Modern Scientific Community – The New Church & How Technology Is A Drug Part II

Part II
What Is The Scientific Method?

Side Note Regarding Previous Article

I had a debate with a gentleman the other day (by the time this article, part II, gets published it’s been a month however) over my previous article and came to realize that a couple of things should be clarified. First of all, my definition of science is some mix of “systematized knowledge in general” & “knowledge, as of facts and principles; knowledge gained by systematic study”, but I understand that some people define it only as “any of the branches of natural or physical science” (Reference1, from now on I will try and cite all sources at the end of each article). Second, I differentiate between a priori (“truth”) and a posteriori (“empirical evidence suggests”). Third, I am aware that I have not presented any concrete evidence for my first argument other than referencing to Kuhn on general theory of scientific paradigms, and so I believe this to be a well-suited opportunity to redeem myself for those who are interested:

- “Scientific Controversies: Case studies in the resolution and closure of disputes in science and technology” by Ernan McMullin (You can read it for free at googlebooks, just google it);
- “The Dynamics of Technical Controversy” by Allan Mazur.

These books contain careful examination of specific cases where scientific evidences have been tossed aside/neglected due to political, conservative and/or other reasons. Last but not least I’d like to thank everyone who commented, I had a lot of fun reading it all!

Preface

I was originally thinking to make this a 3-part series, but this project turns out to be quite an essay, so I will have to split it up in shorter articles, else this will be way too long.
Before we go on I must also say that as I research data to back up my arguments I feel that I am roaming a yet unmapped region. Conclusively, if you say “show me a map that agrees with you saying there is a lake over there”, well, I can’t. Because I don’t think there is a map describing what I’ve seen. I will, off course, try and provide sources for all my claims and reasons to think what I think and to believe what I believe (and no, it will most often not be wiki), but I expect that the major scope of following statements will be unfamiliar to anyone reading them, and there will be no sources for many of my points since the arguments stem from common sense.

Introduction

When initially thinking about writing this series I thought about taking different methods and inquiries in different branches of science (history, chemistry, math) and analyzing them separately, but when I started on setting up the layout of these articles, I decided it would be more precise and coherent to just take on the scientific method as a whole.
Scrutinizing scientific method can be done in two ways. Either bottom-up, i.e. “Aaahhh, look at those cute little humans, trying to discover and comprehend the universe” (pretty much the way common people learn about history of science in books), or top-down which would basically mean to dissect the scientific method as a behavior modifier designed, literally designed, to do the following things:

1. Propagandize occult philosophies;
2. Reward self-indoctrination into these occult philosophies through various technological gadgets, that also serve as a distraction for point #3;
3. Produce military and surveillance technology that will once and for all secure complete world domination (for whomever wishes to acquire such a thing I might add);
4. Eradicate any sense of superstition from the collective body of human intellect.

In this article I will introduce the reader to an idea that the scientific method is a religious doctrine of investigation, no different than a group of bishops meeting to discuss a religious text. The next article I will focus on points #1 & #4, while in the last article(s) I will discuss points 2-3.
I chose the top-down approach because should I have chosen the bottom-up approach then I could either go at it lightly, “well, you know, scientific method aint that bad, it has some flaws and restrictions, but I guess it’s not really a problem, yadayada…” (but since this site is about a (satanic) occult elite ruling the world, who would want me to go “light” anyway?); or roughly. Had I chosen to go roughly there I believe most of people would simply consider my arguments to be paranoia, at least those readers who are new/semi-new to this site. On the other hand, the top-down approach doesn’t offer any choice. I can either go at it at full gear, or don’t show up to the race at all. If you are reading this very sentence right now, that means I have started the engine. So, we are rolling.

Sense of Agency & Setting up Philosophical Framework

There is a philosophical assumption that we all must make before any “serious” debate regarding the nature of the universe can proceed, and that is to assume that the very universe itself even exists as something separate from our perception, and isn’t simply a figment of our imagination. Now, why is that? Why do we need to even make this assumption? Isn’t it crystal-clear that the universe does exist? Well, since people have been debating this for thousands of years, apparently no.
This is thanks to a function inside of our brain that is called “sense of agency” (Reference2). This function makes us perceive ourselves separate from our own body, it makes us think that our actions are completely controlled by “ourselves” and not by chemical composition of our brain; i.e. it is the root of our feeling of “self-awareness” and “higher consciousness”, and is what I think gives rise to mind-body duality problem. One could in fact argue that it is the main reason for why so many feel that a human “soul” or “spirit”, if you will, is something detached from the body. And I mean feel, not think, because it is a form of sense, rather not thought.

Even though sense of self-awareness, sense of having control over what we actually achieve in life, gives us an urge to take opportunity and do best we can, and at the same time encourages us to be responsible for our own actions, this sense has one major drawback: it makes it impossible for anyone to prove the existence of the universe as an object outside of our own perception. In other words, one can never be sure that anything is real, because we could all be just a bunch of brains laying in jars in some scientific lab, and everything we feel, see and hear is just neurological signals forced into our brain.
The outcome of this “limitation” is that whenever we judge any description of the universe presented to us as accurate, we do not choose it because it objectively accurately describes the universe, for we cannot compare the objective nature of the universe with the nature of the universe that we perceive, but rather because our consciousness finds that description a satisfactory one. (That’s where technology comes in as a factor, since it’s an attempt to satisfy our consciousness in order for us to make a conformation bias of choosing the scientific method over any other method of explaining different phenomenon and gaining knowledge, but I reserve this discussion for a future article.)

From a pure metaphysical point of view your consciousness can only make two assumptions without ability to have evidence for either, but simply “knowing” both to be true. The first is that you exist; the second is that the universe exists as a separate body/entity from you. Both claims are equally metaphysical, or “religious if you will, and cannot be proven. What I mean is: you can’t prove that the universe exists outside of your perception, and you can’t prove that your perception exists outside of the universe. So, essentially, claiming that the universe exists and that all the laws of physics exist is just as superstitious as claiming that demons and souls exist.

By simply saying that you sense that you and your body are not the same I have just proven to you that humans have a soul outside of the body. Because we sense it, just like we sense light, sound, or anything else. The argument can of course return to sense of agency being a biological function of our brain, but in order to go there you must first assume that the universe exists and that radioactivity used to scan brains exists. And how do you prove radioactivity? Through various experiments. And what do you use in experiments? Your senses. Not logic, not reason. Senses. Hence, there is an equal amount of unprovable assumptions in both claiming that radioactivity exists within the universe and that a soul exists outside of it.
Funny thing is, if people claim that there is no universe they are considered wackos and weirdos, but if people claim there is no soul or consciousness separate from the physical body, and that there is no free will, though we clearly have senses to feel/experience it just like we see sunlight or smell ocean, they are somehow taken seriously. Yet scientific experiments in neurology have showed that we sense both the universe and our soul/consciousness, and even free will.
An interesting fact is that most major religions of the world communicate in some way that “you” are primary and “the universe” is secondary (knowledge comes from looking into oneself, the soul/consciousness is more important than the body, etc.). Scientific method, however, puts this the wrong way and tells us to focus on “the universe” as primary source of knowledge and “you” as something secondary. This makes modern scientific principalities a religious fundamentalism in-of-itself, except backwards. I will return to the theme of this paragraph in the next article for a more in-depth analysis.
Before we proceed, I would like to ask a question. Are the following two sentences identical?
- “Be careful, that knife is pretty sharp.”
- “Knife is a terrible and completely insufficient tool for a cook.”
If the answer is “yes” I strongly recommend stopping reading this text, and taking some form of sedative medication. I don’t want to insult anyone, but I also don’t want the debate to be misled to places where it’s not supposed to go. Also, please keep the “knife” analogy in mind, as I will reference back to it several times in the next articles.

Getting Down and Dirty With Definitions

Very often when I debate people over various subjects I find that the core of disagreement is usually initiated by differences in definitions. So, I want to get this out of the way as soon as possible by providing my personal interpretation of what I define as the “scientific method”.

“A method of procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.” – http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/scientific-method?q=scientific+method

“A method of research in which a problem is identified, relevant data are gathered, a hypothesis is formulated from these data, and the hypothesis is empirically tested.” &
“A method of investigation in which a problem is first identified and observations, experiments, or other relevant data are then used to construct or test hypotheses that purport to solve it.” -http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/scientific+method

“The principles and empirical processes of discovery and demonstration considered characteristic of or necessary for scientific investigation, generally involving the observation of phenomena, the formulation of a hypothesis concerning the phenomena, experimentation to demonstrate the truth or falseness of the hypothesis, and a conclusion that validates or modifies the hypothesis.” – http://www.thefreedictionary.com/scientific+method

These definitions describe what I’ve come to know as the “scientific method”, and I believe they label what most people assume the scientific method to be. Though I agree that these definitions actually do describe the scientific method accurately, I find them too narrow and completely inadequate, for they do not take into account the context or the circumstances of the human nature, within which the scientific method is conducted.
Therefore, for the sake of this discussion, I would like to provide a new definition of the “scientific method” that does in fact take into account everything there is to take into account.

“The scientific method is an attempt to gain an accurate description of the universe by procedurally appealing to majority.”

The scientific method is, in its operational state, nothing more but an appeal to majority, and a very cleverly disguised one too.

a) Imagine two men. One is blind, the other is deaf. The deaf man wants to convince the blind that stars exist, because the blind accuses the deaf of being superstitious, and the blind man wants to convince the deaf that music exists, because deaf man calls the blind man crazy. They both have asked you for help to provide arguments for their cause. Surely, for you who can both see and hear, the evidence of both sounds producing different emotions depending on tone, order or rhythm and trillions of small glowing dots above our heads thousands of light years away are overwhelming. Thus, giving them each an argument that should convince the other to believe in existence of such self-explanatory, obvious, everyday-life phenomenon as music and stars should be a walk in the park. Ready, set, go!
…
Having trouble? My bet is that your first question is “How on Earth do they even communicate? The blind man can’t talk to the deaf man, and the deaf man can’t show anything to the blind man.”
Logically, they both have an intrinsically coherent worldview, they both have a rational reason to believe in their own reality, they both have evidence for their claims, that can even be supported by a third party (you). So, what’s the problem? If we assume that they can transfer their knowledge through, say, Morse code (the blind can hear, the deaf can see the frequency), what arguments can you find to help one side to persuade the other?

This is a severe boundary that scientific method never takes into account: the very fact that people share different amount of senses. Not only that, but even within the same senses we have defined there are countless variations, defections and anomalies. (From there we can even go into arguing that our perception of reality doesn’t lay in our senses, but in how our brain puts all senses together to form one consistent “reality”, sometimes referred to as cognitive-creative function.)
What if the majority of people on earth had only 4 senses, i.e. the majority was blind and only a minority had a sense of sight? What do you think would happen if a rational person with sight tried to explain how colors of the sky transcend from deep blue in the east to orange-pink in the west during a beautiful sunset? My guess: mental institution.

But like I mentioned earlier, one doesn’t even have to go that far. Even within same senses there are deviations. Say, color-blindness. You can kiss goodbye to chemistry, because many chemical experiments rely heavily on determining the nature of substance by its color after being mixed with different chemicals. Measurement of pH is a good example of this. Many metals and metal compositions can barely be distinguished from one another unless by the color of their flame. Zoology? Entire family trees of species can’t be set apart in any other way but through color/pattern of/on their skin/exoskeleton/epidermis.
So, we have proven that humans can have less than five senses, and even those five are not always consistent and same for all people. Why then is the majority so impatient and stubborn in proclaiming that we cannot have more than five senses? Thinking of all people who ever claimed that they can see the future or heal the sick, I wonder what they must feel when someone comes up to them and asks them for “evidence”. What would you feel like if a blind man came up to you one day and said “prove to me that stars exist”?

Surely many of those self-proclaimed messiahs are simple charlatans, but so are people with sight. How is a blind man to know if he is been tricked or if someone genuinely tries to help him? It is a question I will not delve deeper into.
I am aware that we currently are developing technology that actually allows blind people to see. Who knows, maybe in the future people who claim to have psychic abilities will have technology for us aswell to gain at least a little bit of their sense and their understanding of the universe. (Side note: in a way we’ve already had for thousands of years. That technology is called magic. Unfortunately, unlike medical tools that help blind people, truth about magic, especially witchcraft, isn’t served on a silver plate to general public. Only those who relentlessly seek knowledge about it will find it.)

b) An old story comes to mind. There were three slaves. They were born into slavery and worked together in mines, digging up diverse metals and rocks, day in and day out. They haven’t seen daylight since they were children. All their life, that they can remember, they have spent in a prison cell below the ground.

One day, one of them had an opportunity to escape. So he did. He escaped from the mines and ran into the nearest forest to hide himself from the slavers. There he saw all and everything, and he was in awe. He saw the trees. He saw the animals. He saw the plants, the insects, river, sky, rainbow, clouds, flowers, blue, red, pink, and yellow, orange, brown, green. He saw it all and he thought that what he had experienced was so beautiful that he owed his two slave buddies to come back and tell them about it, to convince them to escape with him.

When it got dark he snuck back into the mines and returned to the prison cell where his two friends were. As soon as the other two slaves saw him they started questioning where he went earlier. He tried to tell them about miracles of life that he encountered, but he couldn’t. No matter how hard he wanted to explain to them what butterflies look like, or how water reflects light from the sun, all that came out of his mouth were strange noises. He had no words to tell his story. So he tried to explain it with his limbs, but his comrades stood without a clue, wondering why he was wagging his arms.

Eventually, our hero got tired explaining and went to bed. The other two stayed up for a while and started conspiring. “What is it with our brother?”, “The fresh air must’ve made him mad.”, “You saw how he acted. Moaning, almost hit me during that crazy dance of his, or whatever it was.”, “What if he becomes violent later? It’s better for us to put him out of his misery.”, “Agreed”. They conspired and conspired till they reached a conclusion: to simply kill him, believing he’s gone insane. So they stoned him to death in his own sleep and decided never to try and escape the mines, least they become crazy from the fresh air aswell.
(Side note: This story is essentially Plato’s cave from a different perspective and with a different emphasis.)

What’s the moral of the story? No research, no description of an experiment, no scientific survey can be more truthful than the very language used to communicate it. In order for two scientists to agree, they must share same definitions for things they try to describe. This is one of the cores of a scientific paradigm, the historical, social and political arena subjectively deciding how objective facts are allowed to be told.

Considering both points a) and b) as presented above we can clearly see that there are numerous instances which can give rise to differences in perception of reality where either side can, practically speaking, neither prove one’s own stand nor disprove the stand of the opposition. Not because a lack of evidence, but because, really, the human nature itself.
Taking it all into account, my final definition of the scientific method is this:

“The scientific method is an attempt to gain an accurate description of the universe by procedurally appealing to majority of people [who share same amount of senses, nature of which is either identical or indistinguishably similar] OR [who’s brains perform cognitive-creative function identically or indistinguishably similarly]; who share roughly same vocabulary size, and who share same type and set of logical axioms building up definitions in that vocabulary.”

It’s not really that difficult to gain people’s trust by simply appealing to majority on what they sense. It is actually pretty much what I did in my last article. I can impossibly have been to every scientific institution on the planet to scientifically claim that majority of scientists practice their research in favor of corruption rather than empirical evidence. I’ve only studied at two, and read some books on the issue. So, I simply made a guess that my perception of scientific communities is similar to the perception that majority of people share on this site, and hey, it looks like I was right. Unlike the scientific method though, I’m open about what I’m doing, and I actually honestly believe in all of the things that I write. Well, off course there is no way for anyone to truly know that I don’t have a hidden agenda other than just taking my word for it.

Peer-Review Dumbs Down Science and Promotes Jumping on The Bandwagon

Though appeal to majority is already a built-in feature in the scientific inquiry, what really pushes this fallacy to its limits is the peer-review process. You see, all great scientific discoveries made throughout the ages were usually done by people ahead of their time, not along with it. Combine this with scientific paradigms and it becomes quite clear that peer-review process almost completely evaporates any radical way of thinking that just might turn out to be true. Peer-review stimulates to publish articles that majority can agree with, for academic points and perks, rather than pursuing to prove a drastic idea, publishing something majority will disagree with and think of as ludicrous. Oh, right, peer-review process doesn’t even allow something to be published if the majority doesn’t agree with it in the first place.

Don’t believe me? Ask not 1, not 2, not 5, but 34 Nobel Prize winners who were rejected by the peer-review: http://www.gwern.net/docs/dnb/2008-gonzalezalvarez.pdf (jump to end of page 9 for an extensive list).
Good thing Einstein had some good buddies that let him initially publish his articles and defended his theories, because there was no empirical evidence till 14 years after the fact (Unfortunately I couldn’t find any extensive biographies of Albert Einstein’s life available for free, so the reader should investigate this conclusion on their own). If we consider frame-dragging, then there was no empirical evidence or even a way to properly test it till 90-100 years after (!) (LAGEOS, Gravity Probe B). Imagine someone publishing a scientific hypothesis stating “This is how it works, but you will not have any evidence until next century”. Exactly how much credibility will this person have in scientific circles today?

This is why I write modern scientific community, because peer-review wasn’t as procedural before second half of 20th century. So it seems that every hypothesis that came into light of general public before the peer-review became a standard had an equal and fair shot at convincing people of its validity and making a breakthrough. Now any hypothesis must first agree with an already painted picture of what’s true and what’s not. In other words, the scientific method is made of appeals to majority; peer-review makes it a norm.
I’m sorry, but I cannot be diplomatic on this. If after all the facts and arguments presented the reader still thinks that peer-review is good and doesn’t endorse argumentum ad populum in all of its light, then the reader and I live in two different worlds.

Some Nagging (You Have Been Warned)

In short, the scientific method today, combined with peer-review, is mere:
- Y’all see this?
- Yea?
- Y’all agree with this.
- Yea.
- Ok good. Then this is reality. After all, we’re all, like, doctors and professors, and like, we use the scientific method, and it’s totally flawless, and there’s nothn wrong with it, like eva, so like, how could we be wrong?
- And if any thug tries some, we’ll ask ‘em for evidense. If we don’t agree, we’ll just say evidense is “flawed”, or not enuff. If this guy doesn’t have a Ph.D., we’ll just laugh at him and say he’s nuts!
- Good call!
- Awesome idea!
[Everyone cheers and claps each other’s back.]
(Fun fact: this all comes from a guy who himself considers getting a Ph.D. in software engineering someday.)
Claiming that periodic table is an accurate description of atomic diversity is just as trustworthy as claiming that any group holds key to objective morality. Both are the same, because both say “We sense this, and majority agrees with us, therefore our method is better.” We sense gravity just as equally as we sense injustice, we sense photosynthesis just as equally as we sense our own consciousness and self-awareness. So, the scientific method is no different of a doctrine than any of the world’s major religious doctrines. The difference is the sense in focus that is being investigated. Scientific method targets certain senses, while for example meditation targets others. And guess what, just like meditation or prayer doesn’t work for all, but only for some, so does the scientific method. It doesn’t work for blind or deaf, who, in accordance with modern scientific rationale, should be encouraged by scientists to consider majority of what is written in physics and chemistry books to be a superstition.
What annoys me greatly though is arrogance of the scientific method. It assumes things that took me no more than common sense to prove to be wrong and also preaches some form of “über menschen” mentality, where your reality is somehow more valid if you have the more and “right” senses (introduction to transhumanism anyone?). Not only that, it preaches to be a sheep in the flock, to agree with what everybody else sense to be “real”, or else be declared insane and sent to an asylum. Who am I to say that my inner projection of the universe is more objective than that of a blind man, or a deaf man? What if schizophrenia is actually a “sixth sense”, and the people who have it simply lack the right words to describe their knowledge? Just like the slave who managed to escape the cave…

Consider this and the fact that the whole last paragraph is just a warm up for the next, possibly just as long article, where I will extensively focus on things that the scientific method actually preaches, unlike this article where I only put forth what the scientific method really is.

In Conclusion

The point of this particular article was basically to prepare the reader for the next article by making the reader understand that the scientific method has a fair share amount of religious roots, needs a religiously fundamental acceptance of assumptions that are straight out wrong in order to even function, and, of course, is itself a prime example of the good ol’ bandwagon fallacy.

References

Reference1 (definition of science): http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/science
Reference2 (sense of agency): http://scholar.google.se/scholar?q=sense+of+agency&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ei=hUVWU8Qew4nIA9K4gegB&sqi=2&ved=0CCYQgQMwAA , the first article gives a pretty good summary on the subject, but you can off course read more if you like to.

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