Epistemology

Humans have survived through knowledge gained through senses.  We have a sense of reality.  In our minds, we imagine reality to be something consistent with our sense of it.  This works pretty well until it doesn't.

Exactly how our minds connect with reality remains a topic of strong disagreements.  The paradigm in which I matured into adulthood was typical of Western academia.  That is, consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the activity in the brain, which exists to propagate the species.  It seemed perfectly reasonable, even if the electrochemical activity was far from understood.

For the purpose of explaining the foundations of my thinking, I will try to relate an experience that I had with a friend, Bruce, whom I believed could benefit from what I considered to be my scientifically informed understanding of what was real.  This happened in 1980, if memory serves.  My friend had what I believed were some obvious mental and emotional problems.  He told me that he was a medium.  I believed this to be a manifestation of mental illness.  I was concerned that his belief about these bizarre behaviors would lead him into deeper delusions, so I proposed that we do an experiment to test to see if the personalities that appeared to be other than his were actually autonomous.  

I suggested to Bruce that we conduct an experiment that required his complete cooperation.  It required him to go into the trance state, which he had grown to dislike and fear.  He agreed to do it.  At the time, I was living in a cramped apartment with a married couple and their two small boys.  Bruce and the father had had a recent falling out and Bruce was not welcome.  Bruce and I agreed that Bruce would come by early in the morning and I would go out to meet him, which is what happened.  As I was sitting waiting for Bruce to arrive, I was finalizing my plans for the experiment.  I wrote down 3 questions on a piece of paper and hid the paper in the apartment.  It really didn't matter if someone found the paper.  The questions were queries about very simple and very personal knowledge that only I had.  The third question was about a dream that I had the previous night.  

That morning, Bruce arrived and I quietly left and got into his car.  I instructed him to drive up Left Hand Canyon, a place where I liked to bicycle.  Bruce knew the area.  On the way, we stopped at a liquor store to get the beer I promised as compensation for his cooperation.  We drove a few miles up the canyon and stopped at a quite remote location.  Of course, this was well before cell phones.  The idea that he was somehow in contact with anyone besides me was inconceivable, except in a James Bond thriller.  He did not know that I had written down the prepared questions, or that there were 3 of them, or what the questions were, and certainly not the answers.  I planned to ask him the questions from my memory, once he went into trance.

We left his parked car and walked a short distance to a creek and found a lovely spot to sit.  I was expecting something really stupid to happen and I did not have any way to record it, but what happened was a life altering event.  I felt ridiculous even having prepared the questions, but scientific protocol required allowing for the possibility that what was claimed to be real was actually real.  I was stone cold sober when Bruce cracked open a beer, took a sip and asked if I was ready.  In a quite relaxed frame of mind, I said 'sure'.

He entered trance and I was immediately impressed with what I thought must be a very well rehearsed routine.  It was not long before he began to speak in a deep and aggressive sounding voice, in a foreign language.  If that was all that happened, I would have been totally impressed.  Bruce was not highly educated and had no discipline.  The idea that he was so fluent in a foreign language (German or Yiddish, I guess) to be able to speak like that was completely inexplicable.  My mind was racing in awe when he became silent.  Moments later, another voice started, sounding like it was straining to speak, a bit like someone with laryngitis, soft and squeaky.  That voice said little more than to answer the three written questions.  For the third question, it said simply that it could not probe that kind of personal knowledge.  It was Alice Through the Looking Glass time.  I had never even asked the questions.  I had said nothing.

Bruce came back online and asked what happened.  I told him.  He shrugged and said it was to be expected, then finished the beer.  I was trying to act other than shocked, but he probably realized what was happening in my mind.  He had seen it many times.

The next few days contained a lot of hypothesis formation and juggling.  I moved into a different place with a woman and we talked a lot about it.  She somehow did not seem to find it to be so unbelievable.  I settled on the idea that I had experienced strong evidence of non-corporeal personalities that were capable of obtaining knowledge in ways that would be described as "mystical".  Alternatively, I held out that it was all a trick that I had fallen into somehow.  I was much more comfortable with that alternative, and spent years insisting to myself that it must be correct, because it was the only possibility, I thought.  However, accepting that alternative meant rejecting the evidence of my experience and substituting a conspiracy theory that was impossible, or that I had somehow hallucinated the whole episode.  What argued against hallucination was my sober mind, the written questions that were found where I had hidden them and the consistency and continuity of the whole experience, which I went over and over in my memory, for years afterwards.

To satisfy the requirements of empirical science, the experiment must be repeatable, and there was no chance of that.  Besides, I had no desire to start down that path, just in case it was what it appeared to be.  I could see that the chances of deception through my assumptions or by others' delusions or deceptions was far too great to start communicating with these putative non-corporeal personalities.  There are countless examples of fraudulent mediums taking advantage of their gullible victims.

But, the further I rejected my own experience, the further I moved into mental instability.  This brought to mind the British psychiatrist, R D Laing, and specifically his book, The Politics of Experience, which I had read at a crucial time of emotional distress, several years earlier.  There are numerous good points in that book, but the gist might be summarized in saying that the person who rejects the evidence of his own experience is taking a step into insanity, although it is seen as sanity within the society that actually substitutes insanity for sanity.  That must not be taken to mean that experience equals understanding, or that understanding of experience is required before that experience can be accepted as real.  No, it means rejecting direct personal experience is rejecting the self, and rejecting the self means attempting to substitute something in place of the self.  While it is more than socially acceptable to destroy the self by this and other socially accepted methods, I had determined to value my self above social acceptance.

So, I could not reject the experience.  In fact, I pursued both the hypothesis of non-corporeal personalities and the hypothesis that it was all a hallucination, for years.  In the "spirit" of the former, I thought that if my mind was indeed communicating with other forms of consciousness than the biologically rooted one between my ears that experiencing such linkage was limited by my beliefs about it.  That was like a dawning into a much broader, and much heathier way of living and thinking.

With the developments that followed the introduction of Schrodinger's Equation, we still have a sense of reality, but something changed radically.  The philosophical basis used in interpreting Schrodinger's Equation determines what is accepted as real.  This is not generally mentioned to students of modern physics.  This failure to inform them is pretty close to being a hoax played on the vulnerable.

This philosophical shift that allowed interpretation of Schrodinger's Equation was a major focus of Brett Holverstott's thinking.  This is a crucial thing to understand.  He was informed by Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions while quite young.

So, I believe it is reasonable to see Holverstott's understanding as well worth understanding.

That philosophical shift is due to the ideas of Ernst Mach.  The gist of Mach's philosophy (if it can be called that) is that the only things we can possibly know are what can be measured with instruments.

In my sophomore course of the philosophy of science (Professor Gary Stahl), we used a text written by Michael Polanyi, which is most helpful.

Measuring aspects of what we experience is very important, but life survived without such an ability for most of its history.  Clearly, there is more to understanding and knowledge than measurement.

Polanyi divided knowledge into 2 parts:  tacit (implicit) and explicit.

GPT:

{A central concept in Polanyi's philosophy is tacit knowledge—the idea that "we know more than we can tell." Many important skills, from riding a bicycle to interpreting experimental data, cannot be fully expressed in words or formulas. Scientists rely heavily on experience, intuition, and pattern recognition developed through years of practice.}

I would not limit the list of things that scientists depend upon to what is enumerated there.

Understanding source of tacit knowledge is a bit like the eyeball trying to see itself.  It's not a great analogy, but useful.  Our minds can understand our minds by examining the effects that our minds have on our experience.  This typically involves making a fundamental error of substituting the effects for the cause.

More fundamentally, this error is substituting the representation of a thing for the thing.  An eyeball can see a diagram of an eyeball, but the diagram is not the eyeball and sight is not produced by a diagram.  Sight is produced by a set of interacting processes involving much more than the eyeball.

And sight has no significance without an understanding of the broader reality in which vision occurs.

The same is true of science.  To be successful, the broad context of reality must be compatible with a new theory.  What followed from Schrodinger's Equation doesn't comport with reality as we know it.  Accepted interpretations of it don't even comport with each other, and that is how nonsense is demonstrated.

Einstein was well aware of this, and so was Schrodinger.  This problem has never been resolved.  The net result has been to remove the potential of understanding from modern physics, which was famously explained by Richard Feynmann many times.   He said that it is a mistake to try to understand SQM, which is a collection of attempts to interpret Schrodinger's Equation.

Instead, students are taught that understanding actually means something completely different (and directed opposed) to what it had been understood to mean in the past.

Students are literally told to "shut up and calculate", and punished for striving to make sense.

So, in the way of Polanyi's thought, the tacit aspect of thinking must not be relegated to religion or philosophy by modern physics, but that seems to be what has happened in many cases.

This is an error with roots extending back to earliest human attempts to grasp reality.

I remember laughing at myself when I realized the actual origins of modern physics because it seemed that I had been like the peasant who was convinced that Cortez was a returning deity because of his unusual and regal appearance.  Such a mistake can easily prove fatal, and my gratitude to Holverstott cannot be overstated.  Dr. Mills explained the failure of Schrodinger's Equation, but I was convinced that because I did not understand quantum mechanics, that I would never understand GUTCP.

Scientists have enjoyed a status as the sole arbiters of what is said to be real for many generations.  This power has corrupted their minds, in my opinion, just as it did with the priests who held that power before them.  There is no substitute for the experience of the individual, as Laing emphasized, as the key to establishing sanity.

This priest-like arrogance that determines if the peasant (undergraduate) is to be accepted into the ranks of the initiated upperclassmen really has enshrined a refusal to admit a lack of understanding and has led the major schools of supposedly scientific thought to reject reality.  Consider the origin of "dark energy".  The advent of this great "discovery" was an ad hoc explanation for another failure of the current theory of the origin of the Universe, the Big Bang.  The invention of a new mysterious force that caused the Universe to accelerate its expansion (which nobody but Randell Mills expected and previously published) was accepted as a complete explanation, when it was simply putting a name on something that made no sense, had no theoretical support, and was never even observed previously.  Yet, overnight, it was orthodox.

This was the subject of the chapter of Schrodinger's that was the focus of 3 articles that I wrote.  He clearly expected the thought structure built upon his equation to fail as other adventures into nonsense had failed and he used Ptolmaic astronomy with their epicycles as the main example.  Einstein and Dirac, among other great minds of the time thought along similar lines, but correctly anticipating a collapse of theoretical validity does not provide a resolution.

Resolution of the crisis requires understanding of the observations of what is real with what is known in the broad context, as Schrodinger emphasized.  Einstein clearly understood and sought resolution in a Unified Field Theory.  Lacking such understanding meant that science continued down the wrong path for over 100 years.

I do not claim to be the one to resolve the crisis that I attempt to indicate and describe.  But, I believe that we must stop pretending that our problems can be blamed on insufficient control of the individual's right to think, which is the logical goal of accepting totalitarian thought visited to varying degrees in the past, and evident in the headlines of news stories every day.