This is part 2 of a series on Science, an examination of its foundations and the limits of our knowledge and methods in general. The previous part was about the fundamentally human nature of Science, and the following parts are: 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.
The second problem with falsifiability is that of course, it vastly limits the scope of what we can even examine in the first place, which is both its usefulness but also something which creates an unexamined blindspot. Any statement I build around the idea of "Love" for instance cannot be tested out rigorously, because Love is not an idea, it's a quality which emerges from conscious experience, not something I can cause to systematically occur by setting up the right circumstances.
There is a lot going on here, even in this simple example, so let's make some distinctions. There is a blindness to the mind which comes from the limits of literal language. Two fundamental principles which shape literal language are firstly, literacy, or what we could call spatiality. It's the principle which separates Reality into isolated things, which the mind can then examine independently from one another: a chair there, my body here, the sky up there, the ground down there, and so on. The second principle is causality, which is not strictly about time, but more about mind-graspable relationships between things, which allows us to state things such as: pushing the ball makes it roll, some objects are heavier than others, my sibling has the same color of eyes as me, and so on.
These principles are quite hardwired into our usual day to day perception, in that they are much deeper than mere ideas. We don't experience the World and need to remind ourselves that, oh yeah, I need to separate the chair from myself, oh silly me. Instead what happens, or rather a way to explain what happens, is that our perception creates the sense of space and time "before" we can even rationally talk about it.
But notice how I am using a temporal word, "before", to talk about the experience of time. This is because fundamentally, we cannot use literal language to describe our conscious experience, we have to resort to metaphors to 'bridge' the 'gap' 'between' them, which have a way of betraying what is truly going on if we take them literally.
Consciousness is more fundamental than literacy, which is why it cannot be shown in strictly literal fashion how to be more conscious, and what it means to be conscious. To understand consciousness, one has to be conscious, because being is more fundamental than knowing.
A third principle linked to literal thinking is consistency, which isn't strictly baked into our day to day perception, but is something that we tend to care in our man-made systems. Consistency means that a statement and its negation can never be both true at the same time, which would create a paradox.
As self-evident as those three principles seem to be, how would you know for sure that they are True? Well the problem is that, as mentioned in the previous piece, our knowledge is by and large negative. We can know for sure when something is false when we have contradicting evidence to show it, but we can only say that a theory hasn't been dismissed by the information and knowledge we have at hand.
This is where we have to trust artists and spiritual teachers if we do not have any conscious experience of their insights, because they tell us, whether implicitly or not, that those three principles of literacy are false.
Separation is not inherent to being alive, it's a boundary which can dissolve under a profound spiritual experience, or the act of making love, not just the sexual kind, but the act of softly gazing or feeling something or someone else other than your self.
Consistency is convenient for our systems of beliefs and our laws, but spiritual teachers consistently point to how paradoxical Reality and Life are. Reality is both material and mental, to live well is to both take responsibility as an individual, but also surrender to a Higher Force, life gives way to death, which gives way to life, on and on.
And causality is not inherent to the Universe as a whole, which is why the Big Bang sounds so silly to anyone who thinks about it for a moment, after all, how could time itself have been caused by an event in time? If there was a ground to our Reality, in space or in time, it surely would be 'outside' of those coordinates, because being in time makes you subject to causality, which means that something before caused the present circumstances, and those past circumstances were caused by even more distant ones, etc. No, we cannot apply causality to the 'beginning' of time itself, because words such as 'beginning' already imply a time which is 'yet' to exist. Reality is fundamentally acausal, and 'then' and only then does my self 'create' time.
But on a much more practical sense, we don't need to look at the fundamentally paradoxical and acausal nature of Reality to see the limitations of literacy in our lives. What we can notice first hand is that any time we reduce an important quality, such as beauty, freedom, courage, peace, health or love into literal language, somehow, it always seems wrong.
For instance, if we reduce love to mere things, then the conclusion is either that one must acquire as many things as possible, or understand them through one's mind, or the implicit conclusion that most reach in our alienating world, that love does not exist, it's just romantic bullshit that artists and other unintelligent people use to cope with a cold, loveless Universe. Conversely, if love is reduced to my ideas and emotions, then love is whatever I want it to be. It's all in my subjective experience, meaning I can conjure it up at will, regardless of the circumstances or people, which means that in fact I do not even need anyone in my life, I can just sit silently in a room and beam down rays of Love(TM) and Enlightenment(TM), and no one can verify it or contradict me about that, because Love is purely in my own subjective experience. 1
Anyone who has softly loved someone knows that both of those pictures are wrong, and yet not entirely false either. It is possible to enjoy the things in the external world simply because of their appearances, which can be gorgeous for their own sake, and likewise there is a degree of subjectivity to love, because of course we have our own preferences which can mesh well or not with the other's, a process which is necessary to some degree to find harmony in our relationships. But Love cannot be reduced to either of those poles, the first one being the objectivist-materialist, and the second one being the subjectivist-solipsist, Love is in the whole.
This is perhaps far less abstract with the example of Health. We can certainly measure many things about a human body, such as its blood pressure, heart rate, mineral concentrations in the blood, its weight, its cholesterol levels, and so on, and clearly those map to real things happening in our bodies, such that if our heart rate and blood pressure are too high, we are unlikely to be healthy. But, even though we can have rough thresholds beyond which a body cannot function well, this does not mean that someone who doesn't exhibit any clearly definable symptom is healthy, because health is not entirely measurable, it's also about a felt feeling of aliveness and ease which one experiences throughout the day.
But likewise, health is not entirely subjective. You can do a lot of good for yourself by cutting out negativity from your life and surrounding yourself with more wholesome people, and more harmonious environments, whether inside or in nature, but you cannot magically conjure up yourself to be healthy, it is more than simply a state of mind. Health has components of objectivity and subjectivity, but cannot be reduced to either pole, it is what Darren Allen calls panjective.
All of the important aspects of our lives follow the same logic. We can be materially secure and still be miserable, and there is something incredibly hollow about trying to conjure up happiness through mere mental tricks and vapid affirmations. Freedom is both an attitude but also dependent on external circumstances. And Truth is both externally verifiable, objective, but also found within, and colored by the lens of our subjectivity, but it cannot be reduced to either pole.
If you defend the idea that Science is only concerned with what we can externally verify, then fine, but that means in this case that Science is fundamentally at odds with Truth, as well as all the important qualities in our lives, which are grounded and can only be grounded in a conscious experience of Reality.
1 See Panjectivism by Darren Allen
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2025-10-21