Pseudoscience versus science

► Hassani replies: Mario Beauregard, Gary Schwartz, and Natalie Trent associate several notable physicists with the integration of consciousness in quantum theory. History is filled with great scientists who held unscientific, even antiscientific beliefs. Lord Rayleigh believed in ghosts; J. J. Thomson believed in dowsing and psychics; William Shockley and James Watson sponsor racialism and eugenics. But these ideological mistakes, sometimes referred to as Nobel disease (see Physics Today, September 1998, page 29 ), are not made right because of the science of their makers, and the science is not made wrong because of the ideological mistakes of its discoverers. It is the message that counts, not the messenger.

One person who can authoritatively judge the role of mind in quantum theory is John Bell, who proved its nonlocality—a concept that pseudoscientists have deformed into their own commodity. Bell stated,

I think it is not right to tell the public that a central role for conscious mind is integrated into modern atomic physics…. The only “observer” which is essential in orthodox practical quantum theory is the inanimate apparatus … once the apparatus is in place, and functioning untouched, it is a matter of complete indifference … whether the experimenters stay around to watch, or delegate such “observing” to computers. ¹

Experiments that demonstrate our mental ability to influence physical objects would be as revolutionary as experiments that demonstrated the existence of the electron, the atomic nucleus, and gravitational waves. Why don’t the authors submit their results to mainstream journals so that the larger community of experimenters could verify them? Yes, mainstream journals—that is where all the aforementioned experiments were published and where all science revolutionaries disseminate their ideas.

There are essentially three categories of scientists: mainstreamers; those mainstreamers who bend the mainstream; and those who leave the mainstream and become pseudoscientists.

All true scientists are in the first category. If they are exceptionally creative, they may end up in the second category. Pseudoscientists, being rejected by the mainstreamers, misinform the public with assertions that “science revolutionaries have also been rejected by mainstreamers, as we have.” Nothing is further from the truth. Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, and other great scientists were mainstreamers who made it to the second category. ²

Larry Dossey calls consciousness “science’s greatest mystery.” For centuries, biology was “science’s greatest mystery” because of the manifestation of life in living organisms. Many biologists believed in vitalism, the idea that a “vital force” regulated the activity of animate objects but could not “be derived from matter and reduced to anything more basic,” as the “Manifesto for a post-materialist science” states about mind. ³ However, with the discovery of DNA, “vital force” is no longer needed to explain the electrochemical reactions taking place at the subcellular level. Since the source of consciousness is the brain, the scientific answer to its nature will come only from the molecular investigation of neurons, not from near-death “experiments.”

Mysteries always exist in science, and there are two ways to deal with them. One is to wait and give science a chance to resolve them. The other, the age-old strategy of pseudoscience, is to exploit the limitation of science and inject speculative and unproven conjectures as answers. While biologists have abandoned vitalism, the idea has not died out. It has been disguised and taken up by modern pseudoscientists: Consciousness is the new face of vitalism!

Tim LaFave raises a good point regarding debates between science and pseudoscience. Unfortunately, the outcome of such debates would be enormously in favor of pseudoscience, as the Nye–Ham debate demonstrated. When the listeners are scientifically illiterate, the snake oil vendor wins. That’s why, in my Commentary, I proposed that pseudoscience be challenged in the classroom, where science is not drowned in the rhetorical charm of pseudoscience.

Philosophy, despite “its utter charm,” as Hans Christian von Baeyer suggests, has been at odds with science ever since their separation. Democritus, the ancient scientist, said about philosophy: “Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.” Modern physicist Richard Feynman was more blunt:

Here’s this great Dutch philosopher [Spinoza], and we’re [Feynman and his son] laughing at him…. You can take every one of Spinoza’s propositions, and take the contrary propositions, and look at the world and you can’t tell which is right. Sure, people were awed because he had the courage to take on these great questions, but it doesn’t do any good to have the courage if you can’t get anywhere with the question…. [Philosophers] seize on the possibility that there may not be any ultimate fundamental particle, and say that you should stop work … [because] “You haven’t thought deeply enough, first let me define the world for you.” Well, I’m going to investigate without defining it! ⁴