Beyond Scientism

I forgot how fun it is to ponder about the mystery of existence. Questions such as “Who am I?” and ” Why am I here?” are the basis of a myriad of mythologies, philosophies, and religions and, potentially, the main drivers of consciousness evolution. In Western cultures, secular paradigms of existence come from the seventeenth-century scientific revolution. This movement took ancient Greek philosophers as the basis of a path to knowledge based on reason.  Seventeenth-century science intended to crack "The Mystery" through cross-disciplinary studies underlined by logical-mathematical systems that could model physical reality. The era's debate was between the disciples of Plato, who held essentialist views, and those of Aristotle, who held empirical views. The empiricist won, and science started to focus on natural phenomena governed by the laws of physics, events that could be logically modelled and replicated by experimentation. The scientific method slowly broke up with the humanities, looking down on metaphysics as the superstitions of lesser minds. The advances of the Industrial Revolution further influenced the scientific world, which started working towards a theory of everything, creating a materialistic belief system that defended deterministic models of existence based on Darwin's evolution.

Psychology, as an emerging branch of science dedicated to the study of the mind, was caught between materialistic science and metaphysics and, unable to bridge the philosophical gap, ended up focusing on areas that allowed for objective experimentation, such as behaviour and cognitive development. However, as scientific research showed interest in consciousness and started to study subjective experience from a cognitive perspective, claiming it to be an epiphenomenon of brain activity that could be mapped to perception, the metaphysical dilemmas were back. Towards the end of the twentieth century, it was sufficiently clear that naturalistic views and empirical research methods, no matter how sophisticated, were not sufficient to account for complex subjective phenomena and the lines between superstition and science started to blur. In physics, discoveries such as quanta's dual wave-particle nature and non-locality and entanglement properties challenged Darwinian determinism. Einstein’s relativity exposed the observant-dependent quality of experimentation. In mathematics, Godel’s theorem refuted any possibility of creating complete formal systems that avoided self-reference and paradox. A corporate-like mentality in the natural sciences, now an expensive endeavour reliant on funding policies, started to cast doubts on the objectivity of academic research and, in consciousness studies, post-materialistic views emerged to challenge what was seen as scientistic dogma. Transpersonal psychology is one such view. It grounds the analysis of subjective experience on scientific terrain as it honours the mystery of existence with all its metaphysical implications and, therefore, recognises dimensions of consciousness beyond cognition and sense perception. Although initially based on a perennial philosophy favouring a contentless consciousness studied through mystical ideals and neuroscience. It now incorporates complex dynamic models and metaphysical dualisms to explore consciousness as an inherent quality of life, where mind, matter, and more abstract states of being interact and actively participate in the evolutive process of life. 

References

1. Blackmore, S., & Troscianko, E.T. (2018). Consciousness. An Introduction (3rd ed.). Routledge.

2. Berlinski, D. (2000). The advent of the Algorithm: The 300-year journey from an idea to the computer. New York, NY: Hardcourt.

3. Lancaster, B.L. (2004). The Marriage of Science and Mysticism. Palgrave Macmillan.

4. Nasr, S. H. (2006). Spirituality and science: Convergence or divergence. World Wisdom Online Library, 207-218.

5. Walach, H. (2019). The Galileo Commission Report. Scientific and Medical Network.