Why we STILL teach two-bodied science in a three-bodied world ...

Michael Marshall

The simple reason is that until recently, there were no (powerful) bodies opposed to teaching two-bodied science to our kids.

Teachers teach what the powerful in society demand they teach - a 'trickle down' process from the top of society down, down, down to local school boards and local curriculum committees.

Until recently two-bodied science was the only science scientists explored, the only science one got paid to do, the only one that the scientists was likely to get large grants to do.

Scientists loved it, believed in it.

Equally obviously the Right Side of Modernity loved it even if they didn't really understand it and hence, truly believed in it.

Two-bodied science said that the world (and ultimately the Universe) was a treasure trove of profits just begging to be dug up and synthesized into salable goods and services.

There are no limits to what humanity can do--- or as to how much  your company and its profits can grow.

What was there not to love about two-bodied science down at the Chamber of Commerce?

The boys at the Union Hall living on the Left Side of Modernity were equally enamoured of two-bodied science.

They would prefer that they, rather than the businessman,ran the show and got the bulk of the earnings.

But failing that, the only way to see an expanded income for the working stiff was going to have to be that they retained their pitifully small share of national income, but out of a vastly expanded pie.

Growth was good for unions and their pay packets : two-bodied science promised endless economic growth and endless (grudgingly gained) wage increases.

Perhaps the only opponents of two-bodied science until recently were small isolated bands of individuals wearing sandals and living on vegan steaks.

They opposed it from outside science , against any sort of science what so ever, and so failed to garner much support beyond themselves.

For they lived in a world that didn't take scientists wholly at their self-exalting word, but saw that the process basically worked - for good and evil --- it was simply too powerful and too useful to deny.

Two-bodied science's only really dangerous critics would in the end turn out to be well respected 'inside agitators' : scientists who converted to a three-bodied view of Reality grudgingly after reviewing the repeated results they saw in their petri disks and cat- scopes.

Reluctant 'inside agitators' like Dr Martin Henry Dawson....

My target is highly respectable DENIALISM , not the cranks ...

Michael Marshall

My denialist target is the unconscious bias still lurking within mainstream science and mainstream scientists.

I am not after, in the main, the cranks who deny HIV-AIDS/9-11/the Holocaust/Evolution/Climate Change etc.

I have much bigger fish to fry.

My target is The Enlightenment Project and its offshoots : Modernity/Positivism/Scientism and their collective claim that there is nothing in the universe we can not and will not know - eventually.

Scientists who say this are DENIERS all right, deniers of the possibility of limits to Certainty.

They freely admit the space trip to Perfect Certainty will be very long, very expensive, filled with disappointments and errors - but that Science will ultimately arrive.

I ,on the other hand feel ,we can never know or control much of Reality --- in part, simply for lack of money.

To take an example we all talk about but no one ever does anything about, the weather will never be perfectly known.

 It is simply too expensive to fund all the observation posts and computing power needed to do even a reasonably close-to-perfect prediction job.

The Science is there, has been there - but the money has not and never will be.

Partly it is a size issue.

Humans are simply too Big for quarks and too small for Quasars to know much about either without spending an inordinate amount of money that we haven't got to spend, not when more pressing human-sized problems face us.

If this sort of scientific DENIALISM is sheer Blue Sky/ Castles in Spain/ Pie in the Sky wishful thinking , the COMMENSALIST science alternative is refreshingly down to earth.

It cheerfully accepts limits and strives instead to see just how far we can push them along,  for the betterment of life on Earth.

I am aware of many other scientist authors/bloggers out there working to refute crank denialism.

 But I currently know only of a few scientists (insider agitators as it were) who are tackling my definition of denialism from inside their institutional home of mainstream science and mathematics.

That takes a high level of intellectual bravery and I salute them.

In upcoming blog posts I will discuss some of these pioneers' work to explore whether it parallels my own efforts....