What we've discovered about our world through the scientific method is nothing short of astounding. But humans, and life, go way beyond what the scientific method is able to tell us about ourselves and where we live.
Pic: Ruethewhirl3 (cc3.0 atrib/NC/ND)
By its very nature science is limited in what it can know and prove. To be classed as scientific knowledge, the results of an experiment have to be able to be repeated. What was observed in an Austrian lab on Monday has to be able to be observed and replicated in an Indian lab next Thursday.
And while this way of testing and experimenting has brought us countless wonderful pain- and death-relieving substances, it is not the only legitimate way of 'knowing' something. And the further on we go into the age of automation, the more dangerous it becomes for us to believe that our measuring, linear, dissecting ways of seeing and knowing are the sum of what it is to be. But increasingly, with the automated ways we work, the urban settings many of us live in, it is this particularly thin type of thinking we are forced to shove ourselves into most often, like a too-small shoe.
While a part of us is unable to believe our measuring and dissecting and separating everything into bits of information is anything other than the totality of the universe, another part, when we let it, revels in the mysteries that refuse categorisation. That part entertains the wholeness, the chaos. Like Rilke, it loves the questions and sits without answers. It rolls around in metaphor and rolls around in the sack while the smaller measuring self is calculating how many ccs of sperm were produced in the process.
Iain McGilchrist discusses our "divided brain" in the following animation:
Michael Shermer has been writing a column in Scientific American for 15 years and is the founder of the Skeptics Society. In a column from 2014 he wrote about an experience he struggled to explain. His fiance Jennifer had had some of her belongings shipped from her native Germany and one of those was a 1978 transister radio that belonged to her much-loved grandfather, who was no longer with us and whose radio hadn't worked for years. Michael decided to fix the radio. He checked to see if there were any loose connections, put in new batteries, but the radio remained dead. He chucked it in a desk drawer and forgot about it.
Three months later Michael and Jennifer married in their home. At one point in the proceedings Jennifer asked Michael to accompany her to the back of the house to talk. She was feeling lost and lonely away from her family. She wished her grandfather was there - he could have given her away if he was.
As they approached the back of the house they heard music coming from their bedroom. Which was odd, as there was no stereo there. They checked laptops and phones and even opened the back door to try to find where the music was coming from. Then Jennifer opened the desk drawer, where her grandfather's transister radio was playing a romantic love song.
“My grandfather is here with us. I’m not alone,” Jennifer said - who was as skeptical as her husband about paranormal/supernatural stuff.
That night, the radio played classical music. The next day the radio went silent, and it has remained silent ever since.
Shermer's skepticism was shaken by this experience, but the rather brilliant thinker Charles Eisenstein wonders if it's not so much that he suddenly believes in ghosts and ghoulies but that something even more miraculous has happened:
"Perhaps what was shaken is his faith in the primacy of a way of knowing: the one that underlies skepticism and the Scientific Method.
The comments at the bottom of Michael's post are interesting. Many talk about oxidisation of the radio, the radio's mechanics. Which is all true, obviously. It is the how of the situation. But what is far more intereseting to me is why did it happen when it did? Some wonder if Michael's daughter came in and turned on the radio at the right time. Perhaps. Who knows? Would be odd, but explainable.
All of those things are explainable. They explain how it happened. This is what science does. But what science can never explain is the why, is the experience.
"Jennifer is as skeptical as I am when it comes to paranormal and supernatural phenomena. Yet the eerie conjunction of these deeply evocative events gave her the distinct feeling that her grandfather was there and that the music was his gift of approval. I have to admit, it rocked me back on my heels and shook my skepticism to its core as well. I savored the experience more than the explanation.
"The emotional interpretations of such anomalous events grant them significance regardless of their causal account. And if we are to take seriously the scientific credo to keep an open mind and remain agnostic when the evidence is indecisive or the riddle unsolved, we should not shut the doors of perception when they may be opened to us to marvel in the mysterious."
Sure, we can ascribe occurrences like this to randomness. But maybe other elements are at play. Perhaps our consciousness lasts beyond death and somehow Jennifer's grandfather "caused" the radio to do its thing. Or perhaps it's a bit more impersonal. Maybe there is some kind of collective consciousness that works in situations like this somehow. It's fascinating to wonder. And we should not allow science to dissuade us from the wondering.
But what I love most is what Shermer said, that he savoured the experience more than the explanation.
Conscousness - what it is, and where it exists - seems to be one of the areas that has been a bit of a no-go zone in the past, a woo-woo realm. But it seems to be an area now that is giving an inkling of a paradigm change beginning for science and what is allowed to be considered within its walls.
Are we in the middle of a scientific revolution? You never can tell a revolution when you're in the middle of it. It's not until afterwards, when you've taken disparate happenings that in isolation look like chaos, and you join them all together in a narrative that brings clarity to all of those chaotic changings. Maybe science is in the process of another one of its paradigm shifts, - those which appear to be linear when viewed from hindsight but which are crazy leaps, freaky jumps, and great vulnerability. Maybe this time it'll be one that humans can move around in.
Whatever is going on, it's a bit of a mind flip from the categorisations of previous scientific eras. It's a jump of a few centimetres and a million light years in the way we think we see. It's part of what is needed in our learning to see the world re-enchanted. Without it, we will kill the earth and us along with it. Re-enchantment, a larger reordering of our view of the world where we cannot compartmentalise its elements to force them to our own monetising is, in an age that has discarded grand narratives, the grandest one of all.