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November 11th, 2010 by Sean Necessity of the Scientific Method (Part 1)

Oh lookie, it’s 11/11! Now what? Warning: Long post.

Something I’ve come to realize is the necessity of the scientific method. I know I’ve written about this topic in the past, but it has a certain clarity with me at this moment.

### Born Ignorant

The problem is that we’re born into this world with very little working knowledge of the reality around us. This is by design - by offloading the learning phase until after birth, it allows humans to better adapt to our environment (and therefore, survive). So instead of biology producing a human that knows everything out of the womb, it produces a human that can learn and adapt to its environment. We don’t come out of the womb with knowledge of how to speak French; we come with the ability to learn language.

Since we are blank slates coming into this world, we need to figure things out. We need to actively pursue truth.

### Truth is Evasive

It is destiny that truth is hard to figure out. Not for some magical reason - I can calculate and prove that truth is inherently hard to figure out.

Truth only has one strength: it can’t die. Humans can die. Ideas can die. Fashion trends can die. Truth can’t die. Because we can die, we need to be strong. We need to be smart. We need to reproduce. We need to adapt. Truth doesn’t need to do any of that. Outside of its immortality, truth is incredibly weak. Truth doesn’t need a job. Truth doesn’t need to be popular. Truth doesn’t need to gather resources. Truth is sitting pretty.

Some truths are obvious… for example, gravity exists. Just about every human and animal has this truth. We might not all agree on the word “gravity”, but we know that we get pulled to the ground. It’s quite obvious.

But many truths are not obvious. For example, did you know that any rubik’s cube can be solved in 20 moves or less? It sounds like a simple fact, but finding the number “20″ took 15 years of research. Was that fact any less true 100 years ago? Was it any less true 10,000 years ago? No. We just didn’t know it. Now we do.

### Necessity of Discovering Truth

Who cares about truth anyways though? Why must we actively pursue it? In short: to survive. Many things threaten our survival, and discovering truth is the only way to overcome these threats. A virus could kill millions of people. We could kill each other using nuclear weapons. We could get hit by an asteroid. Or 23% of us could just die from cancer.

See: discovering truth doesn’t just mean sitting and thinking. It’s not just about meditation (though meditation is definitely a part of it). If we discover the truth that an asteroid will hit us in 12 years, we can take action to survive. An asteroid could be coming at us right now, whether we discover it or not. Discovering truth is a necessity for our survival.

#### Non-Physical Truths

It sounds like I’m describing very physical truths. Cancer, weapons, asteroids, etc. Is it safe to ignore non-physical truths? No.

A group of extremists might believe they will die and be greeted with 72 virgins if they kill themselves in order to propagate their belief system. Non-physical belief systems use physical humans to propagate. Different belief systems have different strategies for survival.

If I somehow came into possession of a nuclear weapon, I would panic and call the police. If a terrorist somehow came into possession of a nuclear weapon, they might decide to kill millions of people, because of their belief system.

Violent belief systems are a threat to our collective survival.

What about non-violent belief systems? I suspect it is very hard to find a non-violent belief system (though we should certainly strive for one). For example, if you believe that freedom of speech isn’t important - is that a non-violent belief? Denying free speech is a form of non-physical violence. I will have to save this piece of the discussion for another day. My point at the time is that it’s important to discover both physical truths (i.e., how cancer works, when an asteroid is going to hit us) and non-physical truths (i.e., whether 72 virgins are waiting for us after death). Both impact our survival.

### Summary

Let’s summarize where we are at this point:

We don’t know the truth. Truth can be obvious, but a lot of times it can be very difficult to figure out. Something is true whether we figure it out or not. Certain undiscovered truths threaten our survival. We must actively pursue truth in order to better adapt and survive. Non-physical truths can have physical manifestations - therefore, we need to actively pursue truth in all our pursuits, not just those that have immediate physical impact.

Moving on…

### Ignorance and Enlightenment

Ignorance is dangerous. If we don’t know that an asteroid is about to hit us, that is an immediate threat. We must actively seek truth, and enlighten our ignorance. We can’t know everything, but we must try to do our best.

Anything that prevents us from enlightening our ignorance is bad. For example, suppose I believe that asteroids don’t exist. It’s a conspiracy! The truth might be that an asteroid is on it’s way to hit us in 12 years. But my belief is now serving as an obstacle to discovering this truth. My belief is a threat to our survival.

The obstacle doesn’t have to be a belief though. Maybe there is a virus outbreak, and there isn’t enough vaccination to go around. My body is denied the information on how to defeat the virus due to a limited supply. The limited supply is a physical obstacle. In this instance, “enlightenment” is a physical process; it is the transfer of knowledge from the vaccination to my body.

Enlightenment is simply moving from ignorance to truth. Whether it is physical (ex: vaccination) or non-physical (ex: learning something new) depends on the type of ignorance. Ignorance can be physical (ex: the body not knowing how to deal with a virus), or non-physical (ex: the mind not knowing if an asteroid exists).

So, we have two enemies: 1. Ignorance (i.e., not knowing truth), 2. Anything that prevents/delays enlightenment (i.e., not being able to discover truth). These enemies might manifest themselves as physical or non-physical, depending on the situation.

To be continued…

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 11th, 2010 at 5:36 pm and is filed under Belief Systems, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

### 5 Responses to “Necessity of the Scientific Method (Part 1)”

1. Charlie Says:
   November 21st, 2010 at 9:18 pm

   Discovering some non-physical truths are impossible, like the old philosophical questions, we won’t find out what happens after we die, the meaning of life or if there is a higher power at work since truth isn’t subjective so the answer to these questions aren’t within our reach.

   While I’m at it, physical thruths aren’t necessarily true either, i.e. I could argue that I’m not being pulled by gravity to the ground but that the world is falling upwards. Ridiculous example but you get the point.

   I agree that discovering truths are essential to our survival but is it really that important for us to live forever and something we really want? I’m not just talking about the human race I also mean the idea of an afterlife.

   Wouldn’t life loose all meaning if we did live forever?

   I guess what I’m trying to say is that trying to figure out some “ultimate truth” is an endless spiral without any solution.
   It’s not pointless, I think we can learn alot about ourslef by practising meditation and OOBEs.

   In the end what happens happens, only thing we can do is live in the now and make the most out of what we got.

   Looking forward to your next post.

2. nonconformist Says:
   November 25th, 2010 at 6:59 am

   I agree with above, and also reality is subject to perspective and therefore truth is. Who is to govern what is “truth”? That one reality is better than another. Or rather one perspective of the world is better than another. How can one truth be argued as better than another logically? We could say majority but as history shows,the majority can/ and usually is incorrect. Thus why can’t all perspectives be truth ?..Yes i know this would cause anarchy

   If we state that :Truth is essentially an idea/theory/ thought/ or perspective which is correct. If we assume that everything we know to be “truth” is indeed unquestionable, than (all though a cliché, we would still think the world is flat, or believe something else which could also be considered somewhat insane. Depending on who is in power..one theory was that we were all balancing on-top of a turtle lol)

   In life i think we strive for data, in which to form truths or theorys to manage the world we live in. To essentially put things into box’s, they maybe circles and better fitted in another section however it seems that is our aim.

   I enjoyed this post, an interesting topic

3. nonconformist Says:
   November 25th, 2010 at 7:10 am

   finally i will say that finding “truth” in my opinion is not impossible but to so, would require a radical and diverse change in the way we think, and approach our world and regard intelligence. Oh and teach, perhaps a more focused on bending the education to the person, not the person to the education. But alas that is not entirely related (but if your interested http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9LelXa3U_I&feature=channel - that elaborates on the concept)

4. Insectoid Says:
   March 23rd, 2011 at 7:27 pm

   Whatever happened?

5. zani Says:
   July 1st, 2011 at 1:08 pm

   Come on Sean, get back, the world of psionics needs you

### Leave a Reply

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