Believing is Seeing

Rethinking the Scientific Method

Here’s an excerpt from my upcoming book, “The Myth of Science: A Winemaker Recommends Repairs.”

Claude Bernard, a French physiologist who Bernard Cohen of Harvard called “one of the greatest of all scientists,” once remarked, “Those who have an excessive faith in their ideas are not well suited to make discoveries.”

In our modern bubble, we aspire to view the world rationally, objectively, outside of myth. But what if there is no such thing? The postmodern view is that all points of view are founded in myth, and that science is only a myth pretending not to be a myth, like a coyote pretending not to be a canine so as to mock the other dogs.

In the words of Karl Popper, “All observations are theory-impregnated. There is no pure, disinterested, theory-free observation.”

When you see a chair, you cannot help tagging it with its “chair-ness” – that it is solid, that it should move as a single whole, that it should support a human’s weight if sat on. Its design, construction materials, ergonomics, and probable price would inevitably come to mind unbidden.

Our visual field is impregnated with presuppositions. Only about 20% of the neurological impulses the visual cortex receives come from the retina. The remaining 80% arrive from elsewhere in the brain and serve to modulate and filter visual information.

We are so good at this that we imagine that what we see can be taken at face value. The repackaging our observations receive is utterly invisible, leaving us with the illusion that we have access to objective reality.

Consider our ability to distinguish among human faces -- a superpower we seldom stop to appreciate. Last night my wife astonished me by identifying a bit part actor as David Morse from St. Elsewhere, in which his much younger version was a series staple four decades ago. Scientists are no different from the rest of us in taking for granted that what we observe is simply unvarnished reality.

When sight is restored to those born blind, they experience severe initial confusion, perceiving only blurry, shifting shapes and light rather than instantly recognizing objects. Because the brain must “learn” to see, individuals face major challenges in interpreting visual data, as their visual cortex has often adapted to process sound or touch instead and may never get very good at facial recognition. [1, 2, 3]

Most scientists will tell you that the Scientific Method begins with observation. Popper disagrees. All inquiry, he asserts, begins with desire: with a human need to know, even if that need is simply curiosity. All research is driven by passion. That means that there is no such thing as a disinterested observer. Every scientist has an ax to grind.

The contemporary view of the hierarchy of legitimacy of Science’s branches, from hard to soft, goes something like this:

Physics, chemistry, astronomy, biochemistry, biology, neurology, psychology, social science, political science, poetry.

Since science is at its core a human enterprise, this order is completely backwards.

As Alexander Pope put it, “The proper study of mankind is man.”

Simply because we have failed thus far to tackle the hard problems that human study presents does not disqualify their relevance. From this perspective, the hardest science of all is the study of consciousness. But since we have no idea how to get started, this discipline doesn’t even have a name. Poetry certainly comes a lot closer than physics to investigating the human essence.

When today’s physicists speak about an elusive “theory of everything,” they are speaking about the behavior of elementary sub-atomic particles. This leaves out all the emergent properties of atoms, molecules, and -- you know – life. A hierarchy of molecules leading to enzymes, DNA and proteins forms living systems: cells, organs, and functioning bodies. These in turn may form tribes, societies, politics and so on.

The ancient sages, for whom subatomic physics was unknown, instead concerned themselves with the more human end of the scale. How they would have scoffed at the notion of ignoring of the properties of these emergent levels as any sort of “theory of everything”.

One wonders: How did these hyper-siloed, supercilious researchers become our most respected scientists when they really know nearly everything about almost nothing?