What if there are some things where scientific objectivity and scientific method breaks down, and is incapable of exploring?
It's ok if you feel that what I said was irresponsible. I know that is the mainstream view of things, and I expected a lot of backlash for posting a comment on this.
I usually hang out with the crowd where the experience and reality of subtle energy is not in doubt. Among them are the people for whom ... let's just say, something in then turns on (or something), and they are experiencing a number of phenomenas which includes subtle energy. Some of it are triggered by psychedelics, and some of it is not. For them, they experience what you feel: cognitive dissonance, anxiety, fear, anger. They freak out.
Among them are both people who actively sought it out ... and people who are open-minded skeptics. At that point, they are lost. The responsible thing at that point is to provide a framework to help them make sense of it. The ones who are skeptical appreciate it. They have the opportunity to explore and test out the claims for themselves.
>"The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence." - Nikola Tesla
Material reductionism has really done a number on Western civilization. The notion that existence is limited to what can be measured, and all claims to the contrary get painted with the brush of pseudoscience, to me, embodies the hubris that is holding science back. Not to diminish the achievements of science and academia – they just have one eye covered.
See the work of Dean Radin for a series of studies on nonmaterial phenomena, that I hope are the start of a wave of discovery.
This strikes me as deeply ahistorical in two ways.
One is that there are always Dean Radins. In the 1970s we had a wave of interest in ESP and other paranormal phenomena. In the 1920s it was spiritualism and seances. And there are many other, smaller excitements. We're always at the start of a wave of discovery around the mystical. Somehow it never comes! Anybody suggesting it will be different this time really needs to grapple with the other waves.
The other is that overliteral reductionism, definitely a force in science [1], has quite regularly been beaten back. When that happens, it comes through data. Look at the rise of quantum mechanics, which seemed so weird that Einstein talked about "spooky action at a distance". Eventually everybody was like, "Yes, turns out reality is just that weird," and now we're building things with it.
Like any force, reductionism can be harmful when overapplied. But it's a useful balance to other forces. The human mind is an extremely fertile place, where ideas rapidly grow and branch and flower. But all gardens need pruning, so we must assiduously apply Occam's razor lest we be overwhelmed with nonsense.
You're basically describing emotions as though they are somehow more than just emotions. We understand them, they effect things, but they are just emotions. We know that mood can effect someone's physical responses, but we don't assume that's in any way special, unless you can show evidence of those "subtle energy" experiences affecting the world in a different way than regular emotions or placebos.
There is no objective evidence, nothing that I think would be convincing to you. There are plenty of experiences, which many skeptics dismiss as anecdoptal. I can say, here, take this psychedelic, but it would easily be explained as the effects of the psychedelic acting upon the brain. I can say, hey, meet this person, or try this technique ... but it wouldn't matter. Our civilization is simply just not ready for this stuff.
The thing is, there are a lot of phenomena that are difficult to show evidence, even in a laboratory setting. There was one parapsychology experiment that was interesting: a skeptic and a non-skeptic both collaborated and created an experimental protocol. They then watched each other conduct the experiment. The idea being that, each of them have a vested interest in proving or disproving the hypothesis.
Somehow, the skeptic had experimental results showing nothing beyond chance, and the non-skeptic had experimental results showing there is a statistical significance beyond random chance for the phenomena under study.
That can be taken as that, there were some bias that were missing. But what if, for example, it could be as simple as, neither experimenters were truly neutral, and it affected what happened?
Anyways, I'm in the point of my life that I simply don't care enough to try to convince people to believe in one way or another. That emotions behave more than "just" emotion is not something that is special or extraordinary for me. Sometimes, I encounter people for whom they start experiencing this. I help them when I do.
Just as background, I've been doing yoga and meditation for decades. I think the phenomena that people experience as "subtle energy" are interesting and are worth investigating. But my best guess is that these are purely internal phenomena. As eusocial primates with poor internal perception, it's easy for us to mistake internal phenomena as objective. For example, people who think they know what God wants -- who are great in number! -- turn out to be perceiving aspects of their own minds: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/creating-god-i...
With that, to your question:
> What if there are some things where scientific objectivity and scientific method breaks down, and is incapable of exploring?
Then that's a thing you can demonstrate. People are quite regularly proving that existing methods break down. Look at relativity, for example. The Michelson–Morley experiments started in the 1880s. Einstein didn't publish key work until 1905, and the revolution he started took a long time to play out.
You can find similar things happening with germ theory, which forced a revolution in medical practice. Or more recently, with figuring out the true cause of ulcers. Sure, there were a lot of nominally objective jerks who pushed back against these things, defending a failed orthodoxy. That approach does break down. But that's not the only thing going on. If it were, Einstein and the ulcer guy wouldn't have ended up with Nobel prizes.
Science isn't some incomprehensible activity. It's just a formalization of what we do every day, which is come up with ideas about how the world works and then put those ideas to the test.
In fact, you're doing it now. If you want to propose a framework that makes sense of phenomena, as you're doing here, then you don't get to stop half way. "Subtle energy" is one way to explain it. It's clearly useful to people in certain contexts. But there are all sorts of things like that. For example, people naively expect light things to fall slower than heavy things. Feathers fall slower than bowling balls, for example. There are all sorts of principles in naive physics [1] that are honestly not that bad. The same is true for folk medicine. An apple a day doesn't keep all doctors away, but it isn't a bad place to start.
So my issue with what you said isn't that you talk about "subtle energy". It's that you are casting a locally useful approximation as a universal truth. And you're doing that without acknowledging the gap or being willing to do the work. Our understanding of, say, thermal energy is the result of many lifetimes of dedicated, thoughtful work. If you want the power of objective fact, you have to earn it.
>> What if there are some things where scientific objectivity and scientific method breaks down, and is incapable of exploring?
> Then that's a thing you can demonstrate.
Then you are more clever than I am. I have no idea how to test some of this stuff, let alone do it with double-blind study.
It isn't as if science is incomprehensible to me. I understand and apply the scientific method, have run experiments. I also know its limits.
Part of it is that the most reliable instrument for this stuff is the consciousness itself. What is under observation changes when it is observed, and more troublesome (from the perspective of trying explore this scientifically), is that the observer is also changed by the observed.
Some of the phenomena won't happen if there is too much disbelief in it.
Do you have any ideas on how to experiment with stuff like this?
About the only time that gets interesting is when a life-long skeptic have some parts of their consciousness wake up, and now they are trying to figure out what is wrong with them. They were not looking for this stuff -- far from it. And here they are, finding themselves with these phenomena, inducing a lot of cognitive dissonance. When I have encountered someone like that, I point out resources for them to read. They are free to test and verify it for themselves. It works for them because they are capable of verifying it for themselves.
Everyone else have to start from scratch with things like meditation and yoga. And that is going to depend upon the teacher, quality of teaching, the transmission, and how you practice.
A good example is the standing meditation from Taoist traditions. One of the early stages of the phenomena are spontaneous movements in the bowels, or spontaneous movements of the limbs triggered from the early stages of movement of subtle energy. It tends to freak people out, because it is not something that is so easily attributable to internal experience.
The problem is that reliably being able to get to that point to experience for yourself requires dedicated training. A lot of groups might think 1 hr standing meditation is a kind of holy grail of practice ... but I know of one group that drops beginners into 6 hr sessions. It is a huge investment of time, for both student and teacher. Complicating that even further is that there is quite a bit of fraud and abuse aimed at conning people.
That you don't understand how to test something isn't evidence of anything at all.
> Some of the phenomena won't happen if there is too much disbelief in it. Do you have any ideas on how to experiment with stuff like this?
That right there is a testable proposition. Put somebody in a soundproof, lightproof room who can reliably experience the phenomenon. Randomly surround them with groups of believers, disbelievers, or nobody at all. Repeat until you have a large N. If the phenomenon happening is truly sensitive to disbelievers, you should see clear correlations.
More broadly, there's a long, long history of people making claims of mental phenomena and constructing tests of those claims. So it's not me you should be asking. It's the broader literature. And the rise of things like EKGs, fMRIs,and TMS means we're opening up all sorts of new ways to test claims about mind.
If you're serious about claiming these are objective phenomena and that your model for them has more explanatory power, then you should jump in and start doing that work. And if not, maybe just stick to being honest by using phrases like "I once experienced" and "I believe".
I'd love to hear your thoughts on some of Dean Radin's work. For example, these studies on the sense of being stared at. Here's one of the conclusions:
>We conclude that for both data sets that there is a small, but significant effect. This result corresponds to the recent findings of studies on distant healing and the ‘feeling of being stared at’. Therefore, the existence of some anomaly related to distant intentions cannot be ruled out. The lack of methodological rigour in the existing database prohibits final conclusions and calls for further research, especially for independent replications on larger data sets. There is no specific theoretical conception we know of that can incorporate this phenomenon into the current body of scientific knowledge. Thus, theoretical research allowing for and describing plausible mechanisms for such effects is necessary.
Radin has many similarly compelling studies with "small, but significant effects" that suggest the conventional understanding of reality needs to be expanded.
In a material reductionist paradigm, this makes zero sense; people simply cannot "feel" other people watching them, especially from different locations, and if they think they do then there must be some trick at play.
This paradigm's emergence hierarchy looks like this:
(from) Physics (emerges) -> Chemistry -> Biology -> Psychology -> Consciousness
Radin suggests that the true order of emergence is:
Consciousness -> Physics -> Chemistry -> Biology -> Psychology -> Mind
Consciousness is fundamental and pervasive, like a quantum field. This offers, in my opinion, a satisfactory explanation for all nonmaterial/nonlocal phenomena, including intuition, reiki, transcendence, remote viewing, psychedelics, etc.
That some people incorrectly think they are channeling God's will is not evidence against these ideas.
edit: oops, just saw your reply to my other comment. sorry to split the threads apart.
Neurotypical humans anthropomorphize things excessively. So much so that whole societies get built around perception of pervasive mind, from the Greek gods and the Hindu pantheon to Christian and Muslim single pervasive intelligences to Mesmer's magnetism and the Jedi force. A lot of minds just like the idea that minds are fundamental
The obvious explanation for Radin's work is what's behind a lot of other fringe science: people looking for the thing they want until they find it. Over time any particular fad fades away due to lack of corroborating evidence and results. And then we get a new one, and another new one.
So personally, having spent a bunch of time digging into previous waves, I'm not going to invest a lot of time in this one. That a lot of minds like to think that mind is fundamental isn't surprising. But at this point neither do I think it's very interesting.
I disagree that these "fads" fade away due to lack of corroborating evidence and results. Has anything in the nonmaterial realm been conclusively disproved that you connect to the decline in popular interest? Academia has a built-in "knowledge filter" (confirmation bias, if you will), and ideas that run contrary to existing mainstream beliefs don't get funding, and indeed get labeled as pseudoscience or explained away (as you have done here, respectfully), until there is a smoking gun. Which, of course, is difficult to find without funding.
For example, the Chicxulub hypothesis was ridiculed until they found the crater. A more modern example is the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, which is even starting to sway previously-outspoken "skeptics" like Michael Shermer. These are geology examples, but the principle applies to all fields.
I don't think we have found the nonmaterial crater yet. But I do think that Radin and those before him have found something that warrants taking a serious look at. Not to mention that in the past, we didn't have access to the technology that powers the potential and scale of these studies. Scientific progress is nonlinear, and I think it's worth shaking the snowglobe even if (especially if?) positive results would constitute a paradigm shift.
Fringe theories generally can't be conclusively disproven, so if that's your bar, it's an unachievable one. E.g., are infectious diseases really all caused by evil spirits? Maybe! Might it also be miasmas? [1] Could be! But now that we have ideas like "bacterium" and "virus", we we don't need those models to explain and treat diseases. So the "evil spirits" has mostly (but not entirely!) faded, and I think miasma theory is wholly dead.
Another thing that has faded away is the 1970s notion of ESP. E.g,, consider the history of Zener cards, which had at least two waves of popularity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zener_cards
In the 1970s ESP got a lot of attention. As did things like remote viewing. There was a definite fad for those concepts, and there was significant academic interest and funding. But nobody had any replicable results, so it all faded away, just like the UFO craze did.
And sorry, but as I said, I have no interest in Radin's work. As I said, you haven't grappled at all with the long history of fringe-science failure and the many commonalities between the failures. If you can't do that, you can't say why Radin might be different from all the similar guys I wasted time on in the past.
Perfect, a bad faith argument from authority. Thank you.
>In the 1970s ESP got a lot of attention. As did things like remote viewing. There was a definite fad for those concepts, and there was significant academic interest and funding. But nobody had any replicable results, so it all faded away
I don't think so. Here's a list of peer-reviewed journal articles from 1964 onwards, including some replication studies: http://deanradin.com/evidence/evidence.htm. It's fine though, you're clearly not interested in changing your mind.
It's definitely not bad faith. But I get to choose how to spend my time. I've looked into a bunch of fringe stuff over the years. I've got better things to do now. I am interested in changing my mind, but I have reasonable confidence that slight variations on old shticks aren't going to do it. There are more interesting things for me to explore.
I'm sure the same is true for you. Are you busily looking into each of the latest QAnon theories? Are you carefully investigating every alternative remedy somebody is selling? Have you carefully listened to somebody from every sect of every religion? Nah. It's not even possible to be as open-minded to everything as you want me to be to your personal pet thing.
I'll note that you aren't willing to put in any work learning enough about past paranormal fads to explain why your personal fave is any different than previous ones. It seems odd that you expect me to do a bunch more work than you're willing to do yourself.
It's ok if you feel that what I said was irresponsible. I know that is the mainstream view of things, and I expected a lot of backlash for posting a comment on this.
I usually hang out with the crowd where the experience and reality of subtle energy is not in doubt. Among them are the people for whom ... let's just say, something in then turns on (or something), and they are experiencing a number of phenomenas which includes subtle energy. Some of it are triggered by psychedelics, and some of it is not. For them, they experience what you feel: cognitive dissonance, anxiety, fear, anger. They freak out.
Among them are both people who actively sought it out ... and people who are open-minded skeptics. At that point, they are lost. The responsible thing at that point is to provide a framework to help them make sense of it. The ones who are skeptical appreciate it. They have the opportunity to explore and test out the claims for themselves.