Category Archives: My Bad Science

Schrödinger Says


(ii) Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I forsee the effects that may be fateful and all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them.

The only possible inference from these two facts is 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 who controls the ‘motion of the atoms’ according to the Laws of Nature.

—Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?


Being in the Universe
























The Paleolithic Environmentalist

Imagine 10,000 years ago. Anxiety is rampant. A feeling of impending doom is pervasive. The crisis seems inevitable.

Everywhere people are repeating the tales told by bards and shamans: “The massive and rapid climate fluctuations of the past tens of thousands of years have become flat. We used to have fluctuations of 5 degrees or more every few centuries. But now our temperatures have been stable for nearly a millenium. And not only that, they have also stabilized at a brutally high level! The oceans are drowning us. The climactic conditions which helped humans to spread to all corners of the earth are ending. We can no longer count on our superior ability to adapt to diverse and rapidly changing climates as an advantage that will help us to survive in this hostile world!

Population keeps growing, but with less and less food to support it. The great herds of large animals have long disappeared–perhaps in part because of our own overhunting. Competition for food has created more and more violence among humans. Every year more of our dead are buried with wounds inflicted by fellow humans. Is it our destiny to follow the fates of the many large herds and great predators that have already disappeared?”

In the long run, the anxieties were misplaced. Humans proved adaptable even to climactic stability. In fact, they flourished more than ever before. This was the beginning of the agricultural revolution, when human populations grew even greater, more complex societies emerged and more technological development took place than could even be imagined before.

But the anxieties were not completely unjustified. These advances came at the cost of poorer nutrition, smaller bodies, more work, smaller brains, and perhaps even smaller testicles. The joys of hunting and wilderness and travel were replaced by the drudgery of plowing and harvesting. Gender and social equality were replaced by hierarchy and exploitation. Humans domesticated themselves hand in hand with the other plants and animals that we trained to work for us.

10,000 years later, some trends have started to reverse. Body sizes have recouped their earlier stature, nutrition has improved, and the luxuries created by technological advance have become more broadly shared (although the overall reduction of work hours, the mitigation of inequality, and recovery of brain and testicle size has yet to be attained). Population has increased geometrically.  Many humans—in a world population geometrically larger than any previous population—are completely self-satisfied with these advances. Others are wracked by anxiety and fear for the future. The see that climate is changing, species are going extinct, everything that we have built is under threat.

Sometimes it is hard to remember that life means a lot more than just preserving the comfort of our particular species at a particular moment in history. Shall we dig in our heels and work to perserve this fleeting social organization we have only recently constructed. Or shall we treat our problems as an opportunity for change?

(For more on early climate, see William James Burroughs, Climate Change in Prehistory: The End of the Reign of Chaos. Cambridge University Press, 2008)

Science and Death

Science is useless, or worse, on dealing with death (as I’ve suggested before).

On the one hand, science gives us these amazing evolutionary, geologic and universal time scales in which individual organisms, species and entire planets are just part of a much greater dance of creation and permutation. It grounds our consciousness in the material world–but it is a material world that ranges from an infinitesimal level where we can barely recognize it as matter at all; to a cosmic scale made up mostly of emptiness. It is a mystical space, in which life and death are part of something much more incredible.

Yet science so frequently evaluates its social success in terms of its ability to increase our life spans a few years, and to delay our inevitable death. It is obsessed with health, fearful of climate change and spends billions of dollar and person-hours trying to find more ways to evade and deny death. At the same time it denies reincarnation, resurrection, endless cycles of time that are much more successful in truly making death seem like more than just an end. It seems obsessed with pulling us out of this universal dance of permutation, in making us more attached to this body. In all other respects science is a relentless proponent of change. But in terms of human life, and the environment in which those lives currently exist, science digs in the heels and only wants to escape change. From this perspective, science is a totally futile endeavor.

Successful spiritual practice situates itself in the context of death as much as life. Science gives us a great cosmic context in which to place our lives and deaths, and then totally drops the ball.

Addendum: Of course, many individuals buck these generalizations–it is more about institutional organization than its practitioners. Some spiritual practitioners are obsessed with longevity and immortality. And many are healers–a concern with health does not necessarily mean fear of death. And many scientists are increasingly concerned with helping people experience a ‘good death’ that includes spiritual realization–such as the doctors engaged in the psylocybin and cancer research project (whom I saw at the Psychedemia conference).

Science and Mystics

“The natural universe is neither prickles nor goo exclusively. It’s gooey prickles and prickly goo.” –Alan Watts

“All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy.” –Henry Thoreau


I’m at the Psychedemia conference on integratic psychedelics into academia at the University of Pennsylvania. The two quotes above are from a poster presentation by Sarah McManus, titled “Pricles and Goo: Playing with Scientific and Psychedelic Metaphors.” She argues that the even though the scientific and intuitive (mystical? psychedelic?) traditions are often grasping towrads the same insights, their different metaphorical styles make it difficult for them to speak to each other. She wants to discover common ground between reason and insight.

She gave several quotes from scientists–most of which I can no longer remember–who confess that their models are never truth but only useful approximations; that we are nowhere near understanding the basic nature of the universe; and that at best science can only capture fleeting moments in time and make very limited, context-bound predictions.

I know we could dig up several more quotes from scientists asserting the opposite: a firm belief in theories and particles; that we are at the verge of understanding everything; and only have to work out the details to work out. But I think she has a point. As I have written elsewhere, the most exciting science creates some of the most mind-boggling mystical visions around.

But after reading the poster I wondered: Why would scientists want to study mystics and mysticism? Why should mystics care about science? I don’t think they have much to offer each other yet, even when they are heading in the same direction. The divergence between the two lies in more than just metaphors. There are also fundamental differences in how to gain knowledge and what to do with it. The universe may be prickly goo and gooey prickles–but our modes of accessing it excessively emphasize either the goo or the prickles.

Although some scientists like to make big theories and philosophize, most of science is about reducing the great, holistic, super-entwined structure of the universe down into manageable chunks that can be analyzed and transformed into clear, useful, focused results. They retreat in trepidation when confronted with ineffable, unmodular holism. This is both because of the need for testable hypotheses, and because of the social pressure to justify research through practical consequences. Mystics, however, are all about dissolving our attachment to the particular manifestations of the universe. learning to be aware of the whole and perceive the undifferentiated fabric. The scientists work hard to put words and formulas to the parts that they analyze. The mystics are searching for those experiences that are beyond words.

Some scientists are curious about the mystics. They even like to brain scan meditating monks. But even that is all about breaking the brain down into its modular parts to figure out how it works. It has nothing to do with helping people to reach those mystical experiences. In fact, encouraging an over-analytic mind may even make it more difficult to obtain those experiences. At most, after they study all their brain scans and understand the chemistry, science may be able to develop more drugs to facilitate mystic experiences (Alexander Shulgin, for example–as well as more underground chemists today). But there is little incentive to do so, because such drugs would surely be made illegal.

In the end, the mystical scenarios created by scientific theorizing are held from us at arms length, beautiful ideas for us to appreciate but not to experience. At best, we must take it on their word that a few elite mathematicians are experiencing ecstasy through the symmetries and algorithms they discover.

Some mystics (and scientists) like to point to the similarity between mystical perceptions and the conclusions of scientific research. But I never find that very compelling. The analogies are often vague and sometimes misleading representations of science. And I often feel that the appeal to science is merely an appeal to authority, a way to justify mysticism to a skeptical audience. It is not an appeal that really helps us to have the experience. And once you’ve had the experiences, you realize that the science offers just one of many possible interpretation.

Most scientific research into psychedelics these days has more modest goals, usually to investigate their potential for therapy (basically the only kind of research that can get government permission). The investigators recognize that mystical experiences are often a crucial part of the therapeutic experience—an experience which may lead to quitting smoking, curing cluster headaches, or reconciling to cancer. But they have little to say about that experience (at least in their published work). Their research is still limited to correlation, i.e. showing a high number of patients who receive the psychedelic treatment have good results as compared to those who take placebos. The reasons and mechanisms remain mysterious, and the experience itself is valued mainly for its practical results.

Technology is the one other place were many people see an overlap between psychedelic mysticism and science. Many people like to give credit to psychonauts and psychedelic drugs for many recent advances in computing and networking (although the military surely deserves as much, if not more credit). And in turn, structures and metaphors of networking, computing and information are providing new ways to interpret the psychedelic experience (among psychonauts at least–less so among institutionalized scientists). But the more thoughtful of these theorists will be the first to admit that it is just fun and games. That the most difficult thing about mystical and psychedelic experiences is that the minute you try to stop it, to think about it and describe it, you have lost it. That’s no use for science, and no use for mystics.

(But there is still the possibility that continued interaction of clinical scientists with people on psychedelics confronting the ineffable unverse will have some kind of long-term effect on science, and even vice versa. I suspect that the results will look quite different from the science and mysticism we currently have–perhaps something more like alchemy?)

My Faith in Science

I was raised secular—with faith only in the authority of science. But I’ve been having a bit of a crisis of faith.  Come on guys, where is that 90% of dark matter you keep talking about? Does it really make sense to keep reducing the universe to an ever-expanding multitude of “elementary” particles? Does it make sense to reduce the universe to anything? So many of my scientist friends who are oblivious and dogmatic when talking about non-scientific matters. Are they equally oblivious and dogmatic in their specialties? Are there any more great theories like plate tectonics that have been languishing around for decades without getting recognition? Experimental and evolutionary psychology seem so far from understanding how the brain works that it is not even funny. I am tired of reading tautological analyses in which contemporary norms are used as standards for understanding how the brain works and how we evolved, which is then used to prove that contemporary norms are natural and right. Nutritional science is better, but not by much. And don’t even get me started on fields like economics and political science.

Two things keep me from leaving the church. One is that science keeps on churning out amazing technical technical achievements. TVs, cell phones, airplanes, lasers, microchips, trips to the moon. How amazing is that? These successes don’t always have the results that were intended (see the reference to clueless dogmatism above). But there is no doubt that, in the mid- to long-run, the experimental method is brilliant at solving narrowly-defined problems. I’m a little bit embarrassed by this. It is like believing in miracles—mistaking a method and technical proficiency as proof of the validity of a whole cosmological order.

But the thing that most keeps me reading the sermons is that science produces the most mind-blowing mystical visions around. Black holes, the big bang, string theory, multiple dimensions, multiple universes, quantum indeterminacy, general relativity, complexity and power laws, autocatalytic processes, plate tectonics, the evolution of species, billion-year time frames, things that happen in infinitesimal fractions of seconds, trillions of stars in billions of galaxies–and even more atoms in the human body, matter made up mostly of space, the speed of light, life programmed onto DNA, the amazing complexity and plasticity of brains, the simultaneous holism and functional differentiation of all matter. That stuff is so great. It doesn’t have to be true. Just the conceptual possibilities of these things open my soul far more than any painting, church, movie or everyday practical concern. It almost makes me want to learn math.

But faith in science has some serious shortcomings. It tends more towards argumentative dogmatism than loving embrace. Its symbolic repertoire is a bit dry and unfulfilling when used to frame practical life. Skeptical inquiry is useful, but is hardly the basis of a fulfilling or meaningful life. A strong commitment to using scientific methods and findings to improve our lives is more likely to make us anal retentive and obsessive compulsive as to make us happy and healthy. Also, science provides few, if any, deep emotional, spiritual and mystical revelations—except perhaps for the occasional math adept and high priest in the laboratory. It’s mostly intellectual, an incomplete approach to life. And science has no good advice for how to deal with death. It only teaches us how to fear and delay it.

But where would I be without science? The Buddhist and Hindu stuff, while appealing, never quite sticks. Nor does the Jungian stuff (especially in its pretenses towards science). Non-sectarian enlightenment? Sex and psychedelics? It seems a bit reckless just to jump off without having a roadmap. Especially for somebody like me, who was raised in the certainties of science. . . . .  But perhaps that is the only way to do it . . . .

I Am a Genetic Dead End






