Against Science

Science is not truth

I’ve had a leave of absence from writing. I know. One of the reasons is that I started working on a new project that I'm obsessed with and takes up lots of time. Being engrossed in this new thing has really pushed me to rethink alot of things or even just come back to my roots. These new projects always bring me back to the same conclusion. The way science is done is wrong. I think in the same vein, one could even say that science is wrong.

We live in a world that we can’t even begin to grasp. I want you to pause for a second and just think about existence. Think about how thermodynamics causes molecules to move that have somehow allowed us humans to exist. We think and create paint for our walls and electricity, while not even having a clue why we work everyday or what the fibers in our carpet are made of. But this is simple and there is vastness. A single cell is so vast we cannot create one from scratch or simulate it or even really grow much from it. A single tiny chamomile seed contains more knowledge than we have grasped in the whole history of humanity.

The way we try to understand existence? Science.

It would take the total length of the existence of the universe for us to understand the complexity of a single cell through the scientific method. Yet, we persist idiotically because science is a repercussion of society, of how we live.

We want structure, we want dogma, we want someone to tell us what clothes to wear and what food to eat. We want people to tell us what is and isn’t truth or what is or isn’t real. So we created a system of priests who perform rituals and decide. These are the academic scientists.

We impose a system to try and understand something (the universe and existence). Yet the universe and existence definitely don’t fit into our rigid way our thinking about things and experimenting. The people who are paid to do this work must unequivocally believe in the system because the system is self perpetuating. If you leave, you become a false idol, a quack, you’re no longer an expert.

Science is supposedly all about empiricism but why don’t scientists try and figure out the best way to do science then? Why do they follow dogma so religiously even to the point of self-destruction as is the case with the pay to publish scientific paper world that howls at us through the knowledge void a sound more terrifying than the Nazgûl queen herself.

You shout, there is no other way but to systematically try and understand the world. But your words echo the ignorance they claim to slay. Science is not clean and pretty like people claim, the stories abound of happy accidents, rebels fighting against scientific dogma and succeeding. Sloppy messes and random guesses. Science attempts to advance through the void step by step when the void is an infinite search space.

There is no evidence that science progresses the knowledge of humanity faster than any other method. Herein lies the Voight-Kampff Test for humanity, is science the way to understand existence?

If yes, you’re just regurgitating some dogma like a 13th century peasant.

If no, what’s next?

We need to start challenging all the underlying assumptions of science, who does it, why they do it, how they do it and what they do.

That’s why I started The ODIN. I knew that in order for science to actually flourish we need to change the people who are doing it to make it more diverse. I’ve done my best to make so much of biomedical science available so that anyone can do it. From engineering bacteria and yeast to plants and human cells.

When different people start doing science, different questions get asked. But that’s just the beginning.

We need to start asking ridiculous questions and posing ridiculous experiments. And being open to the results they give.

We need to remove the dogma from our brain that science is truth and come to terms with the actual truth, that all science we know right now will one day be seen as wrong or incomplete. And thus we should constantly be searching to challenge what we think and what we know.

We are all stuck in the same universe on the same planet on the same time. We need to start acting like we actually belong here and deserve to be here. We need to stop performing science by perpetuating all the systemic issues in society that we know will not lead us to whatever answers we seek.

To really truly pull knowledge from the void we must do something different or we are doomed to an eternity of never being able to understand our existence.