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[Music] all right here we go are you ready are you ready are you ready to deconstruct the greatest illusion spun by the mind of man science deconstructing the myth of science part one this is a four-part series on the epistemic and metaphysical foundations of science the limits of science and how to take science beyond science this is serious stuff here this is why i do the work that i do this is what i'm most passionate about in my work i have been contemplating the nature of science for 15 years for well over a thousand hours reading researching contemplating investigating thinking very deeply and independently about this issue because this is such a central issue because science grounds our entire sense of reality now before we really start to get into this because there's so much material to cover here let's set it up give me some give me some time to to set this up because this is such a thorny domain filled with so many traps and landmines so here's a list of warnings to get us going warning number one this is very advanced material this is very serious material if you're just screwing around online looking at videos and you know just doing sort of fluffy type of self-help stuff this is not for you this is for people who really really care about understanding reality at the deepest levels possible so just keep that in mind that means when i say something is advanced what that means is is that you have to be very careful with how you use your mind to to interpret everything that i say because your mind is going to want to misunderstand the things that i say and the reason that is is because this stuff is very threatening if you understand the points that i will be making over the next four episodes in this series this will deeply threaten your entire sense of self and reality it could even make you mentally unstable because science is not just some stuff that some guy does in a white lab coat in a laboratory somewhere that doesn't affect your personal life it's way deeper than that your entire identity is wrapped up with the world view of science so your mind is going to have an entire host of sneaky defense mechanisms for getting you to stop from deeply questioning science because if you question it deeply enough i'm telling you you're going to feel like you're losing your mind this is serious stuff if you really understand the things that i'm going to be telling you here you're going to have an existential crisis if you're a professional scientist or an academic this will this will cause an existential crisis for you you might have to rethink your entire career and what you're doing and of course you don't want to do that that's highly inconvenient for you especially if your career puts bread on the table and you've invested decades into it you've got a lot to lose so just watch out watch out for how sneaky your mind is about this information i have to p preempt i've spent hours thinking about just how to preempt all of the tricks that your mind is going to employ to prevent you from listening to this information of course since this is advanced material it requires extreme open-mindedness i'm asking of you a level of open-mindedness which is unseen anywhere else in society because you're gonna your mind is gonna shut this material down really fast so it's on you did you learn the lessons of radical open mindedness that i've taught in the past many times this is the real test of your open mindedness right here of course also i should warn that nothing i say here should be taken on faith or as belief i'm going to be sharing many points and insights with you these insights are valid not because i tell you they are and not because of my credentials or my reputation or my subscriber count or anything like that the only validity these insights have is if you're able to validate them for yourself through contemplation uh through your own direct experiences and experiments and and very careful careful attention to detail this is not a religion that i'm teaching here it is not an ideology of any kind now another note i should make is that while we're going to be talking about science we're going to be talking about it from the perspective of the sun of the limits of science which means i'm not going to be mentioning many of the good parts of science there are many many good parts to science of course obviously this is so obvious it shouldn't even be said but yet it needs to be said because people will misunderstand me so there are many good parts to science but i won't be focusing on them because frankly they're quite obvious i already expect that you understand that and also because they're overemphasized throughout your entire educational career if you went to university or even just in high school the good parts of science are overemphasized no it's it's important to promote science in the public and so forth there's value in that but uh what we're interested in here is going beyond we're interested in taking science to the next level which means that we got to focus on its limitations all right so this presentation over the next four episodes it might seem very negative in a certain sense it might seem very anti-science it's not really anti-science it's just that we're focusing on the limits you see and we have limited time and even though it's going to take us about eight or ten hours to get through all of this content that i have prepared uh you might think that's a lot of time it's not a lot of time please understand the significance of what we're talking about here like i said i spent 15 years and thousands of hours contemplating this material and it's still difficult it's still tricky i still don't have all the answers uh so don't expect me to be able to communicate all of this to you in all of its subtlety and nuance within 15 minutes it's just not possible what you're asking for is impossible so you have to be patient if you can understand the things that i teach you even in a chunk of 10 hours that would already be incredible because most scientists most professional academics and scientists with phds in top universities will not understand this material even in 40 years so just keep in mind the value that is being offered to you here don't take it for granted don't be an ingrate be serious when it comes to serious things know when to be serious and then know when to have fun this is not a time to have fun this is the time to get serious now of course everything i say here will be perceived as an attack on science obviously because science has invented necessarily very clever defense mechanisms to preserve its authority and science is a very huge source of authority in our society and culture but of course see sometimes people misunderstand when i criticize science or talk about the limits of science or try to deconstruct science they interpret this as though i hate science leo you hate science why do you hate science so much i don't hate science in fact i love science i've studied and been interested in science since probably middle school i was very serious into academic science i read about it on my own not to mention in school i took advanced classes in physics in chemistry in biology in psychology i've studied the philosophy of science i've studied advanced mathematics and calculus i took two years of advanced mathematics so uh and i got good grades in all those classes so like i'm really interested in science i love science uh it's actually the opposite of what you think it's not that i hate science it's that i love science so much that i want the most purest form of science possible and what i saw as i was studying science in my youth what i realized after a certain period of time is that science itself is full of corruption and foundational epistemic mistakes that go denied and swept under the rug and my opposition to science became not that i want to do away with science but that rather i want to clean science up i want to reform science i'm not anti-science i'm anti-dogma and so there's a heretic problem here you know we know the heretic problem in the church in the church the church likes to excommunicate and condemn and even sometimes kill heretics you know historically not today but historically and what were the heretics who were they the heretics were those people who criticized the church because they found inconsistencies contradictions limits within the church's teachings well what you need to understand is that the heretic problem this is not a problem merely confined to religion it's a broader problem the heretic problem exists in any human institution that has a lot of power and authority that is criticized every institution has various degrees of corruption with it within it whether it's the the military the government a political party or a corporation uh or science or religion uh all these institutions have their various degrees of corruption and when somebody stands up from within the institution who actually loves the institution and wants to see the institution cleaned up so it's not so corrupt they get called a heretic and they get excommunicated it's a defense mechanism you see and you better believe that science has this problem too as some as soon as somebody levels a serious foundational critique against science they're immediately excommunicated from the academic domain such that their ideas can be easily discredited and just dismissed and not taken seriously and that's of course exactly what's going to happen with all the stuff that i say here which is how science maintains its corrupt state and we'll be talking about all the corruptions in science and making it very clear now also i want to warn that hang in there there's a lot of content here you're going to have questions and objections to the things that i say just keep in mind that there's four parts so many of the questions you have will be answered answered in future episodes uh not necessarily in this one alone and in fact part four of this series i'm dedicating exclusively to objections and criticisms that i will be addressing so i'm not playing any sleight of hand here i'm not being evasive if there's some question you have understand that the reason i didn't answer it probably is simply because there wasn't enough time to put it into a single episode right and in fact i welcome your objections and critiques post any kind of objections or critiques you have in the comments section down below under the first three episodes of this series i will collect them all and try to answer the best ones that i can um you know time permitting in episode four okay so let's begin by making the first distinction here that's important which is that science can be criticized from below or from above please make this distinction this will help you to clear up a lot of confusion there's an unfortunate situation that we find ourselves in culturally and remember science is a part of culture with culture inextricable from culture despite maybe what you have been led to believe so culturally we tend to see science as the opposite of religion and so either your pro science or your pro-religion and those are your only two choices all right this is very unfortunate this is a very um unnuanced uh way to think about this issue which gets us into a lot of trouble so there's criticism of science from below and from above criticism science from below would be something like the critiques of creationism or religious fundamentalists or right-wingers a lot of times make these critiques so they will for example a creationist will create critique you know evolutionary theory and aspects of science that that they don't like because the creation has a creationist has a certain world view that they're indoctrinated into and they need to defend that worldview and so they really don't have an option they need to attack science because science contradicts their worldview you know science says that the earth is four billion years old or something like that and uh creationists might believe that it's only five thousand years old and then you know that's that's a that's a big contradiction so you gotta you gotta wage a battle there um and so but the problem here is that see the creationist is attacking signs from below in the sense that he's doing it from a position of reaction of emotional attachment to his ideology of self bias he's coming from a place of a lot of time of ignorance simply ignorant of the facts or how science is done doesn't know sufficient science to actually make a powerful critique and so his critique of course obviously is is ridiculed by people who understand science and who are at a level of cognitive development that's a little bit higher than that of the creationist and you know many right-wingers they will criticize science because science contradicts many right-wing ideological positions for example on climate change and on environmental issues on maybe homosexuality or other forms of gender identity or whatever you know science contradicts some of the old conservative traditional worldviews and many things that were written in the bible or in the quran maybe 2000 years ago that gets contradicted and so it's obvious it's obvious to those who are who are really passionate about truth and about science that these are critiques from below but there's also critiques from above and this is a possibility that many scientifically minded people rationally minded people and atheistically minded people don't take seriously i want you to open yourself up to this possibility that science can be critiqued from above that doesn't mean that we're critiquing science in order to take us back to the medieval times and to believe in dogma and nonsense no we can accept many of the discoveries and methods of science but then we also find that it's not perfect there are aspects of reality which science is unable to wrap itself around and we need new methods and we need to evaluate the methods of signs and to really wonder whether they're going to be sufficient up to the task or not these are critiques of science which are post-rational the post-rational stages of cognitive development if you watched my series on spiral dynamics and my series on the nine stages of ego development the susan k greuter model so basically critiques of science coming from above are coming from stages of cognitive development yellow and turquoise on spiral dynamics and the construct aware and the unitive stage on the susan k greuter model don't worry if you don't understand what all this language means but for those of you who do i'm just pointing this out so you kind of understand what it means to critique signs from above basically a critique of science from above comes from a level of cognitive development that is beyond the rational and yes there is something beyond the rational that doesn't make it irrational it makes it rational plus it transcends the rational but includes the rational this is what ken wilbur refers to oftentimes as the pre-rational post-rational fallacy or the pre-trans fallacy this is when scientifically-minded people reject critiques of rationality and science because they're afraid that it's coming from below not from above they don't make this distinction they confuse these two and they think that all any critique of science just wants to take us back to the medieval times or into some sort of ideological belief in god no open your mind to a to a higher possibility now you might wonder leah why would anybody want to deconstruct science i mean science gives us good stuff technology so like leo you're sitting here and you're shooting this video uh you know using cameras and computers uploading it to the internet and all of this using fiber optics and uh microchips and all this kind of stuff and this is all science so aren't you being hypocritical here well of course i'm using science but i'm also not arguing that we shouldn't use science we're going to continue to use science stopping using science is simply not an option you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube but the reason you might want to deconstruct science is as follows consider that if you assume that science and truth are one thing and always perfectly aligned then it doesn't make sense to try to deconstruct science but consider the possibility that maybe science is one thing and truth is a second thing and that these things are not necessarily aligned in which case you might have to make a choice between science or truth and then the question becomes where does your loyalty lie if you have to choose one or the other which are you going to choose because after all if you've even studied the history of science a little bit there are many examples in the history of science where science was bad created wrong conclusions wrong theories and various kinds of deceptions so obviously science can be false it can be aligned with falsehood which means that it diverges from the truth so in that case if your loyalty is to science and not to truth can you see what's going to happen is that you're going to veer further and further away from truth there's going to be a divergence this divergence is going to grow if your loyalty is with science you're going to be defending science thinking that actually you're defending truth without realizing that actually these are two separate things and as you keep doubling down on your errors your epistemic errors if they're going to keep getting worse and worse and worse and you're going to veer further and further off into delusion which is in a sense the problem that you have with religion if you're a scientifically minded person see because one of your critiques of religion is that religious people don't admit their faults whereas scientific people are supposed to be able to admit their faults well how do you think that occurs that occurs by deconstructing science if you really love science you shouldn't be afraid to deconstruct it i suggest that it's better to have your loyalties with truth than with science because what we really care about is truth if you think about it what good is science if it is if it isn't getting us to truth see if your loyalty is to truth even when science diverges if the whole world is going mad with ideology and dogma and whatever kind of fad thinking that they are partaking in it doesn't matter because we've got the truth and we can use that to help realign signs back to the truth see so please don't make the naive mistake of thinking that science is equivalent to truth that's a big question mark whether that's the case we need to investigate that in a lot more detail which we will here now you might also wonder why is a self-help teacher talking about science leah what does this have to do with self-actualization well like uh i've given you this analogy and metaphor in the past is that if we think of your mind as a computer with an operating system that runs your entire life see science is the foundation of your operating system especially today you know in the past during the medieval era and for for centuries and even millennia mankind made sense of reality through religion today religion is going out of favor for obvious reasons and sometimes good reasons but then science is coming in to take its place science is not in this case just a collection of objective facts that is being given to you science becomes infused into the very foundations of your mind and how you see the world and it is how you make sense of reality it's certain it serves a sense-making function of your ego mind science is a foundation of your operating system and so you might say well what's wrong with that well what's wrong with that is again if there's a divergence between truth and science and science is at the heart of your operating system and your sense making then any errors within science are going to be infesting your own mind and corrupting how you see and make sense of reality so in practice belief in science is one of the biggest obstacles to understanding reality at the deepest levels which is what my work is about and what i care about the most is helping you to understand reality at the deepest levels that's where my loyalties lie that's my bias and to do that it's necessary like i said in the past to jail break your mind and the problem is that people say well leo but science has been so successful how could you possibly criticize or try to deconstruct science when it's obviously true because it's so obviously successful you know we can launch a man to the moon we can launch satellites and make computers and all this crazy technology well see this is what makes science so deceptive it's easy to see the foolishness of religion and the errors of religion because they're so obviously out of touch with everyday life and with reality science is harder precisely because science gives you all these shiny gadgets and widgets to play with science's success is precisely what makes it more deceptive and more dangerous than religion the greatest deceptions are not pure falsehoods they are truths with nuggets of falsehood inside of them such that then distinguishing the two becomes very very difficult and then they're extremely deceptive they're so deceptive that you would not even think or suspect that there could be any deception and that's exactly what makes a highly successful deception or illusion the success of modern science has given us an over inflated sense that we understand more of reality than we really do there's this sort of sense that oh well science has figured out 90 of reality maybe there's 10 percent left that it doesn't understand and you know if we give it a couple hundred more years it'll figure that out too and then we'll be done and science will have proved victorious this isn't the case there's a gross over-inflation of us thinking that we've figured reality out we have not there are deep foundational aspects of reality which we don't understand and that current science is preventing us from understanding now also keep in mind that my critiques of science here are going to be of current science this doesn't mean that science has to maintain these problems into the future science could change science could change tomorrow in fact that is in line with the spirit of science the problem though is that the spirit of science might say that it likes to change and that it's willing to evolve but when the rubber hits the road when someone comes along and actually starts to critique science and deconstruct it and show it a way forward into a new paradigm is that going to be accepted or rejected you see it's hypocritical on the one hand to say that you're willing to admit that science admits mistakes and that science evolves and yet when somebody comes along and tries to help you to evolve science you deny everything they say do you see the problem with that are you really so naive as to think that the epistemic errors of religion would not creep their way into science that just because you change the contents of your beliefs that that makes you immune to epistemic errors don't fall into that illusion so the reason that i am talking about this topic is because i need to help to jailbreak your mind because ultimately what i teach is i teach love i teach infinity i teach consciousness now how can i teach that to most people when most people's minds are infected by materialist science scientism really and that world view denies the existence and validity of love infinity and consciousness so of course we have to deconstruct this stuff to make to make room for love infinity and consciousness all right let's make the next distinction here an important one is that on the one hand you can have the doing of science and on the other hand you have understanding science as a system please understand that these are two totally different things independent variables so one of the illusions of science is that people who do science or people who see people doing science just automatically assume that well if that guy is doing science and he's getting success in his work then he must understand science obviously right wrong there are thousands of scientists all around the world in top research universities like mit caltech stanford harvard princeton whatever who are really really good at doing science much better than i ever could be they work in laboratories they do experiments you know advanced technical experiments with lasers and radiation and particles and all sorts of stuff they can write great research papers they can get their papers published they have a lot of peer-reviewed studies that they've that they've published they even have awards they even have nobel prizes they get lots of grants they have lots of experience they might have been a scientist for 40 years they're very well respected they have high status they've published many books but none of that that is the doing of science none of that is the same as understanding science as a system you might wonder well but how can that be how can someone do science but not understand what science is seems implausible but yet consider you've been using language for a long time very early in your life you've been using language but you didn't understand what language was or how it really worked in fact people who learn you know their first native language they don't learn it through rules of grammar they don't really understand what's going on with language they just learn it instinctually and they're really good at using it and most of the best language speakers they're great at using the language but they couldn't sit down and give you a scientific analysis of how language actually works or even what language is these questions didn't even cross their mind they're just using language they can use language to write a great novel or poetry or or whatever else be a great orator or speaker but that has nothing to do with understanding what language actually is these are two separate things likewise of course you use your body all the time you've been using it since birth the body is an elaborate highly complex machine bio machine we could say with trillions of cells and different organs and systems and you don't know how any of this stuff works you don't even know all the organs located in your body and where their locations are and what their functions are and yet they all work for you seamlessly and you're able to just go about your day and do the stuff that you got to do this is how most scientists do science most scientists have not seriously thought about what science is it hasn't even occurred to them that there would be value in doing something like this if you want to understand science as a system actually the trick is that you have to go outside of science because look what we're doing we're studying science science is trying to study itself this creates a self-reflection problem and so really that takes us into something i would call meta science the science of science otherwise known as philosophy or epistemology or metaphysics and so we'll be doing a lot of meta signs in the next four episodes and you'll see meta science is different than ordinary science and yet at the same time it's not separate from ordinary science now a common mistake that many professional scientists and academics make is they believe that well yeah sure leo you can talk about meta science all you want but at the end of the day i'm just interested in doing my science and i don't need all that meta-science stuff it's just a distraction be careful with that assumption because that itself is a meta-scientific assumption which you haven't carefully investigated and you don't know the full consequences of this assumption as it turns out if you really want to do the most groundbreaking revolutionary science that pushes the edges of your field and of human understanding then actually meta science is crucial for you because meta science is what is going to allow you to think outside the box of the limitations of the field that you're working in so if you're a professional academic or scientist the next four episodes are going to be crucial for you this is a game changer i'm telling you if you want to make if you want to get nobel prizes listen to what i'm telling you here learn these lessons apply them throughout the rest of your career and you will you will see that you will be able to run circles around your colleagues who are clueless about these things and in fact your greatest challenge will be actually trying to convince your colleagues of the discoveries that you make more on that in the episode too all right now another note i need to make here is that in deconstructing science we will not be disputing the purely empirical measurements of science so you know at a at its lowest level we could say that science is about making measurements of nature so when a scientist takes a measuring tape and measures a rhinoceros from its tip to its tail and tells us that it's 3.58 meters long or whatever i'm not going to dispute that now of course he could be wrong in his measurements but generally we're going to give scientists the better benefit of the doubt with basic measurement type stuff like that so we're not going to be disputing that what we will be disputing though is the interpretations the assumptions the context the paradigms the methodology and the meta science behind the empirical measurements and the entire sense sense-making apparatus behind these measurements because see if science was just an excel spreadsheet of measurements of nature then yeah there would be nothing much to deconstruct there but that's not what science is science is way more than that and we'll be getting that into that real deep here in a moment so before we do that though i want to create another distinction which will be very helpful for us there's really two meanings of science that we need to be concerned with here the first meaning is what i would call the pop cultural or the layman understanding of what science is this is the myth of science as i call it this is what people who are not professional scientists and academics think science is that's distinct from professionals and academics who have phds and who do serious science and think about it in much more depth than laymen do these people have a much more nuanced and better more accurate understanding of what science is but yet there's still a problem so there's going to be a trick that is being played by your mind here this is why this distinction is so crucial is that we're going to start by leveling leveling a basic critique of the pop cultural myth of science and this will crumble very very quickly as that happens the rats will start to jump ship to a new ship the professional academic ship and they will want to say well yeah leo sure of course yeah you made some critiques about cultural the cultural myth of science yeah people online and so forth are stupid they don't really understand science very well but the professionals the academics the guys at caltech and mit and so on they they don't suffer from from this pop cultural nonsense they really understand science and there's no fundamental critique of what they believe and that is precisely wrong so my critique will not just be of the pop cultural notions of science but also of the academic and the professional um and uh and actually this distinction is not so clear what i've noticed is that in practice many of the professional and academic scientists actually do buy into the many pop cultural myths of science so let's uh let's articulate a little bit more fully what this pop cultural myth of science is we might call this scientism rationalism atheism reductionism in the past it was called logical positivism logicism this is the following idea it's the idea that basically you have two camps and two ways of looking at the world you have the scientific and the rational and then you have the religious and the irrational and the new age and the woo nonsense these are your two basic categories of things and so if you're a rational person and you're a truthful person then you subscribe to the scientific sort of worldview and then if you're not if you have some sort of agenda or you're stupid or deluded then you believe in this hocus-pocus stuff over here and uh and that this stuff is defeated by this stuff over here if you just use sufficient logic then that will defeat all of the the hocus-pocus stuff uh and so this sort of battle is set up uh this battle is is present within the the culture and the zeitgeist and uh this is how we make sense of various kinds of perspectives that we run into in society right so you see somebody like deepak chopra on tv talking about something and you immediately if you're a scientific mind person you just kind of lump him into the the you know the woo crowd the crazy irrational crowd um or you know you see gwyneth paltrow and her like goop stuff um uh her group company and you just kind of throw that all into the irrational camp with the crazy religious nut cases and the fundamentalists and the radicals and whatever else and you know they're not being logical well i hate to break it to you but it's not so simple it's way more complicated than this and uh and so this uh this sort of myth of science it puts signs on this pedestal like science is the ultimate achievement of man science is how we get to objective truth it literally is objective truth and the only problem we have is that we have these new agers and these woo people and we have these fun religious fundamentalists who are just so brainwashed that if we just get people to forget about god and to forget about all this crazy religious new agey stuff and all this you know cult stuff and just get them to think more rationally and more scientifically then that will solve all of mankind's problems and that is the best that we can do that will lead us to objective truth and that will solve so many problems in society well this is a myth this is false this will never work and i will explain in a lot of detail going forward why it will never work uh see this myth idealizes and lionizes science and then when you subscribe to that myth you become very defensive of course because you've lionized that you've idealized it and now you're sort of committed to defending signs to the death ironically kind of the way that religious people do with their ideology you see the problem here is when you get really attached to one particular perspective or worldview then you start to bend over backwards to defend that worldview even in light of contrary evidence and then you have a divergence of that worldview from the truth and then all sorts of devilry and disaster ensues you have to remember that it's culture that creates scientists scientists are not born scientists are created by culture and in turn scientists then contribute to creating and changing culture again and so it's a sort of a self-feeding cycle see and we gotta look at culture in a lot more depth to see how it creates scientists and how scientists create culture so this myth of science is in a sense it's not separate from the academic and the professional scientists it it it it's fed by the academic and professional scientists and then that myth gets perpetuated in our media and elsewhere you know on online forums through reddit through these sort of youtube channels that are trying to debunk religion and so forth and you know the new atheist movement that has been popular in the last you know 20 or 10 years this sort of stuff that's all part of the the culture and then that in turn creates the next generations of scientists which then get that worldview imprinted as part of their operating system of their mind and then they will use that to do their science we'll be talking a lot more about culture in part two but okay so let me now give you a list of the uh of the biggest misconceptions of the pop cultural myth of science i'm not going to address and explain every single misconception here there's going to be like 20 or 30 misconceptions i'm going to just list them out just so that you get a big picture sense of why this is a myth and what i'm really pointing to when i say the myth of science all right so here's a list of misconceptions about science that is held by laymen and also by some professional scientists and academics who aren't being careful misconception number one is that science is just a collection of objective facts this is false the next misconception is that science equals truth because it works and because it's successful at producing technology this is false the next misconception is that there's a clear boundary between science pseudoscience and religion this is false the next misconception is that science is the opposite of religion and therefore it cannot be an ideology and therefore it's not subject to the same epistemic problems of religion it's immune from those problems this is false the next misconception is that science is not based on belief or authority this is false science is 99 belief and authority the next misconception is that science is immune from problems of the ego as though the ego is something that plagues other people and domains of life but not science and not scientists and not academics this is obviously false the next misconception is that scientists understand what science is we've already uh alluded to this uh touched upon this earlier uh no they don't you can't just assume that scientists understand what science is most of them don't just because they have a degree or a nobel prize doesn't mean that they understand science the next misconception is that science is objective and unbiased because it ignores things like subjective feelings emotions human psychology intuitions and first-person experiences this is false the next misconception is that if a thing is true it can be proven by science this is false the next misconception is that reason and logic are exclusive to science and are the thing that differentiates science from pseudoscience or from religion and other kinds of delusion this is false another misconception related to this is that reason and logic are objectively true this is false another misconception is that the scientific method is an obvious given monolithic and static singular thing there is this thing called the scientific method and if we can just adhere to the scientific method if everyone would adhere to it this would lead us to objective truth this is false no such method exists or could exist and i'll explain why very soon here the next misconception is that there is no methodological disputes between scientists as though all scientists agree upon the scientific method this is false the next misconception is that science does not make deep errors as though any errors within science sure we can admit that there are errors within science but you know it's surface level stuff you know someone made a bad measurement somewhere okay or did a little bit of bad science here or there you know it's one bad apple out of a bunch this is not the case the the errors of signs are much deeper deeper than just a single bad apple or one wrong measurement the next misconception is that unlike religion science is eager to correct itself there is a big component of this myth of science that well leo if somebody comes along and really points out the error of science science will accept that error and correct itself because that is part of the spirit of science is that we admit that we're fallible unlike the religious people this is false even though you say that you will admit of this error in theory in practice when the error is presented to you because it lies outside of your paradigm you're actually going to dismiss it and you're going to demonize the person who is pointing out the error and so in this way you'll get stuck another misconception is that science is immune to self-deception psychological historical and cultural forces as though science sits outside of and is immune to history to culture to fads in thinking to politics that's just not true another misconception is that science seeks truth that's a very dangerous assumption that's not true another misconception is that mathematics is subjectively true after all what could be more of a paragon of truth and objectivity than mathematics everyone agrees to that right that's false another misconception is that science proves the existence of an objective external material reality this is false science has never proven such a thing nor will it ever prove such a thing such a thing is impossible to prove even in theory let alone in practice another common misconception is that science proves the existence of other beings other than yourself this is false there's a host here of related misconceptions that i'll rattle off real quick that science proves also the existence of objects physical objects this is also false the misconception that science proves the existence of a self of a personal self this is false and that science proves that you are the body this is also false another misconception is that proof is a simple objective notion that is not relativistic this is false another misconception is that science does not have any contradictions within it unlike let's say religion this is false there are plenty of serious contradictions within science and in the third episode i will be giving you a large list of some 20 serious contradictions within science that i have discovered so hang in there for that that'll be an exciting list if you're skeptical the next misconception is that science is not circular unlike religion this is false science is most definitely circular the next misconception is that science has debunked religion mysticism the new age spirituality the paranormal esp and god this is false of course the next misconception is that science is not relative to culture language or the human mind this is false and the final misconception is that science is not corrupted by business or capitalism which is also false so that's a pretty serious list of misconceptions that's a lot to be misconceived about and i find that you know like folks on reddit or folks on youtube part of the pop culture you know intelligentsia they subscribe to these misconceptions very very easily but then also many professional scientists i'm telling you many professional scientists um who people look up to and respect like folks like neil degrasse tyson um you know i can start dropping names here uh lords krause sean carroll rick richard dawkins sam harris jordan peterson like i mean many of these people first of all i wouldn't even call them scientists really it's it's offensive to call these people scientists uh because i have a very rigorous standard for what i consider a true scientist um these people are more like public intellectuals than true scientists and um and yeah they have no idea what science is and they subscribe to many misconceptions and then even many very serious scientists at mit and caltech still fall prey to these misconceptions so just you know be careful all right now let's really get into the meat of this topic and where do we begin where do we begin understanding science well of course with basic questioning such as what is science that's the first and ultimate question essentially everything i'm talking about here has come from that one question what is science it seems deceptively simple it's so taken for granted by us because science is just the water we swim in if we were a fish if you grew up in the 21st century if you were born in the last 100 years science is just the water you swim in and it seems as though science has always been there and that it's obvious and that we know what it is so the first thing i want you to recognize whether you're a layman or whether even you're a professional or an academic or even a philosopher you don't know what science is please have the uh enough self-honesty and aware self-awareness to admit to yourself that you do not know what science is you don't know we have to start with that because if you think that you know what science is how can we really question science you already know you already have an ideology you already have a dogma and you're going to spend the rest of the time defending your pre-existing beliefs and the reason you don't know what science is because you haven't ever seriously contemplated it you haven't seriously investigated in fact you've probably never even thought about this question for an hour in your life you haven't taken it seriously and the reason why not is because your culture never put that idea in your mind that it's worthwhile to question what science is it seems like a waste of time right well but how would you know unless you actually questioned it and then the second important question here is how do you know that science is valid seriously how do you know you might say well leo mankind has used science for centuries now and it's produced all this amazing technology so obviously it's valid well that's uh an interesting theory but um there's two problems with that first of all the problem is that just because you create something successfully you know if you manipulate reality that doesn't guarantee that it's actually valid or true it just guarantees that you've manipulated reality using some system we could conceive of many different systems that could manipulate reality does it make it science doesn't make it true so just again be careful there can be a divergence there between truth and manipulation or success and success produces a very juicy illusion for example a lot of people are fooled by celebrities who are very successful and people think oh well they're so successful they must have a perfect life and then you know later you realize that no this guy is addicted to drugs he's addicted to sex and he's depressed then he ends up committing suicide and he wasn't happy at all even though he had money and he had hot women and he had everything he wanted but he was miserable so again success is not happiness success is not truth success is not science so just be careful about that and and also the other problem you have here is that of course you know science has historically made a lot of errors and mistakes so if science was able to make all those errors how can you be confident there aren't a bunch of errors being made by science right now i mean if you've been fooled once you'd be stupid to assume you can't be fooled twice so here's what i want you to really again using radical self-honesty and self-awareness i want you to admit the following thing that you have never validated science as a method never you have not done this and the reason i can be so sure is because it's actually not possible to do this you haven't done it neither has any scientist ever done it neither has mankind mankind as a whole ever done it and the reason they haven't is because it's impossible and i will demonstrate to you why that's the case over the next hour so just stay with me so let's think about this from scratch as it were where did the scientific method come from it should be pretty obvious that it wasn't there from the beginning in the beginning if you just imagine that you are the first human ever alive of course this is sort of a silly childish thought experiment but hey go go with me here imagine you're the first human ever born do you have the scientific method no of course not and how do you get it let's assume that you're going to be the first guy to get it how do you get it guy girl i'm using it gender neutral here uh let's be let's be politically correct um so how do you get it are you going to get it from god are you going to go up on a mountaintop and god is going to give you stone tablets etched with the scientific method the principles and rules for the scientific method and this is the method he god tells you this is the method that you shall use ye shall use this method to distinguish truth from falsehood and discover everything true about nature just follow these 10 steps no of course not right as a scientifically minded person of course you don't appeal to things like god giving you the answers you have to derive the answers from scratch for yourself and hey i'm sympathetic to that view but let's really really take on that view let's really totally assume that we start from a position of ignorance we know nothing we know nothing now to start from a total position of ignorance this is a very radical thing it's it's difficult for our mind to even conceive of such a thing and to imagine what that is like because our minds have been programmed by culture from birth with all sorts of ideas assumptions technologies and possibilities for how nature is we take most of these for granted we assume they were there from the beginning or that they were obvious but they weren't obvious and science wasn't obvious some human had to invent science which means some human had to decide how to do science some human had to sit down and say this here is valid science and this here is invalid science so the question is how did that first human distinguish between what was valid and what is invalid science what method did he use what criteria did he use how did he do that how is it possible to do that do you see the problem here if you're going to say well he just used science to distinguish between what was valid and valid no you can't do that because that begs the question because our question is how do you know that science is the right way see if you say that you can use science to distinguish between truth and falsehood that already assumes that you validated science and that you know that it's true but you don't know that if you say oh well he just used reason and logic to decide what is valid in valid signs no that also begs the question because the question then is how do you know what is valid logic and valid reason versus invalid logic and invalid reason you say oh well it's just evident self-evident no it's not it's not evident at all it's only evident to you because you're attached to whatever you're attached to that particular way of doing logic or reason and that has been all programmed by by your culture you didn't invent that and there's a further problem let's say you know you're the first guy to invent your scientific method but then there's a second guy the second guy on earth and he he independently develops his own method what are the chances that you two are gonna have the same method and that you're gonna agree and if you guys disagree how do we determine who's right what are you going to say you're going to say well we're just going to use the scientific method to determine who's right that's begging the question you're not getting the depth of the problem if you say that because the whole problem is that we don't know what the scientific method is which means that you can't use a scientific method to adjudicate between two different versions of the scientific method there's not just going to be two of them there's going to be hundreds of them thousands of them in fact every human is going to have their own version of a scientific method unless somehow we create a culture that corrals people to build a a unified method but even then you know there's not one culture in the world there's many cultures cultures have fragments they have subcultures within them you're never going to get everybody to agree on your method now here's the next important point is that we talk about science but what is science really a part of what is science really attempting to do science we could say is attempting to understand everything about nature that is possible to understand nature or you could call it reality or you could call it the universe basically if we conceive of the most ideal version of science what we really care about when we're doing science is we care about the pursuit of knowledge in a sense science is a subset of a larger pursuit which is the pursuit of knowledge so if you sort of imagine the super set of every possible fact and piece of true knowledge that you could have about the universe it's a lot of stuff a lot of knowledge if you could have everything written in like let's say let's say you could take everything true about the world and about you know the world i'm using world with a capital w the universe it's a better word everything's true about the universe and you could put it into a single book it would be a giant book realize that first and then so so we would want to say that in a sense science is interested in building that book that's what science is ultimately about science strictly speaking is not about building technology it's not about manipulating reality it's the pursuit of knowledge because you see if you say that no leo science isn't really interested in the total pursuit of knowledge it's interested in something smaller than that well that's going to be a problem later for you because you see if you say that science is only interested in the in the pursuit of physical stuff but not other kinds of stuff then here's there's a problem because if you're only going to be studying or investigating one part of reality then there's going to be some other part that you leave out that is going to be outside of your scientific method but nevertheless that's still going to be you can you can still have valid knowledge of that but it's just going to be outside the domain of science but you see that's going to be a problem because at heart the spirit of a true scientist and granted these people are pretty rare these days true scientists but the spirit of a true scientist is that a scientist is interested in everything that's true about nature a scientist doesn't judge a scientist doesn't say that well you know i'm interested in electrons but i'm not interested in rhinoceroses no there's no reason why an electron is more important than a rhinoceros you're interested in both as long as they're true as long as you can know something valid about either one you know and then you're interested in stars and you're interested in clouds and you're interested in the earth and you're interested in people and right even stuff like people you're interested in even like sexuality you're interested in sexuality there's a science of sexuality there's a science of people there's a science of politics there's a science of government there's a science of all sorts of stuff all of it is is interesting and potentially very very useful it can be very useful to do the signs of sexuality or the science of of you know government or something like that so we want to be careful not to draw our domain of science so narrow that we exclude the full possibilities of science so really what we're talking about here is the larger pursuit of knowledge agreed okay so if what we're talking about this is the the total pursuit of knowledge in the universe then the question becomes okay what are all the valid ways to pursue knowledge oh boy that's a that's a deep and thorny question what are all the valid ways to pursue knowledge you see most scientists have never even asked themselves this question and that's the problem because they're engaged in a pursuit of knowledge that they call science they've never seriously considered other ways of pursuing knowledge that might be beyond science or outside of science or the way that science has been defined so uh let's let's drive this point home with uh with the following method i am going to list off to you a list of various ways of potentially pursuing knowledge and as i list these off you get a sheet of paper if you want and you write down or circle the ones circle the ones on this list that are invalid science or invalid ways of pursuing knowledge and valid ones those who don't circle or rather i'm sorry i screwed this up uh circle the vat the ones you think are valid and leave the invalid ones uncircled all right all right let's do this so meditation is that a valid way of doing science yes or no if you think it is circle it next contemplation shamanism voodoo reading tea leaves belief witchcraft gossip from your neighbors speculation in an armchair logical deductions reason looking at omens like a crow flies over the horizon and to you that means that rain is coming dreams visions direct experience alchemy phrenology yoga scripture holy book meaning reading a holy book for knowledge ancestral stories stories passed down from your ancestors astral projection animal sacrifice books google searches microscopes radar x-rays interviews surveys polls statistics and drawing a map which of those are valid ways of doing science are you starting to see the problem you see it's not so easy do you think that these terms or items that you circled do you think that your friend or your mom or your dad or your college professor do you think they're going to have exactly the same list with the same circles on it or they can have a different list with different circles how do we determine which of the terms circled is correct you see the problem what criteria are we going to use how do we get people to agree on that criteria so consider the following possibility the following example let's imagine that you are alive 200 000 years ago and humans were alive 200 000 years ago according to science at least um so we'll just take that take that for granted uh you were alive 200 000 years ago you were living life in a small tribe in the amazon pretty much the way that some tribes still live in the amazon today it was just you and 50 people living in the amazon you were a secluded tribe and uh and you were a shaman in this tribe and of course one of the things shamans do you know they do their shaman stuff uh and uh and also what they do is they experiment with with various herbs you're living in the amazon it's a rich ecosystem lots of you know plants around and so of course you know humans depend on those plants so as just part of your survival and life and just your interest as a shaman you you sample different herbs and plants and just kind of discover what they do through trial and error maybe there's a couple of different flowers there's a green one a blue one a yellow one and you try these different flowers and you test what they do one day you try the yellow flower and you discover that this yellow flower cures cures your stomach ache you have a terrible stomach it cures it uh you're you're excited by this discovery and then you tell your villagers and your tribe of course because their you know tribal life is very communal it's almost like a family a family of 50 basically and so you tell everyone in your family that hey i can help you guys you know who has a stomach ache here i know it's a recurring problem in a tribe look i found the solution i found this miracle flower that will cure your stomach and sure enough you give it to them and it works it doesn't work all the time it works maybe 70 of the time uh but still that's pretty damn good and so this flower now becomes a part of your tribal zeitgeist and culture because you know tribe has its own culture people start to gossip about this flower and they tell each other oh yeah it's the yellow the magic yellow flower that will cure a stomach ache beautiful right and then and then later a couple years later you find uh you know a red flower and this red flower will cure uh will cure the plague you know sometimes a plague will will come into the village and you know you know decimate half the population and this will cure the plague and you discover that and this is a matter of life and death you know it could save your entire village save your life discovering this this red flower or whatever um so now my question to you is is is this shaman a scientist see this this puts you scientists in a very tricky position because if you're a professional scientist or academic you would not want to admit that a shaman is a scientist on the other hand common sense tells you that look i mean this guy is basically doing science i mean what's he doing he's experimenting with flowers he's fighting the ones that do something he's creating a catalog in his mind of which flower does what he's testing it on people i mean sure it's not a it's not some rigorous double-blind placebo-controlled study he's not doing it in some academic setting he's not part of some scientific community he doesn't write peer-reviewed research articles but i mean is this not science if what he's doing isn't science then you've got a problem because you've got a very artificial definition of science and again notice you might say that's not science and some someone else might say it is so again who's right you say well i'm right of course because we in in my university we've decided that that's not science okay well but but again can you see that that's just a cultural artifact that's culture there's nothing objective about that you see the problem here is that science really wants to construct the myth of an objective monolithic method of science and that if you just follow this method this will get you to truth but what i'm trying to show you here is that no such method exists it has never existed and it will never exist not even in theory is it possible it's an absurd idea and yet many scientists subscribe to this sort of myth but it's even worse than that because the the even uh scarier question for you is that tribe that now has a culture wherein the flowers you know have different properties are regardedly this the yellow flower cures your stomach ache the red flower cures the can the the plague or whatever um is that science because those people didn't actually do the experiments themselves they just believe it they have beliefs they just believe the shaman many of those people might have not even tried to flower themselves they might have never been sick with a stomachache or with a plague they just believe you know because in a tribe you just believe what the tribe believes and so the tribe tells you that oh that's a good flower that's a bad flower it'll do this and that and you just believe it is that science now if you say no that's not science again you're in a lot of trouble because what's the difference between what i just described in the way that most laymen who are not professional scientists know science they've never actually done any scientific experiments what's the difference but it's even worse than that it gets worse much worse because you see these these tribal people they don't just have a strict you know belief that oh this flower the yellow one does this the red one does that they add additional beliefs on top of that because this again this is helping them to make sense of the world it's not just factual information like yellow flower good red flower bad sort of thing or whatever it's uh it's much it's got much much more behind it because to them you know they have their sort of uh you know animistic belief worldview sort of system uh as the tribe and they believe in you know deities and spirits and ghosts and this sort of stuff and to them you know they believe that the yellow flower this is a gift from you know from the ancestor gods you know the god of of of water she gave us this flower because this flower grows near the you know near the lake and then this the red flower that cures the plague that flower was given us to us by you know by the god of war because you know he is associated with the color red and because these these flowers grow near you know near the you know near the volcanic pits or something where there's fire these are the war flowers and they will cure the plague you see and so that whole belief system and sense making system gets fused with the empirical data so to speak of what these flowers actually do and then that now my question is to you is that science now if you say no leo that's definitely not science now you've gone too far now that's religion and that's hocus pocus stuff well you've got a big problem because that's exactly how most people conceive of science in our society today the deities might be missing the deities were replaced by other things other images but uh see the way people hold scientific facts is not just as facts they put those facts into a a a rich matrix of sense-making which doesn't really have anything directly to do with the facts and not only do the layman do this you might say well those people are just dumb and superstitious they don't know any better the shaman you know he's more of a true scientist he knows better he doesn't do that no the shaman does it too and the academic scientists of today at mit and caltech and harvard they do it too now they do it in a secular way but just because it's done in a secular way doesn't make it any more true and what you see is that you can take the facts and you can embed them in different types of matrices so while that one tribe might have you know their constellation of gods and deities and whatever and myths the neighboring tribe next door is going to have their own they could use those same flowers to cure similar illnesses but then they're going to have a different constellation or a different matrix that they embed those facts into which is going to lead to a different worldview and you could have thousands of these different worldviews that these facts get embedded into including secular ones of today there's a further problem here this list that i just gave you that you were circling stuff on notice those items you didn't circle because you thought that they were pseudoscience or that you thought they were you know witchcraft or something like that let's work with the example of witchcraft it's a really good one so i assume most of you probably didn't circle witchcraft which means you think witchcraft doesn't constitute valid science but my question to you here is now how do you know that how do you know that witchcraft isn't valid science it's not so obvious it's really truly not so obvious have you actually done witchcraft no then how can you say that it's valid science i mean that it's invalid science in order for you to say that witchcraft is not valid science first you would need to actually do witchcraft to test it that would be in the spirit of science because if you just denounce witchcraft with actually testing it what you're being is you're just being ideological and you're just acting out your own prejudices and biases and beliefs what if witchcraft turns out to have a scientific component to it you say well that's crazy but how do you know it's crazy where did you get the idea that it's crazy from your culture but you didn't test that idea it's just a belief that belief could be wrong now you might say well you know i but you know i can go read a book about witchcraft and it's just nonsense first of all have you actually read a book about about witchcraft really i highly doubt it second of all it's not enough to read a book about witchcraft you gotta actually really do wishcraft like really get into it like i mean really get into it in the same way that for example if i wanted to validate uh an experiment within quantum mechanics i couldn't do that just by reading out one book about quantum mechanics to validate an experiment on quantum mechanics i would need to spend 12 years of school plus an additional four years of undergrad plus an additional probably two or four more years after that of graduate school and maybe then i would reach a point where i could finally after what 18 years and thousands of hours of study and practice only then maybe i might be qualified to actually validate one of those experiments and yet when it comes to witchcraft you don't even want to read one book about it you've dismissed it already can you see how problematic that is you're doing that with a lot of stuff with meditation with shamanism with yoga with astral projection with holy books with scriptures and many other things you're creating a confirmation bias do you see here it's a very deep profound confirmation bias it's a methodological confirmation bias in that what you're doing is that remember scientific method was not empirically validated at all we're just assuming what the scientific method was if you say that well the scientific method is xyz where did that come from it only came from two places either you validated it yourself or you made it up or your culture gave it to you so maybe three places but validating the method is very very difficult in fact it's impossible because there's thousands of different ways of acquiring knowledge and you don't know which of them are valid or invalid and it's even worse than that because usually these methods are not foolproof it's not that one method is 100 foolproof to use a method also means you have to know how to use the method properly and there can still be mistakes it's very easy to make mistakes so just because you try a little bit of witchcraft and you fail well that might just mean because you're you're doing it wrong in the same way that if i go try a little bit of quantum mechanics you know uh like in a laboratory with some you know particle collider i'll probably do it wrong i'll do it long wrong a lot it might also be very costly it might be very expensive it might take a long time may take 20 years so you see the deeper point here this is the the ultimate epistemic point that you gotta understand is that all knowledge is non-trivial distinguishing truth from halt from falsehood is completely non-obvious and non-trivial there's a even deeper point here which is the following if you are the first human alive and you are completely ignorant and you know nothing that means that you do not know whether alchemy will yield valid knowledge or astral projection will yield valid knowledge or some witchcraft will yield valid knowledge or some animal sacrifice will get you some valid knowledge or some meditation or some empirical observation see this is completely non-obvious we tend to assume that like well but leo out of all of these methods you mentioned probably the most scientific and rigorous one is the one which involves direct experimentation some form of empiricism where you are directly you know running an experiment but you're already assuming that as a given you actually don't know that how do you know that running an experiment will yield more valid knowledge than sitting in an armchair and just speculating now you say well leo it's obvious that if i'm just sitting there speculating then that that's not real knowledge that's not real science that's not obvious that's not obvious please understand this for this i have a a funny anecdote for you uh funny but also true and uh that is uh with aristotle you know aristotle was a greek philosopher he was married twice in his life as they say and uh for his entire life he argued that women have fewer teeth than men and you know during his time aristotle was actually considered one of the more empirical philosophers he was in in a large sense you know you could you could trace western developments of science back to aristotle he thought that we should explore the the tangible material world in a sense he was sort of a materialist and a pragmatist and yet he thought that women have fewer teeth than men and it never occurred to aristotle to ever open the mouth of his wife and actually count how many teeth she has to discover that it's the same number as him you would think that would be so obvious how could an otherwise intelligent rational intellectual like aristotle not have gotten the idea just to ask his wife how many teeth she has like if you're not going to open her mouth and let her count herself and just tell you it never occurred to him the idea that to know how many teeth someone has you have to open his mouth and count how many are in there that idea itself is revolutionary it seems obvious to us today if we're doing science but it wasn't obvious and in fact it's impossible to know that without trial and error who's to say that a microscope is a valid way of doing science you say well that's obvious of course it is no it's not it's not obvious at all the microscope could be distorting reality and presenting you a false picture you see you have to assume that a microscope is valid science that's not a given who says that radar or x-rays are valid data for science you say well of course they are no that's not obvious at all for this point i will bring to light an example that i like with galileo galileo faced this problem because he was the one of the first early adopters of the telescope and uh he didn't invent it but he he was one of the early adopters and his genius was figuring out that you can point this thing at the stars at the moon and see amazing things that you can't say with your naked eye for example he would look at jupiter and he would actually be able to to resolve and to count like four moons of jupiter that you couldn't see with the naked eye so he discovered these moons then he went to his uh you know his colleagues at the time uh now keep in mind of course everybody was religious back then uh so this was this this does not preclude science all scientists in galileo's time were all religious people uh that doesn't mean they were dumb but he took this information to to them and he said hey look i can discover these extra moons um and they said no that's that's impossible there can't be moons revolving around jupiter because you know our model of the solar system doesn't have these kinds of moons that's impossible and he said well i'm not asking you to believe me or to take this on as faith here's the telescope i invented this you know like i invented this device look it up in the look up in the sky and you can count the moons for yourself and what do they tell them did they say oh okay yeah let's look in there no of course not because they were coming from the position that there are no such moons and there couldn't be such moons therefore what that means is that any moons that are visible through this telescope obviously that's a work of the devil it's an illusion so they condemned his telescope as the work of the devil and they never looked into it and then of course they even got him into trouble and then eventually he went up in house arrest and so forth for various other positions that he held but anyways uh i love this example because what it shows you is that the human mind's capacity for denial of data is infinite it's bottomless you can deny any data that is presented to you all you have to do is deny the method that yields the data you see if i find something through a microscope that contradicts your worldview that threatens your worldview and i try to present it to you what do you got to do all you have to do is discredit the microscope as a method you have to say that's not real science if i discover some data with radar that threatens your worldview all your ego has to do is just say well of course radar that's for idiots radars pseudoscience are you getting how the game works there is no neutrality or objectivity in how your mind understands reality your mind is constructing reality on the fly and what you consider science is part of the meaning making system of your ego mind this is not objective at all even though your ego mind tells you that it's of course objective anything the ego mind imagines as being real it considers to be objectively true that's just that's exactly how religious people fool themselves but so do scientists see here are some questions for you is history science if you say no you've got a problem because are you going to say that historical facts don't exist well if they do supposedly there's a science that that's part of science or should be right like for example did did julius caesar actually get killed by you know by the senators on a certain date did that actually happen supposedly that's a scientific fact if it did but that's within the domain of history so are you going to say history of science or not but you know the problem with history is that there's there's a lot of speculation within history too history is not just a collection of empirical facts there's a whole narrative process behind history history is politicized it's not a it's not some objective telling of of the unfoldment of the universe history so you've got a problem both ways whether you college science or not you're damned if you do and dammit if you don't how about computer programming is that science you might say it's not but then again why can't you have a science of how to do coding you could have various principles and rules of how to code properly there's true things and false things about how to how to program a computer to do certain tasks how about filmmaking is that science you might say no that's not science that's art but there's a lot of scientific aspects to filmmaking like how to light the scene lenses camera angles a lot of technology is involved in that and furthermore you can have a science of like how to tell a good story how to write good characters cinematography lighting color correction audio are you going to exclude that from science how about criminal detective work like if someone in your office you got an office of 20 co-workers someone in your office steals your stapler and then you go on a hunt to to to track down this this cretan who stole your stapler and doesn't want to you know confess so what do you do you know you act like sherlock holmes you take out your detective eyeglass and a hat and then you go around looking for clues and fingerprints and hairs and whatever and then you do some detective work and through some sherlock holmes in detective work you discover that it was bill from accounting who stole your stapler uh is that science supposedly if bill from accounting actually did steal your stapler that fact that he did do it that's a scientific fact you might want to say right are you going to deny that like dna evidence in criminal investigations is science that's a problem if you deny that on the other hand it's sort of a problem if you admit that this is this detective work is science because it really takes you outside of the traditional scientific method as conceived by by rationalists and you know atheists and so forth because this this you know sherlock holmes into detective work and this is this is this is pretty fuzzy stuff this is not some sort of you know objective uh formal scientific method being used here it's it's a lot of guesswork and detective work and um you know piecing things together and then who knows whether that result is even valid and whether you can really rely on it how much validity it has what if there's a you know what if you make a mistake how do you validate all that it's it's it's very hairy how about map making if i'm making a map of the earth by just walking around and drawing on a piece of paper or sailing on a ship you know the way the folks did before satellites and computers and so forth uh is that science go take a look at some of the early maps that were made by european explorers of the americas and so forth like it's they're pretty funny when you look at some of them but was that science so hopefully you're starting to see that this idea of a single objective monolithic scientific method which is static and doesn't change and can clearly differentiate between all the different ways of studying reality that this is a fantasy no such thing has ever existed and can never exist in even in theory it doesn't work doesn't make sense all of these different ways of knowing nature come with a ton of assumptions hidden assumptions which themselves have never been tested and are not objective and when you select one method over another method realize that this is your own subjective mind relativistically deciding that okay well this will be our method that's not objective there's nowhere in the universe that says that like well microscopes are valid method x-rays are valid method radar's valid method but witchcraft is not and map making is not and filmmaking is not this is far too simplistic obviously it doesn't work that way so one of the mistakes of modern science is that it assumes there is an objective method and that such a method is possible whereas in fact in reality method is completely relativistic and what i'm saying here is worse than you even think i'm not just saying that we haven't found the method yet but one exists to be found in the future what i'm saying is that there just isn't such a method in the entire universe because the universe is relativistic all knowledge is relativistic let me ask you this if i take a frog and i put him in a blender blend him up into like a juice and then i study his cells under a microscope and i make some conclusions from that like okay i can there's this fact about the frog and that fact about the frog and then through this method i i come to understand the frog i study the frog through this blended liquid that i make in the blender um and i say okay now i understand the frog it's just a bunch of cells and a bunch of fluids and matter is that valid science is that all there is to science what if there's more to science what if there's more about this frog than just the cells it's made out of you see to put a frog in a blender to think that you can understand the frog by blending it up and studying itself under a microscope this comes with serious metaphysical and epistemic assumptions within the mind of the scientist the scientist has to believe that this is a valid way of understanding what frogs are now sure enough maybe that is a tiny portion of how to understand a frog but can you imagine a scientist who only studies animals by putting them in blenders and then studying the liquid that comes out and then he convinces himself that well that's it that's all there is to nature but then some other guy comes along like me and says well you know what i don't like to blend frogs in a blender i will study the frog in other ways i'll you know i'll keep the frog as a pet i'll study his behavior and his mating habits and so forth his eating habits all get to know the frog that way and maybe i'll understand more about the frog that way than by blending it up and studying under microscope and but the scientist who blends frogs he says what are you talking about that's not science that's some [ __ ] pseudoscience that's some new age stuff you know oh yeah you're going to keep a frog as a pet ha ha that's not academic that's not objective so my question to you is who's right me or him and of course the answer is that neither one of us is right it's relative if we want to really articulate the essence the spirit so to speak of the scientific method we could say it's something like this this is the best that i've been able to do basically the spirit and i use the word spirit here very deliberately to poke fun at the uh the rationalists and the scientists because uh they love they're annoyed by this word um but really this is the problem is that modern science has lost its spirit so what is the spirit of science the spirit of science is something like open-minded empirical investigation which goes something like this these are the principles nothing is known a priori nothing is obvious we start from a blank slate of total ignorance we don't assume anything we don't hold any dogmas we don't speculate excuse me we don't speculate and we don't philosophize everything we claim about nature we need to test every issue must be tested against experience such that we discover and let nature tell us how it works rather than us telling nature how it should work let nature tell us how it works and then whatever nature reveals to us that truth must be accepted no matter how radical or inconvenient it is and sometimes it can be very inconvenient and very radical sometimes we will assume that nature is going to work this way but then nature tells us that no that's not how i work i work something some other way in which case i as a scientist have to be willing to surrender my pet ideas and beliefs and biases and i have to admit that i've been wrong and for this i have to keep a very very radically open mind because nature could surprise us in fact that's been the history of science is that nature keeps surprising us more and more and more mistakes will happen necessarily in this process and the only remedy to that is just to admit our mistakes and to be willing to really look for our own mistakes rather than denying them or sweeping them under the rug that's the essence of science uh notice that it's extremely broad and even as broad as that is you know it it could encompass a lot of stuff so notice that my method here is so broad that it even includes something like witchcraft because i don't know that witchcraft doesn't work i don't know that it's invalid for me to know that i have to go actually do a lot of witchcraft try it out test it see uh maybe there's something to it maybe i'll learn something from witchcraft i can't just assume i can't even assume what witchcraft is until i go and actually do it and i have to keep an open mind such that if witchcraft actually reveals something to me that is contrary to conventional science or whatever i have to accept that and i have to be willing to challenge conventional science because uh my experiment shows that there's something to witchcraft and i have to be willing to admit my mistake that you know if i've been ridiculing witchcraft my whole life now i have to admit that hey i was wrong how many scientists are actually willing to do that actually very few very few you see the problem with science is that there are many domains of phenomenon within nature we could say that all that nature is is just a collection of phenomena that's it there's nothing we have of nature but phenomena different kinds we have phenomena of the earth in the oceans in the sky in the in outer space that's all it is it's different phenomena we have phenomena dreaming we have phenomena thinking seeing hearing that's all phenomena and as we explore more and more phenomena this opens up new fields and new domains of phenomena that previously were inaccessible to us and as we do science and we develop new technology that opens up new fields for example when we first started you know we couldn't really explore under the oceans and now we can we couldn't go to the moon and into outer space and now we can um and even with something like uh psychedelics you know now with modern chemistry we can take a certain chemical uh easily knowing what the chemical is take it in isolation from other chemicals and we can test its results and impact on phenomena but the problem is is that we are opening up new domains of phenomena and there's always the methodological meta-scientific question of which of these domains are valid and what are the methods by which we will investigate these domains different methods are required for different domains the method that you're going to use underwater is not the same method that you use for studying microscopic stuff and not the same method that you study you know the cosmos with not the same method that you study sexuality with not the same method you used to study you know chimp behavior and chimp psychology not the same method you used to study human politics not the same method that used to study uh consciousness the inner human mind and psyche these all require different methods which means that ultimately scient the scientific method has to be so broad to encompass all of that that in a sense there's a problem here if you try to make the scientific method too narrow and confined and limited that excludes certain domains of phenomena and then you don't count that phenomenon as evidence anymore as data it's excluded by your method and then there's a sort of a catch-22 here because once your method is so narrow that it excludes an entire domain of reality a phenomenon when someone comes to you and says hey your method is too narrow let's expand your method because look there's some data here outside of your method which obviously contradicts or you know your method can't account for what is the person who is locked into their method say in response he says what are you talking about that's pseudoscience that's hocus pocus because my method says so but that's begging the question because the whole question is how do you know that your method is accounting for all the phenomena of nature you didn't know that from the beginning you never had an ability to validate your method because in order for you to know that your method was valid and could accommodate all of the phenomena of of nature you would have to completely know the truth the only way to empirically validate the entire well to empirically validate the scientific method would be to explore the entire universe in totality and to know every fact about the universe and only then you could say in retrospect that yeah our method was valid but of course if you knew that you wouldn't need to do science the whole purpose behind science is that science is supposed to be the thing that distinguishes truth from falsehood and uh in a sense we're developing the method as we're using the method because we were never given the method to begin with we had to develop it as we were going there's a great metaphor by otto neurath philosopher of science in the 1900s where he he said our situation epistemically is something akin to trying to build a ship at sea we find ourselves floating in the sea without a ship and we have to build it while we're floating we're not building it on land there's no foundation we're creating the foundation as we go so you see the greatest danger with any kind of pursuit of knowledge is that your theory and your speculations and assumptions and prejudices when they're not grounded in inexperience leads you into delusion but modern science itself fails to clear its own bar it's like modern science has set this high bar of testing everything against experience but modern science has not been able to test the scientific method itself against experience because that would require investigating the entire universe which obviously it hasn't done so modern science can't clear its own method can't i mean can't clear its own bar that's the irony in the contradiction of it open mindedness and neutrality are key in doing scientific investigation and contrary to popular belief most scientists are not open-minded nor are they neutral modern science tacitly holds a materialist realist objectivist metaphysics this metaphysics has not cleared the bar of empirical validation it has not been validated and yet it's held as true just like the gods of that tribal shaman people and the flowers the whole problem is that you're holding metaphysical and methodological biased dogma and you're not willing to surrender it because you're attached to it which is the exact problem of religion it's the problem of the human mind this is a much broader problem than just religion so the fundamental epistemic problem is this we start from a position of total ignorance we cannot know how to distinguish truth from falsehood if we did life would be easy but we don't there cannot be an explicit method for doing science because knowing the validity of the method would require no knowing everything about reality which obviously we don't therefore this is the contradiction of science is that uh your faith in the scientific method is not the product of rigorous testing and validation therefore in fact it's not scientific and it's appropriate to call it faith literally scientists have faith blind faith in the scientific method and this is what gets them in trouble because their method is limited and it will always be found limited in the future it will always need to be expanded there's a further problem here which i call the circularity problem the problem of question begging within science and it goes something like this how is the scientific method validated if you use the scientific method to validate the scientific method then science is circular similar to religion so one of the critiques leveled against religious people like a christian for example is a scientific person or an atheist will speak with a christian and uh ask the christian like well so you believe god exists how do you know god exists and the christian will confidently say well the bible says so and the atheist will say well sure it says so but how do you know the bible is true and the christian will say well it was the bible was written by god obviously and the atheists will say but that's circular logic you see how can i argue with you when you're when you're justifying your worldview in a circle and then he'll smugly say this as though he's superior he's in a superior position but then we take a scientist and we have the exact same problem i tell the scientist well okay so you're scientists you believe in science how do you know it's valid well the scientific method is valid how do you know that well because obviously we've used the scientific method to validate science it's a closed circle you see the problem here is that if there is any mistake within your scientific method that you're not conscious of you will be using that method to validate your own method thereby doubling down on the mistake therefore creating a blind spot within your method therefore data outside your method will not have a way of entering into your method because you're going to be in denial about it because you assume your method is true without ever validating it other than through your method it's sort of like saying i'm always right well but how do you know you're always right well because i always feel that i'm right but what about in this case when you're wrong well that that case i can't be wrong because i feel that i'm right yeah but what if you're feeling that you're right isn't right and it's wrong but i feel that it's right yeah that's the problem that's the whole problem you got to see through that and in order to see through that see you can't do it with science you need meta science to be able to do this because if you're only confining yourself to science and one of the tricks the scientific mind uses it says well but i have to stick to science i can't go outside of science because if i go outside of science then that's falsehood meta science that's woo stuff leo that's not truth but you see that's exactly what the religious person is doing like if i tell a muslim for example hey take some psychedelics and uh maybe you'll discover that there's something outside of islam or like go study some christian texts and you'll discover something outside of islam to the to the muslim this is this you can't do that because for him to even go into a christian church is already a violation of his own faith you see that's something evil that's something wrong so he's never going to go he's never going to read about christianity he's not going to read about buddhism he's not going to take a psychedelic why because his worldview tells him that that's all false that's all the work of satan right now you scientists don't have an idea of satan but you behave in the exact same way anything outside your narrow confines of science you consider invalid and yet of course the very confines of science have never been validated so there you go that's your problem right there so actually in truth it's impossible to distinguish science from pseudoscience if you could do that you would already have all the truth in the universe and therefore you would need to do science it begs the question when you assume that you can distinguish science from pseudoscience which is why it's so silly you know people on reddit and youtube and elsewhere you know the you know they make these accusations like oh that's pseudoscience but actually you don't know that you're begging the question there is no clear line between science and pseudoscience you have to do science to distinguish between the two there's also no clear line between science and philosophy in fact science is a subset of philosophy and historically you should know this if you've taken some philosophy classes is that of course science used to be called natural philosophy science is an offshoot a branch from philosophy and the reason that is that that's not just an accident it had to be that way because the only way you can do science is from a larger domain of meta science in a sense the meta science comes first before the science and when you forget that and then you dismiss philosophy this is also part of the myth of science is this misconception that ah well philosophy this is not true science we don't have anything to do with philosophy if we if we take philosophy seriously that actually dilutes our science makes it less pure nothing could be further from the truth look at this the belief that philosophy is dumb and irrelevant and unscientific and unnecessary to the hard sciences is itself an untested metaphysical epistemic claim which you hold unconsciously what you have to notice here is that your mind your ego mind is playing tricks on you it's constantly the power of the ego mind is that it has the power to dismiss or to deny anything that it wants or doesn't like you can deny any point any fact any interpretation any argument any logic at any time as long as it suits you and you will convince yourself that what you're doing is truthful when actually it's just self-serving you see the problem fundamentally with scientists is that they want to turn science into a dumb brute mechanical process where you just have this like meat grinder you put the meat at the top of the meat grinder you spin the wheel like an idiot you know you just spin the wheel like an idiot and then scientific facts and truth comes out the other end like that this is the ultimate ideal of objectivity the human aspect of science is completely taken out you don't need any intelligent you don't need any thought there's no relativity there's no subjectivity it's just a meat grinder just stuff it in the meat grinder grind it up and truth will come out this is not how science actually works and in fact when you conceive of science in this way there is nothing scientific about that conception firstly realize that secondly when you conceive of science that way you're going to get bad science because there's going to be aspects of nature which do not align with your meat grinder approach to studying nature you can't just assume that oh well nature should fit into my neat grinder neatly no no no you have to ask nature hey nature are you the kind of thing that will fit through a meat grinder and then come out the other end in a truthful way or not and then let nature tell you whether that's going to work or not and what you'll discover is that nature will rebuke you for being so stupid to think that nature is so simple that it can be reduced in such a dumb mechanical way you've underestimated nature and you've done so from a meta scientific position what you're doing is not science even though you're calling it science that's the problem what you call science is not really science it's stupidity it's closed-mindedness it's the limits of your own ego mind which you're not recognizing because you don't take self-awareness as an important aspect of science you think you can do science out there in the world without deeply self-reflecting about the very mechanism through which you're doing science which is your ego mind and of course that's going to create serious serious epistemic scientific blunders so i'm not saying that you need to deconstruct science because science is being mean to religion i'm saying you need to deconstruct science for the benefit of science itself because it's like science is punching itself in the face you might think that logic and reason here can save you from this problem of circularity it can't because logic and reason itself faces the same problem of circularity how do you know which reasons are valid those of you who i call rationalists who think that the world is rational and you can just distinguish truth from falsehood through rationality this is complete nonsense this itself is irrational everybody who's ever believed anything crazy or false throughout all of human history has always had good reasons and logic behind their beliefs that being the case how can you ever ever think that you could trust logic and reason logic and reason are completely co-opted by the ego mind you can't trust them there is in fact no distinction no clear distinction between the reasonable and the unreasonable the rational and the irrational the notion of rational is actually culturally defined it's a culturally defined notion and word which evolves and changes over time what is considered rational today is not always considered rational 100 years ago or a thousand years ago and it's not going to be what is rational 500 years from now by future generations how do you know what is rational that's the problem right now i want to read you a quote here from a great philosopher of science paul feyrobin he writes extensively on this topic this is uh if you want more on this you can read his book called against method and other books that he has about this topic he says quote one can show the following given any rule however fundamental or necessary for science there are always circumstances when it is advisable not only to ignore the rule but to adopt its opposite the material which a scientist actually has at his disposal his laws his experimental results his mathematical techniques his epistemological prejudices his attitude towards the absurd consequences of the theories which he accepts is indeterminate in many ways ambiguous and never fully separated from the historical background this material is always contaminated by principles which he does not know and which if known would be extremely difficult to test end quote and i have another quote here from louis de broglie who was one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics in the early 1900s he writes quote the history of science shows that the progress of science has constantly been hampered by the tyrannical influence of certain misconceptions that finally came to be considered as dogma for this reason it is proper to submit periodically to a very searching examination principles which we have come to assume without any more discussion end quote and one more quote here from max born who is also one of the early founding fathers of quantum mechanics he writes quote i believe there is no philosophical high road in science with epistemological signposts no we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error building our road behind us as we proceed we do not find signposts at crossroads but our own scouts erect them to help the rest end quote so a lot of what we consider science is actually retroactive justifications for a process of trial and error a very complex messy hairy process of trial and error which was actually never this simple process of the meat grinder it was a deeply intuitive human process with many errors and pitfalls and a great price was paid to get to the point we're at now but you should always be careful that you can't assume it's just going to be simple from here on out it wasn't easy to get here and it won't be easy to get to the next step what got us here is not what is what is not what's going to get us to the next step all right now let's move on to the next point this is a big one on the one hand science wants to claim that it is strictly empirical yet in practice it's highly theoretical and most of the people involved in science actually do zero empirical work the myth of science tells us that science is 99 fact and one percent interpretation or theory actually it's exactly the opposite science is 99 interpretation in theory and conjecture and speculation and interpretation and assumption and all this and one percent only one percent of any kind of empirical fact science has never been a set of individual raw facts like some database or excel spreadsheet the myth of scientism paints science this way when you start to conceive of science as just an excel spreadsheet of raw facts that are objectively true uh that are unbiased and independent of humans this this whole view of looking at nature in reality is so simplistic it's so dumb it's so counterproductive to doing quality science it's just it's also completely historical i want you to see that science is full of simplifications and idealizations even the most simple statements that you might think are just brute facts brood objective facts are not something like for example the the statement lemons are yellow first of all i'll ask you is that a scientific fact is that an objective scientific fact many people would say yes it is we can prove it with science really though you're going to claim that's an objective scientific fact can you see how problematic this is this idea of lemons are yellow this is not a fact you find in the world you don't go out with a measuring stick and find the truth that lemons are yellow uh first of all what is meant by a lemon and what is meant by yellow these are not simple notions these are complex notions that are intertwined with language and language is intertwined with metaphysics very deeply so the notion of a lemon what counts as a lemon what if there exists you know most conventional lemons that they sell at the supermarket are yellow when they're ripe but before they're ripe they're green so does that count see you have to exclude that if so no what i really meant to say is that ripe yellow ripe lemons are yellow not the little green ones okay um but see you have to qualify these statements this is a deeply subjective relativistic human enterprise this is not objective fact and then what happens when there are different species of levens what if there's a a species of lemon that's genetically engineered in the future that's going to be blue is that that's going to invalidate your claim um and then what even counts as a lemon is there even such a thing as a lemon i mean conventionally speaking we know what lemons are but ultimately there's no such thing as lemons there are individual lemons so we've created this abstract category called lemon but really there are millions and billions of specific lemons and these lemons are always changing science itself tells us that these lemons are evolving that means no two lemons have the same dna they're always evolving mutations in the dna and so forth new species can be uh you know born any at any time um and then what what counts as yellow i mean is a lemon really yellow are all parts of it yellow what about little dots there they're kind of more brown and black um and then different there are different shades of yellow like so what counts as yellow at what point is it green rather than yellow or more of a kind of a brownish color you see this is all extremely subjective so the idea that lemons are yellow is some objective fact no i mean it's it's it's a gross abstraction gross abstraction how about the statement the earth is round you might say well it's round but is it though what counts as the earth i mean like if you actually look at the mountain ranges of the earth i mean assuming you you buy the idea that the earth is not flat let's just take that one for granted but assuming you buy the idea that the earth is spherical um but when you actually zoom into the mountain ranges i mean they're not ra they're not round at all so what does it mean to say the earth is around like how far do you have to zoom out if you're zoomed in enough the earth doesn't look round when you're on the earth it doesn't look around at all to say the earth is round when you're standing on it is rather absurd you you have to zoom out so you have to zoom out but then so when you say the earth is round you're sort of privileging the zoomed out position rather than the zoomed in position which is true see and and what does round mean at what point does an object go from being round to not round is there a clear boundary there you see these these are very tricky thorny philosophical linguistic metaphysical issues science is completely intertwined with culture with language with philosophy with with with basically everything you can conceive of it's this giant mess which makes it so challenging how about for example evolution you say well science has proven evolution evolution i mean i'll agree with you let's say let's let's just grant that science that's proven evolution okay fine um i'm not gonna dispute that but let's um but this idea that evolution is an objective empirical fact this is very problematic you don't go out into nature and find evolution you don't see evolution every anywhere evolution involves a lot of theory assumption conjectures connecting various kinds of dots in abstract ways over time you don't just find evolution hanging on a tree branch this is a highly conceptual scheme model that is invented in the mind of man and then is projected onto nature to explain certain facts and certain phenomena that are happening it's a very powerful model it's it's great in certain ways but consider that that is something the human mind is projecting onto the facts it's not strictly empirical it's way more than empirical uh how about the example with with dinosaur skeletons did you know first of all that when you go to a museum and you look at dinosaurs the thing you're looking at it's not even a real dinosaur skeleton the real dinosaur skeleton that's a fake the real ones are like in there you know in the back room somewhere uh but even assuming the real ones uh you know when you see dinosaurs in jurassic park or you even see them like on the discovery channel they have those documentaries with the dinosaurs they show their skeletons a lot of times the skeletons they show i'm not even talking about the bodies but just the skeletons alone most dinosaur skeletons are very incomplete like a lot of times when they find a t-rex or something it's going to be only 10 complete 20 complete rarely do you find 100 complete skeleton even 80 would be amazing to find so usually what scientists do is they take multiple skeletons from different parts of the world of the same species they think or roughly the same and then they come they try to combine them together to create you know as whole of a skeleton as they can and even when they do that they still don't reach 100 then what they do is they they extrapolate and interpolate you know like we have this bone here and that bone here and then like what what what would it look like in the middle we don't have that but we can kind of guess maybe what that is and then they guess it so that i mean i'm using this example because it's perfect to illustrate just how unempirical the whole process is and how much it involves guesswork and interpolation and so forth and i'm not even mentioning you know when they actually flush out the the flesh of the skull of the of the skeleton of the dinosaur and they paint it various colors is that science when they paint a t-rex certain colors that's science we don't know what what color the t-rex was we don't really even know if it had feathers or not or what it really um we don't really even know if it was like warm-blooded or cold-blooded or something in between these are all open questions um now that doesn't invalidate dinosaur science it just it just shows you the challenges of science it's not as clear-cut as it is painted out to be by many folks similar with for example the atomic model the classic atomic model where you have like a ball the you know the nucleus of the atom is the ball with electrons on the balls spinning around in circular orbits this this has been completely debunked by quantum mechanics in the early 1900s and yet this simple atomic model is still the kind of model that most people are walking around in in their minds with and they really think that like my hand is made out of these little you know little balls of rotating molecules and stuff like that that's how they make sense of reality what difference is there really between that absurd model that's completely false versus the tribes people who had a little who had their own model about you know how the flower is you know coming from the water deity or whatever or the the war god or something like that what difference is there they're equally false they're equally fictitious and yet these models can still be useful in explaining nature so see the problem with science is that since science does a lot of modeling mostly what it does you can have a lot of different models for the same amount of data this leads us to this problem in science called the under determination problem what this means the under determination problem means that given a set of raw data points let's say i have five raw data points i can create many models and many explanations for that for those five data points this model will account for these five data points and then usually it'll also have implications for future data points these models what makes them different is that they have different implications for the future data points even though they all account for the original five if they're a good model so this gives us hundreds of potentially different models which could account for different data points some of these models could be identical some of them could be interchangeable but others not and it's very difficult to tell which model is right which was wrong and this is a lot of what science is about and a lot of what you understand of nature how you conceive of stars and planets and the earth and atoms and whatever evolution is all models highly conceptual abstract stuff fantasies in the minds of man not objective fact and these models can change but we get attached to these models because these models create a sense of reality for our ego they're more than just models for predicting data they are ways of making sense of reality and then once our mind gets stuck with those ways of making sense it can't shift it's like a record stuck on a groove and it can't get out of that groove and then it denies other models and it mistakes those models for reality itself for truth but truth is not a model that's something we'll talk about more in future episodes so the reality is that all of science is theory laden deeply theory laden and in fact the idea that you can separate fact from theory at all is a complete illusion no such separation is possible the way science really works is that science is a giant web of ideas all validating each other in a giant web in a circle every idea is pointing to other ideas these ideas loosely connect on the periphery to some sort of empirical data which really that's not objective truth what it's connecting to is different measurements from our instruments for example you weigh an apple and that data point is on the periphery of this field of science that you have and then you measure the length of a kangaroo and you put that number here then you measure your height you put it here then you measure something else you put it here and all these different measurements and that's just the thin periphery of this field and then on the inside though is all of the way that you're making sense of all this data and this can be rearranged in a million different ways it can be secular it can be religious it can be new age it can be witchcraft on the inside accounting for the same data so the religious person in a sense is also doing science um they're still accounting for the same data for example a religious person still has to explain why the earth is here why they're dinosaurs uh you know what atoms are et cetera et cetera they all they still have to explain all the same all that data they just explain it in a different way and what you take objection to is not the data but how to explain the data and which data to focus on and how to interpret the data and what the data means because raw data in and of itself means nothing to you as a human as an ego i can give you a giant spreadsheet you know a million pages long of various data about nature and it means absolutely zero to you that's not what you care about that's not what you argue about when you're in some argument on youtube or on reddit about some scientific fact or some new age nonsense that you think needs to be debunked you're not arguing about data you're arguing about your interpretations and you're the way you're making sense of reality and the reason you're getting emotional about it and the reason you're getting triggered about it you don't get triggered by data nobody gets triggered by data the ego gets triggered and emotional about things that threaten its survival that's one of the clues so science scientific statements are tested as a whole body they are not tested as individual statements in fact it is impossible for example to take a statement such as lemons are yellow and to validate that statement in isolation by itself that's a myth you can't actually do that to test whether the statement lemons are yellow is actually true what you're doing is you're bringing in your entire web of meaning making language culture various assumptions logic and so forth you're bringing that in and then your methodological assumptions about how to actually test that lemons are yellow what constitutes a valid test and all of that you're bringing in there and much of the that meta baggage that you're bringing in that meta science um you're not even conscious of what that stuff is and you're pretending as though you're neutral and that stuff is just a given it's obvious when in fact it's not no fact means anything in isolation from the framework that it's looked at from interpretation is unavoidable in science there are also methodological questions that are relativistic and problematic such as which phenomena to study which phenomena is worth studying because there's a near endless amount of phenomena in nature to study what do you study what do you allocate funds and time to your energy to your finite time energy and money which questions do you ask because the questions you ask determine the answers you get back if you don't ask a certain question you will get a certain answer this is highly relative and subjective which experiments do you run how do you design your experiments how do you know which experiments uh which experimental designs are proper and which are improper which are going to buy you know how you design your experiment biases the results you get back and then how do you interpret the results of those experiments how do you categorize things that's another relativizing factor you know even categories like lemons or limes or citruses or oranges or you know fruits vegetables these sorts of categories these are highly relative and subjective and they're fuzzy it's not so clear how to categorize such things there are no clear objective categories found within nature our mind is projecting those onto nature and how we carve up nature that's relative that's arbitrary in a certain sense and that's different for different people and that leads to different results and different meanings and different models and different interpretations and different sense making frameworks just by changing the way you categorize things changes your science changes your understanding of reality you have to be very careful about your categories most people just assume that nature comes with categories but categories are not objective nature has no inherent categories baked into them other than what the ego mine projects there's also the question of which relationships between the data you emphasize so a lot of what science is is a it's a pattern recognition if we think of everything in the universe as just being points of data any two particular points can have some kind of complex relationship or a simple relationship you have to you can think of science as finding connections between these different data points and the relationships cataloging the relationships between them for example one data point might be the the sun one might be the earth and then we we track the relationship between the sun and the earth that might be an elliptical orbit another example might be the relationship between like rabbit populations and wolf populations you know as the rabbit population increases the wolf population follows suit because there's more for them to eat and then when the wolves eat the rabbits too much the rabbits dwindle and so does the wolves because they run out food and there's a complex relationship there and basically all of science can be thought of as that way in a sense of course that's a very limited way to think of it but that's one way to think of it and um the question becomes which of these relationships do we focus on and emphasize and track that's going to change your entire world view depending on which relationships there's an infinite number of relationships in a sense which relationships you pick is biased you're going to pick the ones that are relevant to you because of your survival needs usually even something like object permanence that we take for granted you know children don't have object permanents when they're really young when they see like a ball pass behind a an obstacle like a wall that occludes it and then pass through the other side they don't recognize that that's a single object to them that's like one object here and then a second object appears there now you might say well that's because children are stupid or that's because you're actually interpreting to have object permanence you have to actually make assumptions and in fact science doesn't prove object permanence it's still an assumption every time you close your eyes when you're looking at the moon every time you turn your back on the moon technically empirically speaking if you want to be very strict if you want to be very empirical what's happening is the moon is being destroyed and created destroyed and created and it's happening thousands of times but you don't conceive of the moon as an object that is con that is destroyed and created nor do you conceive of the moon as an object that is different for every person that's looking at it you can see of the moon as one single object that's the same for everybody that's a problem because that's not empirically true if you believe that you're doing a lot of behind the scenes metaphysical speculation and assumption making see now i want to conclude here start to conclude by reading extensively from willard klein he was a brilliant philosopher of science in the early 1900s who made a very powerful articulation of this idea of science as this web of belief that is tested as a whole all the stuff that we've been talking about so let's listen to what he has to say he says quote the totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even pure mathematics and logic is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges or to change the figure total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience a conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field the total field is so underdetermined by its boundary conditions experience that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to reevaluate in light of any single contrary experience no particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole if this view is right it is misleading to speak of the empirical content of an individual statement especially if it be a statement at all remote from the experiential periphery of the field any statement can be held true come what may if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics and what difference is there in principle between such a shift and the shift whereby kepler superseded tolmie einstein newton or darwin aristotle for my part i do quality physicists believe in physical objects and not in homer's gods and i consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise but in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits the myth of physical objects is epistemically superior to most in that it proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience end quote it's powerful stuff and there was a point i forgot to mention which i want to go back to which is the point about psychedelics so remember that example that i gave with galileo looking through the through the telescope and the his colleagues unable to you know to be convinced by that you might say well that kind of stuff doesn't happen today in science you know those were those were silly religious people who were closed-minded and and stupid because they were brainwashed by religion but today science is more sophisticated than that we're better than that today but the same problem exists today almost exactly the same problem because if i go to a serious scientist at mit and i tell him here i found this substance called 5meodmt you take this and it will provide evidence of paranormal things to you uh what are they gonna do are they gonna say oh great how wonderful you've made a amazing contribution to science let me try it of course not of course not they're gonna immediately dismiss this as a hallucination they're gonna dismiss it as invalid science and uh they're never actually gonna test it just like with witchcraft they're never gonna test witchcraft because their culture taught them that witchcraft is bad and their culture taught them that psychedelics are bad and they just believe their culture without questioning it now of course they're going to deny my point here by saying that well leo we can't question or we can't personally test every crackpot theory that's out there and there's a lot of crackpot theories and people peddling all sorts of [ __ ] hey you're right of course that's the whole problem that's the whole problem of epistemology discovering truth and separating out from falsehood is highly highly non-trivial and it's extremely costly and in fact it even comes with risks serious risks even to your own life and if you're unwilling to take these risks and to pay these costs then you're not a true scientist you're not in the business of science science is all about taking calculated risks exploring uncharted territory you see it's very easy to explore already charted territory that's what most scientists are in the business of doing but when it comes to exploring truly uncharted territory that's where they get scared that's where they screw up to explore truly uncharted territory this takes a special kind of mind a meta-scientific mind that can go beyond science see science contrary to the opinions of rationalists science requires really good holistic intelligence and judgment and wisdom beyond anything explicable or formidable formally provable again this goes back to that meat grinder analogy the ideal of most rationalists is that they just want to design some sort of mechanical proof proof generating system that will be able to easily adjudicate between truth and falsehood and they assume that such a thing is possible but actually it's not the nature of reality as such is that it's so complex and sprawling and counter-intuitive that you can't capture it with any kind of simple linear formal mechanical system and historically the best scientists are the ones who had a deep holistic intelligence and were able to think meta scientifically not within the confines of that meat grinder those were the scientists who made the greatest contributions to science these are the newtons the einsteins uh and so on there's many more that i can mention but we're running short on time so what you have to understand is that your proofs and your reasons these occur in retrospect to make scientific scientific discovery possible at all what's required is something beyond science meta-scientific something science cannot explain which is holistic intelligence or intuition so the great contradiction and irony of the rationalists is that the greatest advancements within logic itself were actually made through intuition and the greatest advancements in science and mathematics have been made through leaps in consciousness and intuition by genius visionary scientists not by uh brute force mechanical methods of some sort of meat grinder method that was dogmatically stuck to that way you just get business as usual you don't get new groundbreaking discoveries that way all right i have more that i wanted to say here but we're running short on time so i'm going to leave that content for future episodes i just want to end here i guess on one final quote by einstein einstein said this quote so many people today even professional scientists seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but never seen a forest a knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering this independence created by philosophical insight is in my opinion the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker of truth end quote that's albert einstein and albert einstein is a really amazing guy who i recommend you study his work more deeply study the meta scientific aspects of his work because there were sort of two sides to einstein one side of him was the scientist the technical scientist the other side of him was the philosopher and the epistemologist and really i spent i spent many hours studying uh how einstein saw science and saw philosophy and saw the world and it's remarkable because he himself attributes his groundbreaking paradigm-shattering breakthroughs with the development of general relativity you know when when he was asked what is it that allowed you to make this what is the biggest scientific discovery basically in all of human history why was he the one who was able to make this discovery and what he said was that because his colleagues were just basically involved in technical science whereas he from an early age because he was introduced to several books about uh philosophy of science and epistemic problems within science basically meta science he spent a lot of time thinking deeply about meta scientific issues and that is what allowed him to be able to run circles around his colleagues think outside the box that they were all thinking inside of and to start to question something as obvious as for example absolute time and space and uh to realize that time and space are not absolutes but are actually relative and the reason he was able to do that was because he took these philosophical and meta-scientific issues these epistemological issues very seriously and he was critical of those scientists who poo poo that stuff as though it wasn't important but then again he was a brilliant scientist doing groundbreaking research whereas most scientists aren't doing that so maybe they don't need it i'll i'll end on one final quote of einstein's which is quote i want to know god's thoughts the rest are details all right that's it for part one but we're just getting warmed up just getting warmed up you think this was a lot no we haven't even covered a third of the material that i have to cover so to be continued in part two next week stay tuned uh i wanna remind you to please if you have any questions or objections or counter arguments post them down below under under this episode and i will read through them and then try to incorporate the best ones in part four to address all that all right that's uh that's it i'm done here please click that like button for me and come check out actualize.org that's my website there you will find my blog with exclusive content that i post some of my best stuff goes on the blog and can only be found there so make sure you check it out it's free come check out the book list which is going to be actually very valuable for you in this domain because on my book list i have some powerful amazing books that deal with these topics these heavy topics of epistemology metaphysics philosophy of science make sure you go read those books on my book list they will really ground you in this material and help you with your own contemplations and also help bolster some of the points that i'm making here you know i make a lot of radical points at times and it can seem sometimes that like leo is off in his own little bubble world by himself and he's just making [ __ ] up and whatever uh actually no if you go read the the books on my book list you'll see just how much confirmation there is from other great intellectuals and thinkers throughout history of the things that i'm talking about i'm not just pulling these ideas out of my ass there is a lot of historical background and context and and justification for many of the things that i say i am standing on the shoulders of giants but the problem is that most people have not read what these giants have thought so it can seem like i'm just pulling stuff out of my ass when in fact i'm pulling a lot of stuff from history and from you know great thinkers both contemporary ones and ancient ones uh but if you don't do the reading i assume you do the reading if you don't do the reading you're going to be completely lost with my material it's it's way too advanced to not do the reading so go check out those books check out my life purpose course if you want to find your life purpose come hang out on the forum ask questions discuss things for free on the forum and you can support me if you'd like if you like this content and you want to see more of it and more of this kind of in-depth research available in the future without a bunch of crazy advertising then you can support me at patreon.com actualized all right see you in part two