Dis-covery: The Science of Babel

I. The Fallacy of Modern Science

A grapevine has been planted outside of the father, but being unsound, it will be pulled up by its roots and destroyed.

—Gospel of Thomas 40

I went to college to study the nature of life but found that the topic was not very popular, so I studied philosophy and the sciences and hoped for the best. But how did cognitive science not yet have a model for the human mind? How was there no history of consciousness? Why was biology not concerned with the perceptual depth of lifeforms? And how had so much knowledge still not formed a unified picture of the world?

So I looked into the nuts and bolts of the construction of our knowledge. I dug into the philosophy of science. I studied the development of the method and the nature of scientific revolutions. I learned of the ontological foundations and epistemological underpinnings of our civilization's greatest achievement.

Meanwhile I developed my sense of spirituality. I discovered the beauty and power of language. I learned the meaning of myth and came to know the nature of perception. I left my culture behind and saw the likeness in all people. I became aware of the human predicament.

But if I'd finally made sense of my existence, how was modern knowledge still so lost in itself? Why did it still have nothing to say about what it means to be alive, and why was it farther than ever from its most basic goal of unification?

Reading Lee Smolin's The Trouble With Physics, I found the answer I was looking for, and it was the very question. I caught the founding premise of this monumental construct stripped of fancy language: "[To] give an account of reality as it would be in our absence" (Smolin, 6).

What? Why?

Wasn't the idea was to understand reality as it actually exists—with us?

It turns out that the entire worldview set forth by contemporary science grows out of the belief that we are not 'real,' so we must ignore our existence in order to get to the real truth.

Nothing scientific, this is an inductive assumption; the a priori ontological position which has historically informed the development of all the concepts and entities of our universal language. Hence the 'scientific' effort to build a world-picture with no mention of our subjectivity, and the ensuing and unconscious expulsion of personal experience from the dominant culture's conception of nature.

It might be hard to swallow, but that is, quite simply, the foundation of the global myth. It is a view called "philosophical realism", and it claims that our perceived reality exists independently of our perceiving.

But if the value of science is making sound judgments after our observations, why the urge to leave ourselves out of the picture?

Smolin's quick defense of 'realism' shows him at his least eloquent in an otherwise fascinating piece of work: "We are accidental descendants of an ancient primate, who appeared only very recently in the history of the world. It cannot be that reality depends on our existence" (Smolin, 7).

For in reality, yes: our perceived reality does depend on our perceiving: anything we can, ever have, and ever will say about "the world" is contingent upon our cognitive ability, and to cast this fact aside can only be considered naïve.

Such abomination to attempt an understanding while denying understanding!

How do we build a world on the premise that we are not a part of it? And what does it mean when a civilization leaves itself out of its creation story?

Now it all made sense: the scientific enterprise had not answered my question because it had dismissed it from the outset. My intuition had led me in the right direction—humanity's afflictions have no external basis: the root of all evil is psychological in nature. And we are uprooting it now.

Pt II