The sciences are entering a new phase. The materialist ideology that has ruled them since the nineteenth century is out of date. All ten of its essential doctrines have been superseded. The authoritarian structure of the sciences, the illusions of objectivity and the fantasies of omniscience have all outlived their usefulness.
The sciences will have to change for another reason too: they are now global. Mechanistic science and the materialist ideology grew up in Europe, and were strongly influenced by the religious disputes that obsessed Europeans from the seventeenth century onward. But these preoccupations are alien to cultures and traditions in many other parts of the world.
In 2011, the worldwide expenditure on scientific and technological research and development was more than $1,000 billion, of which China spent $100 billion.1 Asian countries, especially China and India, now produce enormous numbers of science and engineering graduates. In 2007, at BSc level there were 2.5 million science and engineering graduates in India and 1.5 million in China,2 compared with 515,000 in the United States3 and 100,000 in the UK.4 In addition, many of those studying in the United States and Europe are from other countries: in 2007, nearly a third of the graduate students in science and engineering in the United States were foreign, with the majority from India, China and Korea.5
Yet the sciences as taught in Asia, Africa, the Islamic countries and elsewhere are still packaged in an ideology shaped by their European past. Materialism gains its persuasive power from the technological applications of science. But the successes of these applications do not prove that this ideology is true. Penicillin will go on killing bacteria, jet planes will keep on flying and mobile telephones will still work if scientists move on to wider views of nature.
No one can foresee how the sciences will evolve, but I believe recognizing that “science” is not one thing will facilitate their development. “Science” has given way to “the sciences.” By moving beyond physicalism, the status of physics has changed. By freeing the sciences from the ideology of materialism, new opportunities for debate and dialogue open up, and so do new possibilities for research.
Mechanistic science appeared to provide a simple, unified view of nature. Everything was made up of ultimate particles of matter whose properties and movements were governed by eternal mathematical laws. Theoretical physicists are still striving for a Theory of Everything and hope a unified formula will explain all of reality in terms of the properties of subatomic particles and the forces that affect them (see Chapter 1). Everything can ultimately be reduced to physics. As Lee Smolin expressed the conventional view, “Twelve particles and four forces are all we need to explain everything in the known world.”6
This naïve, old-fashioned reductionist faith bears no relation to the reality of the sciences. Physiologists do not explain blood pressure in terms of subatomic particles but through the pumping activity of the heart, the elasticity of arterial walls, and so on. Linguists do not analyze languages in terms of the movements of subatomic particles in the molecules in the air through which the sounds of voices travel: they study the patterns of words, grammars and meanings. Botanists do not study the evolution of flowers by probing the atoms within them, but by comparing their structures and relationships to living and extinct species. As the physicist John Ziman put it,
At successively higher levels of complexity, from elementary particles and chemical molecules, through unicellular and multi-cellular organisms, to self-aware human beings and their cultural institutions, we find systems obeying entirely novel principles. The behavior of such systems is not predictable from the properties of their constituents, so distinct “languages” are required to describe them scientifically. The plurality of our sciences is thus an irreducible feature of the universe we live in.7
There are many sciences and many natures. There is no one “scientific method”; different sciences use different methods.8 Geologists studying rocks make different kinds of observations from astronomers investigating distant galaxies with radio telescopes, or from biochemists studying the properties of protein molecules, or from ecologists studying rain forests. Some sciences involve experiments. Others do not. An astronomer cannot manipulate a star to see how it responds, and a paleontologist cannot travel back in time to change the way sediments formed in the ocean aeons ago. Some kinds of science are highly mathematical, like theoretical physics; others are not, like the taxonomy of dragonflies.
“Science” is an abstraction. Scientists work within specialized disciplines, and students study one or more of the sciences. At university, they have to choose between a wide range of possibilities. For example, at Cambridge University in 2011, a second-year student of natural sciences had to take three courses from the following list:9
animal biology
biochemistry and molecular biology
cell and developmental biology
chemistry A (mainly theoretical)
chemistry B (inorganic, organic and biological)
ecology
experimental psychology
geological sciences A (surface environments)
geological sciences B (subsurface processes)
history and philosophy of science
materials science
neurobiology
pathology
pharmacology
physics A (mainly quantum physics)
physics B (mainly mechanics, electromagnetism and thermodynamics)
physiology
plant and microbial sciences
Each of these courses is broadly based and covers a range of specialities; for example, in animal biology, there are sections on ecology, brains and behavior, insect biology, vertebrate evolutionary biology and evolutionary principles. No one studies “science,” and fewer than 20 percent study history and philosophy of science.
Students absorb their general views about the nature of reality as implicit assumptions or from the writings of scientific popularizers. The doctrines of materialism are not taught explicitly, and many students and scientists are unaware of their influence in shaping the practice and assumptions of their field. For example, most neuroscientists take it for granted that minds are in brains and that memories are stored as material traces. These assumptions are not treated as aspects of a philosophy of nature, or as hypotheses to be tested: they are part of the standard paradigm or consensus reality, protected by taboos against deviant thinking.
Ironically, the fragmentation of the sciences into separate disciplines was the stimulus for coining the word “scientist.” At the third annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1833, delegates expressed the need for an umbrella term to cover their diverse interests, and William Whewell, a mathematical astronomer, suggested “scientist.” The term was an immediate success in America. In Britain, where scientific research was still for the most part an expensive occupation for the leisured classes, “scientist” was slow to displace older terms like “man of science,” “naturalist” or “experimental philosopher.” But as research increased and education expanded, there were more opportunities for employment and scientists gradually became paid professionals.10
As the sciences grew in power and prestige, so did the need to assert their status and authority. Patricia Fara, a historian of science, summarized the situation in the nineteenth century thus:
Hungry for prestige, scientists wanted the authority to declare that they were incontrovertibly right, that the knowledge they produced in their laboratories was irrefutably correct. New specializations were being invented, but not all of them were deemed worthy to be labeled science. Science was splintering into disciplines—but disciplining meant controlling as well as teaching. Like police guards patrolling national borders, scientists decreed which topics should be inside the large domain they ruled over, and which should be outlawed.11
There are now hundreds of scientific specialities, all with their own professional societies, journals and conferences. Specialists are famously said to know more and more about less and less, and in the sciences this process has continued to produce ever more fragmented fields of knowledge, all with their own specialized publications. By 2011, there were about twenty-five thousand scientific journals.12
It is not the job of all these specialists to think about the underlying philosophical assumptions of the sciences. Historians and philosophers of science think about them, but they themselves are in a specialized field, often treated as of marginal interest to the real business of science. By default, the old materialist or physicalist ideology persists almost unquestioned. One of its effects is to put physics at the top of the scientific hierarchy, because physicalism by definition states that everything is ultimately explicable in terms of physics.
Physics is the source of the vision of a simple, unified view of nature, and physicists like to think that their discipline is the most fundamental, unifying all the sciences. It is true that all material bodies are made up of quantum particles, that all physical processes involve flows of energy and all physical events happen within the framework of space-time given by the universal gravitational field. But these aspects of physics leave out almost all the details we might want to know about the growth of pine trees, the effects of sex hormones, the social life of bees, the evolution of Indo-European languages, or the design of computer software.
Ironically, for those who would like to reduce everything to physics in the interests of unifying nature, physics itself has resisted unification for decades. Its two most fundamental theories, quantum mechanics and general relativity theory, are incompatible. General relativity applies to the large-scale structure of the universe—planets, stars and galaxies—and describes gravitation, one of the four “fundamental forces.” Quantum mechanics describes the other three forces (electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces) and is most accurate at the atomic and subatomic scales. But the two theories start from different assumptions, and have resisted years of efforts to unify them.13
This is where superstring and M-theories come in, with ten and eleven dimensions respectively (see Chapter 3). But instead of giving a new unity to physics, they generate vast numbers of possible worlds. The price of unification is a runaway proliferation of universes. All except our own are unobserved and unobservable. What kind of unification is this? It looks more like the ultimate plurality.
In mechanistic science, physics came first historically, growing out of the study of mechanics, astronomy and optics in medieval universities. Physics also comes first in term of prestige because of its claim to deal with the most fundamental realities as well as the origin of all things in the Big Bang. But this priority is arbitrary. Other professional groups could claim that the status of their field is as high if not higher. Consciousness studies could claim primacy because physics happens in human minds and entirely depends on human consciousness. Maxwell’s equations and superstring theories do not exist “out there” as independent facts: they are mental constructs.
Brain scientists then could claim that without neurophysiology and brain chemistry there could be no human consciousness. Proponents of linguistics could argue that without language there would be no human culture; social scientists could claim that without societies no physics could ever have happened; economists could claim that without a functioning economy no one would be able to do physics. Meanwhile physiologists could point out that the brain is simply one part of the body, and is dependent on the coordinated function of the whole, including digestion, breathing, circulation, limbs, sense organs and so forth. Embryologists could argue that without embryological development there would be no bodies and no physiology to start with, and hence no physicists, and geneticists could argue that without genes there would be no embryology.
Evolutionists could point to the evolutionary origins of humanity; ecologists could stress the interdependence of all life; plant scientists could emphasize that humans and all other animals ultimately depend on plants for food, and on the biochemistry of photosynthesis; then physicists could reenter the picture with solar physics and astronomy, without which there would be no photosynthesis. Engineers and technologists could argue that without scientific apparatus no accurate measurements would be possible, and without modern communications technologies and computers the sciences would not be able to function. And so on.
No one can claim absolute primacy. Everything is interlinked. Nothing is permanent and isolated from everything else. There is an interdependence of all things and all levels of organization. This sounds very like the Buddhist doctrine of dependent origination or dependent arising, according to which all phenomena occur in a mutually interdependent web of cause and effect.
The materialist philosophy and the primacy of physics go hand in hand. So do the interdependence of all realities and the plurality of the sciences. The sciences still need unifying principles, but they need not come exclusively from physics.
As well as the familiar unifying principles of physics, like forces, fields, and flows of energy there is the principle of organization in nested hierarchies. Systems, or organisms, or holons, or morphic units at every level, are wholes made up of parts, which in turn are wholes made up of parts. Crystals contain molecules, which contain atoms, which contain subatomic particles. Galactic clusters contain galaxies, which contain solar systems, which contain planets. Societies of organisms contain animals, which contain organs, which contain tissues, which contain cells, which contain molecules, which contain atoms … (see Chapter 1).
The hypothesis of morphic resonance provides another unifying principle: all self-organizing systems draw upon a collective memory from similar systems of their kind (see Chapters 3, 6 and 7).
But whenever we find general principles, their very generality hides the details of specific things. Sequoias, seaweeds and sunflowers all consist of the same chemical elements, capture the energy of light by photosynthesis, and have nested hierarchies of organization. But the properties that make them similar fail to explain why each species is different.
Then there is a freedom and individuality in all particular things. A field of potatoes contains tens of thousands of genetically identical plants; cultivated potatoes are clones. Yet despite the fact they are in the same field, planted at the same time and experiencing the same weather, each plant is different from its neighbors; and each leaf on each plant is different in detail from every other leaf. Even the right and the left side of the same leaf have different patterns of veins and slightly different shapes.
The more the sciences generalize, the less they explain particulars, and vice versa. The sciences need to include both general principles and many specialized fields of study because the systems they investigate are so diverse, from quarks to galaxies, salt crystals to swallows’ nests, and lichens to languages.
One problem with the authority of science is that dissent and debate are dangerous. The need to preserve authority means that disagreements are usually kept behind the scenes. Scientists are reluctant to admit in public that their supposed objectivity can be compromised. Even Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions as paradigm shifts preserved the image of established authority. In a scientific revolution, a new consensus reality replaces an old one. Ideas that were at first revolutionary become the new orthodoxy, like continental drift in geology, or quantum theory in physics. These are not like those rare political revolutions in which an autocratic system is overthrown and replaced by democracy. They are more like revolutions in which one dictatorship is replaced by another.
In almost every other sphere of human life, there is not one but many points of view. There are many languages, cultures, nations, philosophies, religions, sects, political parties, businesses and lifestyles. Only in the realm of science can we still find the old ethos of monopoly, universality and absolute authority that used to be claimed by the Roman Catholic Church. Catholic means “universal.” At the Reformation, starting in 1517, the Roman Church lost its monopoly; now many other churches and ideologies coexist with it, including atheism. But there is still only one universal science.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Western Europe was divided by conflicts between Roman Catholics and Protestants, the ideals of science and reason shone out as a path to truth that rose above sectarian religious disputes. The Enlightenment grew out of this attitude of respect for the sciences and the power of human reason, accompanied by an attitude of condescension toward orthodox religion. As John Brooke wrote,
Science was respected not simply for its results, but as a way of thinking. It offered the prospect of enlightenment through the correction of past error, and especially through its power to override superstition … [But] the motivation of those who pitted science against religion often had little to do with gaining intellectual freedom for the study of nature. It was often not the natural philosophers [scientists] themselves, but thinkers with a social or political grievance, who transformed the sciences into a secularising force as they inveighed against clerical power.14
Scientists claimed to obtain absolute truth by viewing the world as objective observers.15 In the black-and-white version of scientism, science is set apart from all other human activities. Science alone is capable of yielding unassailable facts.16 In this idealized picture, scientists are exempt from the failings of the rest of humanity. They have a direct access to the truth. They are uniquely objective. The myths of disembodied knowledge and the allegory of the cave reinforce this image, and the prestige of the scientific priesthood adds the seal of authority.
This authoritarian mentality is most obvious in relation to psychic phenomena and alternative medicine (see Chapters 9 and 10). These are treated as heresies, rather than as valid areas for rational inquiry. Self-appointed inquisitions, like the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, try to ensure that the subjects are not taken seriously in the respectable media, deprived of funding and excluded from university syllabuses. The belief that mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works has far-ranging political consequences. There are many medical systems, including osteopathy, acupuncture, naturopathy and homeopathy, but only one kind, mechanistic medicine, is labelled “scientific” and accorded a state-sponsored monopoly of power, scientific authority and financial support.
Science as we know it is based on an ideal of objective truth, allowing only one triumphant theory at a time. That is why scientists use phrases like “knocking the final nail in the coffin of vitalism” (see this page) or “the final nail in the coffin of the steady state theory” (see this page), gloating over the extermination of heresies. Much of the hypocrisy of science comes from assuming the mantle of absolute truth, which is a relic of the ethos of absolute religious and political power when mechanistic science was born. Of course, there are disagreements among scientists, and the sciences are continually changing and developing. But a monopoly of truth remains the ideal. Dissenting voices are heretical. Fair public debates are alien to the culture of the sciences.
In the Enlightenment ideal, science was a path to knowledge that would transform humanity for the better. Science and reason were in the vanguard. These were, and still are, wonderful ideals, and they have inspired scientists for generations. They inspire me. I am all in favor of science and reason if they are scientific and reasonable. But I am against granting scientists and the materialist worldview an exemption from critical thinking and skeptical investigation. We need an enlightenment of the Enlightenment.17
An important ingredient in the process of reform would be to introduce debates into scientific institutions. This may seem simple and obvious, but such debates are currently very rare. Debates are not yet part of the culture of science.
One potential debate that underlies much of this book is the question of whether the phenomena of life and mind can be reduced to physics. Many biologists believe they can. But many physicists are more doubtful. A debate on the subject “Can the phenomena of life and mind be explained in terms of physics?” could happen on almost every university campus.
Another illuminating subject for debate would be the objectivity of the sciences. Universities and scientific institutes contain many people who put their faith in science and reason as a uniquely objective way of knowing. Many share Ricky Gervais’s belief that “Science is humble. It knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn’t know. It bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence.”18 Many universities also contain historians, sociologists and philosophers of science who study how the sciences work in practice. They could debate how far the ideal of scientific objectivity corresponds to the practices of the sciences.
Then there are the ten fundamental dogmas of materialism discussed in Chapters 1 to 10 of this book. Each of them would make a good topic for debate, and I have suggested several further questions at the ends of all these chapters, most of which could provide topics for more specialized debates or dialogues.
If scientific debates became a normal feature of public life, university life and scientific conferences, the culture of science would change. Open questions would become normal, instead of one side being right and the other heretical. In democratic politics we are used to an ongoing pluralism, and no single party has a monopoly of public support. There are at least two sides to political arguments. In a democracy, the party in power cannot wipe out opposing views without becoming totalitarian and destroying the very principle of democracy.
But debates have their limitations, the main one being that one side wins the vote and the other loses. Likewise in courts of law, both sides argue their case, but the verdict goes one way or the other, yes or no. This system is invaluable when practical verdicts are needed. A judge and jury have to decide whether to convict or release someone accused of a crime. A parliament or a congress has to decide what laws to enact. There has to be one clear law or another, not a morass of legal ambiguity. Everyone has to drive on the right (as in the United States, France and Australia) or on the left (as in Britain, India and Japan). The decision may be arbitrary, but it has to be left or right, not left and right.
Some decisions in science have a similar practical necessity: which areas of research to fund, who gets a grant, whether to accept or reject a peer-reviewed paper for publication in a journal. The decisions are usually made in private, but there is often some kind of debate among the people who make the decisions.
All these practical debates, whether public or private, need to come to an agreed decision. But most situations are more ambiguous. At the frontiers of scientific research, when answers are not yet known, there is an inevitable uncertainty. Physicists do not agree whether one particular ten-dimensional string theory is correct, as opposed to other string theories and eleven-dimensional M-theories. Several different theories coexist, all with their advocates. In exploratory or uncertain areas, the most productive approach is not through debate but dialogue. A dialogue is an exchange of ideas or opinions, a joint exploration. It is not necessary for one side to win. Of course dialogues or conversations happen all the time in every walk of life, including among scientists, but if public dialogues became a regular aspect of scientific life they would encourage a culture of openness, even more than formal debates.
In my experience, the most productive dialogues are between two or three people.19 So-called panel discussions, a standard feature of scientific conferences, with five to ten participants, rarely achieve anything. By the time each participant has made an opening statement, there is usually no time left for discussion, and with so many participants a clear focus is often impossible. Two or three people can go further faster.
Science has always been elitist and undemocratic, whether in monarchies, Communist states or liberal democracies. But it is currently becoming more hierarchical, not less so. In the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin was one of many independent researchers who, not reliant on grants, did provocatively original work. That kind of freedom and independence is rare today. Science-funding committees determine what can happen in research. The power in those committees is concentrated in the hands of politically adept older scientists, government officials and representatives of big business.
In 2000, a government-sponsored survey in Britain on public attitudes to science revealed most people believed that “Science is driven by business—at the end of the day it’s all about money.” More than three-quarters of those surveyed thought, “It is important to have some scientists who are not linked to business.” More than two-thirds said, “Scientists should listen more to what ordinary people think.” Worried about this public alienation, the British government tried to engage the wider public in “a dialogue between science, policy-makers and the public.”20 In official circles, the fashion shifted from the previous policy of the public understanding of science to an “engagement” model of science and society. The public-understanding policy was based on a “deficit” model, which saw simple factual education as the key. Scientists should tell the public the truth, and they would accept it gratefully. The trouble was that this policy did not work. The British public was told that mad cow disease was no threat to humans. Then it was. Then they were told that genetically modified (GM) crops were good for them, and many did not believe it. Throughout Europe there was a consumer revolt against GM foods, and proponents of the public understanding of science were powerless to prevent it.
“Public engagement” with science was supposed to be the answer. But this change in rhetoric made little difference in practice, and the funding of science carried on as before. So did public distrust. And although there were several well-organized public-engagement exercises in the 2000s, policy-makers usually ignored them.21
Some of the few examples of effective engagement are in medicine, where patient activist groups, like AIDS activists, have already had a major impact on research and treatment.22 There are many kinds of patient groups. Some are primarily mutual help organizations, while others are highly politicized. Sociologists who study these groups have suggested that they exemplify the emergence of “scientific citizenship.”23 However, some patient groups are funded by the pharmaceutical companies, who stand to gain from campaigns for health providers to pay for expensive drugs. But despite this exploitation of some patient groups, many of these organizations demonstrate that lay people are well able to participate in technical discussions.
Medical research charities, like Cancer Research UK, the Meningitis Research Foundation and the Stroke Association, have a direct influence on research by funding it. In the UK there are 130 such charities,24 and collectively they contribute about one-third of all public expenditure on medical and health research. Some are governed by boards or committees mainly composed of lay people.
The interests of patient activist groups and medical charities are confined to particular diseases and disabilities. For people without such an intense focus, there is at present little possibility of engaging with scientific research. I suggest an experiment that would make more widespread public engagement a reality. Spend 1 percent of the science budget on research that actually interests people outside the scientific and medical professions. At present, money is allocated according to agendas set by committees of establishment scientists, corporate executives and government bureaucrats. In the UK, these official funding bodies include the Medical Research Council, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. The UK government’s scientific research budget is about £4.6 billion per year,25 so the 1 percent fund would contain about £46 million a year.
What questions capable of being answered by scientific research are of public interest? The simplest way to find out would be to ask for suggestions. They could come from membership organizations like the National Trust, the British Beekeepers’ Association, the National Society of Allotment and Leisure Gardeners, Oxfam, the Consumers’ Association, the Women’s Institute, as well as local authorities and trade unions. Potential subjects for research would be discussed in these organizations’ newsletters, in specialist magazines, newspapers and in online forums. Their research suggestions would be submitted to the body that administers the 1 percent fund, which could be called the Open Research Centre.
The Open Research Centre would be independent of the science establishment, and governed by a board representing a wide range of interests, including non-governmental organizations and voluntary associations. Like some of the medical research charities, most of its members would be non-scientists. Based on the suggestions it received, it would publish a list of the research areas in which grants were available, and would invite proposals that would be evaluated by experts in the usual way. It would not fund research already covered by the regular science budget.
This new venture, open to democratic input and public participation, would involve no additional expenditure, but would have a big effect on people’s involvement in science and innovation.26 I expect it would make the sciences more attractive to young people, stimulate public interest in scientific thinking, and help break down the depressing alienation many people feel from the sciences. It would enable scientists themselves to think more freely. And it would be more fun.
In addition, there could be other engaging methods of funding scientific projects. One possibility would be a reality TV show in which proposals for research of widespread public interest are submitted to a panel, rather like the BBC TV show Dragons’ Den, in which entrepreneurs pitch for investments from a panel of business people. The panel, including both scientists and non-scientists, would have real money to give out as grants—say £1 million a year, taken from the 1 percent fund.
The greater the diversity of funding sources, the greater the freedom of the sciences. Fortunately, there is already a range of non-governmental sources of funding including businesses and charitable foundations, and some of them already fund areas of research that are taboo for official funding agencies. Foundations have more freedom to adapt to new circumstances than government funding agencies, and may be in the best position to facilitate the opening up of new lines of research.
The sciences as we know them are weakest when they are dealing with, or trying to avoid, the subjective aspects of reality. Our own experience of qualities like the smell of a rose or the sound of a band has been stripped away, leaving only odorless molecular structures and the physics of vibrations. The sciences have tried to confine themselves to I-it relationships, a third-person view of the world. They have done their best to leave out I-you relationships, second-person experiences, as well as first-person experiences, our personal experiences. Our inner life, including our dreams, hopes, loves, hates, pains, excitements, intentions, joys and sorrows, is reduced to charts of readings from electrodes, as in electroencephalograms (EEGs), or changes in the levels of the chemicals at nerve endings, or 2-D brain scans on computer screens. By these means a mind becomes an “it,” an object.
But instead of trying to reduce minds to objects, what if all self-organizing systems are subjects? As discussed in Chapter 4, some philosophers propose that materialism implies panpsychism, meaning that self-organizing systems like atoms, molecules, crystals, plants and animals have points of view, or inner lives, or subjective experience. Most people who keep companion animals take for granted that their dog or their cat or their parrot or their horse has subjective experiences, like emotions, desires and fears. But what about snakes? Or oysters? Or plants? We can try to imagine their inner lives, but it is difficult to do so. Yet in traditional hunter-gatherer societies all around the world, specialists in communication with non-human organisms form connections with a wide range of animals and plants. Shamans link themselves to animals and plants through their minds or spirits, and find out useful information by doing so. They are said to know where animals are to be found, and they help hunters. They know which plants are useful in healing, or as mind-altering brews.
For centuries, among scientists and educated people in the West, shamanic knowledge has been dismissed as primitive, animistic or superstitious. Anthropologists have studied the social roles of shamans, but most of them have assumed that if shamans have any valid knowledge of the natural world, it has not been gained subjectively but rather by “normal” sense-based means, or by trial and error. They think that if shamans have discovered herbs that work, or visionary brews like ayahuasca, traditionally used in parts of the Amazon region, they have done so by trying out various plants at random. But shamans themselves say that this knowledge has come from “the plant teachers.”27
What if shamans really do have ways of learning about plants and animals that are completely unknown to scientists? What if they have explored the natural world for many generations, discovering ways of communicating with the world around them that depend on subjective rather than objective methods? The Brazilian anthropologist Viveiros de Castro summarized the difference:
Objectification is the name of our game … The form of the other is the thing. Amerindian shamanism is guided by the opposite ideal. To know is to personify, to take on the point of view of that which must be known. Shamanic knowledge aims at something that is a someone—another subject. The form of the other is the person. What I am defining here is what anthropologists of yore used to call animism, an attitude that is far more than an idle metaphysical tenet, for the attribution of soul to animals and other so-called natural beings entails a specific way of dealing with them.28
For most of human history, people have lived as hunter-gatherers, and have only survived because they knew how to hunt and had a deep understanding of the animals they hunted. They only survived because they knew which plants were edible, and where and when to find them. Their knowledge worked. We still benefit from their discoveries. About 70 percent of our drugs are ultimately derived from plants (see Chapter 10), and much of the knowledge of these plants’ medicinal properties was traditional, discovered long ago in pre-scientific cultures.
For much of the twentieth century, scientific psychologists tried to learn about minds objectively, from outside, by studying measurable behavior and quantifiable responses. In prototypical behavioralist experiments, rats in cages learned to press levers to obtain rewards in the form of food pellets or to avoid punishments like electric shocks. In more recent research, the emphasis has mainly been on the study of brains and of computer models of brain activity. In the mystical traditions of both East and West, people explored the nature of minds through long periods of meditation, discovering how their mental processes work from within. By contrast, academic psychologists and cognitive scientists usually carry out their studies with paid subjects, generally undergraduate students, who have no professional training in observing or reporting mental processes. As the Buddhist scholar B. Alan Wallace put it:
By leaving introspection in the hands of amateurs, scientists guarantee that the direct observation of the mind remains at the level of folk psychology … Cognitive scientists have taken on the challenge of understanding mental processes, but unlike all other natural scientists, they receive no professional training in observing the realities that constitute their field of enquiry.29
Today there are many teachers of meditation, mainly rooted in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, and some scientists have begun to explore their own minds for themselves.30
Scientific investigations of the interactions of minds and bodies are as backward as the investigation of minds from within. In medicine, there is a growing recognition of the effects of belief on healing, as shown in the placebo response, and studies using biofeedback show that people can learn to gain conscious control over their blood flow in their fingers and other aspects of their physiology that are normally regulated unconsciously (see Chapter 10). But these achievements are elementary compared with the feats of Indian yogis, who demonstrate a remarkable voluntary influence on their digestive and circulatory systems. One of the means by which they acquire these abilities is through the control of breathing. Breathing is controlled by both the voluntary and involuntary nervous systems, and yogic breathing exercises may provide a bridge between them.31
In China, the chi gung or qigong tradition likewise places a strong emphasis on breathing practices, and has many applications in traditional Chinese medicine and in the martial arts. Both prana in the Indian tradition and chi in the Chinese are translated into English as “energy” but they differ from the concept of energy in mechanistic physiology. There are serious problems with the standard scientific dogma of energy conservation in living organisms (see Chapter 2), and a reexamination of human energy balances is long overdue. This is one area in which it might be possible to bring together these different traditions in a new, integrated understanding.
In many parts of Africa and the Indian subcontinent, women carry heavy loads on their heads, and can do so over great distances. Studies of women in East Africa have shown that they can carry up to 20 percent of their body weight “for free,” without any extra expenditure of energy compared with just walking. They can also carry up to 70 percent of their body weight using 50 percent less energy than an American army recruit with a backpack. This skill is not simply a matter of putting the load on the head, but involves a special kind of gait.32 But is a special gait enough to explain this remarkable efficiency?
Their abilities also raise a practical question. Why are teenagers not taught this skill in physical-education classes all over the world? The ability to carry loads efficiently is useful. At some stage in their lives, modern people may need to carry loads over rougher terrain than they encounter in airports, when wheeled suitcases will not work. The main reason for ignoring this skill is social status. Women who carry loads on their heads are of low status, and live in developing countries.
Arrogance and snobbery make most modern, scientifically educated people feel superior to all pre-scientific cultures, including their own. In the late nineteenth century, these attitudes were given a scientific justification in terms of evolution and social progress. Anthropologists, like James Frazer (1854–1941), thought that human beliefs progressed through three stages: animism, religion and science. Primitive societies were animistic and child-like, pervaded by magical thinking. Religions like Christianity represented a higher stage of evolution, but still included many primitive elements. But both animism and religion were superseded by science, the ultimate level of human understanding.
In this context, why would modern people want to learn to carry loads on their heads, like uneducated African women? Or why would they have anything to learn from pre-scientific traditions like yoga and chi gung? And what have shamans to offer but mumbo-jumbo?
As the sciences free themselves from the constrictions of materialism, many new possibilities arise. And many of them raise new possibilities for dialogues with religious traditions.33 Here are a few examples.
Statistical research has shown that people who attend religious services regularly tend to live longer, have better health and are less prone to depression than those who do not. Also, the practices of prayer and meditation often have beneficial effects on health and longevity (see Chapter 10). How do these practices work? Are the effects purely psychological or sociological? Or does the connection with a larger spiritual reality confer a greater capacity to heal and an enhancement of well-being?
If organisms at all levels of complexity are in some sense alive with their own purposes, this implies that the earth, the solar system, our galaxy and, indeed, all the stars have lives and purposes of their own. And so may the entire universe (see Chapter 1). The cosmic evolutionary process may have inherent purposes or ends, and the cosmos may have a mind or consciousness. Since the universe itself is evolving and developing, the mind or consciousness of the universe must be evolving and developing too. Is this cosmic mind the same as God? Perhaps only if God is conceived of in a pantheistic spirit as the soul or mind of the universe, or of nature. In the Christian tradition, the world soul is not identical with God. For example, the early Christian theologian Origen (c. 184–253) thought of the world soul as the Logos, endlessly creative, which gave rise to the world and the processes of development within it. The Logos was an aspect of God, not the whole of God, whose being transcended the universe.34 If instead of one universe there are many, then the divine being would include and transcend them all.
The universe is evolving and is the arena of continuing creativity. Creativity is not confined to the origin of the universe, as in deism (see Chapter 1), but is an ongoing part of the evolutionary process, expressed in all realms of nature, including human societies, cultures and minds. Although the creativity expressed in all these realms may have an ultimately divine source, there is no need to think of God as an external designing mind. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, God imbued the natural world with creativity too, as in the first chapter in the Book of Genesis, where he called forth life from the earth and the seas (Genesis 1: 11, 20, 24)—a very different image from the engineering God of a mechanistic universe. And in a creative, evolving universe there is no reason why the appearance of matter and energy should be confined to the very first instant, as in the standard Big Bang theory. Indeed, some cosmologists propose that the continued expansion of the universe is driven by the ongoing creation of “dark energy” from the universal gravitational field or from the “quintessence field” (see Chapter 2).
If the laws of nature are more like habits, and there is an inherent memory within the natural world (see Chapter 3), how does this relate to the principle of karma in Hinduism and Buddhism, a chain of cause and effect that implies a kind of memory in nature? In some schools of thought, as in the Lankavatra Sutra of Mahayana Buddhism, there is a cosmic or universal memory.35 Likewise, if biological inheritance largely depends on morphic resonance and a collective memory within each species (see Chapter 6), how does this relate to doctrines of reincarnation or rebirth?
If minds are not stored as material traces in brains, but depend on a process of resonance, then memories themselves may not be extinguished at death, although the body through which they are normally retrieved decays. Is there some other way in which these memories can continue to act? Can some non-bodily form of consciousness survive the death of the body and still gain access to an individual’s memories, conscious or unconscious, as all religions suppose?
If minds are not confined to brains, how do these human minds relate to the minds of higher-level systems of organization, like the solar system, the galaxy, the universe and the mind of God? Are mystical experiences just what they seem to be: connections between human minds and larger, more inclusive forms of consciousness?
If human minds, individually and collectively, make contact with higher-level minds, including the ultimate consciousness of God, to what extent can they influence the evolutionary process, or be influenced by the divine will? In an evolutionary, living universe, are humans merely part of an unfolding process on one isolated planet, or does human consciousness play a larger role in cosmic evolution, in some way connected to minds in other parts of the universe?
All religious traditions grew up in a pre-scientific era. The sciences have revealed far more of the natural world than anyone could have imagined in the past. For example, only in the nineteenth century were the great sweep of biological evolution and the aeons of geological times recognized, and only in the twentieth century were galaxies outside our own discovered, along with the vast expanse of time from the Big Bang to the present. The sciences evolve, and so do religions. No religion is the same today as it was at the time of its founder. Instead of the bitter conflicts and mutual distrust caused by the materialist worldview, we are entering an era in which sciences and religions may enrich each other through shared explorations.
As the taboos of materialism lose their power, new scientific questions can be asked and, hopefully, answered.
Throughout this book, I have suggested a range of new possibilities for research: for example, the use of comparative effectiveness research on conventional and “alternative” cures for conditions such as lower back pain, migraines and cold sores (see Chapter 10); experiments on experiments to find out how significantly experimenters’ expectations influence their results in the “hard” sciences (see Chapter 11); an analysis of existing data to find out if the Universal Gravitational Constant varies (see Chapter 3); a mass-participation investigation to find out if earthquakes and tsunamis can be predicted on the basis of animal premonitions (see Chapter 9); and a prize challenge to find out if any alternative energy technologies or “over unity” devices actually work (see Chapter 2).
Existing lines of scientific research will, of course, continue. Nothing changes very fast when big institutions, vast amounts of money and large numbers of jobs are involved: there are now more than seven million scientific researchers worldwide, producing 1.58 million publications a year.36 What I am suggesting is that a small fraction of these resources is devoted to exploring new questions. New discoveries are more likely to happen if we venture off the well-trodden paths of conventional research, and if we open up questions that have been suppressed by dogmas and taboos.
The delusion that science has already answered the fundamental questions chokes off the spirit of inquiry. The illusion that scientists are superior to the rest of humanity means that they have little to learn from anyone else. They need other people’s financial support, but they do not need to listen to anyone less scientifically educated than themselves. In return for their privileged position, scientists will deliver knowledge and power over nature, transforming humanity and the earth.
The materialist agenda was once liberating but is now depressing. Those who believe in it are alienated from their own experience; they are cut off from all religious traditions; and they are prone to suffer from a sense of disconnection and isolation. Meanwhile, the power unleashed by scientific knowledge is causing the mass extinction of other species, and endangering our own.
The realization that the sciences do not know the fundamental answers leads to humility rather than arrogance, and openness rather than dogmatism.
Much remains to be discovered and rediscovered, including wisdom.