Show notes
This week, we had Kehlan Morgan on to talk about the philosophy of science. Science has lost touch with philosophy, and in turn, it has lost touch with reasoning, the metaphysical, true empiricism, and reasoning. Kehlan gives an amazing take on health as a sort of cohesion.
We delve into the psyche, touching on Jung's work, which leads us into a conversation about Lamarck, evolution, and morphic resonance.
This quickly turns into a discussion on the scientific method. We touch on the need for presumptions and rationalism in the seemingly empirical scientific method. We also discuss ideas of falsification, true scientific reasoning, and problems with the scientific method. Interestingly, we touch on scientific constants and why mathematical constants might not be the true constants of nature. We talk about ideas from Goethe, Whitehead, British empiricism, and many other phenomenal philosophers.
We finish by talking about the structure of science as problematic (Scientistry) and the need for true science (Scientody). We also discuss the need for the reintegration of the individual in nature and of the sciences in general.
This was a mind-blowing episode that will leave you thirsty for knowledge.
Get your notes ready and enjoy.
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Video
Transcript
Liev
Kehlan, thank you so much for coming on today.
Kehlan Morgan
Thanks for having me on man. Great to be here!
What is Health?
Liev Dalton
Yeah, so like I said I ask all my guests the introductory question. What is health? This gives us a great basis, a little foundation what we can work off. I want to know your perspective on that. It’s going to be a little more philosophical today for sure. But I think that's very important, especially in this discussion that we're having here. So, I want to ask you. What is health?
Kehlan Morgan
All right. Yeah, this is a question that I'm going to answer in a very abstract way because Health sciences are not necessarily my realm of expertise. But I think this is a totally important question because I think it also relates to all kinds of other things. We can talk about Health with vitality I think we're really talking about something like cohesion. This idea that really any kind of organism any kind of system is a multiplicity which is attempting to achieve and maintain and elaborate a kind of wholeness through which the different aspects of the system, the different cells in your body, the different organs, or organ systems are being brought together into a kind of cohesive meta system. This is something where I feel like this isn't just a concern with regards to health sciences. This is this is a concern for science in general because I think that that kind of cohesion these kinds of dynamics of dissonance and consonants, incohesion and cohesion disorder and order are fundamental to the way that nature itself operates, the way that animacy itself operates. And by extension the way that consciousness itself operates. There are all kinds of things that we could say here and kind of branching out from that idea and then relating things back to this idea of human Physiological Health or human mental Health or wherever we want to go with it.
On the Psyche, Jung and Alchemy
Liev Dalton
Cool, Awesome answer. When you we were saying a wholeness, that's certainly a topic that's come up a few times. I've read a lot of Jung and I just think of a psychological wholeness or the integration fully of the Self. To integrate all parts of the mind and that was something I thought of, and I think Jung was on the right track, for the most part of course. But you know I think I liken it to health as well. It's just the wholeness. It's an integration of all parts, an integration into nature. You know what is true, what is true to human beings. Not necessarily that our technologies are untrue, but we created them right? So, we created these technologies and obviously we take the stance here that a lot of these technologies come with harmful side effects. They come with their benefits, they come with more comfort, they come with so many benefits. There is an opposing force there too. A thought that just popped in my mind was alchemy. I don't know if you have any thoughts surrounding the study of alchemy, but I'd love to hear what you think. I was just thinking within the alchemical teachings, there's kind of this underlying principle that you can apply to many factors in life. Whether it comes to health. You have this sort of transmutation that's always occurring, this cyclical way forward in life I don't know if you have any thoughts here, but please.
Kehlan Morgan
Yeah, so let's start with Jung and then move into alchemy because Jung was very interested in alchemy. Within Jung’s psychodynamics, he really orients everything around this idea of the self. Sometimes people refer to it as like the higher self or he'll even just say the soul and within Jung’s framework what that amounts to is something like a potentiality. You could think of it as being a form, right? Because it's not your body at any given moment. It's not necessarily the history of your body up to a given moment. Its center is nowhere and its circumference is everywhere. It's this possibility of self-cohesion itself which then serves as a kind of center of gravity something that the human psyche and presumably the human body as well as if we want to really extend it in that direction, is kind of orbiting around. It's this center of narrative gravity to borrow a term from Daniel Dennett where there's this cohesion of the psyche which the psyche is trying to achieve and so really, we can think of that higher self as almost a platonic form of what that ultimate cohesion would be like. But it's not just a platonic form, right? It's not just a mathematical object or something. It's kind of like an ideal of the self or all the different aspects of the self being woven together into a whole.
So, then we can start to step over into the world of alchemy here by looking at what Carl Jung saw in the alchemical tradition. Now the alchemists are really interesting because in a way they're. Continuing forth with this kind of platonic tradition. They're working within these kinds of archetypal systems that they're inheriting from the Hellenic tradition, from the astrological tradition, from the platonic tradition, from the hermetic tradition. What they end up coming up with though is really interesting. They start looking to matter itself, the natural world as something that could provide them with clues, with an insight out into how to achieve this this kind of Christian notion of theosis, of the salvation redemption, the spiritualization of the body right? and so this is very different than. A lot of the mystical traditions that we see really across the board. The whole proto-Indo-European diaspora, which is this idea that the bodily realm is this kind of veil of Maya. It is illusory. It’s just kind of something that were stuck in as it were and we need to somehow figure out a way to escape or transcend and we do that through kind of receding into the soul away from the world. Kind of using pure reason or the stillness of pure consciousness and the Indic traditions to get away from our situatedness within the flow of becoming within nature. And so, the alchemical tradition is very different, in that they are, looking to the natural world. As a way of achieving a kind of transcendence instead of just going into their own minds. So, they're not just sitting in their armchairs or meditating in a cave or whatever they're actually in their weird little laboratories, playing with sulfur and mercury and you know trying to figure out what phlogiston is or the ether you know and this is really important right? and let's relate it back to Jung. The significance that Carl Jung saw in this in that kind of archetypal framework that the alchemists were operating within this idea of transmuting lead into gold. So gold is associated with the sun. It's associated with higher ideals. It's associated with the personal will, with the self. Lead is associated with Saturn, associated with weight and gravity, solidity, concrete the world of hard solid materiality. So, what's interesting there and what Jung saw in this is that the aspiration of the alchemists to discover a way to transmute lead into gold and really all the different things that they were trying to do were about trying to enact this this archetypal dynamic that they were looking for. By which the body is spiritualized and Jung saw a kind of mirroring there between his own ideas of the Archetypal self and what the alchemists were trying to do and so that's super interesting because it does seem like there's a correspondence there.
Liev Dalton
Yeah, yeah, and I mean even in the field that we're in here, the health field, I've always likened it to the process of healing as well. When we look at Disease, we don't really look at them as diseases right? We kind of look at it all as healing processes or even you could have disease processes as well, which leads to a deterioration. But in essence it's a process. The symptoms are the healing process, right? When you have a fever, your body's trying to achieve a goal and move towards this divine purity which we may call Health. So, that's something that I've always kind of liked about the alchemical tradition and how I relate it back to Health. I've heard a few people speak on that topic. People like Barre Lando does a great job if you want to check that out a little bit further. But, just relating it to this underlying process of reality.
Evolution, Morphic Resonance, & Lamarck
We talked a little bit about evolution and maybe we could talk a little bit about this. Because I know you're well fond of the morphic resonance theory which is not something that we've spoken about too much. So maybe you could give us the gist of that. But we've talked a lot about Lamarck and how there's this sort of cyclical process. How we do adapt to our environments. We may not have been created at random right? He doesn't necessarily address that obviously there's a lot of speculation involved in that whether it's creation or whether it's this neo evolution of we evolved from monkeys, but I don't know too much there. I'd love to hear your thoughts on maybe morphic resonance how it fits in. Obviously Darwin had some great ideas. But this neo-darwinistic movement I think falls short quite a bit and maybe I can open up discussion there.
Kehlan Morgan
Yeah, absolutely so well, let's start with Lamarck then so it was Lamark's idea of evolution. First of all, it pre-dated Darwin. And this is, for those who aren't aware, the idea of evolution as an inheritance of acquired characteristics. This idea that organisms actually alter themselves, whether consciously or unconsciously or due to interactions with their environment or what have you. Then those alterations then might be able to be passed down to offspring and Lamarck theorized this as being a potential process by which biological evolution could occur. And Darwin comes along and the thing about Darwin though is Darwin really doesn't contradict Lamarck. If you really look at ‘on the origin of species’ I mean there's really nothing in there that says Lamarck was wrong. Darwin just brings this idea of natural selection into the picture which is a great idea. It's the idea that the pressures of the environment itself the actual situatedness of the organism in relation to the kind of metaprocesses of the biome and the other organisms. And it's situatedness in time with this kind of, fannings out of reproduction and things like that are really significant factors in in determining how organisms come to shape themselves over time. So that's a brilliant idea.
But where things went wrong, I think we can probably agree on this is with the Neo -Darwinian revolution because that really changed the game. It was during I believe the 1950 s when the double helix structure was discovered by Watson and crick and that other lady who I do not remember her name., but she's always ignored because of course and that's a whole thing.
The conclusion that evolutionary theorists started coming to was like oh well now we know what genes are… up to that point the idea of a gene was just the idea of a heritable trait there was really no theory of genes as a kind of code that was stored inside of cells or anything like that. It was just rather abstract and rather neutral idea up to that point. But then with the discovery of the double helix structure. And the realization that that double helix structure was responsible for protein synthesis, evolutionary theorists started saying aha. Well, this is how it works down at the mechanical level. We have this, kind of squishy computer code that codes for the organisms and then maybe random alterations due to radiation or whatever can cause these slight alterations and the natural selection can act on those. Because they code for phenotypic traits in this really bizarre indirect way that we don't really understand but we'll figure it out eventually. And that became the paradigm.
That became the paradigm for people like Robert Trivers, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Pinker, I mean really anybody who was talking about evolutionary theory in the 90s and early 2000s when I was first getting into this stuff, and that was just the facts, right? And it was either you believed in that, or you were a young earth creationist. You know that was their foil that they set themselves up against when of course in reality there was there was actually a lot of contesting going on beneath the surface of that rather kind of theatrical framing of the issue. And later on, what we would begin to see, and I believe this really began in the 90s and certainly picked up in the 2000s was the field of epigenetics. Scientists start to realize, Lamarckian inheritance is very real and we can actually prove this. We’ll I shouldn't say prove but we can show this to be the case in laboratory conditions in numerous different ways. The field of epigenetics has floated over the past couple of decades and, this is a bit of a problem for the neo-Darwinians because you know even if you go back and read something like Darwin's dangerous idea which is Daniel Dennett's kind of theoretical text on evolutionary biology.
He's like well Lamarck can't be right, because for Lamarck to be right there has to be some means by which alterations to the organism are able to recursively and selectively alter the DNA sequences such that those can be passed down and we don't know of any way that that could happen so it must be baloney. But lo and behold it happens anyway. So that's interesting, right? And within the field of epigenetics too, there's been this kind of desire I think to hang on to the neo-Darwinian paradigm as much as possible. So that a lot of them have come up with these rather elaborate and in my opinion rather unconvincing mechanisms by which epigenetic inheritance is thought to occur. So, they're like oh well maybe it's, prions that are in the body and then they somehow go to the germline cells and start fiddling with things. And this really calls to bigger issues in sciences. Sometimes those explanations are presented as like oh this is the fact we know that's how it works. No, we do not. That is pure speculation at this stage and in fact I think it's probably incorrect at the very least incomplete but probably just nonsense frankly.
Now bringing this into the realm of morphic resonance then, Rupert Sheldrake developed this idea of morphic resonance as basically the idea that the formative fields of organisms should actually be treated as kind of things in of themselves. That these fields are actually able to perpetuate themselves. They're able to inherit their own past. Directly without needing any kind of mediation by DNA or proteins or anything like that really. And that the interactions between these fields can first of all be passed down through inheritance but can also be, inherited in a kind of horizontal way, between organisms that are not even necessarily directly related. That there's a kind of non-local co-informing which occurs between these fields. And this is a really interesting idea to me for a number of reasons first of all because of the way that it relates to parapsychological phenomena, and that's a whole thing we could talk about. But also, with regards to the way it lines up with these ideas developed by, certain philosophers prior to Sheldrake. People like Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson, David Boam and Arthur M Young.
All of these guys, these process philosophers started developing these ideas, really about metaphysics about what the nature of reality and consciousness are. And Whitehead in particular came to the conclusion that you know it's essentially, I think the exact same as the conclusions that Sheldrake came to, but he came to it for very different reasons and he kind of languages it in a different way. But it's the same basic idea this idea that the possibility spaces which are being navigated by organisms, their fields or, underlying forms or whatever you want to call it, should be able to interact independently of direct physical contact. They should be non-local in some sense. So, this is something that's been really fascinating to me and something I've talked about on my channel, ad nauseum. Ah so yeah, there's a lot here though.
I want to, before I finally stop talking, I Want to at least lay the groundwork for you to pick up because this is definitely something that we can relate back to health sciences for sure because it has all kinds of implications if we look at something like. The Obesity epidemic For example, a lot of the science around this has suggested that ones predilection towards obesity is heritable and therefore following the neo-Darwinian logic, it must be genetic. And if it's genetic, that means you don't have any control over it. It's just something that happens to you that you have to deal with. But if we're thinking in terms of inherited characteristics which can be passed down habits that can actually form, that can then inform offspring. Then this starts to look like a very different scenario. First of all, it looks like your genes might not really have much to do with it at all. The exact DNA sequences you happen to inherit might be at best slightly relevant. It could rather be the case that these are predilections that we have inherited that we actually have much more responsibility towards because they're not just a code that we're born with, that we don't have any control over. These are habits, and not just habits in the sense of behavioral habits, but also like bodily morphological habits that could be altered over time and then if we lean into particular bad habits, Obesity is just one of them. But there's all kinds of different examples of this. We could look at then, that could be something where we're not just harming ourselves but potentially harming our children too because it's not just the genes we don't have control over that we're passing on there actually are things that our agency is directly involved with that we could be passing on to our children. And so that that really changes the game. It really changes the framing of how we look at obesity but really all kinds of different issues within the health sciences.
Liev Dalton
Yeah, it's totally related 100% related, and I think that's why I love the topic so much. And well Rupert Sheldrake was one of the first people that I started to read when my consciousness was shifting, right? He really opened up my eyes to not only just morphic resonance but the entire field of science even before I picked up my first terrain book. And that was the inventing the AIDS virus by Peter Duesberg. But Sheldrake certainly open my eyes so that I could see moving forward. But you know we talk about heritable diseases a lot and I think the distinction, I think they feed us a half truth here because your kids do look like you right? you can inherit these traits. It seems rather obvious you know you inherit your mother's eyes or your dad's hair color, or skin color, right? You know these are undeniable. And that's the half -truth now the half lie is that you can inherit these diseases that are genetic origin and truly epigenetics really throws all of this out the window. Our genes actually adapt to our environment, obviously.
And our genes, maybe our genes do code these proteins which do end up leading to these traits that we have but for that to happen with a disease, I kind of place these diseases in 2 categories and it's birth defects versus something that comes later in life right? So, Weston A. Price did some great work, where the health of the parents seemed to affect the health of the child. So, if they were malnourished parents, and I'm really paraphrasing his work here quickly but most of the listeners are familiar with Weston A Prices work, malnourished parents leads to dental deformities in children and this is crooked teeth, poor, smaller jaws and poor facial development. Now, he talked a lot about cavities. Cavities are not something that he thought were heritable. That was due to direct diet. So if the children were eating a poor malnourished diet, they would have high cavities. But if these children with deformities in their face ended up consuming a more native diet, because he studied natives of course, a more nutrient dense diet, their children would have perfectly straight teeth so it would only take 1 generation, right? So, I'd always distinguish disease if you're born with it. It's much different than developing it things.
Like autoimmune diseases they say are caused by genetics right? and in a lot of it tt is speculation like you mentioned, because there are no studies that actually utilize a scientific method that prove this phenomenon. But you know autoimmune diseases develop later in life. So they have this idea of a latent gene that just gets triggered and comes about eventually. It’s nonsense and definitely there's no scientific basis for these claims whatsoever. So, when I was in my undergrad, I took biochemistry and molecular biology and it was a large emphasis on genetics I probably took 6 or 7 genetics courses and you know we were taught all of these things as facts. You mentioned these prions and all these proteins that have these effects and essentially what they're trying to do is they have their conclusion and they're working backwards they're trying to create this theory to explain their results to fit within their narrative. Which you were alluding to there earlier. It was interesting whenever you would press the professor, they would just say yeah you know really, it's just an emerging field, where we just discovered epigenetics. So, we have these textbooks full of facts and then when you press them. They're like yeah, there's actually no evidence for this. This is just the theory.
Kehlan Morgan
And then they will gaslight the hell out of you because you'll be like well Okay, if this is this is all just speculation, then why are you presenting it as though it's true. Then they're like oh well if you understood the science then you would know, this is just because you're ignorant that you think we're presenting these as facts. But if you really understood the field, you would know.
This is all speculation, like come on.
Liev Dalton
Yeah, you sound just like my professors. Yeah, actually we were in a Zoom once and I was pressing my genetics professor about the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test and I asked her I said okay, well you're telling me right here that we can't run a PCR test over 33 cycles so why do I have a CDC document that says that we should run the cycles at 45 cycles and she was like she lit me up in front of the class, like that's a fake document. I'm like, I just downloaded it off the CDC website.
Kehlan Morgan
Oh, the CDC I mean they are known for publishing a lot of fake things. So, I mean you never know right.
On the Scientific Method & Falsification
Liev Dalton
It’s really something else. But anyways I think this's a good time to shift the conversation maybe towards the scientific method now. Maybe I'll just open it up with hearing your thoughts generally on epistemology, how we go about knowing things. And we could circle into empiricism or rationalism and how the scientific method that obviously is a more empiricism-based model of course, but yeah, I just want to kind of open up I know you have some really great ideas too on German Idealism. So anyways I want to give you the floor and we'll take it from there.
Kehlan Morgan
Yeah, so this is a topic where I'm really in the process right now of trying to formulate something like a big picture bird's eye view of. Where we are and where we're going. Which is to say that I do not have a nice neat little thesis I can present. But there's all kinds of things we could talk about here that are really interesting. So, we'll just kind of survey things a little bit.
Liev Dalton
Let's do it.
Kehlan Morgan
So, one of the videos that you did recently you talked about how science is, it's not very good at dealing with theological topics of morality, topics of spirituality, teleology, consciousness and what's interesting here is that if you start tracing the threads backwards through the history of science I think what you find is that the quarantining of science off as though it's this just completely isolated thing separate from all these other different very imminent human concerns. Is actually a rather novel idea and in fact, I don't think it really took its modern form until after World War 2 which is very recent. If you go back to of course the medieval alchemists, obviously they saw absolutely no distinction whatsoever between what they were doing and their theological beliefs., but the same goes for Isaac Newton the same goes for Johann Van Goethe who was one of the German idealists who was also a very prolific scientist.
And even going into the early twentieth century, where these kinds of more materialistic ideas had already begun to gain a lot more traction. If you look at some of the most prominent most ingenious scientists of that time people like Marx Planck or even Albert Einstein, lots of these people were very heavily involved in philosophy and a big part of that is because at that time the center of gravity of science in general was Germany which meant that the scientists who were at the cutting edge saw themselves as carrying on a tradition that was continuous with Kant and Fichte and Schelling and Hegel and Goethe. Not all of them were extremely well versed in the philosophical tradition but all of them saw what they were doing as, in many ways, continuous with philosophy including Einstein. Einstein was probably, I would say the least philosophically literate out of out of that whole gang as it were, but even for him you know he saw himself as continuing the tradition of Baruch Spinoza the Pantheist philosopher.
And so, moving forward from that then we can see that there was this severing which occurred, or which was attempted to be done around this kind of World War 2 period and it really happened with this guy named Karl Popper who you've probably heard of before if you've ever… Well, you're into the sciences you have definitely heard the term falsification before that all goes back to Karl Popper and this idea of critical rationalism which he developed in a book called the logic of scientific discovery. Now popper what he was essentially doing was he was taking this earlier idea of science as verification, and kind of flipping it upside down and here's why the verificationist idea of science is seemingly common sense.
It's like you have a scientific hypothesis and for it to be a scientific hypothesis for it to be a claim about nature. It has to say something that we can check, we can look and see whether it's true or not, but the problem that popper saw was that the humian problem of induction was still there, which is to say that whenever we're actually creating scientific theories, we're never just talking about the things that we can see. We're always extrapolating beyond that which we actually have in front of us. Even if we're just doing something as simple as saying well the sun rose yesterday. So, it'll rise tomorrow. You've got to have some kind of idea of a uniformity to nature, a coherence, a cohesion to nature in order to justify that claim but in order to believe in nature having a certain kind of order or cohesion or universality you've got to be doing metaphysics. You've got to be thinking about what the nature of reality is per se before you can start developing scientific theories.
Karl Popper did not like that, he did not want science to be a dependent on philosophy. He didn't want that codependence. He wanted science to be its own thing doing its own business and the philosophers they could you know chase their own tails all day. You know as long as science is able to actually perform experiments and whatnot then science will be fine. So he develops this idea of falsification as a way of kind of splitting those 2 things apart. So what he does is this; he says well we can't ever justify an inductive inference without metaphysical presuppositions.
But what we can do, is we can falsify theories which have inductive implications. So, we can say all right, well all swans are white and then we can treat that theory as though it's true until we find a black swan and then that falsifies the theory. And so, I mean even to this day I mean even in universities falsification is taught as though that's what science is that's how it works. But once you start looking into the nuts and bolts of that that idea, it gets very complicated very quickly. So just to take that little black swan example. Ff you define swans as white and you find a black bird that looks an awful lot like a swan that's not Swan right? Okay so the way that we language things is always playing a role and you can literally just redefine your terms to save a theory. I mean it's that easy.
Moreover, many of Karl Popper's followers, those who actually tried to take his ideas about science as this kind of algorithmic process and actually apply it to the history of science found out that he was just wrong. Science does not progress in that way at all. In fact, I would say all of the time scientific theories have conflicting data and it doesn't cause us to just throw out the theory, because you can always find some kind of way of explaining away things that don't quite fit and sometimes those ‘explainings away’ turn out to be true. Sometimes it does turn out that something is just a statistical fluke or noise or whatever.
And so a great example of this if we look back to the Copernican revolution. This story really complicates the whole thing a lot because the way that we're taught this in school. So, people believe that the sun orbited the earth and that's not true and then scientists studied nature and then figured out that earth actually orbits the sun somehow, and somehow Galileo's telescope had something to do with that. Yeah, don't ask too any awkward questions… but then okay if you actually zero in on that and look okay, what actually happened, how did they actually move from a geocentric to heliocentric model. The truth is way more interesting than what Popper had in mind when Copernicus first developed his heliocentric model. He did it because he did not like these epicycles that were needed these kind of vortices that that were needed in order to model the solar system as geocentric.
But the problem was for Copernicus that, it just didn't work, like his system did not actually accord with observation because he was still using circular orbits. And so, there was this tension there because a lot of the astronomers at the time preferred Copernicus’s ideas because it seemed to simplify the solar system. It seemed to present a kind of aesthetic, harmony of the model. Whereas they saw this tomeic model is as messier somehow., but again the Copernican model at first just didn't work. It wouldn't be until later where Johannes Kepler introduced this idea of elliptical orbits. That they were able to actually bring this heliocentric model back into accordance with the actual astronomical observations.
So, what's going on here if you're not looking at philosophy, you're never going to see it. Because what happened is Rene Descartes, the fact that he broke from the traditional platonic understanding of the universe and opened up the doors for truly modern philosophy. Now what that means then is that from that traditional platonic perspective, the heavens are not nature. Nature is down here like the heavens are not just nature, but in space. they're like a completely different metaphysical domain, of the eternal, the necessary, the perfect. And because of that you can't have egg-shaped orbits up there. They need to be perfect circles because those are understood to be, perfect platonic forms whereas elliptical orbits were understood to be, more messy, more contingent, more earthly, as it were.
But after Descartes, western thought started to really break from that platonic tradition, and they started to see the heavens as nature as being just a continuation of the processes that are at work down here. And this is what you see in Kepler. Kepler's no longer really thinking, at least not in the same way of the heavens as a transcendental realm, he's thinking of the planetary bodies. Really in much the same way that we would think of any other objects here in nature that we would understand scientifically. that's a really big deal, because what's happening here is the scope of natural science, which up to that point had ended at the firmament, the earth's atmosphere, suddenly just blew the lid off and suddenly the scope of natural science was the entire universe.
And so, what's happening here is not just like a theory being falsified by experimental data or whatever, and certain hypotheses being corroborated. No. What's happening here is much deeper than that. What's happening here is much more philosophical and metaphysical. And I think if we look to the history of science in general, we see these currents throughout, even into the present day. It's just that in the present day. They're much more obfuscated because they're buried under these procedures and mathematical abstractions and all these other kinds of smoke and mirror games which prevent us from clearly seeing what's happening within Science philosophically.
Scientific reasoning, Scientific Presumtions and Constants
Liev Dalton
I'm really glad you brought that up, I guess I should have said in my video that modern science takes the materialistic perspective like there's been a separation. This is something Rupert Sheldrake talks about that. There's been a separation of Spirituality and science which makes no sense in my opinion, and you just beautifully laid out there.
But yeah, even when it comes to the implementation of the scientific method. That's something that we've been talking about a lot and obviously. Changing of definitions is something that we see a lot in the germ theory of things. The big one is isolation. You know when you look at the definition of an isolation. It's to separate from all other parts. It's supposed to be the single phenomenon. That's by itself right? And we're presented this set of postulates Koch's postulates that require an isolation to prove [Causation]. And it comes down to even the talk of isolation of the independent variable right? You want to isolate the variable to prove that that is the true cause of something right?
Kehlan Morgan
Right, right. Okay, and so this is really interesting here because this is where we can start really thinking about the philosophical presumptions of scientific methodology itself and what changing those presumptions could actually mean for scientific practice right? because you're totally right to say here that in isolating variables we are performing a kind of intellectual exercise. Variables are not actually isolated in the real world. Everything is interwoven with everything else, right? And so, doing that serves an important function. Potentially, it allows us to kind of pick things apart and try to 0 in on a particular object of inquiry. But then it's like well if that's all we're looking at if all we have are those abstractions that we've created through our experimental methods and our data and our mathematical models, well I mean we've just completely lost contact with nature itself. At that point you know we've just created this giant screen and we've forgotten that there's an actual natural world behind it that we're supposed to be studying.
So this is really interesting and this is why lately I've been taking a lot of interest in, Johann Von Goethe who was this late eighteenth early Nineteenth century kind of polymath. He was a poet and a scientist. He was a botanist. He was interested in geology. He did a lot of work on optics all kinds of stuff. Super interesting guy and his understanding of nature is just so fascinating and just so at odds with the presumptions that we see in in contemporary scientific discourse. A really great example of this I've been talking about a lot lately is when he first started to get into biology, it was a very common trope within the study of human anatomy to say that the thing that separated human beings from other mammals was the pre-maxillary bone which is like a snout bone that you see in lots of other mammals and I believe reptiles as well. But you don't see it in adult human beings and so scientists at the time we're like oh well that's the anatomical thing that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Goethe looked at this and he was like, no, that's just not how nature works and he was like no it has to be there. There has to be a pre-maxillary bone in human beings and his suspicion was well it's probably there in fetuses and infants and then we don't see it in adults because in the development process it fuses into the rest of the human skull. And lo and behold, he was completely right. We now know that that human beings do indeed have a premaxillary bone. Now this is really interesting to me because Goethe did not have any reasons that we would today consider to be good scientific reasons for believing that. He had no data. He had no experiments. He was just like that's not how nature works that's really interesting right. Why is he thinking that, and he was right. He's thinking that because he's looking at nature in a completely different way in a much more holistic way than the way that modern science does now. He’s looking at these skeletal structures and he's saying there is a holistic harmony here where the different parts can be played with there's a kind of structure here which nature can elaborate, or it can explore in different ways. But you can't just take bones out. You can't just take out one of the colors from the rainbow. There is a holistic cohesion here that has to be maintained because that's just how nature works.
Now that's really interesting, because what that seems to intimate is just a very different way of looking at science in general. And I think it's one that's going to become necessary very soon. This is where we can kind of loop things back around to Rupert Sheldrakes ideas. If Rupert Sheldrake is right about these morphogenetic habits not only accounting for biological and behavioral morphology, but also accounting for the stable features of the physical world itself, that the things that we regard as constants in nature are actually habits that themselves developed in a kind of evolutionary way.
That really saws off the branch that science has been sitting on for a while now. Because, for a very long time, since Newton, it has been presumed that the constant, consistent, compositional features of nature are these mathematical forms. And that those are the things that stay the same, that are universal and if we can just figure out what those are then we can figure out how nature works and this this plays right into the reductionistic game because if you think those are the primary building blocks of the world and you can figure out how atoms behave in relation to them, then presumably you can build up from there and then you can understand how proteins work, and how cells work, and how organisms work, and how stars work and everything else.
Really, I think if we look at the big picture here, if we start looking at the failures of modern cosmology, the failures of modern biology, psychology, everything, I think what we see is that that that methodology just has not worked out very well for us. And so anyway, the big picture here I think is this; if we're going to start looking at the constants of nature as habits then this completely changes the way that we have to go about actually doing scientific induction. So think about within modern cosmology. We look at the universe, we have certain, mathematical functions that we regard as being constants and so we're like okay well if those stay the same and we rewind the tape then we can make inferences about what the universe was like five billion years ago, ten billion years ago, thirteen billion years ago, and that's we came to the conclusions of our current astrophysical narrative of the history of our universe.
But if we can no longer make that presumption, if we're sawing off that branch and saying we really aren't sure that those mathematical constants are constant then something has to be constant. There has to be some universality that we can kind of rest ourselves or anchor ourselves to such that we can actually make these inductions, make these inferences. And so if it's not those mathematical models anymore then what is it going to be. I think Goethe gives us a clue here. It's not about the mathematical regulation, it's not much of specific numbers that stay the same. It's something more formal than that something about holistic cohesion something about the way that nature plays with forms. These are the ideas I think that we need to really start to move beyond the limitations that have been built up around us over the past two hundred years or so.
Empiricism, Rationalism, & Presumtions
Liev Dalton
Something I've been looking into a lot recently is kind of the Empiricism versus Rationalism debate and I think if I'm correct here and what you're getting at it is sort of along the lines of this… That we're so limited by our sensory observations and that's the crux of empiricism. I think what you were getting at there too with Goethe, not necessarily him but the other scientists in the field that we're looking at ‘we don't have this bone in our faces.’ it was all based on that observation and he went beyond that right? he took maybe a more rational standpoint there and deduced from that. He was looking at the larger forms of nature.
You know the empirical model has failed over and over again if you study the history of science at all. You can see that and I think a large excuse is that science is constantly shifting and you know the scientific consensus is moving around and you know we get new data and new hypotheses and new tests and new experiments and it's constantly moving and moving and moving, and it never ends. I don't think it will ever end because like you said like we were talking about earlier.
You could change the definitions you can change the way we language Science. It's going to be a never-ending cycle and it seems to just help the current narrative at hand It seems to always align with the vested interests and what they want the population to know to benefit them. It always seems to align with that. But I really appreciate your perspective here and I think that's phenomenal. You're really onto something, looking at how nature acts beyond. Amazing. I can't even I can't even articulate it.
Kehlan Morgan
Yeah, well let's riff on this real quick. So, you mentioned rationalism and empiricism. And yeah, they're totally limited if you're trying to be like a die-hard empiricist then you cannot get off the ground. Because again, you can't even infer that the sun will rise tomorrow because it rose yesterday, you've got to be a rationalist to some degree no matter what. But what's interesting here if you look at Goethe. He actually, as opposed to seeing himself as a rationalist, as an opposing British Empiricism, he actually kind of saw it the opposite way which is really interesting.
So, he's kind of criticizing Newton in his work on optics, and he says these really interesting things because Newton. Again, these are the early days of science and Newton's developing his optical theory which he's framing in terms of wavelengths of light that there are these different frequencies that correspond to the different colors. Part of the problem that Goethe’s going to have with this is the way that that Newton is implying that color is something that our consciousness does and wavelength is something completely independent. Goethe is really adamant about not splitting consciousness and reality apart from one another in that way. So that's part of the story, but he says, this is super interesting, he says well if you really think about it you have never seen a wavelength of light empirically that is an abstraction that you cooked up in order to contend with the phenomenon. And Goethe's like no we actually need to be more ardent empiricists here.
Forget about wavelengths, I don't even know what that is, forget about wavelengths. The phenomenon at hand, the thing that we encounter in nature is the rainbow. So, let's make sense of that. That the formal structure the motifs and their relationships within that actual phenomenon, that should be the primary object of science and we should relate everything back to that. With these ideas of wavelengths, we can't actually relate that directly to our experience in any way and so he saw that as a problem not necessarily because it was wrong, I suppose. But because it was an abstraction, specifically because it was moving away from nature and into this more platonic, more rationalistic territory. It's weird because there is this kind of latent Platonism which I think is completely inescapable, like we are the children of Plato whether we like it or not. But within modern science, the form that's taken is this idea of physical constants like those are the platonic forms from the perspective of modern science. But because that presumption, that conception is basically an unquestionable dogma, it gets a free ride. It does not get any, barely any critical scrutiny.
There are some ideas, so some physicists have developed ideas that there could be temporal variability in the actual quantifiable constants of nature. But even then I don't think they're going far enough I think this is something that really has to cut into the very idea of what science itself thinks that it is. So yeah, a lot of talk about here.
Liev Dalton
Amazing. Oh definitely. I think it's interesting that that he takes that stance that it's like we need to align more with our observations. And when I was kind of getting into this whole empiricism versus rationalism, I was thinking, the beauty of this discussion is they make great cases on both sides. Now they want to take one side to the extreme, but you know the empiricists will say that if it's not related to our senses then it's further away from our reality which was one of the criticisms of rationalism. That thought is much further away than what we can actually observe.
The Abstract Nature of the Scientific Method
And I suppose when I said earlier that empiricism failed, I think the branch of the scientific method of course presented by Bacon. There was the aspect that failed of empiricism. I think it was taken to extreme because and I don't even think the scientific method now aligns with the empirical history. I don't think it does align with the empirical tradition because we've gotten away from our sensory observations, right? We have all of these technologies now that allow us to see so far beyond our realm of observation, of our five senses, that it's not even empiricism anymore. even in a way you know we've convinced ourselves that it is right and I'm reading these threads and all the atheists are these diehard empiricists on the internet for some reason and you know they don't even realize that the scientific method is not even truly following empiricism right? We're concerned about microorganisms and viruses and genetics and all these phenomenon that we can't see, it's kind of interesting in a way right.
Kehlan Morgan
Yeah, and that's the danger here I think that Goethe was warning against is that at a certain point, especially once these ideas start to become institutionalized. It's so easy to just completely lose touch with reality where you're in this world where you're doing science. But you're literally just playing with these abstractions that were cooked up by other people and then they came to solidify and now you're treating them as though they are the reality itself when and you know the truth could be that there are dozens of just completely groundless philosophical speculations that are getting a free ride in this. Because no one's cracking the hood open and looking at how these things actually work. I mean you see that in everything like cosmology, and in astrophysics, probably in health sciences as well. I would assume because it's just so easy to fall into that once Science becomes this thing where it's not just a bunch of eccentric intellectual weirdos trying to figure out how the world works but rather it's this like Titanic Financial bureaucratic apparatus. You know that that really changes the whole thing and not in a good way I don't think.
Scientistry and Scientody (True Science)
Liev Dalton
Yeah, and this is something that Vox talks about Scientistry versus Scientody, we talked about this a lot recently, how scientistry of course the way that science is structured now forces it to lose touch with the true knowing of the truth of what is happening in reality right? The financial incentives and the incentive to publish positive research, you can only publish these IMRaD studies now. It's so institutionalized that it's and if you don't publish research then you won't get tenure as a professor. So, the way science is structured with these financial incentives removes the true platonic practice of science from what it is. Scientody, he describes this as true science like you said there's no vested interests, right? I have no dog in this fight I'm trying to remain pure there at least because I'm truly concerned with knowing. At the end of the day, I always say that it's best to just go outside and spend some time in nature and spend time with loved ones and do stuff that makes you happy. That's real, not things that give you pleasure but things that are real that give you joy.
Like playing with the dog or eating dinner with family. Whatever it may be. You know, spending time at the beach and the sun and you know you know I think it does come down to a certain point where it's like what is useful and what is not. But I obviously enjoy these types of conversations, this brings me joy, this is what's good for me too. So, yeah, and I think you're probably the same right? Yeah so, I think that's what science needs Science does need this.
It needs the scientists and the philosophers to be excited about it about knowing. to be excited when they're proven wrong as Well. There's no room for this inflated ego and in science you know that's when it becomes problematic when I think obviously. If you truly believe in something and you stand by it. But once you're presented with the overwhelming evidence that that's not true. You have to move forward, right? You should try and defend your claims as much as you can, but you need to look at it truly objectively and I think that's lost. objectivity I think it's completely lost in The modern way that we practice science as you were alluding to there.
Kehlan Morgan
So there's certainly a value in, commitment, in faith in being able to really anchor yourself to something that really does seem fundamental and important. And I think there really is a human impulse towards that. But the problem is that it can be very easily misplaced. We can very easily start to attach that your political ideology, you found on Reddit, or a scientific theory or whatever. And in doing so lose sight of that which should actually be evoking that kind of commitment from us which is this idea within the context of science that is bringing ourselves into contact with the inner workings of nature. We are actually participating in a kind of spiritual quest I mean that's how Alchemists saw it. That's how Newton saw it. That's how Goethe saw it. I mean that's how Einstein saw it. That was just what science was for most scientists, for most of the history of science.
Then again after World War 2, it seems to me that's really where this break happened., where science started to just be quarantined off where it was just this kind of strictly professional, bureaucratic thing. That had these financial ties to like the military industrial complex and big corporations and Yada Yada. It's just become this really kind of a parody of itself in a lot of ways. What you see with a lot of scientists who are I think genuinely compelled by that like spiritualistic impulse still end up being led astray because they end up being sucked into this world where it seems like the most natural and obvious thing in the world to take that kind of impulse and target it upon. A very specific kind of hypothesis or theoretical framework or whatever when the reality is that those hypotheses and Theoretical Frameworks need to be fluid. They need to be changing all the time we need to be constantly changing our minds about these things and if you're misplacing that kind of inner commitment on something that should kind of by definition not be fixed then you end up locking down something that should not be locking down something that should be open to question.
But then as that happens and as those practices and those habits become institutionalized you get the development of Dogma. You get the development of this thing where questioning certain things will get you ridiculed in front of your class or like you know, literally kicked out of the University you work at or things like and that happens all the time and the fact that more scientists aren't alarmed by that is itself kind of alarming.
Liev Dalton
Yeah, and worse so than in the academic circles, we saw a lot of doctors lose their job, through the fiasco that just passed by us right, for questioning the [Vaccines] and that's something that obviously is more pertinent to what we're talking about here. But you know not even necessarily just doctors right? It was anybody who didn't necessarily want to take the old cupcakes in the arms. When I made my video on scientific method, questioning, if you look up scientific method, questioning will always be in the scientific method. For some reason there are certain questions that we can't ask which makes no sense which is why science is unscientific. You had a beautiful video on that. How science became unscientific, and you highlighted some great points on how the structure of science is unscientific now. Even within the publishing realm and, you know there's so many different avenues that you could attack this. Science is admittedly fraudulent as well, right? There are more papers out there with fake data. It's absurd, right? It's truly Absurd. We've lost touch with what science even is, but I love that you're alluding to this idea that you know even just this search of understanding is sort of this spiritual practice and I think you laid that out beautifully.
The search itself is what you need to tie yourself to in a way because truly at the end of the day, is it possible to get all the answers, can we even end our lives with all of the answers. Perhaps right before you're about to go you reach enlightenment as Jung might have talked about and you've become your true self and maybe that is the answer, right? Maybe. Maybe there is this sort of individualization which is the true goal rather than trying to understand this collective happening.
But I think truly if we're going to try and understand this collective way forward this collective way that things work, I think you're alluding to the right ideas here. That you're looking beyond these mathematical constants, that you're looking beyond. That's something that we could probably make a whole episode on just in and of itself I think that's a groundbreaking idea.
The Reintegration of Science and the Individual
Kehlan Morgan
Oh yeah, so let's actually loop this back around to the place we started from this idea of health as cohesion. So, if we really back that idea up and look at the whole of the human journey, let's go back to the myth of Prometheus right? So, you've got the Titan Prometheus comes down brings humanity the power of fire which is implied to be the power of the heavens. The power of the gods. You know fire produces light, so do the stars. There's a kind of correspondence there. And what that fire then allows humanity to do is to begin developing technology to then to begin developing civilization to begin developing a mastery of nature and a potentially adversarial relationship with nature as a consequence of that. Now that's interesting here because what I think what's going on here is you have this intimation of the opening up, of the human intellect as something which can really begin to experience itself as something separate from nature and so there again, there's a kind of individuation process that's happening here. Then that sets us on a very particular trajectory, right? Because whenever you have that kind of separation, differentiation and multiplication of entities that then creates a kind of disorder, a kind of chaos, a kind of friction in the multiplicity itself. That then needs to somehow or another weave itself back together into a whole.
And again, we can look at Jung in this regard with his idea of the individuation process as this kind of cycle whereby the child comes to differentiate their own personality from their mother and father from their community even. And they become more and more kind of isolated in a way, they become more and more distinguished from their social environment from their natural environment from their familial environment. Then what that then necessitates is a return, it then demands that somehow that individual be reintegrated into the whole, that it is embedded within.
And if we look at ritualized initiation practices throughout, really any culture, you see something like this. Where a young man usually who's coming into Adulthood is required to go through this great trial of some sort whereby their ego is kind of broken down in a way so that it can then be reconfigured, kind of woven back into the tribe, the community, the nation, the church, whatever it is. So now taking that kind of logic and applying it to the human journey and to the place of science in that journey, what seems to be going on here is this that the human intellect has gone through such an individuation process. We have individuated from nature and now the real goal the real attractor of science is then going to be reintegration. And we need to actually be able to understand nature because we need to figure out a way to weave ourselves back into it in a cohesive way and this is this is more important now, I think than ever because we're at a kind of belly of the beast type phase at the moment. Where our sense of separation from nature and even separation within individual human beings, the separation of the intellect from the intuition, the imagination. The body has become so acute that it's at a kind of breaking point, essentially.
And you know when if we look at this in in Jungian terms or in Joseph Campbell's terms. That's the turning point. That's the point of greatest intensity, the point of greatest separation the point of greatest darkness and turmoil. But it's also the point where the big revelation happens, the big turnaround happens, the big insight, the light bulb turns on. And there's this realization of what's actually being demanded of us such that we can begin to engage and take the first steps into the journey back home as it were.
Liev Dalton
Yeah, I can't help but think back to our podcast with Phoenix Aurelius. He mentioned, and he's an alchemist, that science has kind of undergone this alchemical process in of itself which you just amazingly laid out. That we've separated all the science into these different fields that everything is so specific now. People study a gene, 1 gene for their whole life. They're concerned with everything to do with this 1 gene, this little genetic sequence that we found in humans somehow. You know he talked about how now it's about bringing it all back together and I've kind of made it part of my purpose to try and bring this all back together. Maybe it's too big of a goal but I think it's possible.
And I think even when I go back and read old philosophers, when they describe what a philosopher was, a philosopher wasn't somebody who sat around all day and thought. They just didn't sit around thinking all the time. They were a mathematician, they were a historian, they were a doctor, they were a gardener, they were a carpenter, they were anything you could think of. And taking from all aspects of life which I quite enjoy. And truly dedicating their lives to the craft of understanding. I like that that, makes me excited for where science is moving because there are a lot of great minds out there, I think, like yourself and I've talked to amazing people through this podcast and through this journey of creating this podcast and Instagram there's so many brilliant, brilliant people out there and I think that we're moving in a really good direction. You know I'm optimistic for sure.
Alfred North Whitehead, Empiricism & American Pragmatism
Kehlan Morgan
Yeah, myself as well. And I want to end with this actually, so one of the major philosophers who I've been riffing on, elaborating on, and studying for quite some time now has been Alfred North Whitehead. And he was part of this British empiricist intellectual tradition. He was originally a mathematician. He was really concerned with mathematical logic. And, you know he went through this period of a dark night of the soul as it were because his son died in World War one and he ended up kind of going through this crisis period where he ended up selling a bunch of his possessions I believe, and he ended up moving to the United States where he ended up at Harvard University. And he ended up becoming very influenced by the American pragmatist movement specifically John Dewey and William James.
Now this is really interesting to me if we put the specifics of Whitehead's philosophy to the side for a moment, if we look at the big picture here. What's going on? So, you had this kind of rationalism versus empiricism thing happened in Europe and then the empiricism tradition kind of facilitated the development of modern science, in certain ways. But then the German phenomenological tradition did as well. And in fact, up until World War 2, it was the German phenomenological tradition that was really, informing science in a lot of ways. More so even than the British empiricist tradition because so much of physics was happening in Germany, right? So, the empiricist tradition though, that whitehead's trying to remain faithful to, to some degree, is this insistence, very much like Goethe’s interestingly, that the empirical, that our actual experience of nature, of what it is to actually be in the world, be regarded as something epistemologically and ontologically primary.
Whitehead really does not want to sink back into this kind of dissolutive idealism or rationalism by which we start to see the world as just a user interface, or a hologram, or a simulation, or just kind of not really real phantom which is emerging out of this purely ideal, absolute consciousness or whatever. He's not necessarily opposed to these ideas of regarding consciousness as fundamental. In fact, he does come to that conclusion. But what he's really trying to enforce here is this idea that our experience of the world is primary that matters. Everything has to begin with that in some way.
And it's really interesting to me that he ended up in America and he ended up being informed by this American pragmatist tradition. Because in a way you can see the American pragmatist tradition as kind of like the next logical step in that progression where we're not just regarding observation as important, but we're actually looking at the way that truths and beliefs and ideas actually condition our participation in the world right? That our actual being in the world is being in flux, and being in the process, being a part of these metabolisms of life, and water and carbon and blood and ideas and everything else.
And that's really important here, because I think there's this intimation of a kind of redemption arc in a way. Because that American pragmatism, which I think goes far beyond just William James and John Dewey, it's really something that is fundamental to the psyche of America itself. This idea where the rubber meets the road is where things matter. That kind of attitude has been, I think in a lot of ways, kind of transmogrified into this really pessimistic cynical kind of, financier, used car salesman type of attitude where truth doesn't really matter, there are no higher aspirations, I'm just here to make money right? And that's kind of like the shadow of the American soul in a way. But then with Whitehead the way that he's influenced by American pragmatism, and really if we look at William James and John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce by themselves, I think we can see that there's a light side to this too. That's not quite shining through at the moment.
But it can and it's important because it's playing a role in this. It's part of the story that's unfolding and I think it's kind of yet to be seen exactly the way that these things are all going to kind of come together at the end but I'm also very confident that they will, so we'll see.
How to Support and Learn from Kehlan
Liev Dalton
Great, amazing! Yeah, great way to wrap it up! I want you to tell the listeners how they can learn more from you or how they can support you in any way. I know you got a great YouTube channel.
Kehlan Morgan
Ah, yeah, if you want to see my video essays and other interviews and whatnot on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@Formscapes). You can also check out our website (https://www.formscapes.org/). And I have been hosting webinar courses on there. This is the thing that started recently I've been going through in a kind of class style format, process in reality by Alfred North Whitehead, as well as this book the ever-present origin by Jean Gebser. Those classes have already begun. But if you stay in touch and keep an eye out. We're going to be starting another round of webinar courses here probably within the next. Month and anybody can sign up if they want to and they're super fun. We've been having a blast doing that. We also have a Discord server if anybody wants to come and hang out and meme about stuff, we've got that going on as well. And yeah, that's pretty much the fur of it I've got a Twitter (https://twitter.com/Nalhek_Morgan?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) if anybody wants to follow that and that's pretty much the whole operation at this point.
Liev Dalton
Awesome! Well, I really appreciate you coming on. I appreciate absolutely everything that you're doing. You're one of those people that truly motivate me to want to learn more. You really just spark a fire under me. That's just like I just want to learn more you know, and I really appreciate you for that and I appreciate you for coming on.
Kehlan Morgan
Yeah, I appreciate this. This was a great conversation, of course we should totally do this again sometime. There are all kinds of things that we didn't talk about that we could totally bring up. So yeah, this was great. Very much appreciate you having me on. I Wish you the best I'm sure your channel is going to do great! Keep doing what you're doing. You've got a great Voice. You've got a great presentation style! Loving it!
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