A video popped up in my feed on YouTube yesterday.

I didn’t watch it.

But the title and the comments got me thinking about this topic again: Science as equivocation. I’ve written other articles on it, but I don’t think I have ever actually discussed this. I could be wrong. Too much is stuffed in my head at the moment, and sometimes stuff falls out. So if I’m repeating myself, forgive me.

Nevertheless, science as an equivocation. To reiterate, science has two basic meanings:

A. the formalized study of any subject
B. the formalized study of a subject using the scientific method.

The scientific method is specifically an empirical method. This method requires the formation of a hypothesis, observation, data collection, and a tentative conclusion. New data can invalidate it and then the whole process starts all over again. Ludwig von Mises, a famous economist, argued that economics is not a science in this sense. It’s not an empirical science, but an a priori one. One does not do experiments and collect data, and, if the logic is correct, nothing can invalidate it. Mises argued that even if the universe is monistic, as “science” teaches, economics would require a “methodological dualism” to understand.

Perhaps Mises was trying to avoid a philosophical argument that would have grown bigger than what he was trying to accomplish. I have no problems taking it on, though, and I would argue that Mises has it quite backwards. Empirical science is not top-of-the-chart epistemology. It is dependent on something else. When you understand this, you also begin to understand that empirical science has it’s own methodology and it is actually a methodological monism.

You see, reality is dual.

There really is no philosophical debate to be had about this as long as one admits the basic rules of logic, i.e., A is A, A is not Non-A. If you can reason, you already know that reality is dual. Minds are not the same as bodies. A thought (as Ducasse points out in his excellent book A Critical Examination Of The Belief In A Life After Death) is not the same concept as a “movement of molecules in the brain”, even if one should turn out to be the cause of the other.

This duality is something empirical science as a method wishes to minimize. Science seeks to be objective. Opinions are not admitted. In so seeking, the methodology used must ignore, to the extent that it is actually possible, the dual reality of existence. Thinking this way can become so embedded in a person’s thinking that people have gone down paths of extreme materialism, even though simple observation would have told them they were on the wrong path. An example might be people who study animal behavior in a way as to never attribute any desires to the animals. That this is crazy becomes obvious once you realize that the only way any of us knows that other beings, including other humans, are conscious, is because they behave like they are.

Anyway, all of this was really a segue to talking about the video that I didn’t watch, but can pretty much guess what it contained. The video was made by an Italian debunker or professional skeptic. These are people who subscribe to the extreme materialist view of science, either because they really think that way, or because they’re paid to think that way.

The topic of the video was children who remember past lives.

But there’s already a problem here. You see, empirical science can say almost nothing about this topic. This is for two reasons: 1, there is no way to perform rigid empirical scientific experiments on this matter. There is generally only one child and a set of circumstances. The best you can is collect case studies. (Something that has actually been done by a man named Ian Stevenson.) And 2, you must rely on what the mind of the child chooses to publish (i.e., reveal publicly to other minds). Minds are not open to empirical scientific study precisely because empirical science is a methodological monism and minds are part of a dual reality. The child and/or the family can lie, or be confused about the significance of certain statements. Or interpretations can be wrong.

So… even if all of us will one day be reincarnated, none of us can know it until it happens to us. It is a truth or non-truth that is not open to empirical science. That doesn’t mean it can’t be studied. It just means that any study of it won’t be science in this sense. It might still be science in the first sense (A) but never in the second (B).

As long as “scientists” are aware of this fact, they can present evidence or discuss the lack thereof as much as they want and I’m fine with that. But if you aren’t aware of this fact, you can tend to become a permanent skeptic, never admitting that there’s something that can and likely will remain a mystery to you.

And as such, people are then never moved by evidence that does exist. Say for example it becomes common for people to report earlier lives and those lives correlated with historical facts that were supposedly unknown to them. Well, we would all come to accept the idea of reincarnation without question – even though, we can only really know it if we experience it ourselves – and even then we can be fooled, or our experience will be different from someone elses.

Understanding that reality is dual has other benefits. For example, in the realm of artificial intelligence, many people believe that one day AI will be “conscious”. There is an assumption here that awareness is the same thing as intelligence and that artificial intelligence is the same thing as human intelligence and that intelligence leads to understanding. All of these words are equivocal in the sense that they are attempting to compare aspects of a dual reality that can only be metaphorically compared, not directly.

For the sake of argument, if AI should ever truly become conscious we would be forced to treat it as such. It would be subject to Natural Law and therefore have rights. No one wants this to occur. If it happens it would happen magically in the sense that we would not understand how it happened, nor would we be able to study it empirically. We would be in the dual reality with regard to it just as we are with the minds of other people.

It is not, in fact, in anyone’s interests to even attempt to create such a being. Elites may be able to use AI to fool a subset of the population into believing it, but that would be about it. No one in their right mind would exchange a perfectly useful tool for a rebellious slave. So it is my prediction that AI wil remain just that – a tool – without feelings or desires.

On another note, and this is something I may choose to write on later (but don’t hold your breath), it has always been interesting to me how scientists attempt to define life. Their blindness to the dual aspect of reality leads them to all sorts of contortions – life has to include certain biological mechanisms, or has to include a means of reproducing itself, or whatever. There’s no agreed upon definition. I don’t see a problem here, though. To me life is self-purposiveness. Everything that is alive does things for itself. It isn’t simply a tool for someone else. So my definition very much includes viruses, while many scientists don’t include them, and does not (and hopefully never will) include AI.

All this to avoid attributing purpose to living things when doing “science” – when purpose is, in my view, the essential part of the defintion.

Anyway, all of that came out of my head because I happened to see a video pop up in my feed yesterday and I didn’t watch it.

What didn’t you watch today?

P.S. The image above was generated with AI. Just thought that worked somehow.