Transcending Scientism: Mending Broken Culture's Broken Science

By Stephen Jarosek

In an increasingly uncertain world, we are witnessing symptoms of an existential crisis. Where Christianity once provided the basis for unity, new atheists now promise an enlightened age of secular reason based on science. But there is a problem with their empty promise... their science has ceased to be scientific.

Likewise, Darwinian evolution by natural selection is inconsistent with nature and the law of entropy. It omits a crucial ingredient that is essential to life’s ability to resist disorder (entropy)... Mind. There exists a theoretical framework for the mind stuff, however, in the semiotic sciences, and this enables Stephen Jarosek to articulate the problems that are playing out in our zeitgeist. He provides a solution that is of scientific and cultural relevance.

Science can become more spiritual only by becoming more scientific. Transcending Scientism is Stephen Jarosek’s answer to a world where science has ceased to be scientific and democracy has ceased to be democratic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Sep 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781365380785

Stephen Jarosek

Stephen Jarosek began questioning cultural differences in his teens, when he first began to wonder why people believe the things they do, and why people from different cultures believe different things. But he found theories about culture lacking. His first degree in engineering reflects his analytical approach, from first principles. The engineer asks, "Will this bridge stand?" He asks, "Does this theory hang together?" He applies his engineer's rigor to his published research in semiotics, culture and the life sciences. Questioning why people from different cultures believe different things would invariably bring Stephen to question why men and women believe different things. His book, Tyrants of Matriarchy, is a practical, interdisciplinary application of theories in the cognitive and life sciences, directed at a general readership, with particular emphasis on gender roles. He thus establishes a framework for interpreting matriarchy and patriarchy within the context of biology and culture, in non-technical language that is easy to understand.

Book preview

TRANSCENDING SCIENTISM

Mending broken culture’s broken science

STEPHEN JAROSEK

Copyright img1.png Stephen Jarosek 2016

All rights reserved.

ISBN  978-1-365-38078-5

Published by Lulu Enterprises, Inc. (Lulu)

Grateful acknowledgement is given for the cover image, Weathered road leads into abandoned city, copyright img1.png Bruce Rolff (rolffimages/123RF Stock Photo).

Emphasis in this book is first on referencing as substantiated in reputable, print-based sources such as scientific journals. In the interests of accessibility, factoring in alternative points of view, and independence of institutional biases in academia, referencing also incorporates substantive online sources. Because of the dynamic nature of the internet, any web addresses or links referenced in this book are subject to change by their respective authors, and may no longer be valid after this book’s publication.

PREFACE

For some considerable time over the past few decades, we have been lulled into a false sense of security, with a smug perception that we are living in an era where we’ve never had it so good. This is reflected in the sound-bite hey, it’s [insert your current year]!, as if the trajectory of progressivism is, with each successive year, invariably towards a higher plane of existence. In this spirit, Justin Trudeau’s justification for a gender-balanced cabinet, because it’s 2015, is an expression of the same smug self-assuredness that characterizes the post-boomer generations.

But 2015 has begun to see the unraveling of the liberal-progressive agenda. There is a new, unprecedented level of crazy that is consolidating its presence our world today. It is catching many of us by surprise. It has become more noticeable with the immigration crisis in Europe and the surprising rise of the Donald Trump phenomenon in the lead up to the US elections. How could the Republicans have so misread the motivations of their constituencies? Things are looking less certain now, more complex and less secure.

But there is nothing new here. It is just history repeating. The established party is taking liberties and indulgences that only a new authoritarianism can roll back.

There are several dimensions to this crazy. In the first instance, there is a broken life-science paradigm that provides the assumptions that govern our narratives… including our political narratives, such as those relating to liberalism and feminism, or conservatism and chivalry.

But as the unraveling of our Occidental cultures proceeds unabated, there is another crazy that is less conspicuous because we are all accomplices in its narrative. One manifestation of this is the new atheism that claims to do away with god, without any appreciation of the dependency that this atheism has on their golden calf of scientism.

From the start, the primary motivation for this book has been to get the life-science paradigm right. But as we proceed with our analysis, it becomes all too apparent that it is one of the main objects of our study… our culture… that provides us with the very tools with which we dissect culture. Or, to put it another way, the object that we are analyzing is the very object that provides us with the narratives by which we want to understand it. Consider the intractable nature of this dilemma… if our cultural narratives are flawed, then it will be problematic if we have to rely on these broken narratives to explain our culture and its broken narratives. It is easier to lift oneself up by the bootstraps than it is to dissect this paradox.

There is, however, hope on the horizon. A compelling narrative for an alternative life-science paradigm is available. It is in the synthesis of Jakob von Uexküll’s biosemiotics with the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. And as we incorporate this theoretical framework into our analysis, the source of the problem that we face becomes more clear.

All our sciences have their origins in our cultural narratives. All science is understood and communicated in narrative. And this is why getting our life-sciences right takes precedence, because all life lives by narrative.

The so-called nature-nurture debate has, for a long time, revolved around two opposing schools of thought. The nature side (genocentrism) posits that human nature is defined by the DNA and therefore innate. The nurture side is the blank-slate hypothesis, and the idea that all behavioral traits are attributed to nurture and experience, and therefore learned. This simplistic, crude dichotomy is far from satisfactory, and sheds no light on the more subtle dynamics that play out between DNA, biology and experience.

The Peircean-biosemiotic framework changes all of that. We now have a paradigm where there is no separate nature or nurture, but a single set of principles, expressed in the context of semiosis, and that applies to all living entities. The science of biosemiotics is the science of narrative. It is a science that is relevant to every aspect of the living, from single-celled microbes and insects to humans and cultures.

In order to transcend our contemporary culture of the absurd, we need to understand it… and we need to understand it at the deepest levels. This book is intended as a vehicle for that objective.

It is not the purpose of this book to detail all the steps required to attain transcendence. Our objective is to cross the first and most important hurdle… to be able to see the dukkha that characterizes our zeitgeist. Dukkha is a Buddhist term commonly translated as suffering, anxiety, stress, or unsatisfactoriness.  Within the context of our dukkha, our emphasis in this book is on the things that our cultures are getting wrong, from their founding paradigms, to their shallow indulgences and hypocrisies.

Dukkha relates to samsara (reincarnation and the continuous cycle of birth and death) and the Buddhist parable of the burning house. To understand why we need to flee this burning house, we need to see and understand dukkha.

US election foreword

The body of this book was completed before the US election of 2016 had taken place. While the revelations provided by Wikileaks were, for the most part, not a surprise to this author, the Trump phenomenon and the ability of a courageous Donald Trump to crack open that nest of vipers was.

In order to understand how the Clinton-Obama-Soros phenomenon has been able to persist for so long without any serious challenge, this book relates directly. It relates to the relationship between personal identity and culture… how we learn how to be. What has unfolded in the leadup to the US election, and what is to follow in its aftermath, is of special significance to what this book is about.

Irrespective of whatever the outcome of the 2016 US election might have been, something has changed. Something new has entered the cultural narrative and has become validated. The seed for a new form of cultural identity has been planted. We should not be surprised to eventually see other cultures confronting their own entrenched narratives. Globally, we are entering uncharted territory.

INTRODUCTION

In order to understand the Occident’s dukkha, we need to understand, first of all, its epistemology, and how Occidentals have come to know what they know. To this end, in Chapter 1 we begin by addressing the Achilles’ heel of the Darwinian paradigm… namely, entropy and their unscientific notion of evolution by dumb luck. We see that this Darwinian interpretation has provided the assumptions upon which Occidentals base their default, starting position regarding a mostly sterile universe, where the appearance of life is the rare exception, not the rule.

But the persistence of complexity (life) across time is the deal-breaker for any notion of evolution by dumb luck. If life is a rare, chance occurrence that relies on unlikely mechanisms such as natural selection and mutations, then it follows that life will be especially vulnerable to the forces of entropy, and will likely vanish as quickly as it arrived. On the other hand, the assumption that life is the default throughout the universe suggests principles with mechanisms that are resistant to entropy. In one paradigm, we are not meant to be here, in the other, we are.

In order to persist across time, the principles of life have to be robust… life has to break past the entropy bottleneck. By analogy, a rocket with insufficient thrust to counter its own weight is unlikely to even budge, let alone lift off. But a rocket with a robust thrust that far exceeds its weight will propel it skywards without ambiguity. In a similar vein, life as a whimper will be unable to muster the life-force necessary to combat the entropy that would turn it to sludge. 

As we progress through the first chapter, we arrive at an alternative interpretation that does resist the entropy bottleneck. This brings us to the semiotic sciences, with the insight that it is imitation, expressed in the context of knowing how to be, that is best positioned to resist entropy. Or in other words, it is mind stuff that is first cause, and without which life can have no beginning.

Our semiotic framework introduced in Chapter 1 has practical implications that enable us to clearly articulate the controversies that are playing out in our contemporary cultural context. And so in Chapter 2 we go to these controversies, to address that aspect of Occidental dukkha where the carnage of a broken Neo-Darwinian narrative is most evident… that is, the gender war attributable, in the first instance, to feminism. Within the context of this Neo-Darwinian narrative, gender roles are wrongly attributed to genes and the DNA blueprint, not lifestyle choices. Under feminism, beginning with the sexual revolution, Occidentals have arrived at a peculiar confluence of contradictions and inconsistencies. Within the context of the Neo-Darwinian narrative, none of this makes any sense. But within the context of the semiotic narrative, it becomes self-evident.

From our review of Occidental dukkha in Chapter 2, we come to a clearer understanding that feminism’s obsession with patriarchal authority renders invisible an equally formidable authority… that is, the matriarchal. This brings us to Chapter 3, where we explore the role of the primary nurturer in first defining the things that matter. Within the context of the semiotic narrative, we are able to unpack old assumptions, to provide a clearer understanding of gender roles and why they are important. We are thus better equipped to understand the parts that both male and female play in culture, evolution and transcendence. More specifically, in order to transcend culture’s dukkha, we need to first transcend the matriarchal.

The implications of a broken cultural narrative are extended to Chapter 4, where we discuss the breakdown of the scientific method that was once the pride of the Occident. This is less a critique of the scientific method than of the culture that has stopped being scientific. Many scientists are now allying themselves with feminism, oblivious to the irony of scientific logic allying itself with solipsistic self-indulgence as the epitome of anti-logic. The priorities of rigorous science have been replaced by the priorities of funding and political fashion.

The broken science narrative extends into contemporary cosmology, with convenient interpretations of established science made in the spirit of confirmation bias. The theory of special and general relativity (SGR) of Albert Einstein was once a part of the discourse of scientific scrutiny that was hotly debated among scientists who took their science seriously. Today, by contrast, SGR is no longer debated but accepted as a given, as one of the holy gospels of scientism. And upon SGR’s premise is constructed an edifice of self-consistent, unverifiable conjectures, such as Big Bang theory, cosmic background radiation, dark matter, dark energy and other interpretations that are unfalsifiable. They hang together in a kind of fundamentalism that bears an uncanny resemblance to the fundamentalism of religious zealots, who would quote references from the bible whenever they are asked to explain their reasoning.

In the epilogue of Chapter 5, we reaffirm our emphasis on dukkha over transcendence… the problem must first be identified, before we can know what it is that must be transcended. We explore the relevance of the concepts explored in this book, within the context of the contemporary crises that are unfolding around the world… from the US elections of 2016 and the cultural schisms that are playing out, to the refugee crisis in Europe. There is no time like the present to address Occidental dukkha, and we should be taking stock of how we got here and what needs to be done in order to fix it. And in transcending this burning house, may we play our part in making the world a better place.

CHAPTER 1- ENTROPY VERSUS IMITATION

The Neo-Darwinian model for evolution, with its emphasis on natural selection and mutations as the source of variety, suggests that all the remarkable complexity of life on Earth can emerge through blind, thoughtless processes. Variation and selection goes the mantra, as if that is sufficient an explanation. But it’s not. That the complexity of life can manifest is one thing. But that it persists across time is quite another.

The persistence of life across time, with the forces of entropy arrayed against it from all quarters, suggests that an important piece is missing from the puzzle. That piece can be understood in the context of mind stuff. We might, on the surface, recognize it as imitation, but it is more complex than that, because it relates to nuances from phenomenology and philosophy. But whatever the nuances, if we define this resistance to entropy in the context of the replication of behavior, then imitation will serve as a suitable starting point. It is that dimension of behavior that we recognize as imitation, which is essential to resisting entropy.

1.1 THEORY OF EVOLUTION BY DUMB LUCK

If we are to properly understand human motivations and psychology, then Darwinism, in all its manifestations, needs to be rejected in favor of a more realistic paradigm. In this section we demonstrate that Darwinism’s principle failure is at its foundations, and there is little point trying to fix it.

In accordance with Occam’s razor, elegant simplicity is valued in science, and this is a good thing. An elegant, simple solution has to reflect reality, and in that spirit, Isaac Newton is king. Patterned on this Newtonian initiative, in the pursuit of elegant simplicity in science, follows the inspiration to regard Darwin in the same light. But Charles Darwin’s formulation is simplistic, not simple. It is inelegant and clumsy because it falls apart in its simplistic reliance on its principle axiom, natural selection. Darwinism is a two-legged stool where its third leg – that which varies and is selected for - is clumsily accounted for. At best, natural selection can provide only a partial account of what takes place within any ecosystem.

But at least Darwin, in his acceptance of the theory of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, provided a not wholly unreasonable account for the missing third leg. Things really start getting out of hand after Darwin’s passing, when genetics enters the Darwinian narrative in order to factor in the source of variety. Thus was born Neo-Darwinism. In its assumptions grounded in genetic determinism{1}, Neo-Darwinism has taken the role of choice and meaning out of the life-science equation, in favor of an infotech narrative that portrays behavioral characteristics as adaptive traits. It is accepted by the mainstream as the foundation upon which to reason a secular, atheistic narrative, and the damage inflicted by Neo-Darwinism is less in reason than it is in the breakdown of reason itself. Reason that escapes rigorous scrutiny opens the floodgates to absence of reason, and it becomes permissible to give substance to narrative over evidence. Neo-Darwinism represents a breakdown of the scientific method and the jettisoning of rationality itself. This is nowhere better illustrated than in the failure of Neo-Darwinism to address the problem of entropy (the tendency to disorder).

Neo-Darwinism’s willingness to turn a blind eye to entropy establishes a predisposition that tugs at every other inconvenient truth that is problematic for the scientific agenda. One disturbing manifestation of this is the breakdown of our peer-review process, which Richard Horton (2015){2} laments in The Lancet:

The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, poor methods get results. The Academy of Medical Sciences, Medical Research Council, and Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council have now put their reputational weight behind an investigation into these questionable research practices. The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming.

The bottom line... it is not that Neo-Darwinism is just getting a few facts wrong. And it is not that it is broken beyond repair. It is that Neo-Darwinism is contaminating the whole of our life sciences itself with a broken, corrupt methodology that is anything but scientific. As Horton observes, In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. This is precisely what is taking place with Neo-Darwinism’s failure to properly address entropy. The reality of entropy is inconvenient to the Neo-Darwinian narrative. And the solution is to do exactly what any charlatan with an agenda does when confronting truths that are inconvenient to a cherished narrative... ignore them.

Life imitates art? Or is it Art that imitates Life? Or should that be Politics that imitates Broken Science? It is no accident that corrupt politics is imitating an irreparably bankrupt methodology that has more in common with faith than with science.

Let us now tackle Neo-Darwinism’s Achilles’ heel... the failure to properly address entropy.

The need to take entropy seriously

There is no interpretation of Darwinism, evolutionary psychology (evopsych), or any other mainstream biology that will explain the goings-on in the video clip by MoreThinking (2013){3}, on the Inner Life of the Cell. What is needed is a revised, interdisciplinary interpretation of the biological sciences, one that factors in the important considerations, such as entropy.

Throughout history people have held an intuitive awareness that a universe by dumb luck is impossible. They may not have understood why, but their instinct connects with the law of entropy. The Muslim in this video clip (ThinkIslam, 2014){4}, not a scientist, is expressing the same sentiment. He gets what Neo-Darwinian atheists refuse to get, he is expressing an intuitive albeit imperfect awareness that Darwinian evolution... that is, ordered complexity by dumb luck... is nonsense.

Entropy is a concept from the second law of thermodynamics. It manifests in both the physical and the life sciences as the tendency to disorder. Biological structures are complex and, left to the physics of their surrounding environments, they are unstable and will be reconstituted into the surrounding dirt... that is, unless they are alive. The key question then is, what is