From: "Richard" (rcarlson@olympus.net)
To: scienceandspirit@sriaurobindocenter-la.com
Subject: Re: science and yoga
Date: Sat, 20 Aug 2005 21:05:54 +0200

Don wrote:

>(Rich - take note - "control and manipulate" - this relates to your main concern about the positive and negative side of current scientic methodology).

Disregarding for the moment the many unintended consequences which can be derived from the scientic enterprise which despite the initial intent behind the research may result in inventions utterly unforeseen, the control and manipulation tendency that Don alludes to in much of Big Science certainly reects a bias and a world view driven by an assumption which would not seem to square with an integrative evolutionary aspiration.

Although as an instrument of our Agency in the world, in which we are trying to survive and make use of things in the process, a certain amount of instrumental reason is needed, the extent to which the fascination of controlling and manipulating the environment (including other human beings) has taken hold of present day science (politics, economics,) seems to be driving us headlong into crisis.

And although this fascination with control, manipulation and the corresponding reductionist epistemology of science can be viewed as a phase in the evolution of consciousness which began somewhere around the time of Galileo, and which at the time was a necessary response to an untenable religious and dogmatic meta-physical system. One has the feeling that like the bishops and papal authority it superseded, that the new priestly class of scientist were and are unwilling to relinquish the control and power they have garnered through their inductive scientic method, by which they have ascended to the upper orders of the hierarchy of modernity.

Through recent scholarship on Goethe's scientic method we know that in the 18th century, an alternative scientic understanding was revealed which combined both poles of observation, that of the observer and the observed. Goethe's epistemology and methodology was very different than one in which the observer is in command of the separate object which is observed. This path could have co-evolved on a parallel or complimentary path with Galileon or Newtonian Science and could have perhaps had the effect of placing the entire scientic project in a holistic context. But it seems that because Goethean science could not readily produce economic results that the science of control and manipulation of the world emerged solely triumphant. And perhaps this is due to the hidden motivation of egotistic or economic control which is driving science by a force whose goal is also perhaps world domination.

The power over nature and society which ratiocination brought, like all power before it proves difcult to cast off, and when wed to an egoistic desire for control and manipulation can become the instrument by which the Asura enters the world. At present it is the vulgar Will to Power seems to drive a desire to control and manipulate the world through the reductionism of scientic knowledge.

Of course this is not lost on all scientists, and as we see by the efforts of Don, Michael and others in the integral psychology movement a more integrative tendency within science itself is on the move.

Ron has also made clear the relationship of these integrative tendencies of efficient human evolution to quantum physics and the study of consciousness.

For myself it is interesting to see how the new paradigms of science have evolved in cybernetics. Because the evolution of cybernetics has also overlapped into various other scientic disciplines such as biology, physics, chemistry, as well as the social sciences, and in concert with deconstructive energies of post modernism aimed at the meta-narratives of ideology, patriarchy and hierarchy, has exposed the fallacy of the science of control and manipulation .

For instance the initial thrust behind the science of cybernetics was for control and command of biological and information systems, however as the observation of cybernetic systems unfolded reality proved beyond the grasp of this engineering mentality and control of the observer, and evolved into a 2nd order cybernetics which had to take account of the observer him/herself. In so doing the cognition of the observer and self-organization of the whole system had to be taken as central to the whole project. The work of Maturana and Varela took this stage further into a study of the autopoesis of living systems in which evolution proceeds not by adaptation of a organism on to a seperative environment, but one in which both organism and environment are structurally coupled as a single co-evolving system.

The last series in the continuing unfolding of the cybernetic sciences promises to be more integrative as the advent of the sciences of chaos and complexity eschews command and control in a search of exploring the patterns that underlie the pre-existing often chaotic harmony of the organic universe.

(Ron since you worked with some of the pioneers in the field feel free to tweak this assessment of cybernetics)

But that said if there is a buck in it or the egotistical motivation for control is there, I am not so sure if any knowledge which as a byproduct evolves techniques which can also be used for control and manipulation will not be utilized for more dubious enterprises.

Don (anyone) I guess my question is, do you see this tendency for control and manipulation abating in psychology and the sciences in general? If not, is it because that command and control seem to further certain economic interest best or is it just the ignorance of egoism? and if so do you also feel that this move for control and manipulation needs to be rejected (much as we reject adverse forces in the individual sadhana) as a contrary movement to the direction of aspiring science as compelled by the pressure toward integrality?

Rich