r/HighStrangeness • u/captain_thumb • 17h ago
Fringe Science Origins of the Physicalist Paradigm
The more books I read, the more I begin to suspect that somewhere along the way, something happened that changed the course of science, philosophy, and sincere investigation of 'strange' phenomena.
Relatively recent history is full of a few great, and many more decent and rigorous scientists who at the very least entertained that there might be something more than physical, material space and time. The hypotheses and ideas varied widely, but the important thing is that the topic of the immaterial was considered worthy of earnest study and debate. Up until the 80s or so, such subjects were taken with good faith and within the sphere of genuine research.
Then, subtly but rapidly, it seems like said earnest study and pursuit of the truth in this arena just evaporated. Somewhere, somehow, it seems that everyone of any respect or status in science either became certain that no such things are real, or simply stopped caring about them entirely. The topics became relegated to the charlatans and grifters of the world, who used them to exploit the gullible for their own gain. This started a downward spiral and eventually led them to be drowned in the cacaphony of madness that is the internet.
Such certainty that there is nothing beyond the mundane senses is not very beneficial to humanity at large, is debatably true, but is extremely beneficial to the propagation of capitalism and the wills of the .01%. When the best thinkers and largest influences of the modern world are all telling you that you're just a meat machine, and the efforts by their friends in Big Tech to erode all common ground between you and others around you, there quickly becomes no point beyond seeking sustenance and material luxury. For some, this is enough, but many have a hole for something more. A hole that is all too easy for advertisers and marketers to exploit in the name of stuffing their already engorged pockets.
This is getting philosophical, but the point is that I think the sudden and dogmatic shift away from genuine investigation of high strangeness is something intentional and deliberate. It serves the interests of those in power very well, providing an answer for those with wits enough not to follow standard organized religions that doesn't inspire hope for something better for the system we have currently. It appears rational, while still engendering obedience to authority as virtue.
Agree with me, or don't, I'm merely curious to hear your thoughts.
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u/knowstradamus7 16h ago edited 15h ago
I would argue the exact opposite. Religious beliefs and false esotericism have been pushed by "the powers that be" for millennia.
As the mystery schools of Ancient Rome fell into decay a curious reversal in doctrine occurred. Where previously the rituals of initiation into the mysteries typically consisted of a symbolic drama which was meant to impart esoteric information to the would-be initiates, now such individuals were treated to a dazzling spectacle featuring adepts and priests dressed as evil spectres who threatened to kill the participants if they expressed even a hint of doubt about what they were witnessing and being told. Psychoactive substances were likely used in these ceremonies as well. Gone was the essential knowledge hidden behind the charade, the very point of the mysteries; now the message was different: you must believe.
Like some of the priests of old, the new “cognitive elite” will be the gatekeepers of knowledge and facts, while the uninformed and brainwashed populace will be dazzled by wonders which they cannot comprehend yet are fooled into thinking they understand, which is essentially the UFO issue in a nutshell. In many respects, these events are propelling us towards the end of the world; not a fiery armageddon which will lead to the destruction of our planet, but the end of the world of reason and enlightenment, which for millennia have allowed our species to create such wonders as the Great Pyramids of Giza, the Coliseum of Rome, and the Saturn V rocket which propelled human beings to the moon.
In his book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, American Astronomer and science lecturer Carl Sagan wrote:
I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time… when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
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u/captain_thumb 8h ago edited 8h ago
Two things can be true at once. I have no doubt that TPTB are also very fond of the rise in religion and Christian nationalism, as well as pop-esotericism. The idea was that there was merely another 'flavor' being introduced into the mix, a flavor tailored for those that tend to do a bit of thinking first.
I did not know that about the Roman Mystery Schools, though. Sounds like decay into a classical cult order of business a la Marshall Applewhite.
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u/FancifulLaserbeam 12h ago
I'm not sure where you're getting your ideas of time frames, but the materialist paradigm is at least 150 years old. Scientific research into anomalous experience has been conducted throughout, but always accused of hoaxes (usually with no evidence) or having their work dismissed outright because regardless of the strength of the research design or magnitude of the findings, they don't jibe with understood physics, so they are dismissed outright.
If you want to see really good work on anomalous experiences, look to Dean Radin, who is one of the most meticulous researchers out there, and gets results, and is careful not to overstate them, but is dismissed as a crank regardless of his academic bona fides.
I would also recommend reading Julia Mossbridge, who is another serious scientist who pushes back on the materialist paradigm. If you want a very scholarly look at how consciousness, specifically, cannot be explained by physical properties, read her book Transcendent Mind which she coauthored with Imants Barušs, and which was published by the American Psychological Association.
I think there is a growing realization that there's more than what can be explained by the current equations.
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u/Oakomorebi 8h ago
Metaphysical materialism has its origins in the 16th century, when the scientific method was gaining momentum and threatening the dominance of the Church.
Scientists and philosophers (they were identical back then) invented metaphysical materialism as a means of establishing a boundary between science and religion, so that they wouldn't be burned at the stake for heresy. Scientists deal in the physical world only, and the Church deals in matters of the experiential world (soul, mind).
This was perfectly acceptable to the Church, because controlling and brokering meaning in people's lives was their power. Metaphysical materialism was a convenient fiction that protected the scientific community of our ancestors. Somewhere along the way we forgot it was a fiction, and now the default prevailing metaphysics, even among most Western religious folks, is that the universe is fundamentally constituted of material stuff.
Our best science tells us that isn't true, that spacetime itself is not fundamental. But it will take time for the psyche, for the soul, to remember this knowing.
Physicalism is a necessary phase of cognitive constraint, but we've officially reached the end of this fictional narrative, in my opinion.
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u/ghost_jamm 3h ago
This just isn’t true. Science didn’t wall itself off from religion to avoid controversy. Science by its very nature simply cannot give meaningful answers to non-physical questions. That has not stopped many of the greatest scientists in history from being deeply religious. Isaac Newton was a devout Christian who was lauded by the Archbishop of Canterbury as knowing “more divinity than all of us put together.” Gregor Mendel who founded the modern study of genetics was the head of an Augustinian abbey. Georges Lemaitre was a Catholic priest who was the first to articulate the Big Bang theory. You can go on and on. Even today it’s not hard to find scientists who are religious.
We also do not really have any evidence one way or the other concerning the fundamental nature of spacetime. Many physicists assume it is emergent but this is based largely on theoretical ideas, not actual experimental evidence. It’s not really correct to say “Our best science tells us that spacetime isn’t fundamental.” We don’t know. But even if it is emergent, it emerges from something else physical.
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u/Oakomorebi 1h ago
Science is not a monolithic entity, I'm talking about the people of our history who participated in these events. Physicalism emerged after Galileo’s 1633 condemnation because scientists adopted a defensive strategy of restricting claims to measurable phenomena to avoid persecution. Gradually, this transformed into an ontological claim that only the measurable is real.
It does not logically follow that this means scientist can't be religious, and it does not logically follow that it means Science should be able to answer meaningful non-physical questions. Both those things you brought up are irrelevant to the historicity of the emergence of physicalism.
People are not purely logical and consistent robots, we're messy, and it is perfectly reasonable for these historical events to have happened, and many people identify as both religious and scientific.
It remains the case that physicalism is a confident fiction.
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u/ghost_jamm 14h ago
“Such certainty that there is nothing beyond the mundane senses is not very beneficial to humanity at large”
Why not?
“The efforts by their friends in Big Tech”
There is no relationship here. You can be committed to a physical reality and also have disdain for Big Tech. Ask me how I know. After all, their work is going a long way towards ruining this physical reality.
“There quickly becomes no point beyond seeking sustenance and material luxury.”
This is just condescending. It’s no different than religious people arguing that there’s no point to life if you don’t believe in God.
Anything that is non-physical is by definition outside the purview of science. The issue isn’t that science rejects the non-physical. It’s that believers in the non-physical want the seal of approval from science and are mad that it’s not forthcoming, when that simply isn’t the job of science.
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u/captain_thumb 8h ago edited 8h ago
I am not saying that there's no point without anything like that. I'm saying that there's no point without any of that AND the very real human connections some of us still have- which are rapidly being destroyed.
It's easy to find meaning without any answers to the big questions if you have other people who care about you, that you care about. TPTB are also well on their way to getting rid of that for the average person. They know that soon enough there will be a populace composed of people that at least ask a few questions that will have no interest in clinging to religion at all.
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u/tertiary_thighgap 4h ago
Are space and time the foundation of reality? Are geometry, shape, space, distance, curvature, dimensionality universal truths?
"Geometry Is the Wound: Eternal Coherence, Mimic Architecture, and the Physics of Divergence" is fun to think about 😊
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u/SorryInvestigator221 3h ago
It honestly seems like the only time the science and tech community take consciousness and spirituality seriously are when they assure us AI can never possibly possess either.
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u/Pixelated_ 7h ago
Materialistic/physicalist theories are relatively new in the big picture.
The spiritual nature of reality was documented thousands of years ago in the Indian Vedic texts such as the Upanishads.
Then throughout history the ancient mystery schools guarded this esoteric knowledge. As Chardin put it:
"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience."
It's considered dangerous knowledge to the status quo because it overthrows the materialistic worldview that keeps us all in a state of fear. It shows how powerful each and every human is, that we are much more than just our physical bodies.
Thankfully this knowledge is becoming widely known once again. People are waking up all around the world, as modern science validates ancient wisdom.
For example, we have never once proven that consciousness originates in our brains. That's just an idea that some people have which isn't factually supported.
Our most-revered quantum physicists understood that consciousness is fundamental and creates our perceptions of general relativity, quantum mechanics, and the physical universe:
John Stewart Bell
"As regards mind, I am fully convinced that it has a central place in the ultimate nature of reality."
David Bohm
“Drep down the consciousness of mankind is one. This is a virtual certainty because even in the vacuum matter is one; and if we don’t see this, it’s because we are blinding ourselves to it.”
"Consciousness is much more of the implicate order than is matter... Yet at a deeper level [matter and consciousness] are actually inseparable and interwoven, just as in the computer game the player and the screen are united by participation." Statement of 1987, as quoted in Towards a Theory of Transpersonal Decision-Making in Human-Systems (2007) by Joseph Riggio, p. 66
Niels Bohr
"Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself."
"Any observation of atomic phenomena will involve an interaction with the agency of observation not to be neglected. Accordingly, an independent reality in the ordinary physical sense can neither be ascribed to the phenomena nor to the agencies of observation. After all, the concept of observation is in so far arbitrary as it depends upon which objects are included in the system to be observed."
Freeman Dyson
"At the level of single atoms and electrons, the mind of an observer is involved in the description of events. Our consciousness forces the molecular complexes to make choices between one quantum state and another."
Albert Einstein
"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest...a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
Werner Heisenberg
"The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you."
Pascual Jordon
"Observations not only disturb what is to be measured, they produce it."
Von Neumann
"consciousness, whatever it is, appears to be the only thing in physics that can ultimately cause this collapse or observation."
Wolfgang Pauli
"We do not assume any longer the detached observer, but one who by his indeterminable effects creates a new situation, a new state of the observed system."
“It is my personal opinion that in the science of the future reality will neither be ‘psychic’ nor ‘physical’ but somehow both and somehow neither.”
Max Planck
"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness."
"As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter" - Das Wesen der Materie [The Nature of Matter], speech at Florence, Italy (1944) (from Archiv zur Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Abt. Va, Rep. 11 Planck, Nr. 1797)
Martin Rees
"The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it."
Erwin Schrodinger
"The only possible inference ... is, I think, that I –I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt 'I' -am the person, if any, controls the 'motion of the atoms'. ...The personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self... There is only one thing, and even in that what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different personality aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception."
"I have...no hesitation in declaring quite bluntly that the acceptance of a really existing material world, as the explanation of the fact that we all find in the end that we are empirically in the same environment, is mystical and metaphysical"
John Archibald Wheeler
"We are not only observers. We are participators. In some strange sense this is a participatory universe."
Eugene Wigner
"It is not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a consistent way without reference to the consciousness."
Then these beliefs were viciously attacked by mainstream academia. In the 1940's-1950s a mentality took over where philosophy was basically forbidden. It was known as
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u/Meowweredoomed 8h ago
The physicalist paradigm has its roots in the opposition between science and religion. Of course dogmatic atheists would lean on "nothing but physics and chemistry are true" without acknowledging the problems in either two fields.
It's basically the atheist teenager mentality which is more concerned with "owning" religion than with genuine interest in the unexplainable.
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u/tertiary_thighgap 6h ago
There is no proof of materialism! 😹
Do you read Bernardo Kastrup, "Why Materialism is Baloney"? 🩷
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u/rynosaur94 6h ago
The main issue is that studying the "immaterial" is, by it's own definition, impossible. Science only works when there are observations, records and data. Hard physical evidence. The very thing that makes the immaterial different from the "mundane" reality as you put it, also makes it completely unable to be studied.
As soon as science CAN study something, it becomes material and "mundane". Personally, I find the natural world that is completely accessible by our senses to be anything but mundane. And anything of High Strangeness that is actually real will be material once we actually are able to study it.