There is no scientific backing for the concept of 'music'. So called musicians claim that the playing of special sounds, known as 'notes', can produce profound emotional states, feelings of awe or rapture. However, when we played these notes arranged in sets (known as "scores") to study participants, no clinically significant instances of awe or rapture were found
From this tweet
This is a fantastic analogy, which I would personally extend to things that have been helpful in my life but which I can't explain within the frameworks of materialistic science. Unblocking my chakras and the whole field of energy work in general, shadow work and most notably Existential Kink, and the value of directing your attention, especially to your own body, that your learn from meditation. 9
Science does this weird thing where on one hand, it completely acknowledges the existence of placebos because the experiments are designed such that we can detect a meaningful deviation from them, but on the other hand, it completely rejects them as a way of actually helping people. Don't get me wrong, if someone's leg is broken, we should treat it, not have some type of placebo that helps someone’s mind or emotions or whatever. But most problems in life are far more subtle than just a broken leg: they influence the way you interpret everything, they have ways of hiding themselves and resurfacing under different conditions, they create patterns of further problems if left unchecked, such that in total, they are difficult to make sense while you are inside them and are quite sticky. This highlights to me how trying to use the same methods to treat all problems is not just foolish, it's straight up insanity.
As a result, I think the idea that if we cannot assign some type of materialistic causal explanation for why something works or doesn't, then it must be bullshit, is incredibly destructive for individual lives. For instance, I don't think I have ever heard any scientist advocate for more embodiment. In fact, the word didn't even enter my vocabulary until I stumbled upon a book describing trauma and how to deal with it. Even though that recording—one of Peter Levine's books on trauma and somatic experiencing 10—would probably fall under the umbrella term of “psychology”, it is definitely not the type which can be quantified and analyzed through statistic tests and the likes, so the nature of its “scientific backing” is quite different from let's say Physics. 11
But still, it massively helped me feel better in my body, and really feel alive, and that effect is undeniable. Whether it is "just a placebo" or not is something that leaves me utterly indifferent. But perhaps I am conceding too much ground to the benefits of Science and its methods here, because the truth is that it is worse than useless at a lot of things, typically chronic complex problems as opposed to the ones we can intervene on with surgery or similar methods, which have a clear cause and effect relationship.
For those problems, I have significantly more trust in practices which have a rich history of thousands of years behind them, such as meditation, energy work and holistic health systems such as Ayuverda and Traditional Chinese Medicine, than most of the things that have cropped from "Science". I use quotation marks because it groups up so many fields which have demonstrably different epistemologies, such as Physics and Psychology, that the label doesn't make any sense. Psychology as a field loves to bundle itself with the hard sciences because it gives it more credibility, but in truth they are not even close to being the same thing, and I would say that the move towards quantification and the “rigor” of statistical tests in psychology seems to have done very little when it comes to actually helping people, which isn’t surprising because the agenda of academia, like all institutions, is its own survival, not the well-being of people.
5 This habit of tunnel vision also contributes to myopia by the way. See the channel Myopia is Mental on Youtube which describes how it happens, and how you can revert it naturally!
6 See more from me in a mini-essay titled rootless pseudo-culture
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2024-11-30