Scientific Evolution

Western natural sciences are far from reaching the end of their research, but indeed are still lingering at the very beginning of their relatively young history (compared to other culture´s sciences). They are characterized as a creative process of accumulating knowledge over many generations of researchers, driven by never ending curiosity that leads to ever new discoveries as well as to ever new puzzles and questions, ever new trials and errors, ever new insights and outlooks. Good scientists know that they should always surpass themselves again and again and that none of their insights are final. So their self-image can meaningfully only be that of evolutionaries, whose thirst for understanding is always seeking out new boundaries and horizons in order to grow and expand their knowledge. In this sense there is no absolute truth in the pure spirit of scientific research, but only a persistent approach towards it and the deep fascination of research itself which is the real driving force of anyone who wants to fathom systematically the mysteries of the world and human existence.

    Ideally, sciences are belief systems that are conscious of their own beliefs. As the German term for sciences "Wissenschaften" states very clearly, their aim is to create knowledge. This means that they are deeply rooted in the basic philosophical assumption that we humans know almost nothing for sure, or at least very little, about our own existence and the nature of the world around us. As Socrates wisely said: “I know that I know nothing!” Far more than on well-founded knowledge, human world views have always been based on beliefs that are relevant to survival, based partly on personal experience and partly on culturally transmitted wisdom. Such beliefs by no means have to describe an objective reality, but rather enable the people who believe in them to live their personal lives meaningfully in their specific environment. In any meaningfull belief, an abyss must be clearly assumed to be something into which one can fall and break all their bones, regardless of whether one otherwise perceives it as a product of geological processes or a creation of God. But every kind of serious science strives to replace vague beliefs with more concrete knowledge. Objective observation, precise measurements and reproducible experiments are scientific methods that can be used to achieve this goal.
    However, the creation of objective knowledge is not easy, since every scientist starts out as a believer and will remain one for life. Even if scientists actually create specific knowledge in their field, the vast majority of their worldview will continue to consist of vague beliefs. Realistically speaking, science itself is clearly a belief system that differs from other belief systems only in that it is ready and willing to recognize, question and develop its own beliefs as such. It formulates hypotheses based on observations, measurements and experiments and attempts to substantiate them into theories through further research. It should be clear, however that today's theories by no means represent an universal truth achieved forever, but will make future generations of researchers laugh at such primitive conceptual constructs. The prophets of science who develop completely new ideas are usually quite aware of the relativity of their knowledge, but this is often no longer the case for their believing disciples and for the institutional priesthood among scientists who feast on the believers faith. This is why one will usually find little reflected wisdom and a lot of stupid parroting in human sciences, especially in highly institutionalized environments. This also applies, and even more so today, to the western natural sciences. Their whole world view is so shaky that one can only wonder why it does not immediately collapse in on itself. But faith is known to work wonders. Materialism, for example, which outside of quantum physics is still considered the basis of reality in almost all natural sciences, is nothing other than a belief spun by naturalistic philosophers in the 18th century which has since prevented the scientifiic explaination of all mental and spiritual phenomena in the world and in us human´s inner life. After centuries of research materialistic biology is still unable to explain the phenomenon of life in any way, at best it can describe it. After decades of brain research materialistic neurology is completely unable to grasp the phenomenon of consciousness. The whole idea that a world made up of dead lumps of matter could produce intelligent life forms through purely random evolution seems so obviously far-fetched, that the belief in such nonsense can only be explained by stubborn clinging to blind faith.
    Sciences will not be able to survive without continuing to believe. But they can try to remain constantly aware of this and to question their beliefs again and again. Every science needs healthy self-reflection and a clear will to evolve by learning from errors. What should characterize a good scientist is not to strive for absolute truth, but to slowly open one's eyes to recognize the winding path from blind faith to enlightening knowledge research. In this sense, science can only be meaningfully pursued in continuous evolution and will allow ever new generations of researchers to strive towards ever new horizons of knowledge. Man and the world will probably continue to appear to us as great mysteries and barely explainable miracles for a long time to come. But isn't it precisely this mysteriousness that makes the exploration of the unknown so fascinating for countless researchers? So let's put the absolute truth into perspective at this point and throw ourselves into the exciting adventure of scientific evolution...

Science never has all potential facts at its disposal, but rather a limited horizon for understanding a situation through the lense of incomplete data, human senses, cultural world views and technical possibilities. It often has just a few pieces of a puzzle at it´s disposal and tries to use them to imagine a rough picture of the whole. Therefore, it cannot proclaim the truth or describe the nature of reality, but can only estimate probabilities in which the world can be roughly described with the known limited facts. This is especially clear in paleontology, for example, where the evolution of a species or an entire ecosystem is reconstructed from a few, often fragmentary, individual findings with millions of years age difference in between them. Here happens more imaginative and daring gap-filling than the solid evaluation of an objective data set on the actual evolutionary process that has been collected over millions of years. With such an extremely high rate of interpretation, one can realistically only speak of vague probabilities and should expect the tendency that such a scientific field produces a wide variety of scientific hypothesis and schools. Good scientists who understand this are even able to derrive for themselves several alternative hypothesis from the same set of facts and to compare their estimated probability of describing reality. Additional facts can then later lead to the strengthening or weakening of probabilities for one or the other hypothesis. The method of probability estimation and fact interpretation is part of the basic toolkit of any science, that wants to conduct objective research. And the clear admission that no truth never ever is to be proclaimed as such, but rather probabilities are to be estimated as truthfully as possible, should be part of every scientist's initiation into research.

Science lives from it´s methodology, it´s objective observation, precise measurement, comprehensible experimentation, critical assessment of probabilities, peer review and other scientific methods. One could even boldly claim that the evolution of scientific methodology has barely begun. Many scientists assume that methodology represents a basic framework of science that has been once developed and is now unchangeable, and at best can only be refined. But this should be firmly questioned. Because what we consider to be objective observation, for example, is subject to strong subjective and cultural influences. The assumption of quantum physics, for example that observers can influence the outcome of experiments with their consciousness, shows that objectivity which is itself considered to be the core of scientific methodology, could be by no means as unchangeable as scientists like to assume. Standing and walking on this shaky ground means that good scientists have to constantly check not only their hypotheses and theories, but also their methodology for their suitability and, if necessary, for further development. This is most evident in the area of experimentation, where most scientists are well aware that in their field it´s important to develop ever new types of specialized experiments for ever new research questions. Also the measurement methodology can be refined more and more as our technical possibilities become more and more advanced. In general, it should be clear that science will have to develop ever new methods that we may not even can imagine today, but could prove useful one day in the course of further scientific evolution.

Over the last few centuries, western natural sciences have increasingly oriented their interpretation of the world towards left-brained reasoning, largely excluding right-brained intuitive aspects. The reasonable mind analyzes the world by breaking it down into its components and coldly examining them in order to understand their interactions and functions. The world view that emerges from such one-sided reasoning is a separating one, in which humans - including researchers - appear isolated from the rest of the universe. This is how scientists can carry out animal experiments without feeling the animal´s pain as their own. This also explains the ever increasing specialization of disciplines and the resulting idiocracy of over-specialization, since sciences that separate and atomize the world tend by their nature to split themselves internally in ever more fields and sub-fields until they ultimately mutate towards a maximum of specialized expertise with minimal interdisciplinary overview. In the end, every scientist knows almost nothing about almost everything and almost everything about almost nothing. And science as a whole no longer is able to reflect, understand and guide itself holistically.
In comparison to left-brained reasoning, right-brained science intuitively recognizes overall connections and is able to follow holistic inspirations. It also plays an important place in western natural sciences, even if not officially, for example in form of the intuitive inspirations with which quite a few quantum physicists developed their quantum world view. Or in the intuitive assessments with which experienced researchers interpret a new situation. But this happens more in the quiet ivory towers of research and is later mentioned in researcher´s biographies than it would be accepted as an official methodology. Since intuition is difficult to measure and to reproduce experimentally, it is viewed as suspect in left-brained sciences and is even attacked or ridiculed if it´s relied upon too much. Yet holistic intuition would be the best solution to the divisive specialist´s idiocracy of the dictatorship of pure reason over research. Also only intuitively the flood of data from the most diverse research areas can be grasped and used to create an interdisciplinary basic overview of the sciences as a whole. Only intuitively the narrow logical framework of the separating mind with it´s lack of emotions and remoteness from live can be integrated into humane and live-affirming sciences. Such a holistic scientist´s self-image cannot be that of a cold demigod in white, but must be that of a living and loving human being modestly wishing to expand their understanding into all details of the whole.

Western natural sciences have taken a culturally unique path that is rare in the world: They have separated physics and metaphysics from one another, left metaphysics to religion as a derided belief, and have since tried to explain the world in purely materialistic terms. Their success in creating technological wonders that impress our postmodern world seems to prove them right. But they can explain neither life nor the mind, they come up with adventurous world views, and are rarely prepared to take responsibility for the consequences of their unreflective, rapid progress. Sciences that are undoubtedly still in their infancy.
If one compares western natural sciences with the great sciences of other advanced cultures, such as the Vedic traditions of India or the ancient Egyptian mystery schools or the Chaldean Marduk cult, one will see, that they all unite metaphysics and physics and try to understand man and the world from the inside and the outside. Spirituality as a systematic search for inner insight and enlightenment and natural science as an objective method of understanding the events and laws of the world through observation go hand in hand. This is precisely what the far too one-sided, materialistic western sciences lack: They dissect everything in a loveless, dry way and don´t find the meaning of the whole in the dead, but interesting individual parts with which they can build then artificially lifeless systems. And then they wonder why a spiritless and godless race of people grows up in such an artificial world and becomes mentally ill. People and the world are whole and healthy when their self-image and worldview are holistic, encompassing the spiritual as well as the material, the internal as well as the external, the subjective as well as the objective. In fact, there has long been an interest in Kabbalah, the Vedas and other spiritual wisdom teachings, particularly among quantum physicists, since they discovered that human consciousness seems to influence the results of experiments and that the quantum world is highly ghostly and subtle in nature. If one looks closely, our matter appears to be an energy cloud of interfering standing waves that reflect, influence and shape each other. Many spiritual schools describe this phenomenon in detail and can teach the western natural sciences about it. In return, spirituality also benefits from the technical capabilities of the natural sciences when, for example, yogis or healers can prove their unusual abilities in scientific studies. Many other phenomena that were previously considered "supernatural", such as telepathy and telekinesis, have now been very well researched scientifically and are considered proven in specialist´s circles. Philosophers who as thought leaders are often one step ahead of researchers, are already predicting the scientific paradigm shift from materialism to panpsychism, mentalism or vitalism. The once hard-hitting material world view of the mechanistic age and industrial society is - in keeping with the emerging information age - increasingly changing into a spiritual world view in which matter and energy are ultimately recognized as products of creative consciousness. Many scientists who are currently still trained in materialism will still resist this development, but the next generation of researchers will probably be beyond this and devote themselves more to the scientific research of metaphysical phenomena.Those who miss the change will die out like the dinosaurs once did. Perhaps the new fusion of physics and metaphysics could be called “noophysics” to describe its holistic nature of mind (Greek:Nous ) and body (Physis)?

Metaphysics as a science

Like physics, metaphysics can and should be pursued as a serious science, so as not to get carried away with profane religious superstition or with esoteric nonsense, as is often the case in many of today's pseudo-scientific spiritual subcultures. To get an idea of what a metaphysical science might look like, natural scientists who want to become holistic can study numerous great metaphysical sciences of human history, such as the Indian Vedas or Egyptian Hermeticizm that researched the laws of the psychic realms and developed techniques for achieving certain states of consciousness. Metaphysics also uses the scientific method of value-neutral observation and documentation of spiritual experiences, the experimental reproducibility of such experiences through the repetition of certain techniques and a vast range of methods for measuring subjective inner experiences. Metaphysics pursued by using such methodology can achieve scientifically comprehensible research results, on the basis of which scientifically sound techniques can be developed to specifically change, expand, or transcend the human psyche. Metaphysics is theoretical research that leads to practical application. Just as physicists with their scientific research provide engineers with the basic knowledge that those then use to build their technical wonders, the metaphysical research of mystics creates a knowledge hub for yogic practices to expand one´s consciousness and achieve states of enlightenment or for shamanic techniques to heal the sick and communicate with nature spirits. Such techniques only work if their scientific basis is solid. Everything else is either unreflected naive belief or conscious charlatanry for the benefit of the imposter who in a spiritual context would be called a "black magician". Neither is spiritual in any way, but unscientific pseudo-metaphysics. A holistic scientist should therefore always research the spiritual world by using solid metaphysical methodology.

Research & technology, art &
spirituality as a holistic profession

Just as the union of physics and metaphysics can enrich the western natural sciences immensely, the same applies to the integration of technology and art into research. The feedback between science and engineering is extremely important for high-tech societies, on the one hand to show scientists the impact of their research on the practical application of their research results in technology which in turn has a profound impact on society. Good scientists should keep an eye on these effects and thoroughly examine the technology developed thanks to their preliminary work. This enables them to direct their research in such a way that its technical and social impacts can be optimized and harmful consequences minimized. On the other hand, it is interesting for engineers to have feedback with science in order to be able to drive necessary or useful technical developments through targeted research. Ideally, both sides should work closely together instead of seeing themselves as separate professions. The same applies to art which can ensure that scientific and technical products and processes are designed to be aesthetically pleasing, harmonious and intellectually stimulating. Good science is in itself an art form and if the scientist sees himself as an artist - as in the case of Leonardo da Vinci - the results of his research can only be works of art. Likewise, good technology is often characterized by a high aesthetic value. Why should machines or technical infrastructures only be purely functional when they can also be designed to be extremely beautiful and uplifting? And finally, future generations of scientists are called upon to place the union of research, technology and art in a higher metaphysical-spiritual context. Without this feedback with spiritual values, science is threatened with meaninglessness and aimlessness. But if such metaphysical values - such as the targeted advancement of further human evolution from animal to god or the deliberate further development of humanity into a global collective brain, the planetary intelligence of the living earth - are formulated and realized as a higher overall challenge, research, including technical apparatus and aesthetic demands, can orient itself towards these metaphysical attractors. In this sense, the researchers of tomorrow may also see themselves and act as technicians, artists and mystics – as a new scientific profession.

Science without ethics gives birth to monstrosities. Ethics can provide research with a moral feedback loop that is extremely important when it comes to giving science a human face. High ethical basic values such as philanthropy and affirmation of life can prevent misanthropic and life-denying tendencies in science. And the western natural sciences in particular urgently need this. Animal experiments or even human experiments as they are common practice, are clearly contemptuous of life and humanity. Genetic experiments on humans may satisfy researchers' curiosity about what is technically feasible, but they are ethically clear outgrowths of a sick mind that feels no empathic connection to the victims of its joy of experimentation. With the ever-increasing technological power of our highly complex civilization the pressure towards an increasing ethical orientation of science will grow significantly. Because research that plays around with the fundamental forces of nature like an inexperienced sorcerer's apprentice will always reach evil and the most evil results of it´s irresponsible actions. There are already enough warning examples of this. Good scientist should therefore always be aware of the moral responsibility they have with all their concentrated creative power. Developing increasingly godlike abilities, as our civilization and it´s researchers like to do, should also go hand in hand with increasingly godlike wisdom and the ability to love. Anyone who wants to play God successfully should become extremely good at fulfilling this role in a meaningful and constructive way.

Summary:

Scientific evolution means to pursue scientific reseach as a self-reflecting, self-optimizing believe system, to estimate factual propabilities rather then proclaiming to know the truth, to refine and further elaborate the research methodology, to complete the separating scientific intellect with holistic intuition, to reunite physics and metaphysics and to fuse them with technology and arts, and lastly to develop life affirming and humane scientific ethics.

About the Author:

Freigeist von Lebenskunst (artist´s pseudonym), born 1967 in West-Germany, studied stone age archeologist, paleoanthropologist and ecologist (University of Tübingen, Germany), practizing futurist, evolutionary philosopher and ecosystem designer. Expert in any questions of past, current and upcoming human evolution.

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