Heroes Not Zombies

I don’t know about you but it seems to me that there are some people around who seem to think that science can explain EVERYTHING. Personally, I think there’s a lot more to human endeavour and thought than the scientific method, but that’s another story….perhaps.

Here’s an article from Scientific American where they are posing the question “Too hard for science?” – a question which is actually wondering if there’s anything which can’t be explained by science. They put the question mark at the end because they clearly feel it’s unlikely that that sentence could be a statement. This particular article is by a sleep scientist who talks about how his subjects often want to tell him their dreams (I might be wrong, but I got the feeling he wasn’t that keen on hearing them!).

Dreams often feel profoundly meaningful, bizarre experiences often interpreted over the centuries as messages from the gods or as windows into the unconscious. However, maybe our brains are just randomly stringing experiences together during sleep and investing the result with a feeling of profundity.

Those last three words caught my attention – “feeling of profundity” – is meaningfulness a feeling? Would that make understanding also a feeling? Or insight? Are scientific insights feelings?

He goes on to scope out the “problem” as he sees it….

The problem: The difficulty in exploring this idea is that how meaningful something is might be too hard to measure. “It’s a bit like beauty — it’s in the mind of the beholder,” Stickgold says. “It’s not like heart rate or the level of electrical conductivity of the skin, which you have outside evidence of. If a person says something is meaningful, you’re not sure how to measure that, and you’re not sure how, if at all, that applies to others. One has to come up with a meaningful definition of meaningful.”

That’s the “problem” with the scientific method, isn’t it? It’s all about measurement.  Meaningfulness, beauty (go on, add your own list) aren’t measurable. They’re a subjective expression. Not only that, but one person’s subjective expression is often not at all like another’s. What are we to do with that?

Ken Wilber would point out, I’m sure, that only surfaces are measurable, but depth requires interpretation. I deal with the subjective experience of health and illness all day. It’s only through the telling of their story that an individual can communicate that to me, and it requires me to listen, non-judgementally and compassionately so that I can interpret what they tell me. It wouldn’t be helpful to reduce people to what’s measurable in my opinion. Brian Goodwin, the biologist, also used to point out that objective, “measurable” scientifically described phenomena are only the result of intersubjective consensus anyway, and I think that’s also true.

This distinction between what is “objective” and “measurable” and subjective experience isn’t as helpful as it first appears. Whether we are observing, measuring or interpreting, we need reach a consensus about our subjective experiences. That’s the bottom line for me with patients – it’s their experience, as told by them, which is most important and reliable if I’m going to help them to find greater health.

I guess what I’m saying here is that I don’t think science is “the way, the truth and the light” – it’s an appropriate way to increase understanding in some circumstances, and not so appropriate in others. Or is that just too narrow a view of science?