This is part 5 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, the third part on the limits of controlling variables, the fourth parth on the self-referentiality of the mind, and finally the last remaining part as of now, Part 6 on the limits of utilitarianism, which is the ultimate purpose of Science.
I have talked at length about falsifiability, literalism and the limits of the mind, but what can we say about empirical evidence? There are again two levels at which we can examine the problems with empiricism, the first one being the human corruption we all know of but which needs to be said again and again, because it is a reflection of a much deeper problem, and the second level being the epistemological limit of the mind and methods at large, which ignore consciousness, a rather problematic blindspot because our knowledge is ultimately founded upon conscious experience.
One of the problems of modern-day empiricism is that in many ways, it is not truly empirical. You cannot dismiss the benefits of holistic approaches to health without trying them for yourself, which does not mean that heuristics for dismissing certain approaches aren't useful, but once again, usefulness is not the same thing as Truth. Given that we have finite time and resources, we of course need certain guiding principles to filter what is sensible to spend time on and what is not, but this decision is always taken a priori, which means that it necessarily comes from a limited perspective.
What the mind loves to do however is to convince itself that its limited perspective is the right one, or at least more right than the others, which is a completely circular position: I am right about things, even when it comes to outside subjects I don't understand myself, because I use a certain rigorous principle that they don't. How do I know that they don't? Because they go against me, or because their position couldn't possibly be correct, which means they are wrong whereas I am right. How do I know that my rigorous principle is correct? Because people who don't use it are wrong.
From my experience, given the right combination of instruction and follower—the latter needs to put some amount of work—I am quite confident that so-called "alternative" approaches can be significantly better than allopathic medicine when it comes to chronic, complex illnesses, which is what most people struggle with in our times. Ironically, modern medicine is quite dependent on faith in external institutions and researchers, as well as large pharmaceutical companies, because the data comes from highly specialized professionals working with expensive instruments which require ample funding, whereas holistic approaches tend to be based on conscious discernment, exercises and meditations, and readily available supplies.
Why is mainstream medicine not empirical in practice? For instance, if you ask a health "expert" whether cold drinks are bad for you, they would say that there is nothing inherently wrong about the temperature of the drink, but because cold drinks are typically sodas or other similar beverages, you should stay away from them to keep your sugar levels low, a leading factor in health problems. I agree with the latter point, but anyone who has experimented with eliminating cold drinks from their life for some time, and switched exclusively to hot drinks such as coffee or tea, can see for themselves that warm liquids tend to make you more relaxed, and are easier for your digestive system to process, whereas cold drinks can be quite a shock to your system.
Holistic systems like Ayurveda or Traditional Chinese Medicine will talk about the "chi" in your stomach, or a similar metaphor which has to do with fire and the life force, but frankly it's not very difficult to imagine that our digestive system works best at a certain temperature and acidity, and that the temperature of our food and drinks can work with such parameters, or make them worse.
And more fundamentally, whatever explanation you have for that phenomenon doesn't change the direct experience you get from experimenting with your diet. Try to bring such a point to most (Western) doctors, and you would find it surprisingly hard to get them to consider that the temperature of your food and drinks could have a genuine impact on how you digest them, even though anyone can verify that for themselves.
Another example you can play with yourself if you have myopia 1 is that your eyesight is linked with how tense or relaxed your eyes are, and this is something you can exercise to permanently improve your eyesight. That's right, myopia is not some curse you are forced to carry with you for the rest of your life, it's a condition you can improve naturally over time. Even if the long term results take time to show up, you might have experienced times where you were noticeably more stressed out and where your eyesight was genuinely worse. The insight consists in noticing that the opposite is true, that deliberate relaxation in your body and how you look at things can improve your eyesight, even if just a bit, for that moment.
It is said that screens make our eyesight worse, and there might be truth to that because they do beam a lot of light in our eyes, especially because we rarely take breaks from looking at them. But one element which you can easily verify for yourself is that screens tend to narrow your visual field. In fact, the way to heal myopia consists in doing the opposite: being able to have a wide visual field, by being more and more aware of your peripheral vision, while still vividly looking in front of you. 2
This also necessitates having to take your glasses off, because they are a sort of crutch that prevent the process of rehabilitating your eyes and how you use them. The basic idea that some people can use their eyes better than others sounds utterly silly if you have never examined this for yourself, but it becomes astoundingly clear if you consider that some people are very tense when they look at things, always in a narrow and anxious manner, whereas others are far more relaxed, which incidentally allows them to notice more things, both in breadth but also in depth of details.
Everything I have said can be verified for yourself. All you need is a bit of trust to give it a try, and patience to stick with it over a period of time long enough to notice the progress. Even in the short term you might notice small improvements in eyesight, which point towards the bigger link between relaxation (or lack thereof) and eyesight.
Again, this point is something you could never bring to an ophtamologist or optician. They might have some explanation for why people's eyesights are getting worse and worse, but they certainly aren't interested in getting people to not need glasses to begin with.
In this case, it's not too hard to see emerge a major reason why real empiricism does not exist: the medical system is an institution first of all, and even if money isn't its primary motivation, it has the same requirement as all other large-scale collectives, which is maintaining itself. As a result, the well-being of the patients, and especially their independence, is at best secondary to the practices of doctors, who have to keep their job and the structures which provide it to them.
Moreover, institutions much like machines can only function properly through generic and predictable parts, which is why doctors have to comply to a set of ideas and practices where consciousness has no place whatsoever. They reduce the body down to a set of causal, isolated parts because only in that way can we remove any conscious aspect from medicine, which would require discernment and sensitivity, qualities which are totally at odds with the mechanical-ness required by institutions. To achieve genuine health is to understand the delicate and dynamic balance of our body, something which requires a very flexible mind because everyone is simply too different from one another for any cookie cutter method to work.
Which makes us arrive to perhaps the first interesting reason as to why we do not live in a truly empirical world, on top of the usual corruption and self-interest of the institutions of our times, which is that Reality is highly complex and often multimodal, whereas the direction of our society and methods is one of homogenization.
In the case of medicine, the mismatch manifests as human bodies which are very different from one another, such that what is needed for one can differ significantly from another, whereas the methods promoted by medical institutions try to push towards a homogenized approach of treating an assumed "average" body, as can be seen by how modern science consistently deals with averages.
But there is no such thing as an average body in Reality, diversity 3 is a key aspect in ecology because it provides robustness and exploratory power to a population. Trying to go against that very core of existence is simply insane, not only does it lead to "solutions" which try to accommodate everyone but end up helping no one, 4 and in general homogenization also limits the greatest amongst us, who are by definition outliers.
One of the first things that you learn in Ayurveda are the different body types, starting with the simplest classification of 3 body types: Kapha, Pitta and Vata. The basic idea being that what is helpful for one body might be harmful for another, which is why we must have a decent understanding of someone's type before trying to alter their balance.
The level of details can go significantly deeper and subtler, because no one is totally Kapha, Pitta or Vata, and can even take into account where you live—colder climates require more calories, more fat and more meat for instance—the activities you engage in, and the food that is available around you, but the basic idea of prioritizing what mode you belong in before giving recommendations still applies.
The reason why our society pushes towards homogenization is not because some cabal of elites decided it should be the case, rather it's because the system as a whole has a direction towards integration and efficiency. Our system is not just driven by technology, but what gives rise to technology, which is what Jacques Ellul called Technique, which I would roughly summarize as being a process for optimizing for ends.
The reason why consciousness tends to be phased out of our lives is because it is far too unpredictable, which gets in the way of efficiency. It would be far more convenient to have a machine that could translate your needs into physical products, which could then be sold and delivered to your door. Such a project is impossible of course, unless people themselves become less conscious and do not see the difference between what their being truly longs for, love, freedom, peace, adventure, self-overcoming, and what their identity tends to want, attach itself to, and what it is sold.
If consciousness was at the center of our work, not only would the output be unpredictable, such an artisan chair or handmade clothing, the process would be slower than with machines producing generic items, and such consciousness would also demand radical freedom, since quality cannot emerge from rigid standards and tyrannical demands.
The system, in its drive for increasing its own efficiency, as well as competing with other systems, destroys any value of quality, freedom and self-reliance of work because they get in the way of efficiency, which is why we live in a world of machines which human beings have to comply to, a world which pushes towards homogenization because it is the easiest way to coordinate large amounts of people together, all to operate the larger social machine we are a part of.
It's not hard to see that heterogeneity, such as the one resulting from the diverse cultures of Europe, Asia or Africa, gets in the way of efficiency. If different people speak different languages, have different relationships towards time and work, and live in totally different contexts, it becomes very difficult to work together. The process of homogenization is of course a disaster when it comes to the wealth of cultures we used to have, whatever replaced it can hardly be called a culture, but the system as a whole has only one drive, which is efficiency and integration, goals which have no ends in and of themselves, because they are born from a self-informed self, the ego, to whom only self-perpetuation makes sense.
Ego does not care about Reality, it much prefers its own fantasies and projections of it, which is why it ends up building an entirely artificial world where Reality and consciousness have no place whatsoever, and which things appear to get better because they are quantitatively augmented, but in reality are more and more hollowed of essence, beauty and truth.
Culture is one obvious loss of homogenization, but anything which sits outside of the scope of quantifiable and technical domains is also impacted. Someone's medical record contains various measures, such as one's blood pressure, heart rate, height and weight, cholesterol levels and whatnot, as well as externally verifiable symptoms and relevant images, but nothing whatsoever which relates to your personal quality of life, because those cannot easily be recorded and shared with other doctors.
A doctor might know that your heart rate is high and that you have a general sense of anxiety, but they do not have access to, and more importantly do not really care about, your conscious experience, how you tend to tense up in certain events, how you have a way of avoiding your problems which makes you feel guilty and even more afraid, how you love to spend time in your own mind, even though all of those aspects are incredibly central to addressing one's anxiety. But because they are all conscious, thus not externally verifiable, they are difficult to share and communicate about, and are often quite difficult to compare the situations of other people.
Which is to say that the demand of homogenization creates bureaucracies which normalize the channels of communication between institutions in order to be more efficient, through using technical language and standards for instance, but this process ends up narrowing the scope of what institutions can talk about.
Thus, even empiricism itself, the supposed key quality of science and what distinguishes it from quackery, does not appear in practice, because it is subservient to the demands of the system. Something is only empirical if it fits in the homogenized and mechanical pseudo-reality of our society, which means that anything requiring consciousness, effort, love, sensitivity, nuance or any genuinely different state of being is automatically erased from any discourse.
This is not because people have deliberately sat down and made the decision to remove consciousness from our lives. Rather, it's a combination of the ego benefitting from such trends in the short term, the overall autonomous nature of the system, the way in which innovations continuously arise from people pursuing their own itnerests, and get integrated into the system as a whole, and the way in which consciousness is the only thing which could notice its own disappearance, which means that as the world becomes less and less conscious, no one notices it.
At the risk of sounding like a Marxist or critical theorist, it is truly naive to believe that we can use a single principle or set of methods to examine Reality and obtain the Truth, such as empiricism, without addressing the significantly deeper level of survival and ego, since the latter must prioritize its own survival at all costs, and ends up building a world which favors it, and not the Truth, beauty, love, freedom or any quality we might defend.
Empiricism will be defended by the ego to the extent that it helps it acquire power, but when it doesn't, it too falls away from the list of priorities. There is no easier path to be alienated by the system than to be the kind of person who grounds their epistemology on their direct experience, rather than on what has been filtered by institutions, or even deeper than that, the mind. Publicly, everyone's view is informed by "hard facts" and "cold logic", but privately what appears instead is a violent clinging to one's ego, career, safety and useful beliefs.
1 The following might apply to other eye issues but I do not know firsthand.
2 The Youtube channel "Myopia is Mental" is also a good resource.
3 Let's not confuse ecological diversity to the totem of diversity upheld by the modern world. The latter is a simulacrum, the former a deep principle of Reality.
4 Medicine cannot be both safe to everyone and be effective.
Go back to the list of blog posts
Science Corruption Empiricism Mind Incentives Multimodal Homogenization Technique System
2025-10-23