Richard Lloyd Jones: Although scientists today are generally against any idea of a transcendental reality, it wasn't always like that. Pasteur said, the more I study nature, the more I'm amazed at the work of the Creator. For centuries, the greatest geniuses considered the ultimate creative force of God fundamental to any understanding of reality. And then, it all changed. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and today I'm Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, Troubled Science.
Well, before we dive into our admittedly heated subject today, let me just say Happy New Year to you and send you my best wishes for a successful and conscious 2008. In consciousness, we will need more of to really address our looming, particularly environmental crises, but our many other social difficulties as well. I, like many individuals in all countries on the globe, have been personally interested in this for years, but it wasn't until discovering the work of Brazilian-Austrian psychoanalyst Norberto Keppe that I began to understand the source of all the problems.
Keppe's work outlines very precisely the psychological distortions that have led human society away from its true purposes and caused us to erect social structures that actually make it impossible to live to our human potential. I started this radio program to begin to talk about these very foundational discoveries because, well, this is my medium, but there are other ways to explore Keppe's work as well.
Just write me at rich at richjonesvoice.com and I'll steer you in the right direction. My dear friend Susan Berkley and I will be soon starting a special online and teleclass program on Dr. Keppe's work, so stay tuned for more on that as well. We're pretty excited about it. Today, my colleague Cesar Soós and I are going to jump into the heat of the fire again.
It seems whenever we try to offer a critique of modern-day science, our arguments hit up against a formidable wall of skepticism and unrepentant commitment to the current dogma that so unfortunately characterizes the scientific worldview today. But something changed in science. For centuries, scientists and philosophers were pretty much united in their consideration of God in their scientific understandings. Even Descartes, who was instrumental in the so-called scientific revolution that sought to free the human being from what they saw as the repressive superstition of organized religion, was a devout believer to the end of his days.
But the scientific proposals that burst forth from that period of history influence us even today, and not necessarily for the better. Keep your mind open and join us for what I think is a very important discussion today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Science, as I can understand it, Cesar, seems to have taken a very kind of a drastic turn somewhere in our history.
Of course, this was a process. I'm sure it didn't happen overnight. But maybe you could start by helping us to understand what it was and when that turn, that transformation of science took place. Give us some historical perspective.
Cesar Soós: It's interesting. I was reading a book on metaphysics of science another day, and the author, Edwin Burt, he told that René Descartes, In 1619, the spirit of the truth, it appeared to be the spirit of truth, showed up in a dream.
And this spirit told Descartes that he had been chosen by him, by this spirit of truth, to lay down the basis of knowledge for the years ahead. And this was to be found in mathematics. And that was precisely what Descartes' contribution to the world, scientific world, was the mathematics. He was the first one who developed the mathematical functions.
Richard: And what's the significance, Cesar, of having a mathematization of the scientific view?
Cesar: He cannot be taken alone. After Descartes came Galileo, who extended the discoveries of Descartes, these functions, mathematical functions, and try to apply them to reality, to physical reality. So by doing this, he united two worlds, a mental world and a physical world. For example, for Galileo, as long as you know all the parameters involved in one phenomenon, you can mathematize this phenomenon and through the formula that connects these parameters, you can predict the results of future experiments.
Like, for example, if you want to study the trajectory of a ball. If you kick a ball, the ball has a certain mass, has a certain size. All of these parameters put together in a formula give you conditions for you to predict where this ball will go after a kick, depending on the force you give to it. Galileo was the first one who opened a road to mathematize the real phenomena we see.
Richard: Now this sounds like a reasonable way to move.
Cesar: It sounds reasonable. The problem is that mathematics is just one language of nature. It's not the basis of nature. Nature is much, much, much more than mathematics. Even though nature expresses itself in mathematical terms.
Richard: There are mathematical formula, etc., for the various shapes and forms of nature.
Cesar: Exactly. And quantum physics today shows that this mathematical approach is not an appropriate approach to study science.
So
Richard: before we go to quantum physics, let me come back a bit to Descartes and Galileo and these scientists. I'm sure there are other scientists involved in that. What did they exclude when they mathematized or sensorialized science? They
Cesar: excluded other parameters of quality. They quantified science. So science began to be something quantifiable, sensorial. This was a very big hit against metaphysics, for example, against theology, which exposes values who are much superior than the physical world only.
And this helped build up a system of knowledge based on matter, based on senses.
Richard: What's the implication for us of this?
Cesar: The worst implication of that is the implications we see today. Materialism that took control over all kinds of knowledge. Our knowledge today, our science today, is based on matter, because matter is something that we can sense. We can mathematize, we can quantify.
And that's the worst consequence. Take
Richard: us back and see if you can explain, in simple terms, how science was different before Descartes and Galileo and this scientific revolution. How did it look? How did it appear to us?
Cesar: We can make a comparison, for example, in the case of Italy. Italy is a country well known for the arts. Scientists at that time, you can take the example of Leonardo da Vinci, he was a complete man.
He was a scientist, he was an artist. And at that time, art was connected to science. And so people had a science more connected to reality itself. It was not too much based on thoughts, on ideas. And so Leonardo da Vinci was a universal man, very much ahead of his time. And many of his inventions was based on art, on his artistic intuition.
Richard: And Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, who was not the scientist that da Vinci was, but many of these scientists pre-Renaissance and during the Renaissance, had a very deep theological component to them, didn't they? Exactly. What I'm trying to get at here is what did we lose from that scientific view?
Cesar: I tell you this, Richard, art is more connected to intuition and mathematics is not.
Mathematics is something quantifiable and art is qualifiable. So if you take the example of Italy, for example, you came from Leonardo da Vinci to what Italy is today in scientific terms. In scientific terms, we have like a renowned scientist, Enrico Fermi, for example, this big scientist of this 20th century. And what did Enrico Fermi did? He developed a nuclear reactor to make atom power plants, to make even the atom bomb.
You know, the consequences of detaching art from science led us to this, to not know exactly what kind of outcome we will have.
Richard: And also, I think, as well as the exclusion of art, we have the exclusion of the study of the being, the ontology that they would have studied in theological philosophical schools before this mathematization of science. And losing the study of the being also causes us to lose the study of ethics, of values, of qualities of being, of ways we should be, of ways we should behave, ways we should treat other people.
Cesar: You know, Richard, there is another very good example. It's the example of Werner Heisenberg. He was a pianist. Before he decided to study physics, and when he was studying piano, he said, well, music has not so much that strength it had before. So now the road is open for physics and I will dedicate myself to physics. And he became the chief scientist of the atom bomb project in Nazi Germany.
And look at where he he went. He he it would have been better for him to become a pianist instead, you know. It means that a science without art leads us to to consequences that cannot be always good, because
Richard: it's separated from these more moral ethical issues that would have been studied before the strictly mathematized part of science, right.
Cesar: Exactly. Richard, mathematics gives a false idea that you are a god, you are a god-like being, and we are not.
We are subjected to universal laws. And art is different. In art you create, but if you do not create according to certain rules, pre-existing rules, then nobody likes it. But Cesar,
Richard: if we if we now look at science as a as an entity, it's very very materialistic, very very based on measurement, on what it can see, what it can evaluate, if we reintroduce metaphysics to our science today.
How will science change? What will we see as a difference in the way we study science, in what we study in science?
Cesar: Well, metaphysics deals with the being, and the being is much more than quantifiable qualities. The being especially is love, the being is reason, is logic, is everything that science encompasses and much more than that, intuition, consciousness. So for example I can give you a simple example.
If a country attacks another one, if you take a scientifical approach, the other country will just respond striking back. This you can say is a scientific reason. In a superior level you have a philosophical reason that involves like different type of intelligence. You will consider if it's prudent or not counter attack the country that attacked you first. You will think well maybe this is not convenient because this cannot be good for the country, for the people, even though I am stronger than him.
But in a metaphysical level it this involves love as well. And then the country which is attacked would think well what can I do in order to help my neighbor country for him to stop with this aggressive idea, because we live in the same planet. We must share the same place, the common place. As you can see, there are three levels of reasoning, three levels to respond to an aggression, to respond to a certain cause.
The effect can be scientific, very low level, philosophical, a medium level, and metaphysical. I remember
Richard: during the escalation of the Vietnam War back in the late 60s, early 70s, when Robert McNamara was the Secretary of Defense in the United States, and he was very much basing his expansion of the war in Vietnam on mathematical terms. If we have 50,000 troops there, we will get these results.
So if we expand that to 75,000, we're going to have X results. He was mathematizing the results, trying to create results from a mathematized point of view. So I like what you're suggesting here of a more metaphysical approach which would include these transcendental elements, universal elements of justice, goodness, love, as you suggested. This is a different realm for science to work in, isn't it?
Cesar: Man cannot develop research science to understand him if this science does not consider the superior elements he has. For example how can you develop a science that does not consider intuition, does not consider consciousness, or if it considers considers under the point of view of a physical reaction of chemical reactions in your brains. Take the example of Freud. Why Freud, Sigmund Freud, was not so successful as it should be, because Freud based his theories on sex, on organic elements.
He the consequence of his theory that you should treat your sexual life in order to have happiness, this is this is senseless. It's
Richard: a second totally secondary element, it seems to me. Then is that that this this break, if we want to call it, from the more metaphysical world stripped us of the study of universals. And if we enter this world of universals which you and I have talked about a number of times in these podcasts, we're talking about something that already exists.
And science, you talked about science being like scientists being like gods or seeing themselves as gods if they can mathematize, if something is universal, if it's something that already exists. We have to see science as the study of something that is already, not the study of something that's developing through an evolutionary process. This brings us then to this universal reality that we've talked about before.
And science, it seems today, wants to avoid that acknowledgement of something pre-existing, something intelligent, something already there.
Cesar: Exactly. The very idea of evolutionism brought by Darwin and others much before him, even from Aristotle, You know, this very idea is wrong because it is inserted in time and space. And time and space, they are inserted in a greater realm, in the transcendental realm.
For example, our paranormal capacities, they all happen outside time and space. So how can you develop a science or develop a theory with inferior parameters? Time and space they are inferior parameters to develop a theory. The question of evolutionism is crystal clear, you cannot go anywhere. And so the transcendence, for example the study of the being, lies outside time and space. The being is is not in development, in evolution.
You are what you are and this superior force that created the universe, because the universe didn't come out of nothing. This is logical to think like that. So this force made this outside time and space.
Richard: Now, the argument we hear from science today is that if it's going to fit into the scientific method that's been developed in the last 300 or 400 years, if it's going to fit in the scientific method, it needs to be falsifiable.
How can you falsify something that's preexistent and universal? So science dismisses this completely.
Cesar: This idea comes from Karl Popper, isn't it? Karl Popper was an Austrian philosopher. He was very much influent in the development of the scientific method. And he was even president of the Aristotelian Academy in England, if I'm not wrong, in 1959 or so. And this shows very clearly that he had an Aristotelian view.
And Popper was very much led by this Aristotelian point of view to make his philosophy, and he said that you can use one theory until you find it's not right. For example you know that from your previous experiences that the sun has always risen up, but you cannot say that the sun will rise up tomorrow because it didn't come yet, you
Richard: haven't seen it yet.
You haven't seen it. But if tomorrow you wake up and you see the sun doesn't come up, you can falsify your theory. So we are based on theories. We live on theories that can be falsified. What are the limitations of this, Cesar?
Cesar: The limitations is that you attack all knowledge. There is no eternal theory. That's the point. And for a metaphysical approach, laws are eternal.
They are never falsifiable. So for example I believe the law of gravity says the the things will come down. If I throw a pen this pen will come down to earth. I do not expect to throw my pen tomorrow and the pen will rise up to the ceiling, you see. And for Popper this can happen, yeah. And so if this can happen, no matter what theory you have in front of you, you must find a problem in this theory to falsify it.
Richard: It's worked for 10,000 years, but on the 10,001st year it may not work. And so, but this has implications not in a material sense as much, it does in that way too, but very much in a soul sense, sort of inside the human being, because the human being is not a series of synapses in the brain and a series of organic processes.
We are something much more than that. And so the science that is being studied in a materialistic sense really limits us in this study of the purpose. The purpose of a human being, the essence of a human being, why we're here, what is our finality in our life in some way, right? This
Cesar: is very interesting because we are like in a trap, Richard.
We create theories and these theories, according to the scientific method of today, must be falsifiable if it is to be a scientific theory. So this means that all theories have to come from the human mind. So the idea of God is impossible for this kind of approach. So they ruled out theology, which is the basis of all knowledge. So we are like in a trap.
How can scientists propose a solution for our problem if they created a system that does not accept the solution? This
Richard: is a very interesting point and the great Malachi Martin, who was one of the great exorcists, and here I'm going to bring in something rather strange in a more scientific discussion, perhaps, for some. Malachi Martin wrote a book about exorcism in which he outlined five cases of exorcism that had been well, well documented.
And each one of these exorcisms was founded on an essential dialectical point. In other words, it came down to a philosophy of life of the person involved. And the exorcist had to fight with this philosophy of life as Socrates did 2,500 years ago to try to show the illogicalness of it to return the person to sanity. And one of the key elements was this.
All mysteries can be resolved in natural explanations, natural in quotations, meaning rational, scientific, quantifiable. There is no relevance in anything that cannot be rationally understood and no truth beyond the rational. And a person who followed this philosophy of life had to be exorcised. Now, I don't want to enter so much the spiritual question in this regard, but it shows a certain insanity of following only a quantifiable point of view.
How would you help us to understand this better? Well,
Cesar: if you create the theories, you control the theories, right? And this is the standpoint of our science. We, scientists, must create the theories and test them. So, to be rational means to have control of all realm of study. And this is like to be a god in psychopathology. This is to be sick.
The more scientists believe they can control all knowledge, the sicker they are. We must as human beings perceive that we are connected to a reality which is much greater than us, for the very fact that we didn't did not build up ourselves. You didn't say oh I want to be born, so you are simply born and you don't know why, but you were born.
So you are not the controller of your life, so you are dependent on something else, you are. And not only of your parents, because your parents also had origin before. And so before and before and before, there was a starting point.
Richard: Something, not a nothing. There was a something. Dr. Keppe says in his marvelous book, The New Physics, which we're going to try to make available to podcast listeners very soon, along with a workbook we've designed on this book, which is quite a complex book.
We're going to try to make this available by download very, very soon. So please keep listening and write me if you'd like more information about that, rich at richjonesvoice.com. Dr. Keppe says in this book, the time has come for humankind to learn how to deal with the most elevated elements of his personality. That is, with that which constitutes man's essential structure, called energy by physics and soul or substance by metaphysics.
Dr. Keppe is really trying to reintroduce this transcendental element back into the world of science today, with, I think, tremendous implications for us.
Cesar: Yes, like I told you before, we are in a trap, Richard. And, for example, the Nobel Prize winner for physics, Steven Weinberg, in 1979, he won the Nobel Prize. He made a statement lately saying that physics needs urgently to review all of its bases in order to go forward.
Because physics is defined as the relationship between matter and energy. The study of matter, energy, and their interrelations. So, if they do not have a proper understanding of what energy is, matter and energy, they are in a trap. And so, how come physics, from the material standpoint, want to understand the transcendental realm if the transcendental realm is the cause of the physical world.
This is impossible.
Richard: Keppe says it this way in his book, The New Physics. He says the definitions of scientific phenomena are extremely restrictive because they focus only on what can be seen in the moment without searching for a cause or meaning. I believe that it's impossible to practice science without knowing the phenomena behind it. And these phenomena are found in philosophy and theology as well.
That's a beautiful statement, isn't it? It reconnects us to old wisdom that we exclude, thinking, oh, that's just superstition. This is for sure what happened in the scientific revolution. We want to cut people away from the superstition, from the dogma of the church, and have people rely on things that can be measurable, testable, provable, and not just based on blind faith. We're talking about years of Judeo-Christian philosophy and theology that contains a lot of wisdom.
If you just cut that out, as you said, we're swimming without a foundation. We don't have anything to stand on. When Auguste
Cesar: Conti, that French philosopher that created the positivism, He simply discarded the metaphysical knowledge, saying that it was a kind of primitive knowledge. Like all the Judeo-Christian tradition was a kind of primitive knowledge. This is amazing. With which authority can a man come and say such a thing?
To put down thousands of years of knowledge accumulated by geniuses, let's say. Saints, philosophers who came before him, and this is a statement that implicates a lot of responsibility. And what amazes me most, it how come humanity follows such ideas, because according to the the law of three states of Auguste Conte, metaphysical knowledge was the first knowledge, the most primitive. Then it is replaced with time for the philosophical knowledge which is a second step, and then the third step would be the positive knowledge, which is the sensorial knowledge, the knowledge based on senses, on experiments, and this third step would be the scientific, the positivistic,
Richard: the pinnacle, right?
Cesar: Yeah the pinnacle in which we are in today. And so only what you can see, you feel, when you can test with your five senses is considered true knowledge. But this is so
Richard: limiting because it took scientists 25 years to tell us that global warming was probably, because they can never say definitely, was probably caused by human activity. But this is obvious to anybody with a brain just by looking.
You don't need 25 years of research to tell you that. Science is very limited in this sense.
Cesar: But I think, Richard, there is another parameter in that is the economic power. There are today many economic powers that be in the world that wants to convey the studies. I am sure that there are many scientists who developed very important things for humanity, but they give noble prizes mainly for the ones who are of interest for these powers.
Today you give a Nobel Prize for physics who help electronic industries. Universities in the United States, they are all sponsored by big companies who have interest that the people, the geniuses, they hire to work for them. So they only develop things of their interest. We do not develop things for the interest of humanity as a whole.
Richard: That's absolutely right, Cesar, and a big problem in our society today.
To finish our program, Werner von Braun said, Scientific concepts exist only in the minds of men. Behind these concepts lies the reality which is being revealed. That reality that we're exploring, I'm thinking, was somebody else's head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Talk to you next week.
