June 29, 2022 by James Lyons-Weiler
Those who back constructivism, whether they know it or not, provide a pretext for those who would care to dictate reality. We must be responsible with our constructs.
The study of conscious awareness, and conscious self-awareness, is a fascinating topic. Due to COVID-19 lockdowns, a plethora of academics with time on their hands are now publishing their ruminations on the source and origins of consciousness. It will take a decade for all of their papers and books to be digested, compared, perhaps debated – but the one thing I’m certain nearly all of them share in common is – not one of them is going to prove to be testable.
Falsifiability is the hallmark of Science: Any hypothesis worth considering must be testable. If an idea cannot be challenged by making and testing specific predictions using directly material measurements related to that idea, it’s not a hypothesis. It’s just an idea. If ideas are not testable, the formal metacognitive process we call Science itself cannot proceed forward on such questions; instead, they are viewpoints, opinions, which may or may not have any bases in reality.
Questions on the very nature of reality of course bring us to the topic of physics, in particular, quantum physics, which has lately been making some stunning claims. The ancient idea of an “ether” – a substrate upon which reality rests – was dismissed strongly, only to resurface fairly recently as an energy manifold from which, under the right conditions, matter materializes in untold trillions and trillions of moments of “mini-creation”.
Now, in 2022, we’re being told that spacetime – the player in Einstein’s theory of general relativity – is not fundamental – specifically, that we’ve been looking at spacetime as manifestly “part of” the universe we are trying to understand. If it is not fundamental, that means then that it is emergent – it, too, is generated, under the right conditions, from other fundamental parts of the universe that we are only beginning to glimpse.
I’m not ready to jump down that particular rabbit hole given that I am not yet convinced that it is settled that the concept of spacetime is not a construction, a model or metaphor that we happened to see “work” mechanistically in equations. The fly in the soup for me on relativity and quantum mechanics alike has always been how time – the dimensions of time, to be precise- cancel out in the equations leading to general relativity. Why is this irksome? Clearly, if time appears in both the denominator and numerator in a term or function, we can cancel it out, right?
Well, that depends. […]
Postscript: The FDA will soon be deciding on whether they will require vaccine makers Moderna and Pfizer to conduct new clinical trials as they change the formulation of their vaccines. The proposal by Moderna and Pfizer is to be allowed to concoct whatever type of biologic they think necessary and useful without randomized prospective clinical trials. This is necessarily a step into the New Dark Ages I keep warning about. Demand Science, and a lot of it – and demand that it be peer-reviewed before being acted upon by regulatory bodies, and that it be conducted by independent researchers with no financial conflicts of interest. No ties to Pharma, nor to HHS. No more Science by Press Release. Wake up, Neo.