STRICT TEST OF SCIENTIFIC VALIDITY

Scientific methodologism insists that all theories must be firmly based on repeatable observations that can be made under controlled conditions and which must be demonstrable so that they are registered by one or more of our five main sense organs. In practice and of necessity in the so-called 'social and historical sciences' one does not insist on repeatability or controlled conditions for the simple reason that this is almost always impossible. One does insist on observation.

Empiricism is seen in most social science as a guiding philosophy, not just as a method for ascertaining certain matters of fact, which is what it is. Despite the demonstration of the unavoidable illogical consequences and paradoxes of scientific empiricism, the mentality of the academic and scientific establishment today is still dominated and underpinned by so-called sense empiricism or scientific methodologism, which requires observation by aid of some sense organ(s). There is no doubt that this requirement has been extremely fruitful in developing empirical science and technology and in freeing human culture of many unfounded superstitions as to the causes and origins of physical phenomena. Nonetheless, this approach comes up against barriers which it cannot surmount as soon as it attempts to deal with matters which do not fall within its domain.

The sense organs, are assumed out of hand to be nothing but physical. Though organic in structure, they are seen as complex bio-physical mechanisms, in much the same way that neurologists regard the brain. Science holds that what cannot be decided by a crucial observation - namely by a decisive fact registering on one or more sense organs of the observer - is 'not scientific', which is often said as being tantamount to simply not having existence or not being true. At the same time, science insists that 'physical reality' is largely, if not entirely, quite other than the human sense organs show us. To add yet more confusion, since Newton a majority of scientists have demonstrated that the sense organs themselves can 'create' subjective phenomena. The 'qualities' of colour, taste etc. were not to be regarded as belonging to the objective 'external world'.

One assumption of empiricism that was unprovable but is now widely regarded as erroneous, namely that the mind is as a blank tablet at birth and receives absolutely all its impressions from experience and the ideas that arise from impressions. Ironically enough, several kinds of recent empirical research into pre-natal influences, such as of human language on unborn children, even provides evidence that this is not the case.

Thus, scientific empiricism is based on the narrow and outdated assumption that all that can ever be known about anything must come to us through the sense organs. Without tangible evidence to support it, it denies the possibility of cognisant abilities for which there is massive extra-scientific evidence and also of the possibility that introspection can provide inner perceptions, insight - or even conceptions - for which there is no sensory basis. Physiology itself has long since shown that at least one of the 'five senses' (touch) is comprised of a variety of types of sensor. Meanwhile, experiences for which there is no clearly identifiable organ are denied any validity, even though physiology has only tentative or partial explanations for the function of the human brain and other bodily organs like the pineal gland, the medulla oblongata etc.

Plato had the aim of showing that many judgements, from mathematical to ethical, are not - based on what we today would call 'scientific evidence' and cannot reasonably be so. The same basic insight is upheld by Kant and many another great philosopher. Our minds have access to some other and transcendental source in so far as we are capable of making moral distinctions and 'knowing' what is wrong. True, we make use of experiential observations when we assess any questions of fact. For example "Does the material evidence and testimony sufficiently prove the accused did cause the death of the victim?" can only be answered by an evaluation of the facts of experience, such as scientific empiricism can help establish. But the question "Ought we to return a verdict of guilty?" is a moral one that no number of facts can solve. It is one that can only be solved satisfactorily by appealing to one's own conscience or sense of right and wrong. This 'sense' is not related to any sensory organ in the body and cannot be the object of any scientific observation whatsoever.

An African tribe in the bush somewhere were once shown a cowboy film. They took the events portrayed as quite real, to the extent that, at the dramatic show-down, they all cast their spears as one man at the bad man on the screen. It is claimed that science does not naively accept appearances, but analyses them so as to discover the reality behind. Most sciences and scientists, however, still fail to recognise or take enough account that there is also a reality in front of the screen of objective appearances, one to which all these outward events appear. This is consciousness, the essence of the human subject, of the observer and the interested participant in events, which is systematically 'overlooked' in chasing the miasma of a neutral objectivity in looking at the material world.

CHANCE AND CUMULATIVE UNIVERSAL KNOWLEDGE

The key observation on which we saw that chaos theory is based has always been obvious; that any single and minor event can, under the right circumstances, affect or alter major events. The obviousness of this is based on human experience of many kinds. One well know 'natural' example of this is the introduction of a few rabbits and dogs to the Australian mainland which led to the alternation of the whole ecology of huge areas of the continent through infestation by rabbits and dingos. Human history is packed with similar instances where 'for the want of a nail the battle was lost' and the (apparently) normal order of society was overturned by an apparent bagatelle. During the 2nd World War, a dozen or more otherwise insignificant 'chance' incidents famously had enormous consequences for the outcome of major campaigns, including the decisive engagements at Midway and the Normandy invasion.

In science too, as the above quote indicates, the 'chance discovery' of some unexpected event still regularly often leads to unprecedented major changes in whole areas of life, or - though not with constant regularity - at least repeatedly, and hardly with less frequency than in earlier days. The advance of scientific knowledge is itself not an ordered one, the future shape of its 'front-line' cannot be planned or predicted, and certainly not by the application of 'chaos theory'. Only the local tactical plans within limited disciplines can reasonably be predicted, and even then the results can be quite other than intended. By chance, Fleming not only noticed a lack of bacteria on a slide, but pursued the matter until it led to the discovery of penicillin as a medicine and hence to anti-biotics. Such unpredicted and uncontrolled elements are also the key to a huge range of technological inventions.

The progress of science - seen at the overall strategic level - is subject to 'chaotic phenomena' in that even the main direction of research interest can alter unpredictably because of unexpected new perceptions or barrier-breaking insights. No one can predict to any reliable degree which kind of invention today might assume global significance tomorrow... as illustrated by the discovery of the transistor effect that led to compact electronic, the computer and altered world culture. Such events, like a drop of water that alters the direction of a stream or finally causes a dam to burst, are the unpredictables that chaos theory investigates.

It is hardly surprising that scientists interested in chaos theory started by questioning the existence of the supposed order that science aims and claims to discover in everything. Chaos means disorder, but chaos theory does not really assume chaos, but rather a more obscure order underlying what appear to be chaotic events. However, the complaint that emergent 'chaoticists' levelled against existing orthodoxy comes to expression here:-

"Each scientist had a private constellation of intellectual parents. Each had his own picture of the landscape of ideas, and each picture was limited in its own way. Knowledge was imperfect. Scientists were biased by the customs of their own disciplines or by the accidental paths of their own educations. The scientific world can be surprisingly finite. No committee of scientists pushed history into a new channel - a handful of individuals did it, with individual perceptions and individual goals."¹

This itself illustrates the very sort of influence of 'chaos' that the theory attempts to describe in physical nature, in economics and the like. The 'handful of individuals', often making discoveries that arose by chance rather than by aim, influences world developments though altering the course of some important aspect of science. By showing that one event of very small energy can change the direction of events involving even enormous amounts of energy, chaos theorists seem to challenge the validity of basic scientific assumptions. One chief assumption of science has always been that 'all events have a cause' (principle of universal causation). Chaos theory does not actually challenge this, however, for it only demonstrates how the 'direction' a chain of causes and effects takes can be influenced by almost infinitesmal events. The direction of flow of massive amounts of gas or liquid can (or even must) originate with tiny movements, as when local winds lead to major cyclones or drops of water collect and join with other causing unpredictable floodings and so forth.

Chaos theory aims to systematise knowledge of how to calculate and identify causal chains not accounted for by existing physics. In so doing it extends the reach of scientific research through new applications of mathematics and experiment. It continues the physicalistic tradition in trying to incorporate more unexplained phenomena into the body of scientific knowledge than before. It aims to 'fill gaps in the hypothetico-deductive system' that science represents. However, Gleich rejects the standard contention that science grows optimally by well-defined disciplines seeking the resolution of a well-defined problem. Individual inputs come out of the blue, as it were, and disturb the model of linear progress: "As non-linear science arose in odd corners of different disciplines, the flow of ideas failed to follow the standard logic of historians."²

All this helps to illustrate how the overall growth of scientific knowledge is not under sufficient control. There is no overall plan in the scientific community, not would such have much chance of being effective given the ideals of (almost total) freedom of research and experiment and the interwoven tensions of interests and conflicts within and between states or between huge business forces and against governments. I conclude that a major limitation of science is in control of itself. The idea that it moves consciously in linear fashion towards the goal of omni-science, or works at ever gradually cumulating more complete and objective information about the totality of the cosmos is not tenable. The idea that the remaining gaps in theory that scientists supposedly work assiduously to fill are being filled is a false image - long cherished by ivory-tower, book-learned philosophers of science - which distorts the nature of the entire undertaking. The closer one supposedly approaches the long-heralded 'theory of everything', the greater are the number of unexplored subjects, unsolved paradoxes, and unforseen consequences of theories that arise.

Some proponents present chaos theory as having opened the eyes of scientists to the fact that not everything can be predicted and, a corollary of the same point, that there are limits to scientific knowledge... greater limits than previously thought. Or to the amazing diversity and variation of natural processes which always have an element of chaos (randomness or chance etc.). One can but shrug and ask why scientists were so blind before. Had they no idea of what Karl Popper, David Hume or other philosophers of science have shown beyond doubt? Have they really understood that empirical generalisations and simple, neat equations can never explain anything at bottom, that its always a case of 'wait and see'? The 'discovery' that human knowledge is necessarily limited in principle is age old and could not be disproven empirically anyhow, however many combine on however many computers. It is an insight that arises only gradually with experience combined with deep reflection, probably the more rapidly so when aided by philosophical and spiritual sources.

SCIENCE, THE UNKNOWN AND UNKNOWABLE

Because of the way in which science represents reality in as concise and universally understandable a way as possible, the fullness of experience and the intricate complexity of the cosmos are somehow misrepresented and its ultimate inscrutability is ignored or forgotten. As Max Weber put it very graphically during the time of the 1st World War:-

"Now, as soon as we attempt to reflect about the way in which life confronts us in immediate concrete situations, it presents an infinite multiplicity of successively and co-existently emerging and disappearing events, both 'within' and 'outside' ourselves... The absolute infinitude of this multiplicity is seen to remain undiminished even when attention is focused on a single 'object'..." and "All the analysis of infinite reality which the finite human mind can conduct rests on the assumption that only a finite portion of this reality constitutes the object of scientific investigation, and that only it is 'important' in the sense of being 'worthy of being known'."³

This perspective was also taken by the physicist Eddington in his work on the nature of physical reality. It supports the contention that, for every door science opens, ten more unopened doors are revealed. For example take the recent awkward upstart that was first ignored and eschewed but which after much persistence received fairly widespread approval, chaos theory. This theory showed how chaos is a component part, so to speak, of order and it opened a door. This has seemingly brought the unexpected bi-product of a new kind of appreciation of the intricacy and imponderability of creation.

The following diagram helps illustrate the epistemological situation. The entire field of knowable reality entirely surrounds what has been established by science with any reasonable degree of likelihood.

The full design and vastness of creation itself is almost unmentionable in the academic science business, where the knowledge market must be made to seem to be cornered.

THE PROTEAN MULTIPLICATION OF SCIENTIFIC INFORMATION

It is widely held that science is so vast that no-one can have a complete overview of its scope in general review of its principles and practices through the ages and throughout the modern world. I found that this is very largely a convenient myth of scientism, an argument used against anyone who attempts to question radically the role many would ascribe to science as the criterion of truth or point out unequivocally the weakness of philosophical standards in the scientific community.

It is obviously true that no single human mind can absorb the totality of scientific information. Nor can anyone keep track of every specific application of the sciences. However, this does not mean that an overview is unattainable. It is from the vantage point of the meta-sciences and philosophy that the limits of its potential become visible by studying its in-built premises and the limiting factors of hypothetical-deductive methodology.

The well-established conclusions and their main consequences in most areas of science are at any rate not so phenomenally extensive as to be beyond the appraisal of philosophy of science. While the worship of the sciences' supposed virtual infallibility and vastness would humble critics, it also tends to enhance the self-importance of the scientific community. This is seen, for example, in the way books in the philosophy of science never point out the vastness of what is yet not known, or of what cannot be predicted or even disproven.

It is most deceptive to think that the limits of scientific knowledge cannot be know by anyone but a polymath genius Nobel Prize level scientist. Many a well-informed layman who cares to think about it can appreciate certain limits of knowing beyond which science does not extend itself. One very striking question that no science can solve is the time of birth or death of any living being, let alone the real cause and meaning of either or what occurs in between.

The mainstream in philosophy of science was and still is a supposedly critical evaluation of science which, however, stays within narrow boundaries and discusses almost only methods and results within the sphere of the sciences. The weight of that literature, unfortunately, still very largely consists in explanations, interpretations and elucidations of science very largely safely within the very premises that science sets. It tends towards giving a carte blanche to science by making the 'search for truth' mainly as a technical epistemological matter in a search for worldly knowledge and know-how. This tends towards, or by omission adds up, to moral justification for scientific practices.

From thoroughgoing critical study of several selected sciences representative of the main divisions, one can discover the relative narrowness or breadth of the limits within which researches always operate and function. Having learned the epistemological orientation that pertain in research methods and being versed in scientific argumentation of various kinds, one can extend this insight towards critically evaluating the scope of answerable questions inherent within any natural or human science. Independence of thought requires a maturity of freedom from the social or internalised pressures of orthodoxy, conventionality, collegiality, need for intellectual acceptance and praise etc. It also invariably would require some degree of completely authentic experience of, and insight into, matters beyond the scope of science.

The more scientific knowledge increases and expands its frontiers into the material environment, the less the specialising scientist actually tends to understand, all in all. This has various reasons, ranging from limitations of perspective caused by orthodox ideology and by professional over-specialisation to confusion resulting from 'information congestion'. There is a vast production of observational data at the elementary level due to the huge advances in instrumentation, recording of data, as well as in data-handling and storage. This has added to the multiplication of empirico-theoretical hypotheses (whether validated or not) and of detailed systems of theoretical possibility in all fields of investigation of the physical environment today. This has resulted more in cumulative complexity than in simplicity and economy of explanation, which were once the watchwords of scientific discovery. Indeed, economy of thought applies to the most universal statements of natural law (usually in the form of mathematical equations), but not to applied scientific grapplings with the so-called 'real world' or, in other words, the continuum of phenomena we encounter in their

There are many consequences in science of the data revolution, not all of which are positive. Among the problems generated are an over-reliance on instruments and computers with the corresponding weakening of the individual scientist's independence of thought. Overwhelmed by complex data in so many fields of analytical investigation and a world-wide plethora of hypotheses of uncertain epistemological status and sub-theories not easily understandable without intellectual efforts, the appetite for intellectual synthesis and overall critical thinking is easily weakened.

SCIENTIFIC PREDICTION OR PROPHESY?

The success and popularity of scientific thinking is due to its ability to make certain accurate predictions about causes and effect, which gives society or some individuals more control of the physical environment (eg. with technology and in the prevention of some diseases etc.). The ability to predict accurately, when successful, has resulted from a process of programmatic reservation of judgement about ideas until they have been proven as far as possible by systematic observation or experiment guided by hypotheses and cemented together by consistent, rational theory.

The desire to predict the future in advance, rather than follow the advice of the father of scientific empirical philosophy, David Hume, to 'wait and see', leads scientists into a peculiar mental contortion. It may be illustrated by a car driver trying to steer his car by looking only in the rear mirror. What has been observed basically sets the framework wherein what will be observable. For example, a para-psychological phenomenon like thought transfer, if not directly observable by any physical means, cannot exist for they are not per specie observable! By the same measure, the human mind, the soul, the spirit and Divine intelligence are all words for non-observable delusions! Scientific intelligence also suffers to the same degree (if not more so)!

One of the modern scientific community's leading figures and often its adopted spokesmen, the philosopher of science Karl Popper, said in an interview on the BBC, "I have written it is stupid to predict and it is not possible to predict. The possibilities of life are too great and too varied." Popper was presumably referring to quite other predictions than those made in scientific experiments under controlled conditions, which natural science itself depends upon entirely. Yet despite Popper's cautions, scientists increasingly persist in making optimistic public 'predictions' (a cover-up word for wishful guesses) about forthcoming developments in knowledge and applications. Interviewers repeatedly ask for predictions about future applications and when they can be expected to arrive, often asking the interviewee to 'gaze into your crystal ball for a minute'. These 'scientists' almost invariably quite happily abandon any sort of scientific predictive stringency and making more or less well-informed (or ill-informed?) guesses... but always about positive consequences and possible beneficial uses of their work. It is an observable fact that they almost never lay any importance whatever on assertions of possible great dangers and misuses that may or are likely to arise in the future! This obviously tells us something about scientists, but little or nothing about the actual future.

Scientists are heard to joke about 'crystal ball-gazing' even while they do so figuratively themselves when explaining expected advances in their work or what answers science may soon be likely to provide. Scientific scepticism is mostly reserved for others than scientists who make doubtful claims in journals and media interviews to describe advances or future applications. It has become a habit for science interviewers to follow up statements about even the most tentative or controversial of novel theories by asking for 'estimates' of how useful they can be and when ('predictions' is far too good a term for such speculations, though 'scientific soothsayer' would be unfair). Far too few of these guesses, not least in medicine, appear to lead to the supposed results or the technical applications, which are what ultimately count.

This sort of presentation invariably applies most to the natural sciences and to the associated science-based 'arts', such as medical technologies, programmes and policies, to chemical and biological engineering or to very involved politico-social questions of ecology, resources, environment, social-natural interactions etc. The crafts of micro-technology in computers and many other micro-physical applications are also naturally made the subject of science-related guessing games and speculations. Now, all of this can obviously have its legitimate uses and news-value. What we do not hear much at all about are the misuses and the many cases of redundancy due to miscalculation, wrong hypotheses, errors and professional semi-hoaxes. Only the really big blunders with possible enormous consequences are reported, which is unavoidable anyway, such as in the case of the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl disasters or the famous 'cold-fusion energy' scandal.

SOME PREDICTIONS THAT SCIENCE CANNOT MAKE WITH ACCURACY

Through the promulgation of science's achievements and future expectations of such, an impression is constantly given that most of what occurs and what will occur is known by science. This is far from being the case, a fact that is not nearly as commonly appreciated as it should be.

Due to the practical unfeasibility of knowing either the mass or the complexity of operative conditions that apply, sciences cannot predict the vast majority of large natural events. These include, for example:-

- exactly which future events will have social or historical significance (even events that have been very soundly planned cannot be predicted with certainty). This includes all passing fashions, material, social or intellectual:- - the time and place of human accidents, including the time of 'accidents' of birth and death.

- what regulates any living body's energy production (i.e. not the mechanics of nutrition, but what initiates, sustains or withdraws life energy - such as in the case of stillborn children).

- the time and exact place of major natural disturbances and catastrophes.

- any of the chance patternings, distributions, genetic changes or environmental adjustments of any anorganic or organic life throughout the entire range of natural phenomena of every kind.

- future changes in type, distribution and amount of human production and consumption.

This list could be extended and detailed indefinitely, as anyone with sound knowledge of the sciences and independent powers of observation can do themselves. Whatever bio-physics claims to be able to know, even the most 'mathematically precise' science cannot with any reliability predict the exact time of a living being's death - be it a healthy dog or a failing man - even often to within years! Even where the death of man or beast is apparently imminent according to all previous clinical experience and taking into account all known theoretical and technological means from the genetic to the psychological, the doctor cannot know the exact moment, minute, hour or day that the body will lose its vitiating principle - life.

There are natural phenomena involving larger masses than the above which may become gradually more predictable through statistical and other means in future, but about which only highly unreliable specific predictions can so far be made. These include:-

- most earthquakes and volcanic eruptions
- the geological effects on crust structures of huge dams
- annual world weather patterns
- the exact incidence of sunspots and related phenomena
- the course and characteristics etc. of non-regular comets
- future collisions of meteors, asteroids etc. with the earth.

It is well known that the sciences cannot even roughly predict to what the vast increases in energy use, global warming and severe depletion of the ozone layer will eventually lead. Despite vast computer capacity, continuous global satellite surveying etc., meteorologists cannot regularly predict the vagaries of weather seasonal or annual variations, and often not even tomorrow's weather with accuracy. Likewise, seismologists and their kin are unable to predict the place, time or scale of eruptions of volcanoes or major earthquakes.

Many more such fields of possible research remain almost untapped. Despite the much-cited advances in the understanding of the human brain, there one is yet nowhere near any explanation for how and why we sleep or dream, though the science of neurology employed about 80,000 researchers world-wide in the 1990s. One does not know how, or even if, the brain generates its own mental images or receives them from other sources, such as the sensory world. How images are related meaningfully and symbolically in dreams, let alone waking life, is far beyond any scientific researches so far envisioned. Despite the massive evidence of thought transference available to any serious researcher, neurologists do not even consider that the brain can receive waves in a manner perhaps similar to a radio set.

Few spokesmen of science are as reserved in their judgements as the bare facts would warrant. The temptation for 'experts' is to predict with apparent authority when only making informed guesses about future events (eg: "We can say that there will most likely be a drug for this illness, a computer for this task, a solution to this riddle etc. within about x years") and also when they are simply barnstorming for support of their profession and recognition of the essential role of scientific research (read also 'funds') in everything from education and technology to business and medicine. The Nobel Prize winner for DNA discovery, Francis Crick, predicted in 1966 the chemical synthesis of an enzyme 'quite confidently... within the next five or ten years' and even eventually of cell components. As of 1997 not even the simplest organic molecule has been fully synthesised. The complexity required is staggering - quite apart from the unreckoned likelihood of vital bio-energy fields as yet unknown or unrecognised by science being involved.

It has even seriously stated now and again by some medical spokesmen that with sufficient resources, the human body could be kept alive indefinitely... an exaggeration if ever there was one! The fact that many diseases, once considered as virtually, are again proving incurable is sufficient to explode any claims of medicine to be able to create a 'bionic man'.

Medical science has certainly succeeded in instilling a false sense that there is relatively little that baffles it. Perhaps this has been done with good though misguided intentions of spreading a feeling of great confidence in doctors and hospitals. People may be better off without the continuous announcements of likely future cures long before they have even been tested on animals, let alone human beings. Only a percentage of such apparent breakthroughs lead to actual effective treatments, and such treatments are almost always confined to a tiny percentage of world population in any case, often only being available to the well-to-do in a few of the most medically-advanced countries. The concentration of cutting-edge research on new epidemics, many uncommon ailments and 'dramatic' inventions - which mostly benefit small minorities - appears often to take place at the expense of chronic and recurrent illnesses that are suffered by the huge majority and preventative medicine. Back problems are suffered by up to 80% of some populations, but medical science is decidedly second-rate in this area compared to alternative methods of treatment.

In the clinical practice of medicine there are in most countries extraordinarily high percentages - countless cases - of misdiagnosis, mistreatment and inability to recognise as such a wide range of illnesses and disabilities (and then usually to put them down to psychological causes). The increasing tendency to bring doctors and hospitals to court in the West has shown the previously unimagined extent to which malpractice is prevalent. In medical theory there are clearly also gaping holes and blind spots in profusion, and perhaps it is natural enough that these are not considered worthy of the same degree of publicity. Be that as it may, the general rosy picture should be put right so as not to dash false expectations awoken thereby in sufferers and in the broader interests of truth.

SELF-ADJUSTMENT TO EXPERIENCE?

A underlying assumption of empiricism, seldom stated as such, is the belief that experiential trial and error tends to eliminate error and lead inevitable to greater truth. There is, however, a strict limit to what experience itself shows, all depends upon what one makes of it, or often what one learns to avoid from it. Secure or real progress in knowledge, or in practically any worthwhile human enterprise, requires nothing less than the transcendence of experience, the past. This means that one must look futureward with imagination to conceive new goals. To discover and scale new heights, some measure of faith and trust regardless of past experience is ever called for. The failings and limits of science cannot be overcome by sticking only to traditional methods and poor philosophy.

Scientists are now talking about human beings as the highest type of 'self-adjusting system' in the living world. They hold that any organism - which is to say, any complex system - naturally develops greater complexity as it lives and reacts in its environment; i.e. the surrounding reality which provides the inputs to which it 'learns' to adjust. Indeed, the true motivator of adjustment to reality in human life is what we call 'experience'. Personal experience in the learning process is far more important for the generation and evaluation of most kinds of knowledge than the 'second-hand experience' that book-learning provides. That the technical scientist relies much on vicarious experience through books and other media, is one of the dangers in that persons of little insight and narrow experience can indiscriminately release into the world all manner of potential ill.

What then is experience? For all organisms, scientists regard it as reaction to information from the surroundings, which does not start to come only at birth. Any organism, and especially the human being, is the result of a highly complex preceding evolution during which that type of organism has gradually adjusted itself, resulting in its present level of complexity or development. The human instrument can thus be thought of as a 'crystallised system resulting from adjustments to past information'. This agrees fully with the Vedantic theory of karma whereby our lives and all that happens to us in them (apart from our own actions) are a result of the sum of our own past actions.

Throughout evolution, wrong information has gradually been rejected by evolving organisms through trial and error. This, evolutionists reason, and includes the human central nervous system and brain, being the most complex of 'systems' known to us. This may well be so, but what of the human mind and spirit? As the terms suggest, these are not identical with the physical brain.

At any time, we have both true and some false ideas. Most of our perceptions can be relied on as correct - though not necessarily as objectively interpreted or correctly understood. Our more general ideas can yet more easily be subject to error. True, experience tends to eliminate false ideas, but only provided it is not itself guided and interpreted through false ideas. Personal experience is superior in this respect to the kind of experience represented by mentally transmitted 'knowledge' through reading books or other media of communication. Science is itself very largely 'second-hand experience'.

At any time, false ideas can easily enter the mind, sometimes along with a true one together with which it first occurred. We learn all such ideas from our environment and they are processed and stored in the mind. We also know the basic difference between morally right and wrong ideas, which are learned from childhood onwards. These are doubtless influenced by consciousness, which also acts as a channel for inner impulses, such as conscience or higher intuitions. Ethically bad ideas are invariably first learned by observing the bad example of others, or perhaps through reacting badly to someone else's actions.

However, the ideas that can be corrected by experience only represent a proportion of all that we can think, and most likely a rather small proportion. There are ideas which we may never attain to because they remain outside our experience or because our mind-set is such that we are inclined to reject them out-of-hand before investigating them in any thorough way. Such ideas are influenced by experience, however, in that only persons having certain kinds of experience will entertain or find truth in those ideas. They often include among their number ideas supported by unusual or even unique experiences, such as those termed para-normal, para-psychological, mystical, religious or miraculous. Many philosophical ideas have clearly also arisen from conditions of consciousness that are not commonly experienced. Such ideas will tend to be rejected because the basis for accepting them is nowhere present in the experience of the sceptic. Ideas frequently termed 'transcendental' or 'metaphysical' - especially in the more spiritual or perhaps theological sense - are soon rejected by those of an empirical and materialistic leaning. Yet these ideas frequently attempt to express sublime truths, which truths are of a nature that words cannot adequately describe or express them.

In short, the wrong experience can reinforce wrong ideas and thus carry over the ills of past generations to future ones. There is therefore no cast-iron guarantee that experiential knowledge leads to greater appreciation of the truth as a whole. In the modern human being evolution enters a qualitatively new phase, an ethical challenge to respect, understand and love all others and to sacrifice self to create a just and good world. It is to acquire knowledge that forwards these ends, and such knowledge alone, that is the challenge for science and human understanding altogether.

A common argument against metaphysical and similar ideas is that, since they cannot be proven by demonstration or experiment etc., they are not worth bothering with. This standpoint is truly an intellectually revanchist one that shows a lack of sensitivity to all higher things, in short, an absence of deep and true understanding. As is shown in my web-book 'Beyond Science', understanding proper is not at all the figuring our of some mental conundrum, it is rather the product of a life of broad experience and deeply felt sympathy with all people and living beings... even with being itself.

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