:38
Speaker
business and the philosophers, they could chase their own tails all day. As long as science is able to actually perform experiments and whatnot, then science will be fine. And so he develops this idea of falsification as a way of splitting those two things apart. So what he does is this. He says, well, we can't ever justify an inductive inference without metaphysical presuppositions.
00:38:05
Speaker
But what we can do is we can falsify theories which have inductive implications. So we can say, all right, well, all swans are white. And then we can treat that theory as though it's true until we find a black swan. And then that falsifies the theory.
00:38:28
Speaker
And so, I mean, even to this day, I mean, even in universities, falsification is taught as though that's what science is. That's how it works. But once you start looking into the nuts and bolts of that idea, it gets very complicated very quickly. So just to take that little black swan example.
00:38:51
Speaker
If you define swans as white and you find a black bird that looks an awful lot like a swan, that's not a swan, right? Okay, so the way that we language things is always playing a role. And you can literally just redefine your terms to save a theory. I mean, it's that easy.
00:39:16
Speaker
Moreover many of carl poppers followers those who actually tried to take his ideas about science as this kind of algorithmic process and actually apply it to the history of science found out that he was just wrong science is not progress in that way at all in fact a lot of the time.
Challenges in Scientific Theories
00:39:37
Speaker
Um, scientific theories, uh, in fact, well, I would actually, I would say all of the time, scientific theories have conflicting data and it doesn't cause us to just throw out the theory. Um, because you can always find some kind of way of explaining away things that don't quite fit. And sometimes those explains away turn out to be true. Sometimes it does turn out that something is just a statistical fluke or noise or, or whatever.
00:40:08
Speaker
Um, and so a great example of this, if we look back to, um, the Copernican revolution, um, this story really complicates the whole thing a lot because the way that we're taught this in school is all right. So people believe that the sun orbited the earth and that's not true. And then scientists studied nature and then
00:40:33
Speaker
figured out that the Earth actually orbits the sun somehow, and somehow Galileo's telescope had something to do with that. Yeah, don't ask too many awkward questions, but then, okay, if you actually zero in on that and look, okay, what actually happened? How did they actually move from a geocentric to heliocentric model?
00:40:51
Speaker
The truth is way more interesting than what Popper had in mind. When Copernicus first developed his heliocentric model, he did it because he did not like these epicycles that were needed, these kind of vortices that were needed in order to model the solar system as geocentric.
00:41:14
Speaker
But the problem was for Copernicus that it just didn't work. His system just did not actually accord with observation because he was still using circular orbits. And so there's this tension there because a lot of the astronomers at the time
00:41:35
Speaker
Preferred kapernicus is ideas because it seem to simplify the solar system it seem to present a kind of aesthetic. Harmony of the model that that were where is they they saw this tomaic model is as messier somehow.
00:41:54
Speaker
But again, the Copernican model at first just didn't work. It wouldn't be until later where Johannes Kepler introduced this idea of elliptical orbits that they were able to actually bring this heliocentric model back into accordance with the actual astronomical observations.
00:42:14
Speaker
So what's going on here? If you're not looking at philosophy, you're never going to see it because what happened is René Descartes, the fact that he broke from the traditional platonic understanding of the universe and opened up the doors for truly modern philosophy.
00:42:34
Speaker
Now what that means then is that from that traditional platonic perspective, the heavens are not nature. Nature is down here, like the heavens are not just nature but in space. They're like a completely different metaphysical domain of the eternal, the necessary, the perfect
00:42:58
Speaker
And because of that, you can't have egg-shaped orbits up there. They need to be perfect circles because those are understood to be perfect platonic forms, whereas elliptical orbits were understood to be more messy, more contingent, more earthly, as it were. But after Descartes,
00:43:25
Speaker
Western thought started to really break from that platonic tradition, and they started to see the heavens as nature, as being just a continuation of the processes that are at work down here. And this is what you see in Kepler. Kepler's
00:43:44
Speaker
no longer really thinking, at least not in the same way, of the heavens as a transcendental realm. He's thinking of the planetary bodies in really in much the same way that we would think of any other objects here in nature that we would understand scientifically.
Philosophical Cosmology
00:43:59
Speaker
That's a really big deal because what's happening here is the scope of natural science, which up to that point had ended at the firmament, the Earth's atmosphere,
00:44:11
Speaker
suddenly just blew the lid off, and suddenly the scope of natural science was the entire universe, right? And so what's happening here is not just like a theory being falsified by experimental data or whatever, and certain hypotheses being corroborated. No, what's happening here is much deeper than that. What's happening here is much more philosophical and metaphysical
00:44:38
Speaker
And I think if we look to the history of science in general, we see these currents throughout the, even into the present day, it's just that in the present day, they're much more obfuscated because they're buried under these
00:44:55
Speaker
procedures and mathematical abstractions and all these other kind of smoke and mirrors games which prevent us from clearly seeing what's happening within science philosophically. Yeah and I'm really glad you brought that up. I guess I should have said in my video that
00:45:20
Speaker
Uh, modern science takes the materialistic perspective. We like, there's been a separation and this something Rupert Childrich talks about that there's been a separation of spirituality and science, which, which makes no sense in my opinion, as you're, and you just beautifully laid out there. Um, but yeah, even when it comes to the implementation of the scientific method, that's something that we've been talking about a lot. And obviously, um, the changing of definitions is something that we see a lot in the.
00:45:50
Speaker
germ theory of things. The big one is isolation. When you look at the definition of an isolation, it's to separate from all other parts. It's supposed to be the single phenomenon by itself. We're presented this set of postulates, Koch's postulates, that require an isolation to prove
00:46:15
Speaker
And it comes down to even the talk of isolation of the independent variable. You want to isolate the variable to prove that that is the true cause of something, right? But interject, please. Right. Okay. And so this is really interesting here because this is where we can start really thinking about really the philosophical presumptions of scientific methodology itself and whether
00:46:47
Speaker
what changing those presumptions could actually mean for scientific practice, right? Because you're totally right to say here that in isolating variables, we are performing a kind of intellectual exercise. Variables are not actually isolated in the real world. Everything is interwoven with everything else.
00:47:10
Speaker
Right and so we're I mean they're you know doing that serves an important function potentially it allows us to kind of pick things apart and try to zero in on a particular object of inquiry.
00:47:25
Speaker
Um, but then it's like, well, if, if that's all we're looking at, if all we have are those abstractions that we've created through our experimental methods and our data and our mathematical models. Well, I mean, you know, we've just completely lost contact with nature itself at that point. You know, we've just created this giant screen and we've forgotten that there's an actual natural world behind it that we're supposed to be studying. So.
00:47:50
Speaker
This is really interesting. And this is why lately I've been taking a lot of interest in Johann von Goethe, who was this late 18th, early 19th century kind of polymath. He was a poet and a scientist. He was a botanist. He was interested in geology. He did a lot of work on optics, all kinds of stuff. Super interesting guy.
00:48:14
Speaker
And his understanding of nature is just so fascinating and just so at odds with the presumptions that we see in contemporary scientific discourse.
00:48:30
Speaker
So a really great example of this I've been talking about a lot lately is when he first started to get into biology, it was a very common trope within the study of human anatomy to say that the thing that separated human beings from other mammals
00:48:57
Speaker
was the pre-maxillary bone, which is like a snout bone kind of that you see in lots of other mammals and I believe reptiles as well, but you don't see it in adult human beings. And so scientists at the time were like, oh, well, that's the anatomical thing that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. And Goethe looked at this and he was like, no, that's just not how nature works.
00:49:26
Speaker
And he was like, no, it has to be there. There has to be a pre-maxillary bone in human beings. And his suspicion was, well, it's probably there in fetuses and infants. And then we don't see it in adults because in the development process, it fuses into the rest of the human skull. And lo and behold, he was completely right. We now know that human beings do indeed have a pre-maxillary bone.
00:49:49
Speaker
Now, this is really interesting to me because Goethe did not have any reasons that we would today consider to be good scientific reasons for believing that he had no data, he had no experiments, he was just like, that's not how nature works. That's really interesting, right? Why is he thinking that? And he was right.
00:50:11
Speaker
He's thinking that because he's looking at nature in a completely different way, in a much more holistic way than the way that modern science does now. He's looking at these skeletal structures and he's saying there is a holistic harmony here where the different parts can be
00:50:36
Speaker
played with. There's a kind of structure here which nature can elaborate or it can explore in different ways, but you can't just take bones out. You can't just take out one of the colors from the rainbow. There is a holistic cohesion here that has to be maintained because that's just how nature works.
00:51:00
Speaker
Now, that's really interesting because what that seems to intimate is just a very different way of looking at science in general. And I think it's one that's going to become necessary very soon. And this is where we can kind of loop things back around Rupert Sheldrake's ideas. If Rupert Sheldrake is right about
00:51:22
Speaker
these morphogenetic habits, not only accounting for biological and behavioral morphology, but also accounting for the stable features of the physical world itself, that the things that we regard as constants in nature are actually habits that themselves
00:51:45
Speaker
developed in a kind of evolutionary way, that really saws off the branch that science has been sitting on for a while now, because for a very long time, since Newton, it has been presumed that the constant, consistent compositional features of nature are these mathematical forms.
00:52:11
Speaker
And that those are the things that stay the same, that are universal. And if we can just figure out what those are, then we can figure out how nature works. And this plays right into the reductionistic game because if you think those are the primary building blocks of the world and you can figure out how
00:52:29
Speaker
atoms behave in relation to them then presumably you can build up from there and then you can understand how proteins work and how cells work and how organisms work and how stars work and everything else and really i think if we look at the big picture here if we start looking at the failures of modern cosmology the failures of modern biology psychology everything.
00:52:52
Speaker
I think what we see is that that methodology just has not worked out very well for us, actually. And so anyway, the big picture here, I think, is this.
00:53:04
Speaker
If we're going to start looking at the constants of nature as habits, then this completely changes the way that we have to go about actually doing scientific induction, right? So think about within modern cosmology. We look at the universe, we have certain mathematical functions that we regard as being constants, and so we're like, okay, well, if those stay the same and we rewind the tape,
00:53:32
Speaker
Then we can make inferences about what the universe was like five billion years ago, 10 billion years ago, 13 billion years ago, right? And that's how we came to the conclusions of our current astrophysical narrative of the history of our universe.
00:53:50
Speaker
But if we can no longer make that presumption, if we're sawing off that branch and saying we really aren't sure that those mathematical constants are constant, then something has to be constant. There has to be some universality that we can kind of rest ourselves on, anchor ourselves to, such that we can actually make these inductions, make these inferences. And so if it's not those mathematical models anymore,
00:54:20
Speaker
than what is it going to be? And I think Gerta gives us a clue here. It's not about the mathematical relation. It's not as much as specific numbers that stay the same.
Nature's Constants and Scientific Understanding
00:54:32
Speaker
It's something more formal than that, something about holistic cohesion, something about
00:54:41
Speaker
the way that nature plays with forms. These are the ideas I think that we need to really start to move beyond the limitations that have been built up around us over the past 200 years or so. Yeah, something I've been looking into a lot recently is kind of the empiricism versus rationalism debate. And I think
00:55:09
Speaker
If I'm correct here, what you're getting at is sort of along the lines of this that we're, you know, we're so limited by our sensory observations and that's the crux of empiricism. And I think what you were getting at there too, with Goethe when he, not necessarily him, but the other scientists in the field that we're looking at, you know, we don't have this bone in her face.
00:55:33
Speaker
Um, it was all based on the, and he went beyond that, right? He took maybe a more rationalism, a rational standpoint there. Um, and, and deduced from that, that, you know, he was looking at the larger forms of nature. Um, you know, the empirical model has failed over and over again. Uh, if you study the history of science at all, you can see that. Um, and I think a large excuse is that.
00:56:03
Speaker
You know, science is constantly shifting and, you know, the scientific consensus is moving around and, you know, we get new data and we knew new hypotheses and new tests and new experiments. And we, and it's constantly moving and moving and moving. And, you know, it never ends. I don't think it, it will ever end because like you said, like we were talking about earlier, you can change the definitions. You can change the way we language science, you know, it all is, it's going to be a never ending cycle. And it seems to just.
00:56:33
Speaker
It seems to just help the current narrative at hand, right? It seems to always align with the vested interests and what they want for the population to know to benefit them. It always seems to align with that. But I really, really appreciate your perspective here. And I think that's phenomenal. You're really onto something. Looking at how nature acts beyond these
00:56:59
Speaker
Amazing. I can't even articulate it. I'm going to have to go back and listen to that again. Let's riff on this real quick. You mentioned rationalism and purism.
00:57:18
Speaker
If you're trying to be like a die-hard empiricist, then you cannot get off the ground. Because again, you can't even infer that the sun will rise tomorrow because it rose yesterday. You've got to be a rationalist to some degree, no matter what. But what's interesting here, if you look at Goethe,
00:57:38
Speaker
He actually, as opposed to seeing himself as a rationalist as an opposing British empiricism, he actually kind of saw it the opposite way, which is really interesting. So he's kind of criticizing Newton in his work on optics.
00:57:54
Speaker
And he says these really interesting things because Newton, again, these are like the early days of science, right? And Newton's developing his optical theory, which he's framing in terms of wavelengths of light, that there are these different frequencies that correspond to the different colors. And part of the problem that Goethe is gonna have with this is the way that Newton is implying that color is something that our consciousness does and wavelength is something completely independent.
00:58:23
Speaker
Gert is really adamant about not splitting consciousness and reality apart from one another in that way. So that's part of the story. But he says this super interesting.
00:58:35
Speaker
He says, well, if you really think about it, you have never seen a wavelength of light empirically. That is an abstraction that you cooked up in order to contend with the phenomenon. And Goethe is like, no, we actually need to be more ardent empiricists here. Forget about wavelengths. I don't even know what that is. Forget about wavelengths. The phenomenon at hand, the thing that we actually encounter in nature is the rainbow.
00:59:04
Speaker
So let's make sense of that, that the formal structure, the motifs and their relationships within that actual phenomenon, that should be the primary object of science. And we should relate everything back to that. With these ideas of wavelengths, we can't actually really relate that directly to our experience in any way. And so he saw that as a problem
00:59:30
Speaker
Not necessarily because it was wrong, I suppose, but because it was an abstraction, specifically because it was moving away from nature and into this really more platonic, more rationalistic territory, interestingly.
00:59:49
Speaker
Yeah, it's weird because there is this kind of latent Platonism, which I think is completely inescapable. Like we are the children of Plato, whether we like it or not. But within modern science, the form that that's taken is this idea of physical constants. Like those are the platonic forms from the perspective of modern science. But because that
01:00:13
Speaker
presumption, that conception is basically an unquestionable dogma. It gets a free ride. It does not get any kind of, you know, barely any critical scrutiny. There are some ideas, some physicists have developed ideas that there could be
01:00:35
Speaker
temporal variability in the actual quantifiable constants of nature. But even then, I don't think they're going far enough. I think this is something that really has to cut into the very idea of what science itself thinks that it is. So yeah, a lot to talk about here. Oh, definitely. Yeah, yeah, no.
01:01:02
Speaker
It's just sparking so many different ways that I could take this into that. I got a bunch of notes here. I got to go do more research when I'm done here. Um, yeah, I really liked that. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Um, I think it's interesting that, that he takes that stance that it's like, we need to align more with our observation. And, you know, when I was kind of getting into this whole empiricism versus rationals, I was thinking, I was like,
01:01:29
Speaker
The beauty of this discussion is they make great cases on both sides. Now, they want to take one side to the extreme, but the empiricist will say that if it's not related to our senses, then it's further away from our reality, which was one of the criticisms of rationalism, that thought is much further away than what we can actually observe.
01:01:58
Speaker
And I suppose when I said earlier that empiricism failed, I think the branch of the scientific method, of course, presented by Bacon there was the aspect that failed of empiricism. I think it was taken to extreme because, and I don't even think the scientific method now aligns with the empirical history. I don't think it does align with the empirical tradition because we've gotten away from
01:02:28
Speaker
our sensory observations, right? We have all of these technologies now that allow us to see so far beyond our realm of observation of our five senses that it's not even empiricism anymore. Even in a way, you know, we've convinced ourselves that it is right. And I'm reading these threads and, um, all the atheists are these diehard empiricists on the internet for some reason. And, you know,
01:02:54
Speaker
They don't even realize that the scientific method is not even truly following empiricism. We're concerned about microorganisms and viruses and genetics and all these phenomenon that we can't see.
01:03:06
Speaker
you know, it's kind of interesting in a way, right? There's really, I think Gerta was warning against is that, yeah, at a certain point, especially once these ideas start to become institutionalized, it's so easy to just completely lose touch with reality, where you're in this world where you're doing science, but you're literally just playing with these abstractions that
01:03:32
Speaker
were cooked up by other people and then they came to solidify and now you're treating them as though they are the reality itself when in you know, the truth could be that there are dozens of just completely groundless philosophical speculations that are getting a free ride in this because no one's like actually, you know, cracking the hood open and looking at, you know, how these things actually work.
01:04:00
Speaker
And yeah, I think we, I mean, you see that everything in psychology and astrophysics certainly, probably in health sciences as well, I would assume. Because it's just so easy to fall into that once you, once science becomes this thing where it's not just a bunch of eccentric intellectual weirdos trying to figure out how the world works, but rather it's this like titanic,
01:04:28
Speaker
financial bureaucratic apparatus, you know, that that really changes the whole thing and not in a good way. I don't think. Yeah. And this is something that Vox talks about. Scientists tree versus Scientology. And, uh, we talked about this at recently, uh, how scientists tree of course is the, the way that science is structured now.
01:04:57
Speaker
makes it, it forces it to lose touch with the true knowings, the truth of what is happening in the reality, right? The financial incentives and the incentive to publish positive research. And even you can only publish these IMRAD studies now and it's so institutionalized that it's, and if you don't publish research, then you won't get tenure as a professor, right? You, you know, so it's,
01:05:24
Speaker
the way science is structured with these financial incentives removes the true platonic practice of science from what it is. And Scientology, he describes this as true science. Like you said, they're like really just, there's no vested interests, right? Like there's no, I have no dog in this fight. I'm trying to remain pure there at least because I, I'm truly concerned with, with knowing, you know, and
01:05:53
Speaker
You know, as useful as it is, right? You know, at the end of the day, I always say that it's best to just go outside and spend some time in nature and spend time with loved ones and do stuff that makes you happy. That's real. Not things that give you pleasure, but, but things that are real that give you joy. And, um, you know, like playing with a dog or eating dinner with family, whatever it may be, you know, spending time at the beach in the sun and, you know, you know,
01:06:19
Speaker
I think it does come down to a certain point where it's like what is useful and what is not, but I obviously enjoy these types of conversations. So this brings me joy. So, you know, this is what's good for me too. So, um, and I think you're probably the same too, right? So Oh, absolutely. That's what I'm here for. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I think, but I think that's, that's what science needs. Science does need this, this, it needs the scientists and the philosophers to be excited about it, about, about knowing and,
01:06:49
Speaker
You know, to be excited when they're proven wrong as well. You know, there, there's no room for this inflated ego in, in science, you know, that's when it becomes problematic. When I think obviously if you truly believe in something and you stand by it, but once you're presented with the overwhelming evidence that that's not true, you have to move forward, right? You should try and defend your claims as much as you can, but you need to look at it truly objectively.
01:07:16
Speaker
truly objectively, and I think that's lost. Objectivity, I think it's completely lost in the modern way that we practice science, as you were alluding to there. Right, and I think, so there's certainly a value in commitment, in faith, in being able to really anchor yourself to something that really does seem fundamental and important.
Science as a Spiritual Quest
01:07:44
Speaker
And I think there really is a human
01:07:46
Speaker
impulse towards that. But the problem is that can be very easily misplaced, we can very easily start to attach that to, you know, like a really, you know, obscure political ideology we found on Reddit or whatever, you know, or a scientific theory or whatever the case may be. And and in doing so lose sight of
01:08:11
Speaker
that which should actually be evoking that kind of commitment from us, which is this idea that within the context of science that is, I think it's this idea that
01:08:25
Speaker
Through bringing ourselves into contact with the inner workings of nature, we are actually participating in a kind of spiritual quest. I mean, that's how the alchemists saw it. That's how Newton saw it. That's how Goethe saw it. I mean, that's how Einstein saw it. That was just what science was for most sciences, for most scientists, rather.
01:08:50
Speaker
for most of the history of science. And then again, like after World War II, it seems to me that's really where this break happened.
01:09:00
Speaker
where science started to just be quarantined off where it was just this kind of strictly professional bureaucratic thing that had these financial ties to like the military industrial complex and big corporations and yada yada and it's just become this really kind of a parody of itself in a lot of ways and and yeah what you see with a lot of scientists people who are I think genuinely compelled by that like
01:09:30
Speaker
spiritualistic impulse still end up being led astray because they end up being sucked into this world where it seems like the most natural and obvious thing in the world to take that kind of impulse.
01:09:43
Speaker
and targeted upon a very specific kind of hypothesis or theoretical framework or whatever. When the reality is that those hypotheses and theoretical frameworks need to be fluid. They need to be changing all the time. We need to be constantly changing our minds about these things.
01:10:02
Speaker
And if you're misplacing that kind of inner commitment on something that should kind of by definition not be fixed, then you end up kind of locking down something that should not be locked down, something that should be open to question. But then as that happens and as those practices, as those habits become institutionalized,
01:10:28
Speaker
Um, you, you get the development of dogma, you get the development of this thing where, um, questioning certain things will get you ridiculed in front of your class or like, you know, literally kicked out of the university you work at or things like, and that happens all the time. And the fact that more scientists aren't alarmed by that is itself kind of alarming. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And we're so then.
01:10:57
Speaker
in the academic circles and, you know, we saw a lot of doctors lose their job through the, that fiasco that just passed by us, right? For hosting the, you know, and that's something that obviously is more pertinent to what we're talking about here. But, you know, not even necessarily just doctors, right? It was anybody who, who didn't necessarily want to take the old cupcakes in the arms. It was just like, um,
01:11:28
Speaker
And fundamentally, when I made my video on the scientific method, questioning, if you look up scientific method, questioning will always be in the scientific method. And for some reason, there are certain questions that we can't ask, which makes no sense, which is why science is unscientific. You had a beautiful video on that, on how science became unscientific. And you highlighted some great points on how the structure of science is unscientific now.
01:11:57
Speaker
even within the publishing realm. There's so many different avenues that you could attack this. Science is admittedly fraudulent as well. There are more papers out there with fake data than it's absurd. It's truly absurd. We've lost touch with what science even is. But I love that you're alluding to this idea that even just this search, even the search
01:12:25
Speaker
of understanding is sort of the spiritual practice. And, you know, I think you laid that out beautifully, you know, and, you know, the search itself is what you need to tie yourself to in a way. Because I truly, at the end of the day, is it possible to get all of the answers, right? You know, can we even, can we even end our lives with all of the answers? Perhaps
01:12:53
Speaker
Right before you're about to go, you reach enlightenment, as Jung might have talked about, and you've become your true self. And maybe that is the answer, right? Maybe there is this sort of individualization, which is the true goal, rather than trying to understand this collective happening. But I think, truly, I think if we're going to try and understand this collective, you know, this collective way forward, this collective way that things work,
01:13:20
Speaker
I think you're alluding to the right ideas here, that you're looking beyond these mathematical constants, that you're looking beyond that. That's something that we could probably make a whole episode on, just in and of itself. I think that's a groundbreaking idea.
01:13:36
Speaker
Let's actually loop this back around to the place we started from, this idea of health as cohesion. Sure. I love it. If we really back that idea up and look at the whole of the human journey, let's go back to the myth of Prometheus,
Human Individuation and Technology
01:13:54
Speaker
right? So you've got the Titan Prometheus comes down, brings humanity, the power of fire, which is implied to be
01:14:07
Speaker
the power of the heavens, the power of the gods, that fire produces light, so do the stars, there go, there's a kind of correspondence there. And what that fire then allows humanity to do is to begin developing technology, to begin developing civilization, to begin developing a mastery of nature and a potentially adversarial relationship with nature as a consequence of that.
01:14:35
Speaker
Now, that's interesting here because what I think what's going on here is you have this intimation of the opening up of the human intellect as something which can really begin to experience itself as something separate from nature. And so there again, there's there's a kind of individuation process that's happening here. And
01:15:02
Speaker
Then that sets us on a very particular trajectory, right? Because whenever you have that kind of separation and differentiation and multiplication of entities, that then creates a kind of disorder, a kind of chaos, a kind of friction in the multiplicity itself that then needs to somehow or another
01:15:26
Speaker
weave itself back together into a whole. And again, we can look at Jung in this regard with his idea of the individuation process as this kind of cycle whereby the child comes to differentiate their own personality from their mother and father, from their community even, and they become more and more kind of isolated in a way.
01:15:54
Speaker
They become more and more distinguished from their social environment, from their natural environment, from their familial environment. And then what that then necessitates is a return. It then demands that somehow that individual be reintegrated into the whole that it is embedded within. And if we look at
01:16:21
Speaker
Lots of ritualized initiation practices throughout really any culture you see something like this where like a young man usually who's coming into adulthood is required to go through this great trial of some sort whereby their ego is kind of
01:16:47
Speaker
broken down in a way so that it can then be reconfigured or kind of woven back into the tribe, the community, the nation, the church, whatever it is, right? So now taking that kind of logic and applying it to the human journey and to the place of science in that journey,
01:17:11
Speaker
What seems to be going on here is this, that the human intellect has gone through such an individuation process. We have individuated from nature. And now the real goal, the real attractor of science is then going to be reintegration. And we need to actually be able to understand nature because we need to figure out a way to weave ourselves back into it in a cohesive way.
01:17:41
Speaker
This is more important now, I think, than ever because we're at a kind of belly of the beast type phase at the moment where our sense of separation from nature and even separation within individual human beings, the separation of the intellect from the intuition, the imagination, the body has become so acute that it's at a kind of breaking point, essentially. And if we look at this in Jungian terms or in Joseph Campbell's terms,
01:18:11
Speaker
That's the turning point. That's the point of greatest intensity, the point of greatest separation, the point of greatest darkness and turmoil, but it's also the point where
01:18:23
Speaker
the big revelation happens, the big turnaround happens, the big insight, the light bulb turns on, and there's this realization of what's actually being demanded of us such that we can begin to engage and take the first steps into the journey back home, as it were. Oh, good. And I can't help but think back to our podcast with Phoenix Aurelius
01:18:52
Speaker
He mentioned, and he's an alchemist, and he mentioned that science has kind of undergone this alchemical process in of itself, which you just amazingly laid out, that we've separated all the science into these different fields, that everything is so specific now,
Holistic Approach in Science
01:19:14
Speaker
right? People studied a gene, one gene for their whole life.
01:19:18
Speaker
That's what they're concerned with. Everything to do with this one gene, this little genetic sequence that we found in humans somehow. He talked about how now it's about bringing it all back together. And I kind of made it part of my purpose to try and bring this all back together. Maybe it's too big of a goal, but I think it's possible. And I think even when I go back and read old philosophers,
01:19:48
Speaker
When they describe what a philosopher was, you know, a philosopher wasn't somebody who sat around all day and thought, you know, they just didn't sit around thinking all the time. You know, they were a mathematician, they were a historian, they were a doctor, they were a gardener, they were a carpenter, they were anything you could think of, you know, and taking from all aspects of life, which I quite enjoy, and truly dedicating their lives to the craft of
01:20:18
Speaker
of understanding and you know, I just, I kind of liked that. That makes me excited for where science is moving because there are a lot of great minds out there. I think like yourself and I've talked to amazing, amazing people through this podcast and through this journey of creating this podcast and Instagram. There's so many brilliant, brilliant people out there. And I think that we're moving in a really good direction.
01:20:44
Speaker
you know, I'm optimistic for sure. Yeah, myself as well. And I want to end with this actually. So yeah, one of the major philosophers who who I've
01:20:57
Speaker
Really been riffing on, elaborating on, and studying for quite some time now has been Alfred North Whitehead. And he was part of this British empiricist intellectual tradition. He was originally a mathematician. He was really concerned with mathematical logic.
01:21:16
Speaker
And he went through this period of a dark night of the soul, as it were, because his son died in World War I. And he ended up kind of going through this crisis period where he ended up selling a bunch of his possessions, I believe, and he ended up moving to the United States, where he ended up at Harvard University and he ended up becoming
01:21:38
Speaker
very influenced by the American pragmatist movement, specifically John Dewey and William James. Now, this is really interesting to me. If we, you know, even putting the specifics of Whitehead's philosophy to the side for a moment, if we look at kind of like the big picture here, what's going on? All right, so you had this kind of rationalism versus empiricism thing that happened in Europe, right? And then
01:22:06
Speaker
The empiricism tradition kind of facilitated the development of modern science in certain ways, but then the German phenomenological tradition did as well. And in fact, up until World War II, it was the German phenomenological tradition that was really informing science in a lot of ways, more so even than the British empiricist tradition, because so much of physics was happening in Germany, right?
01:22:35
Speaker
The empiricist tradition, though, that Whitehead's trying to remain
01:22:40
Speaker
faithful to to some degree is this this insistence very much like Goethe's interestingly that the empirical that our actual experience of nature of what it is to actually be in the world be regarded as something epistemologically and ontologically primary whitehead really does not want to sink back into this kind of
01:23:07
Speaker
dissolutive idealism or rationalism by which we start to see the world as just a user interface or a hologram or a simulation or just kind of a not really real phantom which is emerging out of this purely ideal
01:23:29
Speaker
um absolute consciousness or whatever easy not necessarily opposed to these ideas of regarding consciousness is fundamental in fact he does come to that conclusion but what he's really trying to enforce here is the this idea that
01:23:43
Speaker
Our experience of the world is primary. That matters. Everything has to begin with that in some way. And it's really interesting to me that he ended up in America and he ended up being informed by this American pragmatist tradition because in a way you can see the American pragmatist tradition as kind of like the next logical step in that progression where we're not just regarding
01:24:10
Speaker
observation as important, but we're actually looking at the way that truths and beliefs and ideas actually condition our participation in the world.
01:24:25
Speaker
Right? It's that our actual being in the world is being in flux and being in the process, being part of these metabolisms of life and water and carbon and blood and ideas and everything else, right?
01:24:43
Speaker
And that's really important here because I think there's this intimation of a kind of redemption arc in a way because that American pragmatism, which I think goes far beyond just William James and John Dewey, it's really something that is fundamental to the psyche of America itself, this idea that where the rubber meets the road is where things matter, right?
American Pragmatism
01:25:10
Speaker
That kind of attitude has been, I think in a lot of ways, kind of transmorgified into this really pessimistic, cynical, kind of financier used car salesman type of attitude where like truth doesn't really matter, there are no higher aspirations, I'm just here to make money, right? And that's kind of like the shadow of the American soul in a way.
01:25:38
Speaker
But then, with Whitehead, the way that he's influenced by American pragmatism, and really, if we look at William James and John Dewey and Charles Sanders-Perce by themselves, I think we can see that there's a light side to this, too, that's not quite shining through at the moment.
01:25:54
Speaker
But it can and it's important because it's playing a role in this. It's part of this story that's unfolding. And I think it's kind of yet to be seen exactly the way that these things are all going to kind of come together at the end. But I'm also very, very confident that they will. So we'll see. Amazing. Yeah, great way to wrap it up. I want you to tell the listeners how they can learn more from you or how they can support you in any way. I know you got a great YouTube channel.
01:26:25
Speaker
Yeah, if you want to see my video essays and other interviews and whatnot on YouTube, that's going to be Formscapes, F-O-R-M-S-C-A-P-E-S. And you can also check out our website. And by hour, I mean, well, it's really just me, but it's formscapes.org. And we
01:26:45
Speaker
I have been hosting webinar courses on there. This is the thing that started recently. I've been going through in a kind of class style format, Process in Reality by Alfred North Whitehead, as well as this book, The Ever Present Origin by Jean Gebster. Those classes have already began, but if you
01:27:06
Speaker
stay in touch and keep an eye out. We're going to be starting another round of webinar courses here probably within the next month and anybody can sign up if they want to and they're super fun. We've been having a blast doing that. We also have a Discord server if anybody wants to come and hang out and meme about stuff or whatever, you know, we've got that going on as well. And yeah, that's pretty much the fur of it. I've got a Twitter if anybody wants to follow that and that's pretty much the whole
01:27:36
Speaker
operation at this point. So yeah. Awesome. Well, I really, really appreciate you coming on. I appreciate absolutely everything that you're doing. You're one of those people that truly motivate me to want to learn more. You really just spark a fire under me that it's just like, I just want to know. I just want to learn more, you know, and, and, uh, uh, I really appreciate you for that and I appreciate for coming on.
01:28:03
Speaker
Yeah, I appreciate this. It was a great conversation. Of course, we should totally do this again sometime. There's all kinds of things that we didn't talk about that we could totally bring up. So yeah, this was great. Very much appreciate you having me on. I wish you the best. I'm sure your channel is going to do great. Keep doing what you're doing. You've got a great voice. You've got a great presentation style. Loving it. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Thank you.
01:28:31
Speaker
And I want to thank you all for listening. Of course, this is not medical advice or philosophical advice, I guess in this case, but this for informational purposes only. Remember, we are all responsible, sovereign beings, capable of thinking, criticizing, and understanding absolutely everything and anything. We, the people in the greater forces are together, self-healer, self-teachers, self-governable, and so much more. Reach out if you have any comments, criticisms, concerns, you know where to find me on Instagram. It's the best place to reach me to chat.
01:29:01
Speaker
And, uh, yeah, if you like this podcast and any founded informative, you know, you can give me a like comment, review, share, subscribe, whatever you're listening to it on. I would really appreciate that. I have a link down below if you want to donate to the cause as well. Everything is going to go directly back into this. Our vision here, right? The podcast, the YouTube, the Instagram, I want to dedicate more of my time to doing this. So absolutely not necessary, but it'd be much appreciated. And on that note, we all got to remember that there are two types of people in this world. Those think they can, those think they can't.
01:29:31
Speaker
and they're both correct. Thanks for listening, guys. Take care.