What is the definition of real when a scientist says that something can seem kind of woo-woo, but there’s something real going on there? A scientist I was listening to made this observation in relation to the woo-woo of gut feelings versus the reality of interoception, the scientific term for them.
Intuition, these bodily sensations we have that point us in one direction or another, can seem mystical, but because they’ve been scientifically proven, they are real. But did they become real only after we had a scientific term for them or were they also real when we’d had them before they were scientifically studied.
Science often contributes to the problems it’s trying to solve and deepens the divisions it’s trying to overcome.
Censoring the individual stifles the debate
There’s an implication that unless something is happening largescale it may not be real. But, first, it’s real because it’s happening to someone. And second, how can we know if it’s happening on a largescale if we undermine the significance of the individual and suppress individual expression?
The smallscale/largescale divide creates the sense that our feelings and thoughts may not be authentic unless they have a scientific basis to them. It’s almost as if we need science to validate and give us permission to feel what we’re feeling and think what we’re thinking.
This negation of the validity of the individual experience stifles individual expression and by extension to debate and inquiry that science presumably aims to foster and widen.
Is the individual separate from the collective?
The default assumption in science is that individual truth is not valid for the collective until proven otherwise. But isn’t it more reasonable to assume that individual truth is collective truth until proven otherwise?
The separation of the individual and the collective is arbitrary and illusory. There’s no individual without a collective, and no collective without an individual.
Treating the individual and collective as separate entities not only leads us to asking dead-end scientific questions but also imposes a self-defeating limit. The lack of recognition that everything is interconnected and the very separation of science into distinct fields subverts the scientific enquiry and imposes an invisible ceiling on the scientific debate.
The cult of the science-backed information
The battle between my science is superior to your science/non-science is divisive and corrosive to the uniting force of science. There’s a bullying undertone of superiority to it and it encourages exclusion, which is the opposite of what science is trying to do.
What questions is science asking–and why?
Claims that don’t have scientific basis are considered woo-woo. And there’s an assumption that areas that haven’t been extensively studied are marginal.
Our current body of science is a snapshot in time of our best guesses about life. And these guesses are only the by-product of the questions we’ve been asking. But why are we asking certain questions and not others, and what are the main driving factors behind that?
We know little about consciousness, about who we are, and how we create our experience of life. And while these phenomena underpin the experience of being us, they don’t seem particularly high on either the scientific or the societal agenda.
If something is woo-woo in the sense that it hasn’t been studied yet, it doesn’t mean it’s not important it means we haven’t been curious about it enough. And often, the farther and more separate something is from who we really are, the more curious we are about it.