This is part 6, the final part (as of now) 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 part on the self-referentiality of the mind, and the fifth part on how empiricism is secondary within institutions.
I mentioned in a footnote of one of the previous pieces that Science's final justification is always one about usefulness, rather than Truth. The reason is quite simple, following the discussions regarding literacy and its limits, and the self-referentiality of the mind, it is because Science deals with models of Reality, created by a mind which has no access to Reality, only its own projections of it.
What this means is that mind has no access to Truth, but only consistency. It can compare statements to one another to see if there is a contradiction, but the truth of any such statement requires conscious experience. You can ask your mind whether you ate oatmeal or not in the morning, but what oatmeal is, or what anything is, is not a question which the mind can fundamentally answer, it can only refer you to other things in its network of concepts. The way I can know directly that my feet are touching the floor is not through having an anatomical diagram of my feet, a spatial mental image of what the "floor" is, and an explanation of how the sense of touch is communicated through my nervous system down to my brain.
All of those concepts are useful to know of course, and these explanations are accurate in that they map well to Reality, which is why Science is valuable to learn and why it is stupid to try to refute it on its own ground, but the knowing lies in a simple and direct experience of feeling my own feet, which is more primary than the secondary knowledge I derive afterwards.
The relationship between Science and Truth can be rather tricky to discern because most scientists will present their work as a pursuit of truth, for a variety of reasons. Some of them might have never reflected on the mediated nature of the mind, the fact that it deals with representations of Reality and that our models can only be accurate, never true, in which case they might genuinely believe that Science gives us the truth, which is rather sad but those are pretty much always the most mediocre ones in my experience, even if they might have a decently large following and make very confident claims about the nature of Reality.
However, it seems to me that most scientists have heard of the quote that "All models are wrong, some are useful", which means they have a rough distinction between a model and Reality, especially because the metaphors of the map and the territory, and the blind men and the elephant are pretty popular on the internet. I suspect that most scientists would probably admit that their work is fundamentally about building useful models of the world, not the truth in and of itself, but that they will never bring up this point by themselves, because the air of authority they get from their work is too much of a social privilege to ignore, especially around people who are less bright and thus easily dazzled by those with credentials.
What is wrong with pursuing usefulness through the lens of the mind though? I wouldn't say that usefulness by itself is problematic, the same way that there isn't anything inherently wrong about the self, the sense of being a "me" separate from others. I mention the latter because usefulness is fundamentally usefulness to the self, which is to say maintaining it through addressing its basic needs, and mastering it in certain ways so as to express qualities such as beauty through art, which requires technical mastery, or love through our relationships, which require a large degree of maturity, or strength to defend what is important to us.
All this to say that we have a self, which we need to navigate the world, and to deny that would be literal suicide. We need to maintain and strengthen our body, have ideas which map well onto reality, regulate, express and take responsibility for our emotions, and know how to exert our will onto the world.
But all of this starts to be problematic when there is only usefulness, or only self, in which case we get utilitarianism and ego (not to be confused with Freud's usage of the term).
Utilitarianism is an ideology which must be maintained at all costs, even when it is not suited to the context at hand. Likewise, the fundamental alienated condition of the ego, as per the relevant piece linked above, makes it unable to ever step aside if something larger than itself needs to be in charge, such as the conscious I.
What we get in this case is an individual or a group of people who pursue self-expansion with nothing to regulate it. There is no end point to technological progress, because there is nothing in the system or the egos that participate in it that could inform it of what is valuable. They can design proxies of such value, which can be objective such as monetary value, or the time that something took to make, or subjective measures such as the pleasure you get from an experience, but none of those are valuable in and of themselves. People fixated on the pursuit of money are certainly not fulfilled in their own life, and those obsessed with pleasure end up becoming the living dead, desensitized to the subtle joys of life.
But what if the problem is that our measures of value are simply too crude? What if we created more complicated measures, such as the Human Development Index, which takes into account three main dimensions: 1) a long and healthy life, 2) knowledge (through education) and 3) a decent standard of living (adjusted to local costs).
It's easy to point out how ridiculously narrow this particular index is compared to the sheer breadth of a real life, but all indices are and necessarily must be. It's easiest to see it with the simple ones, which focus on one to three aspects of our lives and ignore everything else, but even if you made an incredibly complex index which is supposed to take everything into account, it could fundamentally only measure parts, not the whole.
Think about it, how would you measure the wholeness of something? In medicine, we take measure of parts, such as your blood pressure, heart rate, cholesterol levels, mineral concentration in your blood, muscle mass, and others. But none of those are enough by themselves to know whether someone is healthy or not, all you could say is that someone's indicators are within an expected range, but that doesn't mean that the whole is healthy.
The answer is that unity requires unity, 2 such as the unity of consciousness. To know that you are healthy, you need to be conscious. To know that someone else is conscious and loving, you yourself need to be conscious and loving. To tell the difference between a great work of art, and mere invention or hollow technical mastery, you need to be conscious, and have a deep experience with art in this case. This seems like I'm begging the question, but I am not, I am referring to the ground of all knowledge, which is direct experience.
Contrast that with the mind, which deals with relative notions as mentioned previously, and which importantly here, fragments reality. The mind can focus on certain isolated aspects of reality, which can be incredibly useful and reveal connections, such as what Science shows us, but fragmentation by itself can never give you anything whole. You cannot reduce health to a bunch of mind-graspable parts, you cannot reduce laughter to a few basic concepts, you cannot reduce love to a few correct lines and moves, you cannot reduce a genuine culture to mere ideas and laws that people have to follow.
The mind betrays wholeness through its fragmentation, which is why its measures are always in disaccord with a broader harmony, as Goodhart's Law highlights.
But this fragmentation is precisely why the mind is useful to the self. We can focus on a single machine, examine its parts, isolate every main variable, and see how to increase its efficiency. We can notice similarities about certain experiences we enjoy and think about how to get them more often. We can note that some stones seem more effective at the task of cutting than other, and perhaps eventually come to the realization that there is something about their edge which relates to the act of cutting. Down the line, some people might have a concept of sharpness, which is more general than any physical object, and which can be harnessed by man-made objects in a way that no stone could. 3
To reject the mind and any sense of usefulness entirely is rather naive. But conversely, to live in a way which is entirely devoted to the mind and its representations is insanity, because the mind can never give us the unity from which emerges all conscious qualities, such as love, freedom, beauty, peace, and so on, which are ultimately what we care about.
Today, we live in a world which is obsessed with utility, whether it is the drive for money which possesses people, or the pursuit of Science in order to manipulate the world. 4 I would claim that such a direction is concomitant with how our world is increasingly specialized, to the point that even scientists can barely communicate with one another 5, as well as how increasingly alienated people are from one another.
A world built around utility is one built around the self-informed self, which means that such a world is necessarily one of fragmentation, either the social fragmentation that we all experience nowadays because every self lives in its own bubble, or the fragmentation of the mind attempting to solve the problems of society. The latter pursuit could never reach its goals however. The mind, whether individual or collective, and whether human or augmented, can fundamentally never reach the unity from which genuine harmony could emerge. All it can do is narrowly focus on a part, at the expense of the others, a failure mode also known as cancer, or it can attempt to mimick wholeness by creating surrogates of everything that human beings may want, all in a man-made interconnected system, a failure mode known as the simulacrum, the Matrix, or simply, Hell.
Interestingly enough, because the designers of Hell also tend to be very intelligent, they will have many reasonable justifications for their endeavor. They will appeal to the God of safety and comfort, or the expertise of our professionals, the stupidity of the masses, the impossibility to escape the arms race of technological progress, the poverty of the past we have escaped from 6, the narrative of how humans are becoming closer to Gods and how it's our destiny, the increased equality in our times 7, and of course, all that freedom we now have through technology! 8
At no point will they realize that the Good is not merely an addition of nice things, it is a totality, whether it is someone's consciousness manifest in their sensitivity and sense of justice, their courage to stand up for the Truth even in dire circumstances, or the unity of a sane culture which helps men to overcome their self and love their woman.
Science and utilitarianism could never be ends in themselves, because they are ultimately bound to the self, and when there is only self, we have the Hell on Earth that we currently experience and know all too well.
1 The notion of self, and its division through mind-emotion-body-will can be found in Self and Unself by Darren Allen.
2 I will expand on that in a future piece.
3 The relationship between mind and unity, or lack thereof, needs more discussion, because in the case of abstract concepts, there is a sort of unity between isolated concepts which seems to emerge. The concept of sharpness for instance allows us to notice something more general than in any given physical object. For now I am just going to say that generalization is not the same as unity.
4 And arguably, people too, in the form of the psych industry which attempts to make people functional within our insane system.
5 One of my favourite myths is the Tower of Babel, because of how relevant it is in our times.
6 Even though the most thriving hunter gatherer tribes worked on average less than us, and that people nowadays are far more dependent on systems they are unable to change even for their basic needs, which is to say that focusing only on material circumstances to understand poverty is incredibly narrow, but this is another lengthy discussion.
7 We are equal in the sense that the real differences which could be the ground for interacting with someone genuinely different, such as gender or real culture, have been erased, and in the sense that everyone is equally a slave to the system.
8 It goes without saying that this is the freedom to do things within the choices of the system, and not the freedom to let's say live independently of it.
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Science Utility Ego Power History Collapse
2025-10-25