Dreaming a world without science

Not long ago I had a dream in which I was preparing a lecture about fundamental defects in the scientific worldview. Maybe it wasn’t a lecture. Maybe I was giving a talk to a group of my colleagues at a dinner meeting. People were eating and drinking and seated around rectangular portable tables in a room bathed in yellow-orange light reflected off of varnished wood walls and a well-worn linoleum floor.

I was going to begin the talk with a prop, a section of human vein loaned to me by a female acquaintance who had recently undergone chemotherapy for terminal leukemia. The vein was hollow and empty like a thin wet straw made of surgical tubing or a limp, elongated macaroni noodle, and that was going to be my main talking point: that the sterile piece of vein in my hand was not an actual thing, that once you had extracted it from the complex of physiological systems in which it was embedded, it was no longer anything at all, and to call it a vein was to confer upon it an unwarranted entity status, even to call it “tissue” was to grant it more significance than it deserved. Analytical science, I was to continue, arbitrarily partitions the world into separate and distinct entities—isolated objects and mechanical processes—that have absolutely nothing to do with experienced reality, and yet these artificially individuated objects and processes become the default. In authentic reality—reality as it is actually experienced, not the collection of Frankenstein beasts that emerge from the cold materialism of science—there are no veins in the human body. Even stronger, there are no human bodies! At least not as isolatable entities somehow independent of all relational context.

Science inverts reality. Science chops the world into pieces, and then takes the pieces it has created and christens them the fundamental features out of which the universe is constructed. Science collects individual drops of water from a raging river and then claims that in reality—a “true” reality that exists somehow beyond, behind, or beneath our experience of the surging molten pulse—the river is merely a collection of water droplets in motion. But the true defect in this worldview is seen in its consequences: if you start with the indissoluble wholeness of authentic reality as the default, you could never turn pristine mountain habitat into barren strip mines or foul rivers with the chemically extracted dross from tar sands dredged from beneath what was once verdant forest. To do so would be to gouge deep fissures into your own flesh and to inject poison into your own bloodstream.

As I woke, in the twilight of half sleep, I mulled my dream-speech over and I realized that there was a potent truth here that I would never be able to put into words. And anyway, I would be wasting my time with these folks.

Author: Mark Seely

Mark Seely is an award-winning writer, social critic, professional educator, and cognitive psychologist. He is presently employed as full-time faculty in the psychology department at Edmonds College in Lynnwood, Washington. He was formerly Associate Professor and Chair of Psychology at Saint Joseph's College, Indiana, where for twenty years he taught statistics, a wide variety of psychology courses, and an interdisciplinary course on human biological and cultural evolution. Originally from Spokane, Dr. Seely now resides in Marysville.

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