by Mike Dubbeld
In August 2003, Mike Dubbeld — a practitioner of Saivite yoga under Satguru Subramunia and one of alt.yoga's most prolific original thinkers — posted a sustained philosophical essay arguing that science and yoga stand on equal epistemic footing. Drawing on Gestalt psychology, Kantian epistemology, quantum mechanics, the history of logical positivism, and Vedantic metaphysics, Dubbeld builds a case that all knowledge is conventional, perception is always filtered through consciousness, and the Western privileging of scientific materialism over metaphysics was built on a foundational error — Descartes' equation of certainty with truth — that collapsed seventy years ago but whose ghost still haunts our language and institutions.
The essay is preserved here as originally posted, with only line-wrapping adjusted for readability. Spelling and style are Dubbeld's own — the authentic voice of a yoga practitioner writing philosophy on the early internet.
More fodder for rock throwing from a science post. Here I attempt to show that science has no more validity as a belief system than any religion or other metaphysical system like Yoga. The basis of this discussion is at the roots of knowledge itself. How is something known to be true and how do you know that? This basis is the primary means used by theologians today in defense of belief in religion on a rational basis. If anyone wants references just yell. Because this was written for a scientific audience the discussion assumes knowledge of just how bizarre Quantum Theory is/what it implies about reality so I do not go into that very much. Basically I am saying if you believe in Quantum Theory, there is no reason not to believe in the tooth fairy on that score. :)
Science arose out of a 300 year old false notion based on Descartes skepticism that led for reality as a function of certainty - for which formal logic of mathematics was used as the model. Big mistake. Today it is no longer any more credible to study Quantum Theory or any other endevor in science than it is to study metaphysics. Science no longer has any more validity than metaphysics. It is a shocker and so ingrained is the wrong ideas presented by science that their conservative hanging on continues today - 70 years into the fall of Logical Empiricism and and QM. Our very language is constructed around the fallacy of reality being found in Foundationalism of Descartes and the Enlightenment gang - so much so that metaphysical 'objects' in the west couched in language is such that words are not pieced together correctly in sentences to even THINK about metaphysics correctly. Moreover, a day will come when science will be subsumed under the broader category of metaphysics which is broader in scope and depth.
In quantum mechanics the tables have turned in science. Before the scientist would go perform experiments and then get data and then theoretical scientists would attempt to pin a deterministic law on the phenomena. But now this has changed. Theoretical physicists have the lead. They construct theorys and hope something falls out of them that can be testable. A ton of theory guessing preceeds experiment. This means a lot of thought experiments have to come about After a workable theory comes up to discover experimental proof.
One of the biggest barriers for people to get over is the idea that somehow the world is 'out there.' That events take place in time and space as objective events - whether we are there to see them or not. You don't need quantum mechanics to understand that there is no such thing as 'objective reality.' This was discovered theoretically long ago philosophically and in recent years by psychology. We see what we expect to see. We add order to the information that comes into our senses. The following examples are to show that consciousness plays a role in perception.
If I construct 2 towers A and B 100 meters high and 10 meters apart with 2 red lights on the top of them and then at night stand 300 meters back from the 2 towers, a sequence can be found where the 2 red lights that blink on and off at the top of these towers appears not as 2 lights blinking on and off at the top of each tower - but rather one light that appears to move back and forth blinking on and off between the 2 towers in pendulum fashion. The physics of the situation is such that there are 2 red lights on top of 2 towers blinking on and off. What is perceived by us however is 1 red light swinging back and forth in pendulum fashion blinking on and off. I am not saying we believe there is one light moving back and forth in pendulum fashion. But it appears that way when we look at it. This phenomena is known in psychology as the 'psi phenomena' or 'apparent motion' - search. It is related to something called 'constancy.'
If I stand at the front of a classroom and hold up a bowl 45 degrees to show its top, and ask each person to tell me the shape of the top of the bowl, all will report the top of the bowl is round. Yet not a single person in the room can see the bowl top as round because in order for them to see it round, I would have to show them the bowl perpendicular to the floor and facing directly in front of them. To all in the room the bowl top must appear to be eliptical because of the 45 degree angle that I showed to the top of the bowl to them. If a picture was taken of my holding the bowl from any of the locations of the audience and then the top traced out - an oval shape would be found in each instance.
The reason people report the top of the bowl as round is because they know that bowls are generally round and my rotating the bowl does not change its shape. They see more than the physics of the situation as reported by their seneses. We 'add order' to what we perceive. This adding order can be construed as a negative thing because we are not happy about distorting the sensory input. We may find ourselves saying 'Plato was right, here we go again, can't trust what the senses tell us.' But the fact of the matter is - the bowl top is round. The distortion turns out to be beneficial. The reason we do this is because it is a survival mechanism to make sense out of the environment fast and survive. Those who did not are no longer in the gene pool. The information that comes to us from the senses is the 'Blooming Buzz.' It is a massive array of information to make sense of.
This adding order to the physics of the situation from our senses is deeply ingrained. You literally could not cross the street without it. You would have to learn to walk each time. The motor output responses operate in conjunction with the senses as stored programs in the brain. The phenomena is known as constancy in psychology. Most of the time, the bias or distortion we add is beneficial. All things that come to us from the senses are filtered through the mind (ego filter - manus) with 'distal ques.' The combination of distal que's (a priori knowledge) and proximal que's - what the senses report is what we experience. The more distal knowledge we have, the less proximal knowledge we need/the less looking we will do to understand something.
I could go on and on with examples. This was discovered by Gestalt Psychologists. It is used by illusionists who make use of the idea that 'we see what we expect to see.' The bottom line is that Perceiver can not be separated from the perceived - that is the message in psychology also (like quantum mechanics). But long before psychology or quantum mechanics this was known by philosophers. Bishop Berkley in the west as well as Kant. What falls on the retina of our eyes is a replication of what is 'out there'. It is NOT what is out there. What is 'out there' is unknown and unknowable. As bodies with senses to perceive the environment we know phenomena - the combination of the image on the retina with our minds bias of it. This is called 'phenomena.' What is 'real' and 'out there' is a noumena and can not be know by any means. All information from the senses is a replication of what is out there. Not what is actually out there. In quantum mechanics it is a wave when we do not perceive it and particles when we do.
The reason we reify ('thing-a-fy') things one thing from another is to generalize them/categorize them and make sense of them in a hurry and survive. By far most things have no names whatsoever. You have a name for your PC monitor and a name for your glass. But you do not have a name for the monitor displayed exactly in that position with the glass. What would you call it 'wordglass24degrees?' Nor is there any name for the sound of watter running in your sink - other than the generalized description of all running water. None for a particular sound of wind moving through the leaves of a tree. Only the general notion of wind through trees. By reifying phenomena we are able to categorize them and objectively discuss them with others. Reach agreements on what sort of animal to hunt. It is a means to bring order and use language and think about things reasonably.
The universe itself does not need you to reify it/break it up. This reification is for our benefit. Like anything else it can be abused. Words are models of reality. All things known to the mind are the result of agreements between 2 or more minds. This is so because you cannot tell me as single thing that is not. The moment you do you must use language and to use language means using words that were agreed upon for use by 2 or more people. This means all reality as known by the mind is based on agreement/convention. The fallacy lies in the idea that by knowing the word is the knowing the phenomena. No number of words you could tell me could convey the experience of 'apple-taste' if I had never tasted an apple. The model is not the experience. The map is not the territory. A computer simulation of a hurricane is not the hurricane. (See John Wheeler p1208 in his famous book Gravitation about the limited use of models)
For a thing to be known by the mind also requires it to be compared to some other thing in the universe. Because without knowing what duality is you will be totally lost I will cover it again. This is not the silly Decartes mind-body duality - that is baloney compared to duality. All things and conditions in the universe can not exist without being compared to another thing or condition in the universe. YOU own your existence to all else because without something with which to distinguish yourself from all other things, you could not exist. In fact there is no such thing as 'you' - you is only a construct and has no reality whatsoever. This is important because when understood properly it shows a fundamental limitation of the mind. In the west we tend to worship the mind as something capable of infinite possibilities. But this is a mistaken idea. The fact that a thing can only be known in terms of other things by the mind shows that this is a fundamental limitation of the mind.
It is better to think of the mind as an object like tables and chairs - which also have boundaries/limitations. Due to this being a limitation of the mind, the mind can not comprehend infinity. Since the mind can not comprehend infinity, and infinity is an essence of God, the mind can not comprehend God also. Infinity and mind are outside the scope of possibilities/capacity of the limited instrument of the mind. Now it gets into what is meant by understanding. If I tell you to visualize a square, you can do so easily. If I ask you if you believe such a thing can be constructed, you will tell me the possibility of squares being constructed is viable/possible. If I ask you to visualize a chiliagon - a 1000-sided polygon, you will not be able to do so. However, if I ask you if you can conceive of such a thing being built, you will agree that in principle something like this could be constructed (however difficult). So there is a distinction between being able to visualize something and understanding it and conceptualizing something to understand it. We as minds can not visualize infinity. But we can conceive of the possibility of the existence of infinity. Same thing with God.
Our vocabulary in the west on metaphysics is pathetic. Not only do we use the wrong words for things, we also construct sentences incorrectly to perpetuate false notions. Roger Penrose in Shadows of the Mind says he uses consciousness and mind synonomously but nothing could be more mistaken. I am picking on Penrose but he is only abusing the language as understood and abused by most people in the west. Metaphysics in the west for 300 years was poo poo-ed. The structure of knowledge used since the Enlightenment was WRONG. Modernism Foundationalism/Formal Logic was the model of epistemology for which all activities that wished to be perceived as 'scientific' aspired to. But this was totally incorrect and I could go into this again. The bottom line is that science today has no more basis for understanding Reality than ANY OTHER belief system. It is as appropriate today to study metaphysics as it is to study science!
Since metaphysics was frowned upon with abstract ideas having less reality than tables and chairs for 300 years, our language has incorporated many mistaken notions into it to reflect this attitude. The result is that we do not even construct sentences together properly to enable correctly thinking about things - particularly in quantum mechanics. There is no more reality to tables and chairs than there is for 'justice' or 'one' - abstract ideas have no spatiotemporal existence and were deemed somehow less real in the west. Unfortunately, they are MORE real if anything. The physical universe is the result of abstract 'thought.' The mind gives rise to the brain. The brain does not give rise to the mind. The mind is composed of subtle matter. It does not occupy time and space like tables and chairs. By controlling the mind (Bohm's 'Implicit Order' or Jung's 'Collective Unconscious', or Plotinus Divine Mind), or controlling the internal, the external is brought under control. Science will be a special case Metaphysics which is more broad in scope and is the study of abstract 'objects' (Do a search on Zalta and Theory of Abstract Objects).
Subtle matter has laws also although they are unknown at this time. For a long time before Pythagoras discovered the Pythagorean Theorem, the ancient Egyptians made use of a cored 3 units/4 units for a side of 5 units to build their pyramids with. Pythagoras gets the credit for generalizing the idea - creating an abstract model. But the Egyptians were making use of the knowledge without the law is the point. Same with psychics today. They do not have the metaphysical laws behind what they do, they just know how to do something to make something happen.
A major problem arises in science and metaphysics bumping heads because science likes to experimentally confirm hypothesis - as it has been doing for 100's of years. This is fine, except as I said above, this is changing such that theoretical physicists construct theorys and then go about looking (hoping) to find a means to test it. To wit, Einstein had to wait 3 years long ago to test his relativity theory/a total eclipse for Eddington to determine the stars positions in the sky passing by the sun. In yoga the instruments are internal and subjective. What is real goes back to fundamental epistemological roots. Belief Systems. Are headaches real? You can not see someone's headache or sense it in any way. The person may show signs of something being wrong but there is no way for you to confirm that they indeed have a headache. The reason you believe they have a headache is based on 2 things. First, you have had headaches as well and therefore know of their existence. Second, the person telling you has no reason to tell you any stories/has no motive to lie. Headaches are but one example. Taken together the viseral senses (digestive tract) and the proprioceptive senses (muscles/tendons and ligaments etc) are called the 'subjective senses'. Because you can not prove another has a headache does not alter the fact that they have one or not. It is not reasonable to say that since science can not measure something, it does not exist.
If a class of people doing yoga all perform the same movements and names are given to the movements and the people performing them experience the same sorts of changes in consciousness, the words used to describe these states of consciousness are 'real' to the members of the class. They would mean nothing to others. The general problem arises as to how to arrive at what is real and what is not real. This inevitably leads to whether abstract ideas are real. 'Justice' occupies no space and time/is not spatiotemporal. (Nor does 'German') But Justice can be reified into existence (the wave function popped) according to a community of people voting on a speed limit in their neighborhood o 35 miles per hour say. If a speeder is caught by the police exceeding this limit, the speeder will be pulled over and issued a ticket. Physical reality will be altered. No less real than tables and chairs.
No one (pun intended) studies 'German.' We learn German by studying examples of German to lead to understanding it. German is a name for a language. Not the language itself. Justice is the name of a set of rights and wrongs. But no one reaches into their pocket when someone says 'Your honer show me justice' in a courtroom. There is no such thing as a 'one' in the universe as something occupying space and time. 'Ones' don't grow on trees. But there are countless examples of the abstract notion of the idea of 'one.' One is a label on a word bucket in the mind for a class of phenomena - that is all. All of science to be objective requires measurement which means numbers - using abstract ideas. All of mathematics is abstract. There could be no science if it was not for language and abstract ideas, yet historically abstract ideas have been treated in the west as less real. There are classes of abstract ideas.
The bottom line is, as I said earlier, what is 'real' as known by the mind comes down to agreement and agreement alone. 10 people can look at a green umbrella at the same instant in time. All 10 have differing opinions of that umbrella however due to each having grown up with different experiences in life that have led to their minds programming of things in a very particular way. No 2 people can, ever have or ever will see the same phenomena exactly the same way. This was known several centuries BC by Heraclitus who famously said 'no one steps into the same river twice.' Not only can no 2 people ever experience the same thing in the exact same way, no mind can experience the same phenomena the same from instant to instant - because we are constantly forming new opinions from instant to instant. The only reason the 10 people can discuss the green umbrella at all is because they can all AGREE on attributes of the umbrella to some number of decimal places. Without such agreement on attributes of a phenomena it is unintelligible like the sound of running water has no unique name.
The philosophical implication being that all of science is based on cause and effect (religion too) and agreements of people of experimental results to some degree of accuracy. But in all cases, minds will disagree with just exactly how 'green' an umbrella is or how useful its design or whatever. It is the shared agreement of its attributes that brings reality to the thing as an umbrella. Suppose I look decide to study traffic noise in terms of components of tuba waves. Will I find components of sound in traffic noise found to be made by tuba's? Yes, it I will. Do tuba waves have anything to do with traffic noise? No they don't. That does not mean my method of analysis of traffic noise using comparisons to tuba waves is any less valid. If I go looking for tuba waves in traffic noise - lo and behold - I find tuba wave components of sound in traffic noise. Besides, I live in a 'tuba wave universe.' My method of analysis is just as valid as those idiots in the 'piano wave universe' studying traffic noise in terms of piano waves. :) Reality is what you make it. If you look for a particle in quantum mechanics, you find a particle. If you look for a wave - you find a wave. Until consciousness reifiys the phenomena/pops the wave function/you become aware of it, experimenally using tuba wave apparatus for measuring instruments or piano wave measuring apparatus, it does not exist.
Now go back to this yoga class. To the people in the class, a state of consciousness produced by perfroming certain experiements - ops I mean practicing certain postures -- is a reality. A shared agreement of something. This is not measurable. Nor is how good ice cream tastes. But it IS verifiable. It is repeatable. It can be falsified. This is the only criterion science has under some circumstances. Does something taste good? How is a company going to know this of their ice cream. How do you think - they test it. They take samples of populations and find out. When statistical models are used for reality, deduction is scrapped and so is formal logic and informal logic comes into play. Insurance companies and casino's bank on statistics. Votes. Agreements. Empirical reality. That is all there is anyway. As I said earlier, ALL knowledge is based on agreements whether it is deterministic and provides 'causal explanations' or deterministic F = MA formal logic or 'reasons explanations' as found in all other enterprises - including science - based on informal logic - statistics and sampling and induction.
99 percent of all things you know are based on informal logic and statistics/induction. This is because formal logic deduction contains no new information in the conclusion than is found in the premises. The conclusion follows from the premises. Assuming the premises is true, the conclusion must be true/follows necessarily. Furthermore, it does not matter what the content of the subject is - All A is B. All B is C. Therefore all A is C. Makes no difference what A, B and C are at all. But how many times do you discuss something with someone where the subject of something is not important? Put another way, who engages in a conversation with another because they can not form a conclusion from the premises? Never. Yet formal logic based on this was the model for all knowledge in the west. There are no equations why Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo. You can not dress up a bunch of short guys in 3-cornered hats that like to stick their hands in their pockets and conduct 'Battles of Waterloo.' Historical events are historical in the first instance because they are one-time events. It is not appropriate to study historical events empirically. Nor why someone is late for work in the morning going to follow an equation. Wrong model.
Jones is laying in a pool of blood and Smith is found standing over him with a smoking gun. Smith is brought up on charges of murder and the prosecution brings in a doctor to tell the jury the cause of death. The doctor proceeds to say now the bullet entered the right temple and exited the back of the head, thereby puncturing the brain and causing brain death from lack of oxygen and glucose. But this only tells us how all brains cause death from bullets traveling through them. It is a general statement on the physiology of humans - formal logic/not context sensitive so as to show any relationship as to how or why Smith is connected with shooting Jones. Then the Prosecution brings in a philospher and he tells the jury 'From dust thou commeth and to dust thou goeth.' This is all very nice but all this says is that all men are mortal. It is a generalization of ALL men (All A is B all B is C therefore all A is C). It is not context specific relating how Smith is involved with the shooting of Jones.
Smith hearing all this junk stands up in frustration at hearing all this and says 'Look! I shot him OK. I was in his will and he was terminally ill and my daughter is in the hospital but I can not afford treatment. He was suffering and so I figured I would end his suffering sooner.' The jury upon hearing him sighs a sigh of relief. What Smith says makes sense. They may not have done what Smith did but they can understand his motive for doing it. The jury can empathize with Smith doing what he did. (This and other examples above from Dr. Daniel Robinson from the Teaching Company in his couse Great Ideas of Psychology. Robinson is a Professor of 30 years at Georgetown University in Washington DC) There is no equation found that convinces the jury of Smiths innocence or guilt. Smith provided a 'reasons explanation' to the jury as opposed to a 'causal explanation' (as found in the immutatble laws of nature like F = MA).
It is only Miss Science that is exempt from providing a reasons explanation - science provides causal explanations. All other enterprises are REQUIRED to provide a reasons explanation or they will not be satisfactory. Reasons explanations are based on informal logic and induction. Not the scientific deterministic formal logic deduction model. Descartes in his skepticism so characteristic of Modernism in the Enlightenment used as a knowledge structure formal logic as the model for which should be aspired to by all enterprises if they wished to be considered scientific. Descartes was also credited with inventing analytic geometry. So it is no surprise from a man that has to justify his own existence ('I think therefore I am.') to look for the certainty found in formal logic deduction and equations as the model.
For 300 years universities attempted to be scientific and all enterprises strove to be seen as scientific - attempting to use formal logic and deduction. About 70 years ago at the peak of this non-sense Logical Empiricism was dismantled. It was shown that Logical Positivism using its own criterion for reality could not justify its own existence - it was shown to be self-referentially incoherent. It lacked an explanation for language itself. But this leads to entanglement into language - if one finds meaning in language, then language itself becomes part of the meaning. It is no longer a 'nice neat and clean' equation. If I tell you abortion is murder it means one thing. If I tell you abortion is freedom of choice it is quite another. Meaning itself becomes part of language. In other words how you describe an event lends reality to the event/distorts it as an objective independent piece of knowledge. And that is where we are today. Language is the number one problem in philosophy and a major reason why meaning found in quantum mechanics has so many interpretations. (tuba waves or piano waves).
If I tell someone 'this is a chair' - and the thing looks half way like a chair, it is likely they will agree with me until such time as the notion of the thing being a chair is called into question. I do not parot the definition of a chair as found in a dictionary and then proceed to say how the photons bounce off the chair into my eyes which form an image on my retina and that image is sent to th visual center in the brain by the optical nerve and awaits cortical response. Nope. I do not have prove something every time I say something. And 99 percent of all things you know come about in just such a way. Your parents tell you something and you accept it unless and until you have reason to think otherwise. A belief is 'innocent until proven guilty.' This notion/structure of knowledge is based on informal logic and induction. It is called Late-Post-Modern-Non-Classical-Foundationalism. (LPMNCF)
In Descartes Foundational model of knowledge with formal logic and deduction, this structure of knowledge is like a skyscrapper. It is extremely solid at its foundation and every floor must be able to support ever other floor above it or the whole thing will come crashing down. In like fashion, if a theorm is wrong in geometry, chances are that not only is that theorem wrong but your entire structure of geometry is flawed and will have to be scrapped. In the LPMNCF model however, this structure of knowledge is based on a pyramid structure. If a few blocks are bad, it does not cause the entire pyramid to fall down. If a scientist is studying neutrino's using a particle accelerator, it he knows what to look for but he is betting on a ton of theory that preceeded him and that is true. He himself has not personally tested all the physics that has led up to the point of him conducting tests for neutrino's in particle accelerators.
Similarly, people that believe in religions are not all theologians. They simply can not explain all aspects of their religions. Nor is it required for them to do so to be religious. They also count on what others that have gone before them to be true. It may not be. But they do not have to keep believing in that religion either. Anyway you cut it, science is nothing more than just another belief system. To wit, there are about 7 major interpretations of quantum mechanics. They can not all be right. Yet none of them have been proved to be wrong. You can call each of these schools of thought belief systems also. Religions of quantum theory if you will. All knowledge as known to the mind is by agreement. The believers of Everett's Many Worlds version of quantum theory may be wrong. So might believers in the Copenhagen Religion (ops Interpretation). Is it really so far off the mark to tell someone 'the moon is not there when no one looks at it' and in the same breath say God does not exist? If Quantum weirdness does not convince you that truth is stranger than fiction, I suggest you do not understand quantum theory. General Relativity gives us rulers that shrink to zero size and clocks that stop. Matter altering the structure of space. Space is not empty. Physicists of ALL people should be the ones to keep their minds open because of such bizarre things found in physics.
The soul is the Perceiver. The mind captures conceptions of experiences. No 2 minds can ever capture the same conception of an experience. No 2 people can ever have the same experience as captured as a conception by the mind. But the mind is not the final underlying reality. The universe is Maya - God's Dream. It is a shadow. A reflection of the mind. The mind is subtle matter. Not like tables and chairs - it can not be perceived by the senses. It is what gives rise to the universe. By controlling the mind, we control the universe. But even this is not the ultimate reality. Mind itself is underwritten by that which animates it -consciousness and consciousness arises as a result of the jiva or bound soul. The bound souls (bound as in entangled with the universe in subtle and gross phyiscal matter) once freed realizes it true Almighty identity of Atman - the free soul which does nothing whatsoever. The universe comes and goes but we as Atman do nothing at all. We were never born and cannot die.
Mike Dubbeld
Colophon
Posted to alt.yoga on 6 August 2003. Author: Mike Dubbeld. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.
Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
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