The current scientific world-view and its limitations

Max Payne and Chris Clarke

In the session that I and Max Payne initiated, I talked about science, not as the ideal expressed in Seed 1 ["a system of hypotheses and a self-critical and critically self-aware pursuit of truth"], but as a particular set of beliefs and preconceptions that were in fact current in research institutions today, with a particular slant to my physicist's viewpoint. These belong to the "current metaphysical assumptions of science as postulated by 'scientism'" of Seed 2. I wanted to explore the way in which they were indeed "not sufficient to give us the basis for a complete account of reality."

Science today is dominated by two aspects of its world-view, which I shall call "The Atomist Programme" and "Objectism"

1. By The Atomistic Programme I mean the programme for founding science on simple fundamental entities, with simple interactions, moving in a void. (The names of such entities vary - atoms, quarks, fields, strings, p-branes... but the programme remains the same.) This view is deeply ingrained and remarkably consistent. When physicists talk about "fields" they are not thereby being more "holistic": the fields still fit precisely within the atomistic programme as I have just defined it. For most scientists (essentially those not working in the Santa Fe institute) the idea that "Reality is a holarchy of complexities" (Seed 7) is at best a remote abstraction.

The worldview is maintained despite several influences that seem to be pointing in other directions.

(i) There are aspects of physics - both physical phenomena and aspects of the technique and formalism of physics - whose implications contradict this atomistic picture. The most notable is "the measurement problem" in quantum theory. To name the problem in this way unfortunately presupposes a great deal about what the solution might be and what quantum theory is, so I would prefer a more general statement: that quantum phenomena (the classic particle experiments described in any quantum theory textbook) suggest that the complexities of the large-scale structure of the universe have an influence on the behaviour of small-scale structures, as well as influences that go from small to large. If true, this would require the "holarchy of complexities" to be taken seriously. The key factors in the large-scale might even involve such aspects as "meaning" and even "consciousness", which take us into the other aspects of this meeting.

(ii) Many scientists are happy to speak about the "emergence" of bulk properties in complex systems which are not present in simpler system. The standard philosophical example is the wetness of water, which is not a property of a molecule of H2O. This example, however, merely reinforces the atomistic position because it is quite easy to see how such a property (through considerations of surface tension and inter-molecular forces) could be reduced to micro-properties. It leads the average scientist to hold, as a matter of dogma, that all bulk properties are in the same way reducible "in principle". The trouble is that in practice a whole host of phenomena, from the behaviour of complex molecules to the formation of organs in embyos, have to be regarded as fundamental to the realm concerned with little hope of any practical reduction to elementary particles. As a result, the way "emergent properties" is used becomes an interesting ploy, both denying the atomistic programme at the practical level while affirming it at the metaphysical level through the "in principle" clause. Consciousness is, of course, an extreme case of an emergent property whose reduction, I would hold, is not even "in principle" possible (Seed 8), and so the adherence to the atomistic programme is liable to exclude this, the most important aspect of our experience of the world (namely, the fact that it is experienced ).

2. The second aspect of the world-view of science I call Objectism, a (rather unpleasant) word that I coin to make a distinction from "objectivity". The latter contains the valuable notion of inter-subjectivity, the attainment of knowledge that is not dependent on my particular perceptions, but which is valid for all suitably trained and prepared people. Objectism, by contrast, is the methodology of achieving inter-subjectivity by constantly striving to minimise the role of human perception, by automated recording and analysis, for example. This leads to a rigid separation between the psychological and the physical, and to the systematic down-grading of personal experience in general, and to transcendental experience in particular, as a suitable area for scientific study - despite the clear demonstration to the contrary by the Religious Experience Research centre (as described by Peggy Morgan at the meeting)

3. The consequences of this world-view were clear in the discussions at the meeting. I would highlight both the theoretical and the practical consequences.

(i) For science itself, the prevailing world-view makes it very hard to investigate the psychophysical: we do not have explanatory structures that integrate inner experience, inner attitudes and perceptions of meaning, with the apparrently physical world of healing, for example. This very dichotomy of psychological and physical is forced on us by the scientific world-view that I have described.

(ii) At the practical level, the ideal of objectism denegrates the perceptual skills we have all acquired in the course of our evolution for life on this planet. Human perception has evolved into an exquisitely refined system with a full range of emotional and parapsychic components. Using this, we respond with our whole being to the world around us, but this response is cut off from our intellect, and we have even lost any consciousness of it. The integration with the intellect of this holistic response of the organism to the environment is absolutely essential if humanity is survive on its evolutionary course. But to do this requires not only the intellectual acknowledgement of the poverty of atomism and objectism, but also the acceptance of the internal development within ourselves (Seeds 10-12) that is involved in going beyond the current world-view and being true scientists of the totality of experience.