LITMIR.BIZ

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to reality and that other means of acquiring knowledge are irrelevant.

      A second and equally significant purpose of this book is to discuss the various findings about nature and reality that result from the experience. The notion of ascertaining deep truths through the mind may sound far-fetched, but it is the revolutionary nature of the experience that makes this kind of knowledge possible. The human mind has the capacity to understand fundamental reality, and as we explore questions about what kind of knowledge we can and cannot possess, I will argue that many of our deepest insights are a result of experience, not mathematics, measurement, or experiment. There is, of course, a long list of important thinkers who trusted in the primacy of the mind, including Einstein, Max Planck, and Erwin Schrödinger.

      But I do not simply want to criticize the scientific method and show its limitations; I intend to go much further and challenge the fundamentals of science itself. It may seem heretical to question principles that go back more than three hundred years, but I am going to suggest, quite seriously, that the modern scientific framework has been constructed upon a partially-faulty foundation. Perhaps it is presumptuous to challenge ideas that have been spoon-fed to generations of students, but I will maintain that scientists have made many false assumptions about nature and that as a consequence, the laws of physics are full of unreality. The so-called “success” of quantum theory has given us many useful inventions, but it does not imply an actual understanding of nature.

      Many of you are undoubtedly accustomed to the ubiquitous ideas put forth by scientists and mathematicians that probability governs the world and that nature inexorably progresses towards increasing randomness and disorder. The second law of thermodynamics may have found its way into all of the sciences and even many aspects of popular culture, but I will allege that the mathematical abstraction that the scientists call “disorder” is a figment of their imagination. To be more precise, I will claim that “disorder” has a constant value of zero (0). Since we are dealing with ideas that are deeply ingrained into our thinking (often perhaps without our knowledge), deconstructing them in order to show their true origins will take some doing.

      In Descartes’ Dream: The World According to Mathematics, Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh write that “the stochastization of the world (forgive this tongue-twister) means the adoption of a point of view wherein randomness or chance or probability is perceived as a real, objective and fundamental aspect of the world.” It turns out that randomness, chance, and probability are not real, despite what Davis and Hersh claim. I will show in no uncertain terms that the scientists start with a very questionable assumption about nature that is by its very definition unscientific. In no way can their fundamental starting point be considered “objective,” although it may well be logical and reasonable. Once we have leveled the playing field, so to speak, by showing that the scientist’s world is based on presupposition rather than evidence, we will be in a better position to judge how well scientists follow their own rules. Ironically, we will find that the “hardest” of the “hard” sciences contains nothing but a metaphysical assertion at its core.

      In addition to calling into question various claims of physicists and mathematicians, we must also challenge Darwinian theory and the views of evolutionary biologists. If you follow in the footsteps of Darwinian defenders such as Richard Dawkins and Jared Diamond, you may be entirely comfortable with the idea that our very existence is due to assorted happy and fortuitous accidents of cosmic architecture as well as wildly improbable evolutionary happenings on earth. Staples of science such as chance, accident, serendipity, odds, and blind luck may form integral parts of your belief system, but I will contend that they have exactly and precisely nothing (zero) to do with reality.

      Ernst Mayr tells us in What Evolution Is that “there is indeed a great deal of randomness (‘chance’) in evolution” and that “chance reigns supreme” at the first step of the selection process. Unfortunately for Mayr and his colleagues (but perhaps not the rest of us), this view of evolution happens to be wrong. We can know with certainty that variation (and everything else that follows) occurs by design, not by chance.

      Whatever your viewpoint, I am going to invite you to think again. Much of our so-called “conventional wisdom” will be set on its head in the world that you are about to enter, where the unexpected, the bizarre, and the outlandish will be in abundance. If I can summon any defense for my contrarian outlook, it is that I did not ask to be put in the position of challenging an entire tradition. I may be a revolutionary, but I am a reluctant one. I have no desire to offend anyone (or everyone) ⎜I am simply interested in understanding the world as it really is, no matter where things may lead. If it turns out that the laws of nature and the laws of physics have no relation to one another at times, then the discrepancies should be illuminated and brought into the open. If it turns out that the Darwinian theorists have led us down a false path, I should think they would want to know. In any case, much of our understanding of nature needs to be fundamentally revised, and what may appear to be crazy needs to be considered seriously.

      You are of course entirely welcome to disagree with the radical solutions that I propose to various problems, but I think you will find that many of my arguments, such as those dealing with hidden beliefs and assumptions in physics and evolutionary biology, are unassailable. I will examine the foundations underlying the rationalist world view and will point out that much of their presumed solidity is about as solid as the space between galaxies. Scientists may have convinced themselves and many of the rest of us that they are impartial and dispassionate observers in search of nature’s deepest secrets (and to some extent this is the case), but their theoretical model has been biased from the start. (The fact that the model is incorrect is another issue altogether. It should be obvious that bias does not necessarily mean incorrect.)

      For the most part, scientists are wholly unaware that the foundation of their world view rests upon assumption and conjecture, not experimental result. Far from approaching nature with a neutral and unprejudiced attitude, scientists begin with largely-unquestioned presumptions that completely color their perspective. Let me use the following metaphor: the scientist approaches nature wearing “chance-colored” eyeglasses prior to conducting any experiments whatsoever. These glasses define how the scientist looks at the world, but the scientist does not realize that he or she has them on. We will see that scientific claims of “objectivity” when it comes to characterizing nature are at times little more than a fabrication, even in the context of classical physics. As is well known, quantum mechanics has thrown the concept of objectivity at the atomic level into serious doubt.

      In my four years at MIT, not once did we consider the underlying ground rules that form the basis of the scientific world view. I am not even sure that most of my professors were aware of their preconceived notions, as these notions are part and parcel of the traditional, unspoken outlook. Rigorous impartiality on their part was taken for granted, and assumptions dating back centuries were left unexamined and untaught.

      It is curious, but some scientific biases have a distinctly Western quality, and their origins can be traced back to the ancient Greeks. For example, Chaos, the Goddess of Emptiness and Confusion, arises from Greek mythology; no self-respecting Taoist would embrace such a concept. Democritus is credited with introducing the interplay between chance and necessity, a concept that survives largely unchanged to this day. And Aristotle discussed “potentia,” or potential, paving the way for the still- continuing debate about the possible versus the actual.

      Despite what some scientists may claim, the scientific method is not even capable of dealing with many fundamental issues that must be addressed in any comprehensive understanding of nature. As you read through this book, I expect that you will come away with the realization that a lot, an awful lot, of what passes for “fact” in the world view of the scientist is nothing more than unsupported and unsupportable assumption.

      Given the nature of recent advances in physics, the kind of “craziness” that I am proposing is perhaps exactly what physicists, following the line of argument of Niels Bohr, should be expecting. Shortly before his death in 1962, Bohr is reported to have said the following about a new proposal: “We seem to all agree that the theory is crazy. The question is, is it crazy enough to have a chance of being right? My own feeling is that it is not quite that crazy” (emphasis his). There is much more than an element of humor here, as anyone familiar with the history

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