Top five problems with current science

This is a personal page.

Having studied physics and having experience with supersensible consciousness .. many years ago, at the very start of my study of spiritual science .. (in some sunny chair on vacation in 2014) .. I reflected for myself to try and bring to synthesis what I believed to be the top three or five issues with the contemporary scientific paradigm (as per mineral science). That is about the time I discovered the work of Rudolf Steiner who of course also discusses these points.

There are various versions of such lists, from du Bois-Raymond (1880) upto Sheldrake (2012) to name just two - see overview Schema FMC00.275 on Worldview.

The short list below captures the essence in a condensed way from my notes (to be expanded).

The problem contemporary materialistic or 'mineral science' has versus a holistic open view of reality is:

1 - taking out the observer (re Hegel, Goethe)
2 - 'the foolish (or ungrounded) extrapolation' .. assumes wrongly that the laws and physics as we discovered them on Earth, as well as our contemporary consciousness, can be extrapolated over space and time to give us a model of the whole cosmos and an understanding of creation.
3 - only part of the spectrum is sensory consciousness (re waking consciousness vs stages of clairvoyance) - the bandpass filter picture
4 - reductionism - fragment, section and partition to components to study, not the whole
5 - no teleological meaning (re: Meaning of life#Note 1 - Relevant concepts and terminology)

.

Aspects

science takes out the human being of what it studies, and only studies only the mineral, the element Earth (and not 'life', the etheric or element water, or the other elements and higher ethers). "Because of this our modern science does not apply to human beings and does not help at all when it comes to humanity. You may build as many universities as you like, the processes that are active in the human being will not be explained to you if you go to them. "(1923-07-20-GA350)

Inspirational quotes

1916-12-31-GA173

It is a fact that something can be true but at the same time it may, without becoming untrue, be inapplicable to a certain case. It is not enough for something to be true. What matters is whether it can be incorporated into reality, whether it belongs to actual reality.

Alexander von Humboldt

What speaks to the soul, escapes our measurements.

Lecture coverage and references

1 - Taking out the observer

See also: Goethean science, see below for links.

J. G. Fichte

Do not, then, desire to plunge out of yourself, and to grasp something in a different manner than is possible for you; namely, as thing and consciousness, or as consciousness and thing; or rather as neither of both, but as that which is separated into both only after having been grasped: the absolute subjective-objective and objective-subjective.

1919-10-17-GA191

full quote see: Moral ideals#1919-10-17-GA191

Goethe's knowledge of Nature is chiefly based upon the fact that he has deeply studied the way in which others have come to their knowledge. The greatness of Goethe depends upon this very fact, namely, that he has deeply occupied himself with the way in which others have attained to their knowledge. And it is very, very significant to penetrate really into the essence and spirit of an essay by Goethe, such as “The Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject”. Here we may see how Goethe carefully follows the way in which phenomena of Nature are handled. What we may call the method of investigation, this is something which he has studied with the greatest attention. If you read my Introduction to Goethe's Natural-Scientific Writings you will find what great results Goethe has reached by thus pursuing the natural-scientific method.
In a certain way, that which Goethe has done can be developed further for the achievements of the 19th century and up to the 20th century ... but Goethe was no longer able to do this.
....
Let us take hypothetically something which may seem rather paradoxical. Let us suppose that someone were to pursue the natural-scientific methods, like Goethe: he will certainly not become a materialist, but will undoubtedly accept a spiritual world-conception. An infallible way of overcoming materialism in our modern time is to have in insight into the natural-scientific methods of investigation. In the natural-scientific sphere, men become materialists only because they do not observe, because they insufficiently observe the way in which they carry on their investigations. They are satisfied with results, with what the clinic, the laboratory, the observatory supply. They do not progress as far as Goetheanism, i.e. the observation of their manner of research; for those who allow themselves to be influenced by the natural-scientific manner of contemplating the world and of handling things in order to reach knowledge, will at least become idealists, and probably spiritualists, if they only proceed far enough.

1919-12-31-GA320

full quote see: Music#1919-12-31-GA320

What I have now been saying is indeed so obvious, so trite, that physicists and physiologists will naturally not presume that they could ever fall into such obvious mistakes. And yet they do. The whole distinction that is usually made of the subjective impression (or whatsoever is alleged to be subjective) from the objective process, amounts to this and nothing else.

1922-06-21-GA300B

see The nature of atoms#1922-06-21-GA300B

... matter as simply a static process. If you have a piece of sulfur in front of you, what you really have is a static process. If I am standing here, and it is raining hard, then I have a process in which I am included. However, if I look at the cloud from a distance, it appears as an object to me. When I look at certain processes it is as though I were standing in the rain, when I look at sulfur, it is as though I were observing the cloud from a distance. Matter is simply processes that appear petrified.

For this re-framing statement, see also Schema FMC00.403 on Cosmic fractal, and Schema FMC00.172 on Force substance representation

1923-07-20-GA350

.. it is certainly interesting that by the end of the nineteenth century scientists had reached a point where such important things were not taken note of, and it needed a charlatan, a mountebank like Hansen to come along and show them. It was only after this that attention was paid to these things. You can see, therefore, that science was not as good in the last third of the nineteenth century as people like to say it was. Yes, major discoveries were made in outer ways, X-rays and so on were discovered, but people actually had no desire to know anything decent about the inner life of human beings, and still do not have the desire to this day. Because of this our modern science does not apply to human beings and does not help at all when it comes to humanity. You may build as many universities as you like, the processes that are active in the human being will not be explained to you if you go to them.

2 - Foolish extrapolation

1917-04-19-GA175

see: Mineral science#1917-04-19-GA175

1924-06-04-GA236

If we enter as fully as possible into the situation as we stand here, within the Universe, as human beings on this Earth, we shall say to ourselves: “We as human beings have a physical body: where, then, is the physical in the universe?”
The physical science of today expects to find everything which is on the Earth existing also in the universe. But the physical organisation itself is not to be found in the universe at all.
Man has in the first place his physical organisation: then in addition he has the etheric and the astral. The universe on the other hand begins with the etheric.
Out there in the cosmos the physical is nowhere to be found. The physical exists only on the Earth, and it is but empty fancy and imagination to speak of anything physical in the far universe. In the universe there is the etheric and the astral.
There is also a third element within the universe which we have yet to speak about in this present lecture, for the cosmos too is threefold. But the threefoldness of the cosmos, apart from the Earth, is different from the threefoldness of the cosmos in which we include the Earth.

3 - only part of the spectrum is sensory consciousness

Current predominant waking consciousness represents a bandpass filter of the spectrum of reality of experience.

The other Planes or worlds of consciousness are filtered out, and are invisible (just as radio waves) to our physical senses.

Spiritual reality and higher knowledge requires other stages of clairvoyance

4 - Reductionism - partition and study fragments and not the whole

1919-12-29-GA320

.. a crystal cube of rock-salt is in some respect a totality. The crystal cube can exist by virtue of what it is within the compass of its six faces. But if you look at a rose, cut from the shrub it grew on, this rose is no totality. It cannot, like the cube of rock-salt, exist by virtue of all that is contained within it. The rose can only have existence by being of the rose-bush. The cut rose therefore, though you can see it just as you can see the cube of rock-salt, is a real abstraction; you may not call it a reality by itself.
The implications of this are far-reaching. Namely, for every phenomenon, we must examine to what extent it is a reality in itself, or a mere section of some larger whole. If you consider Sun and Moon, or Sun and Earth, each by itself, you may of course invent and add to them a force of gravity, just as you might invent a force of gravity by means of which my forehead would attract my right hand.
But in considering Sun and Earth and Moon thus separately, the things you have in mind are not totalities; they are but parts and members of the whole planetary system.
This is the essential thing; observe to what extent a thing is whole, or but a section of a whole. How many errors arise by considering to be a whole what is in fact only a partial phenomenon within a larger whole! By thus considering only the partial phenomena and then inventing energies to add to these, our scientists have saved themselves the need of contemplating the inherent life of the planetary system. The tendency has been, first to regard as wholes those things in nature which are only parts, and by mere theories then to construe the effects which arise in fact between them. This is the essential point: For all that meets us in nature we have to ask: What is the whole to which this thing belongs? Or is it in itself a whole? Even then, in the last resort, we shall find that things are wholes only in certain respects. Even the crystal cube of rock-salt is a totality only in some respect; it too cannot exist save at certain temperatures and under other requisite conditions. Given some other temperature, it could no longer be. Our need is therefore to give up looking at nature in the fragmentary way which is so prevalent in our time.
[mineral science only looks at the element earth]
Indeed it was only by looking at nature in this fragmentary way that science since the 16th century conceived this strange idea of universal, inorganic, lifeless nature. There is indeed no such thing, just as in this sense there is no such thing as your bony system without your blood. Just as your bony system could only come into being by, as it were, crystallizing out of your living organism as a whole, so too this so-called inorganic nature cannot exist without the whole of nature — soul and spirit-nature — that underlies it. Lifeless nature is the bony system, abstracted from nature as a whole. It is impossible to study it alone, as they began doing ever since the 16th century and as is done in Newtonian physics to this day.
It was the trend of Newtonian physics to make as neat as possible an extract of this so-called inorganic nature, treating it then as something self-contained. This 'inorganic Nature' only exists however in the machines which we ourselves piece together from the parts of nature. And here we come to something radically different. What we are wont to call 'inorganic' in nature herself, is placed in the totality of nature in quite another way. The only really inorganic things are our machines, and even these are only so insofar as they are pieced together from sundry forces of nature by ourselves. Only the 'put-togetherness' of them is inorganic. Whatever else we may call inorganic only exists by abstraction. Present-day physics has arisen and is an outcome of this abstraction; it thinks that what it has abstracted is the real thing, and on this assumption sets out to explain whatever comes within its purview

1922-07-02-GA213

the study of contemporary mineral scientific geology of the Earth as a dead body instead of a whole living being

see: Mineral kingdom#1922-07-02-GA213

1920-03-07-GA324A

And this brings me to the fact that basically every entity that may be regarded at all as a totality actually carries its time within itself.
I can consider a piece [of an] inorganic body for itself, but not a leaf, because it only has a part in the tree. In my observation, therefore, I must take into consideration what is a total system closed in on itself, what is a totality. But every totality that I look at in this way has time in it as something immanent. So that I can't really have much to spare for the abstract time that is still outside every thing and exists [alongside] the time immanent in every thing or process. When I consider the time that is to go from beginning to end, it seems to me just as when someone forms the abstract concept for the individual horse. The individual horses are there in the external spatial reality, but in order to get the concept, I have to attribute something else to it. It is the same with time.
The question: Is time in itself variable or not? - has no real content, because every total system has its [own] time in its immanent being, and its [own] course of speed. The course of velocity of the inorganic or of the process of life leads back to this immanent time.
...
In geology we describe one period after another, as if it were a reality. It is not. It is only a reality with the whole of the Earth, in the same way that an organism is a reality, where I must not tear out one thing. Instead of relating our processes to coordinate axis systems, it would be more important to relate them to their own inner reality, then we would arrive at totality systems. And then we would have to come back to a kind of monadism.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr (1933- )

"The ideal of the 11th/17th century physicists was to be able to explain all physical reality in terms of the movement of atoms. This idea was extended by people like Descartes who saw the human body itself as nothing but a machine. Chemists tried to study chemical reaction in this light and reduce chemistry to a form of physics, and biologists tried to reduce their science to simply chemical reactions and then finally to the movement of physical particles.
The idea of reductionism which is innate to modern science and which was only fortified by the theory of evolution could be described as the reduction of the spirit to the psyche, the psyche to biological activity, life to lifeless matter and lifeless matter to purely quantitative particles or bundles of energy whose movements can be measured and quantified.”
...
“…you always get these pictures of molecules and atoms as billiard balls banging into each other. Of course it’s totally absurd, but the image that’s created is very, very strong, to the extent you always try to reduce the living to the dead…
This is the period in which modern science tries to reduce the living to the dead.”

5 - no teleological meaning

Examples:

the school explanation of the creation of the solar system .. but the creator who set the whole thing in motion is 'forgotten', not included'
the axis of the car who tries to figure out what is going on but study of its intelligeable scope

General

1917-10-26-GA177

At the present time people generally give validity only to natural phenomena, phenomena of the physical world which are part of historical evolution. They will have to give validity again to spiritual events, which can be perceived with the aid of spiritual science, for only then can the events in which human beings are caught up be really understood.
With reference to this important event it is quite easy to establish how seriously people are in error if they base themselves only on concepts and definitions when considering the world and not on direct observation of reality.
One always has the feeling one ought to base oneself on defined concepts — what is Ahriman, what is Lucifer, what are the particular spirits in one hierarchy or another? Those are the questions we ask, and we believe that having got the definitions we have also understood something about the way these entities work.
An extreme example of the inadequacy of definitions is the following, which I have quoted before. It may not have been the ideal way of defining the human being, but it is the definition which was given in a school in Greece: A human being is a creature who walks on two legs and does not have feathers. The next time the pupil came to school he brought a plucked cockerel: a creature who walked on two legs and had no feathers. This is a human being, he said, according to the definition.
Many definitions of this kind are generally accepted, and many of our scientific definitions are therefore more or less in accord with the truth. We must not base ourselves on such definitions in anthroposophy, however. Perception will be poor if we base ourselves on abstract definitions.

Discussion

This page was created 25 March 2020

Link with Goethean science

see ao:

1883-GA001 - Goethean science
1886-GA006 - Goethe's worldview

Henri Bortoft: 'The Wholeness of Nature : Goethe's Way Toward a Science of Conscious Participation in Nature'

Related pages

References and further reading

Rupert Sheldrake - see Schema FMC00.275
- Science Delusion (2012)
- Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery