The Scientific Method
It was a few months ago that I stumbled on Ken Wilber's Integral philosophy. I'm not sure what brought me to it, except that it may have involved me googling "science and religion unified" or something similar, and finding integrallife.com as one of the top search results. Here is a brief description.
"The Integral Map is an all-inclusive model developed by Ken Wilber that organizes the insights of the world's greatest knowledge traditions: from psychology, science, systems theory, anthropology, mysticism and sociology to spirituality, religion, politics, medicine and biology. By understanding that no one discipline contains the complete truth, but rather many partial truths, we can organize these insights and truths into a more comprehensive map of reality." [http://integrallife.com/integral]
I can't describe my exciting at having found someone exploring this area. Most of the site content was in audio-visual, which I find impractical with my on-the-run student lifestyle, so I got some of Ken Wilber's books out of the the library. A lot of his more recent works fit under the self-help genre, which drives me crazy because I HATE self-help books with a passion. But I found food for thought in his 1984 book Eye to Eye: the Search for the New Paradigm. He used the fascinating metaphor of Three Eyes to describe the different modes of perception: the sensory mode, the rational mode, and the transcendent mode.
What resonated for me was his classification of the scientific method as part of the sensory realm, rather than the rational. Empiricism began with Aristotle in the fourth century B.C. in his idea of "natural philosophy," observing of the physical world to find principals or constants. Despite his enormous contribution to areas like botany, zoology, physics, astronomy, chemistry, and meteorology, he gave logic and deductive reasoning a higher importance than observation. Some of the odd errors in his theories exist because no one at the time had the concept of testing a theory instead of merely confirming it with observations. This "scientific method" of experiment has proved to be an incredible powerful method of not only describing and explaining the universe, but finding new ways of using it. Quantum mechanics would never have existed without the evidence of the two-slit light interference and the photoelectric effect, and without quantum theory, so many fascinating and useful technologies would never have been invented, either.
It's such a simple idea. Instead of thinking about the world, look at it. The mind can come up with an infinite number of logical systems, but all it can prove is that they are self-consistent. Any self-consistent theory is true in a certain specific sense, but not nearly as practical or useful as the theory that corresponds one-to-one with the physical universe. And psychologists know that the human intellect is limited and biased. Testing by experiment, trial by fire, is the only way to ensure that our theories don't contain these flaws as well.
Not to say that the sensory eye is above the others in any way. Any scientific theory is still a rational construction, probably flawed, probably incomplete. Newton's law of gravitation turned out only to be a special case of general relativity. But Newtonian mechanics was enough to put a human being on the moon. The scientific method, senses and reason united, is beautiful because it works.
"The Integral Map is an all-inclusive model developed by Ken Wilber that organizes the insights of the world's greatest knowledge traditions: from psychology, science, systems theory, anthropology, mysticism and sociology to spirituality, religion, politics, medicine and biology. By understanding that no one discipline contains the complete truth, but rather many partial truths, we can organize these insights and truths into a more comprehensive map of reality." [http://integrallife.com/integral]
I can't describe my exciting at having found someone exploring this area. Most of the site content was in audio-visual, which I find impractical with my on-the-run student lifestyle, so I got some of Ken Wilber's books out of the the library. A lot of his more recent works fit under the self-help genre, which drives me crazy because I HATE self-help books with a passion. But I found food for thought in his 1984 book Eye to Eye: the Search for the New Paradigm. He used the fascinating metaphor of Three Eyes to describe the different modes of perception: the sensory mode, the rational mode, and the transcendent mode.
What resonated for me was his classification of the scientific method as part of the sensory realm, rather than the rational. Empiricism began with Aristotle in the fourth century B.C. in his idea of "natural philosophy," observing of the physical world to find principals or constants. Despite his enormous contribution to areas like botany, zoology, physics, astronomy, chemistry, and meteorology, he gave logic and deductive reasoning a higher importance than observation. Some of the odd errors in his theories exist because no one at the time had the concept of testing a theory instead of merely confirming it with observations. This "scientific method" of experiment has proved to be an incredible powerful method of not only describing and explaining the universe, but finding new ways of using it. Quantum mechanics would never have existed without the evidence of the two-slit light interference and the photoelectric effect, and without quantum theory, so many fascinating and useful technologies would never have been invented, either.
It's such a simple idea. Instead of thinking about the world, look at it. The mind can come up with an infinite number of logical systems, but all it can prove is that they are self-consistent. Any self-consistent theory is true in a certain specific sense, but not nearly as practical or useful as the theory that corresponds one-to-one with the physical universe. And psychologists know that the human intellect is limited and biased. Testing by experiment, trial by fire, is the only way to ensure that our theories don't contain these flaws as well.
Not to say that the sensory eye is above the others in any way. Any scientific theory is still a rational construction, probably flawed, probably incomplete. Newton's law of gravitation turned out only to be a special case of general relativity. But Newtonian mechanics was enough to put a human being on the moon. The scientific method, senses and reason united, is beautiful because it works.