This is part 1 of a series on Science, an examination of its foundations and the limits of our knowledge and methods in general. The following parts are: Part 2 on the blindspots of literal language, Part 3 on the limits of controlling variables, Part 4 on the self-referentiality of the mind, Part 5 on how empiricism is secondary within institutions, and finally Part 6 on the limits of utilitarianism, which is the ultimate purpose of Science.
This series is endlessly endebted to Darren Allen's writing, namely, Self and Unself, his philosophy of just about everything, which I have used here to describe the limits of literacy and what the mind can know, and Ad Radicem, his eclectic series of essays about the world.
A common critique against energy work, such as Reiki, Tai Chi, Qi gong or Bioenergetics, is that it is not scientifically verified. Now instead of talking about how many aspects of what is called "woo" are in fact directly verifiable for yourself, the best possible state of affairs for an empirical mind since you do not even need to rely on any external source of authority, I am going to point the finger at the so-called "Science" and highlight that Science itself is grounded on things it fundamentally cannot verify.
There are two distinct levels to my critique at large. The first one is what we could call the human level, which is to say that even when Science is supposed to be rigorous in theory, it isn't in practice because of the power dynamics we are well used to. The Academia is of course not exempt of corruption, as any institution is, which is why we commonly find practices such as p-hacking, echo chambers hiding behind the game of "peer review", the petty games of status amongst people competing for scarce positions, and people working away to arrive to the conclusions that whoever is funding them wants to arrive at.
But even without any direct dishonesty from the people working there, the incentive structures they are a part of tends to deter them from the pure quest for Truth which Science is supposed to be. The well known "publish or perish" dynamic drives academics to churn out papers mindlessly, all to keep up with the academic bureaucracy, even if they aren't of any worth to anyone. And the simple need for funding means that universities are geared towards areas of research which favor big businesses, not the search for truth or helping out the average person, which is why for instance modern medicine makes you utterly reliant on major companies and experts to address your problems, and does not give you the frameworks and mindset to take care of your own health.
I am not particularly interested in Scientific fraud, first of all because I do not have any direct experience working in academia, and I am sure that those who do have more interesting things to say about it, but also because at this point, it's a fairly known topic. It's not particularly surprising that status-driven human beings will do anything just to advance their career, even if it compromises their own integrity, or the one of the institution they are working in. We see this in religious institutions, in the law, in the medical system, and of course in politics, so why should academia be different?
The second level of my critique is what we could call the epistemological level, which is that the core principles of Science are grounded on assumptions which they themselves cannot verify. Falsifiability is about scientific theories, but it itself is a principle which is not falsifiable, objectivity takes for granted the object and subject split, and you cannot use empiricism to verify empiricism itself. These points deserve a lot of attention because they highlight the limitations of literal language, and the mind which produces it.
Let's start with falsifiability, which is the principle which states that "a scientific statement or theory must be disprovable through observation or experimentation." This is very sensible for sure, after all, if you could not even imagine how you could disprove something, then that statement would certainly feel "true" simply because there is no way of knowing otherwise. Statements about how all of Reality is a hallucination in one's mind, or ones which are so vague that they would mean anything depending on an ever-changing interpretation of the terms are excluded by falsifiability, because they would waste time from Scientific inquiry, which at the end of the day must be practical and deal with things we can actually test.
I am not saying that falsifiability is a bad criterion, but there is more to the story than this. First of all, just because a theory happens to find a few seemingly contradicting data points does not mean that the scientific community immediately rejects that theory. Such a blindness to the context would mean that Newton's theory of Gravity would have been rejected because of all the contradicting data points, which could be explained by the facts that a) there are more celestial bodies that the calculations might have not taken into account, and b) the theory is ultimately limited, as Einstein's General Relativity shows, but it is still a great approximation, powerful enough that we could have sent people to the moon with it.
What this highlights is that of course, scientific inquiry is like any human endeavor, which means we do not process information on a crude binary of true or false, but tend to evaluate theories based on how plausible they are way before we get evidence on whether we can dismiss it or not. 1 This subjective evaluation gets a bad rep because it seems unscientific, but in truth even scientists do it and for a good reason, which is that there are only so many theories you can test out with a limited amount of time and funding. This highlights a very important, if not slightly obvious, point about Science: it is ultimately a practical affair, one concerned with utility and modeling the Universe, which is not the same thing as Truth. 2
I do not have a problem with pursuing utility when it is within reasonable limits. The problem is that such limits are routinely ignored, which is why we find a swarm of scientifically minded internet creators happily pushing for transhumanism on their platform (CGP Grey, Tim Urban), and more concerningly, the major problem is that defenders of Science often present it as an unfalliable method for reaching truth, when it just ain't so, it's a method of building consensus and models from the overwhelming amount of data we acquire from living and experimenting, which human beings can then put to practical uses.
We can dismiss the vague statements derived from Astrology on the principle of falsfiability, and this is useful for scientifically minded people, but this does not mean that Astrology is false! Millenia of observations of human patterns, across vastly different civilizations, and how those seem to relate to the cycles of the planets cannot be so easily dismissed after all. You might disagree with the frames, the explanations, the approach, especially because modern adherents to Astrology tend to bastardize it, but Astrology is founded on a massive wealth of direct observations which it would be foolish to completely dismiss.
Conversely, a model such as Newtonian gravity is not totally accurate, even within the limited domain of Physics, but it is certainly useful to make predictions and it would be foolish to discard it entirely, which is why we teach it still to this day. 3
If Newtonian gravity was held to our current standards however, it would basically be seen as a strange occult theory. What it states is not only that we can use the same law to describe the movement of the planets in the solar system, as well as the movement of objects falling on Earth (As Above so Below), but that this movement is the result of a force, which acts instantaneously and without any contact, between any two bodies with any mass whatsoever!
At least in the context of physics we could design experiments to see whether its predictions hold, but you have to admit that the implicit metaphysics behind such a model is incredibly strange compared to the usual notions we have of what a force and matter are. This does not shock us because we are used to it, and because we have to accept the model to pass tests in school, but this would appear as strange to pre-Newton scientists as energy work or astrology appear to modern people, simply because it feels like there is no reason it should be true, but that doesn't mean there isn't any truth whatsoever behind it.
Mathematicians are well aware of results which are true but which are very conter-intuitive the first time you hear them, so why should our theories about the world be any different? Just because something sounds weird or absurd doesn't mean it is false, and just because something is false or incomplete in its current state does not mean that there is nothing good whatsoever about it.
1 It's worth remembering that the epistemology of Science is largely negative, which is to say that we can confidently dismiss a theory if it is unable to take into account or explain various phenomenons we experience and can re-create, but we cannot confirm for sure that a theory is valid, we can only say that "with the data and knowledge we have so far, nothing has dismissed this theory". This is why we talk about falsifiability and not verifiability.
2 More in part 6 about how Science is ultimately in service to the self.
3 It is also pretty ironic that Newton himself was heavily invested in Alchemy, not as a mere curiosity but as a serious practice, and yet he is considered to be the father of modern physics.
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Science Authority Epistemology Woo Essayworthy
2025-10-21