This is part 3 of a series on Science, an examination of its foundations and the limits of our knowledge and methods in general. The first part was about the fundamentally human nature of Science, the second part on the blindspots of literal language, and the following parts are: 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 long-winded discussion of the previous post highlighted the limitations of literal language, which are, to repeat: 1) separation (space) 2) causality (time) and 3) consistency. Those three limits are fundamentally at odds with our conscious experience, which does not necessarily satisfy those three aspects of literal language, which means that questions of Love are automatically excluded from any scientific inquiry, and so is any question of genuine value which must necessarily be grounded in conscious experience.
Claims about Love are not falsfiable because love is not even literally describable, but does that mean we should not bother with them? Hopefully the answer for you dear reader is a resounding no, Love is as real as anything else, and something worth dying for. The limits of our mental tools shouldn't determine our lives.
The second limitation with regards to the falsfiability of Love has to do with experimentation itself. What are the keys for a successful experiment after all? A quick definition on the internet tells us that an experiment is "a controlled procedure to test a hypothesis about the natural world". That hypothesis is formulated in literal language, which again has its fundamental limitations, but the control of variables is another major constraint.
The implicit assumption behind the ability to control variables is that whatever you are studying can be isolated from everything else. This can work for very simple phenomenons, such as studying the trajectory of falling objects—even then it's worth nothing that air resistance has a significant effect on lightweight objects, meaning that even in this seemingly simple context there is a variable which is almost impossible to remove out of the experiment—but certainly not for complex ones such as human behavior.
What this implies is that the control of variables works best for simple phenomenons, the ones we are probably least interested in. It's great to know that Physics is rigorous, and this has allowed engineering to be really powerful in that domain, but it also means that the scientific understanding of human psychology is rather lacking to say the least, often consisting in mere correlations observed in some experiments, and which fail to be replicated in any meaningful way.
What is it about human psychology for instance that makes it so hard to pinpoint to a few variables? Here are some elements that I see. Firstly, the variables which we test for aren't easy to define, as the discussion on the limits to literacy point towards. We can measure the weight of a ball with ease, but how do you measure someone's mood? Or the various type of reactions that someone could have when they are anxious? Or whatever emotional baggage they have from past experiences? What this means is that scientists have to resort to proxies for those important variables, such as using your heart rate to determine how anxious or relaxed you are, which are necessarily oversimplifications of a deeper whole. Or what happens more often than not is that they will ignore an important aspect altogether, such as someone's psychological makeup, how they tend to react in different situations, and how the specific context they find themselves in shapes their decision—it's well known that people act differently around scientists in white coats than around regular people for instance.
Secondly, our perception, beliefs and actions are part of a feedback loop, and in particular can exhibit the reflexivity found in the placebo effect, where a belief that something is effective ends up influencing your body or your mind. The reality of feedback loops is not found in simple systems, and it is something which our minds are particularly bad at modeling. It's easy to wrap our head around a sequence of causal events, even if it's a long sequence of complicated events, but as soon as they involve feedback loops, it becomes much harder to imagine what will happen next, which is why the weather is almost impossible to predict accurately past a few days, because its feedback loops lead to chaotic behaviors.
What is interesting to note here about the placebo effect is that even though it is undeniably real, to the point that it forces scientific experiments to be designed around it, science at large does not work with it, very likely because it is not a variable which can be forced on or off, unlike someone taking a certain drug for instance.
Still, this does not prevent the placebo effect from influencing our lives, and from certain healing practices to make use of it. You might have your opinions about those, but the broader idea they make use of is that of rituals which fundamentally change the mood of a given setting. Even in our modern disenchanted world we still have some rituals, such as marriage of course, graduation ceremonies, birthdays, Christmas reunions, or funerals. Whether we embrace it or not, we are beings who are deeply influenced by our environment, and rituals are a way of working with that to create clear demarcations in time, such as the transition from childhood to adulthood in indigenous cultures, or the passage of the seasons, and to create shifts in mood, such as the ceremonies found in all cultures surrounding the birth of a new child.
We like to think of ourselves as superior to our ancestors, and yet when it comes to the biggest transitions in our lives, our approaches are far more crude than those of indigenous cultures all around the world. There is nothing that really marks the separation between childhood and adulthood in the modern world, which is probably why so many are stuck as perpetual menchildren, both selfish and insensitive to those around them, but also unable to take responsibility for themselves.
Our funerals are also mere formalities, not honoring the transition from life to death that we all take part in, but rather a vague sense of collective sadness that someone has died too young—as if it was possible to keep death away forever.
And our attitudes towards women birthing a child is rather barbaric, the way in which hospitals create this implicit hurry in the doctors, and thus the woman giving birth, because they have to take care of other patients, the utterly alien environment of the room, like seriously white walls and bright lights is exactly how the interior of alien spaceships is depicted in our collective imagination, and how children are habitually separated from their mother right from birth, going from a familiar and safe warmth to a cold room filled with strangers, a fitting description of the modern world at large.
Why do I mention all of this about rituals and our departure from them? It's because our medical system is first of all totally alienated from real, embodied life, which is probably a major reason why it is so ineffective. Many doctors do not even pay attention to their patients, they simply look at the data on a computer screen. You better believe that this has an influence on the treatments and how people relate to their own health. How can we expect people to feel good in their body when the doctors themselves do not care about the body, just the measures? How can we expect people to take responsibility for their health when the only thing that medical institutions do is give away pills and make them rely on professionals? And how can expect people to feel alive in their body when going to a doctor consists in having someone tell you everything that is wrong with your body?
Science is supposed to be pragmatic and focused on results, yet it consistently takes part in a practice of fragmenting the environment and removing everything which doesn't seem useful, which ends up being systematically bad for the results. The control of variables is a practice which is supposed to give us more understanding about the world and human beings, yet what happens in practice is that people lose track of the ends and merely focus on the methods.
It is not scientific to ignore the feedback loops of emotions, beliefs and expectations, just in order to have a simpler model. If someone is more committed to their models and methods than to Reality itself, they are committing the fundamental mistake of dogma and idolatry, which is rather ironic for a period of time which defines itself as being above superstitions and blind beliefs.
A third reason why human psychology is difficult to pinpoint to a few variables is that human beings interpret what they perceive all the time, and this is not strictly a bad thing, though of course it can often go wrong.
There is a famous test which is supposed to highlight how bad students are at reading comprehension, which asks which of the following two statements is more likely (I have skipped the question which is supposed to give context because it doesn't matter here): 1) Bob is a librarian 2) Bob is a librarian and is shy. What the results show is that a surprising number of people answer 2), even though it is strictly included in answer 1).
But what is really going on here is that the students, being normal human beings, interpret parts of a sentence based on the rest of its content, which means that they interpret answer 1) as being "Bob is a librarian and is not shy" because otherwise why would answer 2) exist? In normal, everyday conversation, when we are given a choice, we expect them to be mutually exclusive, it's one of those implicit conventions about talking with others which facilitates understanding. For instance, if someone asks us: "do you want a slice of cake or an ice cream?" very few people will answer "both", because there is an implicit understanding that if someone provides us with a choice, the polite answer is to choose one or the other, but not both.
Interpretation is very important for effective communication because language is inherently lossy. If we interpreted everything in bad faith, nothing could work, we would constantly argue about definitions, referring to a dictionary or this or that expert, and we would constantly construct the worst possible version of any argument we see, instead of earnestly engaging with it. Some amount of good faith and interpretation has to exist for constructive conversations to exist.
Some people believe that we should remove all of those implicit conventions about language and just stick to objective reality, but first of all there is no such thing as a strictly "objective" reality we can describe through language, as the limits to literacy highlight, and second of all it would remove all the non-verbal aspects of communication, which make up most of our interactions, and also give us the delightful moments of shared laughter, and almost telepathy as we correctly guess what the other wants without any words. Not only is it impossible to shape language to be purely literal and explicit, because the ground of language is conscious experience, it would also kill love, laughter and any artistic quality in our lives.
Reality, whether social or natural, is so complex that we have to interpret it. Our minds do not broadcast to us the truth, it instead gives us a representation of Reality which we can use to navigate it. Saying that this makes us irrational is like saying that our occular system is "wrong" because of the various optical illusions we can construct for it. In a narrow, limited sense, it is true, but it loses the context of the kind of environments our mind is suited to navigate, and how it is prodigiously useful if we do not take its representations too literally. 1
Fourthly, and as hinted above, as human beings we pay attention to the whole of a situation, not just to isolated bits here and there. This is in fact a deeply crucial part of proper discernment, the ability to have a broad attention and take into account contextual information.
Scientists do not want to engage with anything related to divination, such as astrology, tarot, geomancy or whatever have you, 2 in part because divination is about broad and subtle perception, rather than our everyday narrow and simplistically causal view of seeing the world, which can be put into models and explained to others.
I would roughly define divination as the use of randomly selected symbols to make sense of the future. This is not the same thing as making precise, externally verifiable claims about the future, which is what Science is concerned with, rather it's about honing your attention to perceive things you might have missed. The fact that it requires conscious discernment rather than being mechanically verifiable through data is thus not a bug, it's a feature. It provides us with a way to train that ability, rather than try to replace it altogether, (an impossibility) which is helpful because we often perceive things which we aren't able to put into rational terms, 3 especially when it comes to the impressions we get from other people.
All of this means that there isn't a clear, unambiguous way to verify the truth content of divination, which is why the scientific argument that it leads people to see meaningful patterns in mere coincidences is correct, since human beings love story telling, feeling uniquely important, and confirming their pre-conceived biases. Discernment is never flawless, but then again, it is involved in everything, even in disciplines with more methods and checks such as Science.
Moreover, it is well known that masters in a given field are not necessarily able to explain their decisions to other people either, as the model of the Four stages of competence highlights for instance. Those who are good are usually at the 'conscious competence' stage, where they can rationally explain their decisions because their process is still rooted in methods and principles, whereas the greatest amongst us are at the 'unconscious competence', where their abilities have been so refined and integrated that it almost feels like some "deeper self" has taken the place of their decisions, instead of the day to day rational mind we tend to engage with.
We can keep speculating about the nature of that final stage in competence, and whether it is related to some innate genius, or Daemon as the Greeks would call it, but the results are undeniable: experts have abilities and discernment skills which rise above what they can communicate with literal language. There is a deeper intelligence at play in how they make decisions, which is much faster, and interestingly enough more accurate, than if they had to painstakingly work through a set of rational principles which could be explained to someone else. 4
Therefore, whatever you think of let's say divination, or paranormal phenomenons, as a rigorous thinker you cannot dismiss something just because it cannot be laid out in simple causal explanations, because to do so would also dismiss the most intelligent and competent people we have.
Terrence Tao, often credited as one of the best contemporary mathematicians, talks about the pre-rigorous and the post-rigorous stages in mathematics. In the pre stage, someone's intuition is incredibly flawed and they make hasty conclusions which are simply false. This is where they must learn to carefully sit down with assumptions, work their way up a proof, so that their reasoning can be grounded and so that their mental images of whatever they are studying is accurate.
But this process is very limiting because it's slow, and while it is good at verifying a proof, it is not adequate to come up with your own proofs, which require certain leaps of logic, and an intuition about the general "shape" of the argument. This is what the post-rigorous proof is concerned with, when someone's intuition is well calibrated, and they can think in novel ways to understand a problem, and know that if they put in the time to come up with the rigorous proof, they will be able to. The proof then becomes a way of verifying that the intuition is correct, but the process of coming up with it isn't anywhere near as linear or simple as what the proof might suggest.
Of course none of what I have said means that we shouldn't remain skeptical of anything labelled as "woo", but I hope that it is clear now that decision-making and perception are far stranger and subtler things than what a naive view of Science might entail. You might have your opinions on those who get information by paying attention to the cycle of the planets, or shuffling a deck of cards, but the geniuses amongst us have a process for thinking and creating which might be even more opaque than those systems, but this doesn't mean we should reject them because we don't understand them.
It is true that divination hasn't been verified scientifically, but then again neither has the beauty of music, which is not a scientific concept to begin with. But imagine if scientists tried to play what they believed to be music in a lab, and the participants didn't show any similar responses to when they were in a concert.
Being able to sense someone's aura, or their vibes, or what the right thing to do at a given moment to do, or how to have a great relationship with someone, might not be scientific questions, but they nonetheless remain incredibly important aspects of our lives, which is why dismissing the endeavor to ask and answer such questions is silly, though of course no method or system is immune to criticism. Taken to its extreme, we shouldn't concern ourselves with matters of love because we cannot reduce it to scientific terms, and when you think about it, freedom doesn't exist because it doesn't have a scientific definition, so there is nothing wrong with living in a prison right?
It is important to provide justification and some manner of self-verification for any claim we make, which is why anyone who tries to get you to favor beliefs over your own conscious experience is suspect. But, the process of self-verification cannot always meet the standards of Science, which are 1) externally verifiable and 2) reproducibility (arguably even Science doesn't meet the second standard for most of its disciplines).
If we were burdened with such constraints, we would be giving up essentially everything to do with our own conscious experience, as well as the miraculous and the unique in our lives, which are inherently not replicable and reducible down to simple causal relationships.
Anything which qualifies as "woo" cannot be verified scientifically for a variety of reasons, but the two main ones which I have mentioned already are that, firstly, they involve some form of conscious practice which hone your perception (divination, energy work, physiognomy) or subtle abilities (energy work, ritual work), which means they are actively participatory and cannot be boiled down to mechanical, external influences, such as the effects of a pill or what a machine can do.
And secondly, they operate within a fundamentally interconnected reality, whether that of the body in the case of "alternative" medicine, the solar system at large in the case of Astrology, or your entire life in the case of the Tarot. Paranormal phenomenons and miracles are definitely not replicable, but perhaps what is going on is that they work with an array of variables which are basically impossible to control, such as the amount of experience of the practicioner, the general belief of the witnesses, the time of the day, whatever spiritual influences might be hovering around, and much, much more.
I am well aware that those two reasons are fantastic excuses to not provide any evidence. To say that for instance you can only verify the validity of occultism after spending ten whole years as an initiate is the classic defense to any outsider critique, it's the echo chamber of the "experts" which the clergy have used in the Middle Ages to defend their abuse, and which funnily enough our present day clergy, the academia, uses to defend their legitimacy now. "Who are you to critique the Science(TM) if you do not have a PhD?" But it is still the case that conscious faculties can only be developed through conscious effort, which takes time, and yes, some amount of faith.
Can you imagine someone interacting with Science with no amounts of faith whatsoever? They would not even listen to anything you said because they already have a belief that every defender of Science has been paid off by universities and businesses, which includes every textbook, video, movie, even the events of history and the idea of an externally verifiable Reality are part of the scientific delusion. It's impossible to talk with anyone who has no faith whatsoever, which is why skepticism taken to its extreme—as far as I can tell no one ever takes it this far because they have to survive in a social environment—can only lead to madness.
The second aspect, that of interconnection, is also incredibly convenient to justify grift of course, because you can always come up with a variable which hasn't been taken into account to justify why this or that experiment didn't work. But it is also undeniably true that complex systems, such as the human body, cannot be reduced down to a simplistic model of parts interacting with one another, the whole is simply different from the set of the parts, which is why modern medicine is so unbelievably bad at dealing with any complex, chronic case, because it tries to reduce everything down to one or two causes, and then either concludes that a condition is not curable, or that it's due to "stress". 5
Let me conclude this by a list of fields and phenomenons which are not well suited to the practice of isolating variables. We have human psychology and medicine as previously mentioned.
Then we have ecology, which much like medicine deals with interconnected complex systems which cannot be reduced to parts, since they involve feedback loops.
Then we have sociology and economics unsurprisingly, because if a single human being is complex, then god knows what large groups of human beings can behave like.
Economics in particular is very interesting, because it is a field with an astoundingly bad track record for predictions, which is unsurprising since our economy is an incredibly complex environment, and its whole gimmick for defending its theories is that "humans are irrational", which never really causes a fundamental reevaluation of the field. Can you imagine if aeronautics was completely flawed and led to planes built on its principles to constantly crash, and the physicists working in that field kept saying that "well, the wind simply doesn't behave as we would expect it to do". I guess it is simply too profitable to have "experts" defend how the current system is so great, arguably the main activity of economics.
It is interesting to note how, by and large, the so-called "soft" sciences deal with significantly more complex phenomenons than the "hard" sciences, which makes the terminology rather misleading, because psychology is way harder than physics when it comes to giving satisfying answers. It also leads to a general sense of Physics envy, where the "softer" sciences try to replicate the rigour of physics by using quantification and statistics, but it just ends up being a sham because the nature and number of the variables at play makes it impossible to have any solid result.
Anything qualified as "woo" is likewise unsuited to be pinned down by a few isolated variables, which includes all of divination as mentioned, all of energy work, holistic medicine, paranormal phenomenons, and much more.
Ultimately the faith in the control of variables exists from the point of view that Reality is a very simple, essentially mechanical thing that we can study. In Reality, this is totally false, and it can only be maintained by people who have lived their entire life in utterly mediated environments which behave as we expect, shielding people from fundamental uncertainty and confusion.
Unsurprisingly, as people spend more and more time with computers, the epitome of a mediated environment, more and more people start to genuinely believe that Reality is merely a simulation, something a mind could run given enough computional resources. There is no way to show to such a person that they are wrong, because to experience the other side, a non-represented world, would require a self conscious enough to experience something other than itself, but there is no reason to do that for an egoic person.
The idea that scientific selves might be constrained by their very own being is an idea which could never find itself in the academia, because institutions require people who can be shaped by them, not sovereign individuals who primarily trust their direct experience, and then secondarily turn to tools of the mind to make sense of what is going on.
There is no evidence that Reality as a whole is a simple mechanical system which we can study the same way we can study basic physics on our planet, which means there is no fundamental reason to believe that the principle of isolating variables in experiments is absolute, and that anything which doesn't satisfy it is somehow "false". To believe in those principles at all costs is to commit to the same dogma that religious people in the past engaged in, which is rather ironic given the subject at hand.
1 See also A Critique of Reason by Luke Smith
2 Astrology and the Tarot are more than just systems of divination, but these are common ways in which they are used.
3 Read more from John Michael Greer's piece about divination
4 See this article on three principles of expert decision-making
5 I'll have a lot more to say about modern medicine as I dive more into Ayurveda and become better at dealing with my own (fairly mild) chronic conditions. Ayurveda views subjects such as allergies, stress, myopia, diet, exercise and a lot more, very differently from modern medicine. I have found it a lot less dogmatic actually, and a lot more willing to examine reality and encourage people to experiment, rather than blindly trust mere ideas.
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2025-10-21