"Science: method, myth, metaphor?"

By Amy Ione

Abstract

Karl Popper once asserted that the aim of science is to find satisfactory explanations of whatever strikes us as being in need of explanation. His point was that it is naive to speak of the aim of science, for clearly different scientists have different aims. Scientists also offer more than one explanation of how science fits within the culture at large. For example, at present, the physicist David Peat suggests that the maps of science have reached so high a degree of abstraction and sophistication that they have lost their deeper meaning and connection to the world in which we live. Peat urges we recapture something of the living quality in ancient mythology. The astronomer Joseph Silk, on the other hand, infers that science retains this living quality when he suggests that the creation story as now told through the Big Bang might be regarded by those who follow us as a late twentieth century myth, one similar to the creation stories of antiquity. All scientists, however, seem to agree with the assessment of the astronomer Martin Rees. As Rees points out, the success of the Big Bang does not mean we should not question it. Like all scientific theories it remains falsifiable. In time we many find that the theory was simply comparable to adding a new epicycle to the Ptolemaic model. Human ideas, like those expressed above, have always existed within the scientific community.

My discussion will focus on how these kinds of ideas are a part of human consciousness and how this influences scientific development and speculation. Using the formation of the Ptolemaic and Copernican cosmologies as a counterpoint to today's science, I will consider scientific development and speculation in three ways. First, I will illustrate how scientists have merged preconceptions and prejudices with our ability to ask questions and our inventiveness in stabilizing scientific models. Second, I will show that scientific speculation has proved to be motile because scientific inquiry cannot be isolated from other approaches to life. Finally, I will propose strategies we can use to detect the operation of cultural prejudices in scientific studies and in our conclusions about consciousness.

Perhaps it is because the existence of the universe cannot be sensibly disputed that our questions about how it works and how it came to be are intriguing. Exploring the answers humans have proposed, we find that scientists have not been able to reduce their investigations to objective methodology, despite their desire to engage in `unbiased' inquiry. This leads me to conclude that all of us can benefit from developing a comprehensive grasp of how cultural beliefs and human consciousness impact scientific investigations and why the falsification process science uses continues to change the face of science as scientists continually question and re-evaluate their assumptions.

Presented at Second International Conference on Consciousness, "Toward a Science of Consciousness '96 (Tucson II). April 8-15, 1996, " Second annual consciousness conference sponsored by the University. of Arizona. , Tucson, Arizona

Alexandria 5 (in press)

Author: Amy Ione

Address: PO Box 12748, Berkeley, CA 94712-3748 USA

Email: ione@lmi.net

URL: http://users.lmi.net/ione