For the man of science, only what is manifest is true. ‘Science says so’: this is one of the hypnoses that has come into common use the most in recent decades. From a scientific point of view, there is no such thing as ‘science’; if anything, there are scientists. Who, precisely because they adopt a scientific method, are always ready to question themselves. A scientist is a researcher and therefore humble by nature; a statement is only scientific if it can be proven false tomorrow. However, since Bacon’s time, there has been an idea of science replacing religion as the explanation of everything. And it is this view that prevails, both among communists orphaned by communism, and among Christians who feel ‘grown-up’.
“Science says so”: this is one of the phrases that has come into common usage the most in recent years, and increasingly in the name of science, decisions are being made on every aspect of social life, as we have witnessed in particular with the health crisis. This makes it urgently necessary to clarify what the scientific approach really means.
First of all, it has to be said that there is no such thing as ‘science’, instead there are people identified as ‘scientists’ who make statements that are scientific precisely because they are refutable. The philosopher Karl Popper taught that a statement cannot be considered scientific if it does not provide a possibility of being proven false. Preventing the expression of critical voices, possibly with the justification of the inadequacy of the interlocutor, is therefore a contradiction, if one wants to move within the framework of the scientific method. Then finally, Thomas Kuhn first and Paul Feyarebend later, refute Popper’s falsifiability model. The true scientist also answers to everyone, he must be able to explain himself even to non-competent people of average education, a phrase attributed to Einstein states ‘You have not really understood something if you cannot explain it to your grandmother’.
The true scientist then is never arrogant, this visibly contrasts with the often derisive attitude of some members of science who are called upon to publicly discuss issues of social impact, the Nobel Prize winner for physics Richard Feynman stated that ‘Science is believing in the ignorance of experts’.
“Science says so” as a dogmatic statement is not only in itself anti-scientific, but is a statement made possible only by a slow, but continuous, work of lowering the scholastic level, which has led to the transmission of notions that are less and less understood, until they reach a dogmatic value. In fact, the amount of information has increased, and it still seems difficult today to have sufficient preparation in many fields of investigation.
A phenomenon described by the writer Aldous Huxley in his The New World when, with regard to the scientific education imparted, he has one of his characters say: ‘You have not received a scientific culture and consequently you cannot judge’. Scientific culture is a culture of doubt and is the opposite of faith in science.
Belief in experimental science goes against its founder Galileo Galilei, thanks to whom the principle of authority, the ipse dixit, was overcome; from that moment on, no one could argue with ‘it is true because I who am the authority say so’. But in the same years, science became an instrument of power in the work of Francis Bacon who, in his utopia The New Atlantis, pointed to scientists as the new priests and guides of society. Science, in Bacon, became a surrogate faith that could replace politics and ideology.
This happened, for example, with the end of communism when a scientist mythopoietic system took the place of Marxist ideology.
Science and Marxism always daughters of the Christian and eschatological view of time. The past is ignorance, the present is research, the future will be salvation and emancipation from superstition. Always tomorrow, as long as there is a tomorrow.
The character, necessarily in common, for this substitution is the claim to offer salvation: we move from the class salvation of communism to the physical salvation of experimental science, both unified in materialism. Materialism is the child of nihilism.
Reality is the result of phenomena that arise at ‘random’ (assuming this expression can mean anything from a philosophical point of view).
In reality, men apply categories (or reflections of ideas) and apply them to reality, interpreting it. In other words, science today establishes a theory or formula and ends up applying the theory to reality, believing that the formula itself is reality.
So it is evident that science becomes faith when it claims, and above all when it is recognised, the right to become an explanation of the entire picture of reality, forgetting that the epistemological limit of experimental science is precisely placed in the impossibility of making statements of meaning. To accept science as the explanation of everything is to make a fundamental choice that denies meaning. Jacques Monod in his ‘Chance and Necessity’ posited as the basis of science the postulate of objectivity, i.e. “the systematic refusal to consider the possibility of arriving at true knowledge through any interpretation of phenomena in terms of final causes”, relying on science to explain the world therefore presupposes as an initial choice the abandonment of a search for meaning.
This becomes an act of presumption. In fact, salvation, if it does not come from religion, today comes from science. In the diatomic vision of reality, the physicist David Bohm, who we find in ‘Wholeness and the Implicate Order’ and in his dialogues with Krishnamurti on the holographic, non-local, syntropic model, argues that the universe is ascribable to two separate worlds: a real reality, which means unchangeable, and a virtual reality.
Mind you, virtual reality does not mean ‘fake’ but modifiable. In this scenario, it is possible to change the physical and temporal connotations, it is possible to see the derivatives, and finally modify space-time according to the perspective of observation. We perceive a virtuality that is always moving, that is, it is always different from the instant before. From atoms to galaxies, everything is in frenetic vibration. We only see virtual reality, illusory because it is modifiable. Or rather, the identification we have with it is illusory. But this is a later plan, we will see why.
In real reality, therefore not modifiable, the scenario is not mathematically definable. In that scenario nothing changes, there is no X function Y. This constant of real reality does, however, appear every now and then in virtuality with its hidden presence in physics. Modern physics affixes the name ‘hidden parameter’ to this constant. Why does a wave behave like a particle? Scientists know that there is something that enters virtual reality and modifies virtuality. But we also know that if the scientist does not measure reality, he feels ruined. He thinks he can measure that hidden parameter, but science is selling the bear’s skin before he has caught it, and that bear will never catch it.
Ultimately, it is not accurate to say that only what is measurable, visible or rather what we believe is visible is real, because we always remember that the brain and the mind interprets. As Umberto Galimberti argues, in the scenario of the sacred as distinguished from the visible and rational where the logical principle of non-contradiction therefore subsists, extremes are confused and contaminated. Reality can be described by phenomena that actually contradict each other. Contradictions are in fact everywhere and are not rationally comprehensible but are intuitable.
Science after all makes use of mathematics, which is a language but not a science. So like all languages it is interpretable. Today, science as the sole or sovereign instrument to take decisions on the political and social life of a population is therefore in itself the choice of a lack of meaning and ultimately the denial of a humanity that values ethics, the transcendent and what is properly human, it is a delegation to build a society on biophysical principles. The scientist society as a substitute for religion needs its own tables of the law to be venerated and respected, priests and gurus in white robes, to identify transgressors and heretics, to maintain the rituals proper to religious society and to develop its own language made up of terms, symbols, gestures that have a value of identification and recognition.
Scientism has attracted the orphans of Marxism and is therefore made its own even today by those who come from that tradition. ‘Vote science’ was significantly the slogan of a party in a recent election campaign. The risk of a similar shift may also be hidden in a religious vision that turns too much to the social, distracting itself from the transcendent, that becomes political discourse, an ‘adult’ religiosity that deals mainly with bodies, no longer recognising the profound needs of the spirit, that looks to progress thinking that tradition is something from a past to be overcome and perhaps forgotten.
After ‘Moustache’ left communism in the lurch, the choice to turn towards scientism could also appear to be the prospect of a disappointed religiosity reduced to a social doctrine, then the path trodden by the orphans of communism could be shared by a tired Christianity, bent on the social and too trusting in a biological salvation that comes from science.
But even atheism ends up being a religion and an act of faith, which believes that the god ‘chance’ resolves the relationship of cause and effect.
What can it mean to live by science today?
Reality can be described by phenomena that apparently contradict each other. The particle is both wave and particle, contravening the principle of non-contradiction typical of Western philosophy from Plato to the present day. In fact, dialectical materialism is a philosophical theory.
It is well known that quantum information cannot be cloned and that what is measured in space-time can only be a small part of the quantum state. Furthermore, the existence of quantum entanglement, which has been proven beyond all possible objections, contradicts Einstein’s local realism. All this also leads us to the conclusion that determinism is an approximation of a reality in which free will, consciousness and non-algorithmic creativity are fundamental properties of the quantum nature of reality, not consequences of classical physics.
Scientific objectivism implies that physical reality is never encountered outside our observations: everything only manifests itself through our measurements, models and manipulations. This does not mean that scientific knowledge is arbitrary or a mere projection of our minds: on the contrary, some methods of investigation work very well and offer acceptable results
These positions, which both converge towards scientific materialism, point to an incorrect or at least incomplete interpretation of reality because they do not take into account a fundamental variable, probably obscured by the ‘dead end’ or ‘blind spot’, which is human consciousness.
A relatively new interpretation known as Quantum-Bayesianism (QBism) – which combines quantum information theory and Bayesian probability theory – takes a different direction: it interprets the irreducible probabilities of a quantum state not as an element of reality, but as the degrees of belief an operator has about the outcome of a measurement. In other words, making a measurement is like making a bet on the behaviour of the world, and once the measurement is made, updating one’s knowledge. Proponents of this interpretation sometimes describe it as ‘participatory realism’, because human experience is woven into the physical process as a means of gaining knowledge about the world. From this point of view, the equations of quantum physics not only refer to the observed atom but also to the observer and the atom as a whole, in a kind of ‘observer participation’. This brings us back to the dead end or dead zone. When the objects of scientific knowledge are observed, there is no tendency to detect the experiences that realise them. It is not pointed out how consciousness makes their presence possible, and because the necessity of experience is lost sight of, a false idol is erected of science as something that confers absolute knowledge of reality, regardless of how it presents itself and how one interacts with it.
Unlike the myth, however, science is forced by its conceptual framework to walk along a causal chain of events. The first cause is a clear break in that causality: how could there be a cause that was not itself an effect of some other cause? The idea of a first cause, like the idea of a perfectly objective reality, is also fundamentally religious!
The blind way becomes apparent the moment one begins to claim that this method guarantees the revelation of an unconditioned and objective reality, when in fact these are only idealised models of the human mind. But real ‘reality’ is only subjective experience, there is no objective duplicate in reality.
The risk of not understanding this fundamental and non-negotiable aspect is to be buried by mediocrity for centuries to come.
In contrast, creativity exists as a non-algorithmic process in which new ideas emerge spontaneously ‘from within’ and contain the motivation to be realised through a process of ‘variation and selection’ that is based on rationality and creativity, not on chance. The creative or rather emanative process is not Platonist. In the model that is proposed according to tradition, One wants to know oneself. This implies, mind you, that One is not omniscient. Every new knowledge is a new creation or emanative process and this process goes towards the infinite without ever reaching it, precisely because the infinite is operationally unreachable.
Even within the framework of the multi-universe theory, there is no talk of theoretical infinity but instead of a totality of possibilities of experience, an absolute freedom in experience.
Despite this, the last word in physics rests with experiment and not with mathematics, which as we said above is a language. In other words, mathematics offers us a map of reality, but the map is not the territory. Here Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem comes to the rescue, which says: in every mathematical theory T, capable of representing all primitive recursive functions, there exists a formula φ, such that, if T is consistent, then neither φ nor its negation ¬φ are provable in T. Gödel’s merit was therefore to have exhibited such a proposition, and the true power of this theorem is that it is valid “for every affine theory”, i.e. for any formalised theory as strong as elementary arithmetic. In particular, Gödel showed that arithmetic itself is incomplete: there are therefore realities that are true but cannot be proved.
Hence, the map must describe the conscious experience of the outer and inner world that is the territory. But there is no map that can represent what does not yet exist.
The creative or emanative consciousness that we can also call the ‘impermanent mental continuum’ brings into existence a new territory that in turn can be described by a new map. But the territory comes before the map.
Our need for control has led us to postulate that everything that will exist must be predictable from laws that already exist. This invisible postulate has led us to the materialism that quantum physics absolutely denies.
Instead, quantum physics describes a holistic world in which there are no separable parts: there is subjectivity and there is objectivity, but there are also situations that are both subjective and objective, such as the fact that I know I exist. I do not need someone else to tell me this. Logical positivism has proved illusory: logic alone is not enough. It is necessary but not sufficient.
What we currently call matter are therefore the shareable symbols of a cognitive language that these entities use to communicate the meaning of their experience, which is private. Symbols and meaning are thus related, but the meaning is always deeper than the symbols that express it.
Shareable symbolic reality coexists with private semantic reality and these two aspects co-evolve and are irreducible. Matter cannot exist without conscious entities and conscious entities cannot evolve without matter, i.e. without communicating symbolically with each other. This postulate is not provable. But it could be accepted at least as a starting point for a new theory that explains reality as the interweaving of the outer physical world with the inner world of conscious experience. Without endorsing it, one could say that in religious terms, both body and soul exist. In spiritual terms, we also add spirit to the two above.
All that is can only be in reality, that is, among the things that can be consciously perceived. According to tradition, it is consciousness, understood in the absolute sense, and that which originates or emanates reality – i.e. a knowing subject and the known object – since strictly speaking observer and observed cannot create each other, but must always refer to something superior. The observing mind and the observed reality if they did not originate from the same metaphysical source would not exist, because one would always have to presuppose the other, ad infinitum. That is why there is no objective duplicate ‘outside’!
According to the exact hierarchical order from Consciousness proceeds the personal co¬sciousness and thus the sensory image, which is experienced as outside the personal consciousness.
Thus being, according to the level at which one stands, is logically one, and equally logically dual (first contradiction or antinomy).
Science meanwhile believes that there is a beginning. But it is not possible to imagine a beginning of reality because it presupposes a nothingness from which reality originated, but nothingness by definition cannot exist. Nothingness is non-being and can only be thought of in being as the absence of being. It is obviously absurd to attribute existence to non-being, which can only be conceived in the situation that sanctions its absence, i.e. in being.
So reality has always been there; on the other hand, being can never not be by definition. For the same reason reality cannot have an end. Since it cannot have a beginning and an end, reality is eternal, which means timeless, instantaneous, and not ‘unlimitedly extended’ according to the meaning normally attributed to that term.
It can thus be said that reality is only what one is aware of, but at the same time it is also eternal. Eternal does not mean infinite, but frozen in a single instant.
In other words, we could say that the present is not T=0 as in the classical view, but the present is the ‘exit’ from time. As Dante made us see, time is a damnation, it is a circle for the damned.
Hence individual life, while appearing as temporal and finite, is, from the point of view of a fully evolved man, eternal, i.e. timeless. In other words, reality can only be eternal and can only be temporal at the same time (second antinomy). It is finite when perceived on an ordinary plane of awareness. It is infinite when perceived on very high planes. The spatio-temporal boundaries of reality extend as knowledge extends, so there is no objective universe that is progressively known, but the universe is continuously created according to the level of the knower.
Science that studies matter and claims to be able to discover the foundations of reality is certainly deceiving itself, for since reality is the only one that exists (but there is also a different truth for each conscious subject – the third antinomy), there can be no ‘nothing’ or zero at the basis of this reality.
Once again to the detriment of the hypnosis proposed by today’s paradigm of science, we can therefore state that it is patently illogical to assert that by reducing material reality into ever more microscopic portions, it will be possible, at a given level of investigation, to establish and measure which ‘minimal entities’ make it up, since every entity can always be reduced to something smaller.
For an entity (or an event in the quantum vacuum) to call itself such, it must always exist in space-time, as it must be able to sustain a space-time reality; but anything that extends in space and lasts in time can be further reduced, should the appropriate technology be available. Hence, it follows that nothing perceptible can claim the title of ‘minimal entity’, while everything that is not perceptible (by whatever means) is not!
In conclusion, believing the scientific dogma that there is freedom of choice in nature, i.e. that things could also not have occurred as they did, is a logical sodomy because it necessitates the presence of a thinking entity that makes choices outside of nature, be it God ‘chance’ or man. Which implies the idea of wrong choice if man is thought to make the decision or the unfavourable event if chance is thought to do it for us. The denial of the absurd concept of option inevitably leads to Nature being necessary in the classical sense and therefore Intelligent, i.e. simply endowed with its own organisational and syntropic coherence implicit in its necessity.
The subjective experience of living life (erlebnis) is seen by science as a disturbing element, yet it is an essential thread, a founding aspect of our humanity and perhaps defining its exceptional nature that makes it a microcosm in the Macrocosm.
In a dual vision of the universe, it can be said that salvation, if it does not come from religion, today comes from science, forgetting that religion and science are daughters of magic or what has just been described above: the territory of the sacred.
If we use the metaphor of the tree of life as an example, the tree itself draws nourishment and strength from the resources of the subsoil. From underneath or from a beyond that is not visible. So why should the source that moves and coordinates life be visible? Moreover, that the source is beyond the visible is something that tradition and literature around the world have been trying to explain to us with great patience, indiscriminately and incessantly for millennia from memory, starting with the Indian sacred texts.
At this point, it is possible to better assess the deeper meaning of the three scientific enigmas: the nature of matter, consciousness and time. They all point to a dead end and the need to reformulate the way we think about the scientific method. When we try to understand reality by focusing only on physical things outside of ourselves, we lose sight of the experiences to which we are pointing and the perceptions that arise from them. The deepest puzzles cannot be solved in purely physical terms, because of the inevitable presence of human experience in the equation: there is no way to make ‘reality’ separate from experience, because the two are always intertwined in an entanglement.
In order to attempt to come out and see the blind way, it is necessary to awaken from the slumber and illusion of absolute knowledge, as well as to embrace not a fatuous hope but the good intention of being able to create a new scientific culture in which man sees himself – at the same time – as an expression of nature and as the subject of nature’s self-understanding.
