the url is a line from The Birds. This title is a waste of time

Saying 22

2005-10-15T21:25:00.000-07:00

Venus is always in her shell,
And I am as well,
though I wish that mine were as resplendent as hers.
Ahh to have such milky white skin
or breasts that hang in only the way
that an artist's brush can afford.
Flaxen tresses
that tickle wonderful thighs,
giggling with delight at their touch.
Oh such skin, oh such hair, oh such thighs.

Alas, I am still only a man.

The Foundation of Thought

2005-09-11T17:30:00.000-07:00

A woman encounters something which she finds inspiring. From this she devises a hypothesis about the inspiration. In accordance with her desire for action, she works experimentally to test her hypothesis. When her work finds a natural point of conclusion, she makes interpretations from the work that she has completed. At this point she either continues her experimental work to refine the meaning of the experimental data, or she leaves the project at this point, for others to take up her experimentation to find inspiration of their own from her work. Of course, as you can tell, I am clearly describing the creative process that is known by every artist around the world. Similarly, I would hope that you would also see an element of the scientific process (or method, if you so choose) in the words that were deliberately chosen to make the ambiguity in the description of the process more readily available to the reader.
We come to a dilemma, of a sort, when we get to this ambiguity in description. If the process of art and science are this indistinguishable, then what can we assume creates “good” art or even more appropriately “good” science? Since, if “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” as Shakespeare has been so kind to point out, what can we say of science? Is science as spurious a subject as art so as to only be taken as “good” by the beholder of the information?
Many scientific philosophers have taken up this subject and have been kind enough to tell us what makes “good” science. They bandy about terms like falsefiability, validity, accuracy, and reliability. They suggest that “good” science is determined by the outcome of the process listed above, as opposed to being determined by the process alone. If these gentlemen and gentlewomen were to act as art critics, they would suggest that “good”art adheres to the principles of design, or theories of art that find creation inside of a different artistic process that somehow does not have to be scrutinized by the means that they discuss. Similar to how the council of bishops decided that the Pope is infallible before anyone determined that they were infallible, these philosophers of science prescribe a value system to impose on science without applying the same scrutiny to themselves, as obviously the notion that all “good” science must have a level of falsefiability is inherently explicitly unfalsefiable. Nevertheless, art is not “whatever is hanging on a wall” or any other cliche that allows anything to be thought of as “good” art, though I would not be so bold as to suggest that I have any way of discerning “good” art from “bad” art for anyone other than myself at a certain place in time. I do not feel that I lose any appreciation for art because of this however. In fact, I find just the opposite. This helps me in my ability to appreciate art in that I see art as any object which has either an active or latent ability to inspire further creativity.
This brings me back around to the concept of science. Science shares a process with any creative process, and as such, it has been judged by the same means as art has been judged in times past. People have judged art by its technique, by its adherence to moral guidelines of the culture in which it was created, and by its ability to accurately describe the external reality of the artist. So too science has been judged. The judgement class in science has tried to create a more codified system that is cloaked in academic jargon so as to defend itself from the criticisms that have been levied against art critiques, but most of the defenses of “good” science and created labels of “bad” science can be reduced to these simplistic notions. At this point in time, as our lines have been blurred as to what makes “good” science, we see that potentially my definition of what makes “good” art as potentially more honest than the veils which wrap up current volumes on the philosophy of science - namely, that “good” science is a value judgement made based on the popular resonance of science with the culture in which it was created. This extends to the personal level in that, if I find a study to have some personal resonance with me, and I have an authentic encounter with that experiment, no matter how obscure it is, I have the potentiality to act on my encounter and create some new body of research which finds resonance with the culture in which I find myself.
A theory without experimentation therefore indicates itself not as “bad” science based on the ideas of fallsefiability, but rather as an unfulfilled scientific hypothesis. It represents one stage within the process, which itself is the hallmark of science, only to be determined as good or bad in the subjective experience of those who have an authentic encounter with the product of the scientific creation. Similarly, a sloppily conducted experiment that does not consider and attempt to control the multitude of variables present in a situation without destroying external validity does not negate its scientific contribution, but rather presents itself as yet another object to inspire further creative/scientific investigation. Again, science is a process, and the determination of whether it is “good” or “bad” is necessarily a value judgement on behalf of those that come in contact with the product that results from the process. Where science may aspire to objectivity in its experimentation, value judgments continue to hold only subjectivity.
Of course, in this we come across the either sad or joyous fact that every hypothesis is created in a value judgement created in relation to the encounter with the inspiration which precedes the experimentation, leaving science, like art, fully in the world of creative exploration. This has led to schools of scientific thought which express the ideas that the scientist is an instrument that must be taken into consideration when interpreting the results of their endeavors. This comes from the idea that “observation implies participation” which was devised by proponents of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, most importantly from Heisenberg’s Indeterminacy Principle, in which observing the velocity of a sub-atomic particle necessarily effects the position of the particle, making an observation of the position only possible through an analysis of probabilities.
Despite this implication of the subjective nature of scientific investigation, mainstream discussions of science have accepted and assumed that objectivity is ever-present in the results of scientific investigation. Like the covert assumption of falsefiability which measures the results of science when it discerns the value of science along the “good/bad” spectrum, we have deified science as an object of worship. We either exalt results as confirming orthodox presuppositions, or we decry their results as heretical when their final products do not meet our criteria of what defines “good” science. You may feel that this is a jump in logic, and perhaps it is, but we must consider that if our value judgments regarding science preclude an untested hypothesis from being deemed science, or if there are too many variable to control, or the methods available to us presently only involve correlational data, then our definition of “good” science has nothing to do with the scientific method, and more to do with the values of the culture judging the science. Technology will advance to allow us to control more variables, test more hypotheses, and conduct more causative experiments. Where we cannot do this, it is for ethical reasons that are based on subjective value claims of our society. These values, though very good for society, do not mean that a scientific proposition is unscientific, but only indicate that creating a causative link is prohibited in our society. As to falsifiability, this to indicates a proclivity in our time to think that we have reached the height of knowledge. To preclude certain subjects from the realm of science seems pessimistic to me in that it does not allow for the cultural and technological successes that we have attained to be transcended. The concept of the unconscious is one such area that has been called nonfalsifiable, but with the successful experiments of Bell’s Inequalities, it becomes more possible to falsify the data. Please don’t misunderstand me here; this is still nonfalsifiable, but it is less the case today considering the notion of the non-local effects of quantum entanglement than it was at the beginning of the last century.
I would now like to return to the subject of “what is science?” Is it that which is presented in journals? Again, this answer seems to be as ridiculous as the idea that art is that which is hung on a wall. People publish all kinds of drivel just because it adheres to the principles that I have enumerated. If science has falsifiability as a tenet of discrimination between what is good and what is bad, then we will find that nothing created up to this point in the research of humanity deserves the title science in any way other than a subjective one. Adding blue pigment to yellow pigment makes green pigment may be falsifiable, but it does not get us anywhere close to a universal objectivity, as this may not hold in ultra-violet environments or through the eyes of someone with a radically different sense of sight. Similarly, though E=MCª did not receive a full experiment until the atomic bombs, Fatman and Littleboy, were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was science before that, and even though experimentation regarding Bell’s Inequalities calls into question Einstein’s notions of space and time, we still must accept the expression of general relativity as science because of the inspiration that was derived from it for further intellectual work. The nonscientific value judgments that decide what is science and what is not show themselves as so laden with subjective thought that we cannot ascertain how proponents of such theories have decided on the objectivity of their own words. Science, in this case, assumes the role of the Pope with those judges of what determines “good” science playing the part of the council of bishops. Shall we suggest that these judges are infallible as well as their value criterion of falsifiability? Or, should we then dismiss the whole affair?
I would suggest that we do not have to dismiss the whole affair with our love of science, but that it is time to take it from its papal kingdom of cultural idolatry. Science is a process and not a final product. Even an experiment that has been conducted that confirms a hypothesis is not conclusive beyond the time, place, and sample that are used to confirm the hypothesis. It is subjective to the degree that it contains subjects. It is participatory to the degree that it includes participants. With this in mind, can we garner abstract universal objective knowledge from something that includes particular, subjective, individuals? If you answered yes, may I remind you that the interpretations of data have been in the hands of one individual (or group) that has not been deemed by the council of bishops as being infallible, and even if the concept of falsifiablity is your criterion du jour that determines this infallibility, what has conferred upon that concept a status of infallibility? Continuing to accept science as an arbiter of objectivity is to assume a position of safely accepting your own stereotypes and presuppositions about the world. In the end, science does appear to be what is presented in journals, the experiments which make it into these journals are mainly conducted at universities, who receive funding from private and public sources that have vested interest in the outcomes of the research (less so in the case of public sources). This vested interest, in the case of most private (particularly corporate) donations, results from a need to satisfy the demands of the consumers that the corporations serve. Finally, these consumers tend to be stuck in a cluster of presuppositions which have been reinforced by the corporations that seek to defend the positions of power which they defend. We live in a self-fulfilling prophecy that necessarily must hold on to the illusion that science holds an objective position in regards to the objects of its creative output. In such a world, we only hold on to a new pope or a new golden cow that precludes us from seeing the world where we hold our own subjective interpretations as more authoritative than the subjective findings of others. Science is art, and art is science, that is all ye shall ever know and all ye ever need to know. Hail Eris, hallowed be thy name!

how old I act - you should check it out too, and post your results here

2005-09-06T14:39:00.000-07:00

You Are 27 Years Old

27

Under 12: You are a kid at heart. You still have an optimistic life view - and you look at the world with awe.

13-19: You are a teenager at heart. You question authority and are still trying to find your place in this world.

20-29: You are a twentysomething at heart. You feel excited about what's to come... love, work, and new experiences.

30-39: You are a thirtysomething at heart. You've had a taste of success and true love, but you want more!

40+: You are a mature adult. You've been through most of the ups and downs of life already. Now you get to sit back and relax.

What Age Do You Act?

2005-07-12T15:30:00.000-07:00

In some ways I don’t mind that people are reluctant to go to a psychologist. Our culture has decided that we go to doctors when we are sick, or more pessimistically, diseased. To go to a psychologist in such a climate means that you are admitting to a disease. We don’t help ourselves in this situation by creating things like the DSM which implicitly states that if you exist, we can find a disease for you. But people buy into this garbage at the same time. The other night I saw a commercial for some new condition called Restless Leg Syndrome, or some other unbelievable bullshit like that. Seriously, that’s a disease? Sounds like a ridiculous rationalization of some grossly engorged fat-ass couch potato who uses a Rascal to get from the couch to his car, and hasn’t walked a step in the past 10 years. Hell yeah, if I hadn’t gotten off my ass in the past 10 years, I sure as hell hope that my legs would get restless before the gangrene set in! Would I call them diseased, or would I be pissed off that I found commercials so fucking entertaining that I was engrossed in watching them 24 hours a day? Given the little bulge of my stomach, I would have to say that I fall somewhere in the middle of those things, not having fully owned up to my own health, but also not letting it get so out of control while sitting in front of the alter of brain-drain.
Still, there are knuckleheads in our midst that would prefer the disease model where it’s not your fault that you’re a fat ass or treat your friends like shit any day over actually having to take preventative measures to not become an asshole or 725 pounds. Depressed? We’ve got a habit-forming chemical for you! Fat? How ‘bout speed, or stapling your stomach so that you can only fit a grain of rice in it at one time! Got no friends? I’m sure that we can whip something up so that you won’t care!!
Yeah, I’m sure I can hear your reactions now that those drugs/treatments are necessary, or I shouldn’t belittle people because of their problems. Rest assured that I am not belittling people for their problems. I have my own, and everyone I know has some, at least if you are so inclined to think that people’s short-comings aren’t a part of some more grand perfection. Nevertheless, what I begrudge people is not their problems, but is their apparent unwillingness to identify these things as problems that they own, and not some objective disease that is plaguing (or maybe terrorizing is more appropriate) their bodies and needs to be eradicated. Yup, I’m going back to gross generalization there, but allow me the lack of scruples for a moment.
We are as big of a part of the problem as are the people that refuse to seek help from us. In this case, I’m not referring to psychologists, but to humanistic psychologists in particular (except for you that is currently reading this, of course). They may have their pills and their cognitive/short-term therapy that tells us all that their problems are easily commodified, but we just as quickly like to trademark our methods, differentiate ourselves as somehow a different package than the mainstream, and accordingly, we turn ourselves into the objectified product that we try to help our clients try to grow past. Do we not recognize that in our ultimate aim of some sort of stable identity, we are showing all the symptoms of some crazed neurotic that can’t cut the apron strings that leave him stuck to the side of his mother? Do you think that Socrates called what he did the Socratic Method? Fuck no! And it would be a disservice to what he brought forth in his symposiums to call our questioning style of therapy psychoanalysis when it’s just a rehash of any Classical Athenian Symposium. Do we have some need to be special and carve out our own niche so much that we can’t recognize that the therapeutic relationship is just a very good relationship? We are not infallible, nor were we meant to be, yet we still hide behind our therapist’s chair and our credentials and our scientifically verifiable methods. In that way, we are as much “product” as is a box of Froot Loops or a can of EZ-cheeze - pasteurized for your enjoyment!
We are creating homogenized relationships as much as reality TV or our “one best system” of education. “Ahhhh, but Will, you naive bastard, we also need to be able to make money in this world to survive, and to do that, we have to adapt ourselves to the society in which we find ourselves so that we can help the noble wretches that come to us for help”. And I answer to that, why is it that few of us are working to question the monetary system? For, with all of the benefit that it has brought us, it is an obsolete system that encourages alienation, division and a prioritization of some over others. If we are so willing to bow at the feet of the almighty dollar, have we come close to applying our own ideology to our own selves? What hypocrisy! We tell people to stop being the well-adapted slaves that the other schools of psychology ask you to become, but in our own work we wear our chains and only try to accessorize them with outlandish names that mean little to nothing: Holotropic Breathwork, Hakomi, Gestalt. What the hell does any of that shit mean that is so much more telling than Froot Loops? Yup, there are still some of you reading this that are so in denial that you actually formulated a response to that question. If you stepped back from your entrenched self-defense that you and your methods are “correct” you’d be able to see that there is little in your response besides fear. You want those words to mean something so that you can find meaning in yourself, never trusting that without a bunch of words to back you up you have meaning still.
We’re afraid of the musical tone of our work even when the Discordian Society has more members than Division 32 had according to Amadeo Giorgi’s count in this past Spring’s, Journal of Humanistic Psychology (and no, I’m not citing that based on some APA style guide, find it if you want and call me a liar if you so choose - my words are not truth, and should not be read as such - if you want truth and you cling to the APA style guide for presenting it, then you are a part of the problem I am describing - seek help now!!!). Courtney Love has more sway over the development of people than any of us do, and if we don’t recognize that then we can add delusional to our already described psychological condition of humanistic psychology.
If we want to reach people, we need to reach them as brothers and sisters and not as over-reaching parents that hold on to their authority and their authoritative speaking patters. In case any of you haven’t been paying attention for the past few years, authority is losing its credibility. The media has lost its mindshare to the horizontal information sources known as blogs, Christianity died years ago and is closer to its death throes than the Iraqi Insurgency is - throwing out flaming rhetoric in some sad attempt to show that it still has some muscle after all, The government I hope made clear in my last statement is also bankrupt in its ability to persuade the people - who really cares if the democrats or republicans win when they both are employed by the same companies, the universities are dying as more and more people turn to computers as their source of learning, and research scientists? Please, outside of physics (which in string theory is our last hope for philosophy) we all question medical research after the scares with teenage Paxil suicides and the black-listing of all sorts of anti-inflammatories in the recent past.
Now then, I don’t want to get all of you anarchists out there hopeful that “Your day has come”, and I don’t want you to believe that I ascribe to your beliefs whole-heartedly either. Nevertheless, I do think that we are experiencing a time of massive world change similar to what Hakim Bey speaks of as the shift to Quantum Reality, or as detractors like to say, of the shift to the Aquarian Age. It is Quantum Mechanics after all which has allowed us to create the integrated circuits that have made our PC’s possible and have been at the heart of the Internet, which, if there ever was an example of Indeterminacy expanding beyond Planck’s Constant, the Internet is it.
We do not live in the world of Fromm, or Maslow, or Rogers or any of the historical 60’s theorists to which we owe so much, and where we can gain a great deal from their insights and from the continued research and theory that is being created in our field, it is time that we start looking forward to what this shift means for psychology at large, and beyond that we need to look to the humanities at large for a way to be seriously connected to the myriad of human possibilities that exist within our unfolding Quantum Reality which will undoubtedly create a wave that effects politics, media, the economy, and of course, our own beloved psychology. Continue researching, continue devising special interest niche methodologies, but understand that we can also begin to look at the shift occurring around us to see how those things represent the change in thought in the society at large and allow ourselves the frailties that we allow in our clients. These things imply a moment of growth, and we should not ignore them. Would psychology be better served to exist in the therapeutic setting, or would it be better served to work out its theories in the classroom, in the boardroom, in the bedroom, in children’s stories, in love songs, or in the pulpit? We will shift, and the only question is: how can we accommodate that shift in such a way to remain relevant in this new cultural paradigm? Culture after all appears to be simply music that goes on forever - it is not its bane, but its saving grace - we ask this of our clients and we should strive towards it ourselves. Anything less would be hypocritical.

2005-07-02T16:11:00.000-07:00

Before neuroscience had determined that certain mental activities occurred in certain hemispheres of the brain, Aliester Crowley had all of his students learn how to write with equal proficiency with both their left and right hands. I do not know the exact reason that Crowley gave for his students to learn this skill, but at the same time, I do have to give him proper respect for such a prescient understanding that by denying our right-handed proclivities, that he was allowing his students to access a more full use of their minds.
Today, we often worry that our schools are teaching our children to be dumber, that our advertising culture has led to what is popularly labeled as the “dumbing down of America”. I wonder if Crowley’s magick of using both hands ambidextrously to write may provide a way for us to create a society that by using both hemispheres equally during the writing process, may give us the boost to grow beyond this generation of idiots and dolts.
There is sarcasm in the words of my last paragraph though, and a certain level of assertion that I must make clear before you begin to believe that I am asking for schools to start teaching incantation, sigyls, and so forth. In the words of Arthur C. Clarke, “Any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. The fortunate situation for us is that such technology exists in a much more commonplace way than hemisync tones whose frequency differential miraculously causes the brain to fire equally from the left and from the right.
As I write this paper, I am using that technology right now. When I type, I am neither right or left handed. I am ambidextrous in my mechanics. In fact, I use my left hand more frequently than I use my right, finding such commonly used letters as: a, s, d, r, e, and t. Every technology has unintended consequences. Nobel was thoroughly upset that after he invented dynamite to aid in construction projects to blast stone, that his invention became a weapon. The consequences of typing has been primarily to ensure that our words were kept in a digital form, where the inconsistency of actually using cursive or print was lost to a consistent font and a clear presentation. It facilitates the mass-distribution of an idea far more capably than does a mimeograph machine with hand-written documents. And, god does it make editing easier (though I’m sure you’ve found my now that it doesn’t make editing perfect).
However, though there may very well be a governmental and commercial conspiracy to keep people dumb, typing in itself may have the unintended consequence of expanding people’s minds by forcing them to use their whole brain as they slave away on their papers, journals, web pages, diatribes against some creed, group, or “other”, and a thousand different things that one may write about. This list could cover many pages, and if we look at the web, we obviously see that this list is an open system capable of continuing on indefinitely. Alas, we are becoming an ambidextrous society driven not by some lab equipment, but by the keyboards on our computers.
If we had such a society in which both hemispheres of the brain were firing in equal proportions, we would expect that linear, compartmentalized logic would give way to non-linear, relational, holistic sorts of thinking. Such a society would possibly be able to see how each part connects to some sort of idea of a whole. This would not place the logical left brain on a sub-level, but would bring up the right brain to the same level that we have already enjoyed with the left.
Again, we have to consider the environment around us to determine if we are already living in that society, or if we are beginning to get to that place. I would suggest that we are already well on our way to that place, and because of technological advancements, that we will see amazing fruits from the beginnings of this change that will be as profound as the move to agriculture from scavenging, or the move to capitalism from feudalism. Potentially, this change will even be greater.
Our first clue that we are already seeing the effects of this shift in global consciousness based on the prevalence of ambidextrous thought is the internet itself. We call it the web because it is the least linear source of knowledge that we have ever known. We have used terms like cyberspace to show its nebulous form, and terms such as the matrix have sprung up out of this sort of thought shift to reflect the idea that there is not just a yes or no in the universe but an infinite system of grids and matrices of maybes. This non-linear understanding of thought has been evidenced in the rise of the blog culture which allows us to expand our scope of authority in what is “right” and what is “wrong”. It has been shown in on-line discussion forums which have given us the ability to have trans-global dialogues open not just to world leaders, but to anyone that can access a computer. It has given rise to wikis where the content created on the screen is created by the users themselves so that the authority of each individual is equally respected and questioned. The wikis in particular have shown the full effects of non-linear thought, as they are riddled with hyper-links and each page becomes a web in itself. Innovations in the web alone are just beginning, and suggestions and recent additions to the framework of the web and web-browsers could hurry us along our path to an integrated culture of mind more quickly than their inventors could intend, tabbed browsing and Internet 2.0 are just examples of what we can expect.
But let us not be guilty of all of the hype that surrounded the internet culture of the late 90’s which believed that all of the problems of culture would be solved with “the promise of the internet”. Many start-ups failed, and many future proposals will fail as well. Monolithic corporations with direct access to governmental agencies have a vested interest in making sure that power is consolidated and centralized, and we have seen recently with the USA’s decision to continue to hold power over the root servers which direct DNS entries to their respective domain names suggests an acknowledgment of the fear that government has in a purely decentralized system of information and thought sharing. Heretics have not found their freedom just yet.
A second, less glamourous example of the way that ambidextrous thought is becoming pervasive in our culture is the idea of relational database systems becoming the primary means that enterprises are conducting business on a world-wide level. Companies such as SAP and PeopleSoft have capitalized on this promise. XML and SQL have become languages/programs that are included in many programs and operating systems as a matter of course. Our computers, at their core, know how every bit of information is connected to every other bit, and they are allowing us to ensure that we know how they are connected as well. Apple Computer’s recent OS efforts, along with Google’s desktop search, are showing that we are moving from the folder paradigm in our computer organization to a search paradigm, or some sort of combination of the two.
All of these advancements in the prevalence of relational databases may mean nothing. However, if we accept the anthropological perspective that we can learn a great deal about a people by looking at their tools, we see a culture changing their tools from those that provide a linear frame of thought to one that is giving more and more credence to relational non-linear thought. We live in the information age. Starting with Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, to the typewriter, to the personal computer, to the internet, to wikis and blogs and relational databases, we are a culture moving towards the free interchange of ideas, no matter how encumbered that progress is by special interest groups with a vested interest in maintaining strict hierarchies of power.
This shift will invariably change our economic system in ways that we cannot foresee this early in the shift, and it will at the same time change our political systems, our religious systems, our educational systems, and everything that we presently take for granted as a given in today’s systems of centralized power. For this system to progress in such a way that it benefits the whole of society, we must all be extremely diligent in our observation of these systems. We must all attempt to see the consequences of each new development, both intended and unintended. There are others that are looking at these consequences from a different perspective, and they will try to use these systems for their own benefit. I feel that we are on the dawning of a change in society that will not allow them to mold this in such a way that centralized power will be allowed to continue to thrive. The war has been lost already, and where we feel the pangs of berth, they feel a sense of impending doom. With that sense in their minds, there is no telling what could happen.
If we hold true to the ideas that Abraham Maslow espoused that we must first teach people that only through growth do we find true safety, we will surely help create a voice in our society to describe that, and in so doing, we can avert any irrational reactions of fear that may try to stop the progress that we are currently seeing. We live in interesting times, and we can hope that this is no curse, but is the dawning of a miraculous shift in the entire system of society around us.
Hail Eris! All hail Discordia!!

2005-06-12T17:59:00.000-07:00

When I was in middle school (junior high for those of you in a different educational system than I came from), we had an assignment to come up with “then and now” sorts of statements to show our progress through life. Ya know the drill: I used to eat my sandwiches without the crust, and now I’m a Satanist with the world’s largest collection of ornate swords. Yeah, simple sorts of adolescent developments that we have all gone through at one time or another. Here was one of the examples of my development that I will share with you for your approval: I used to think that Mrs. Butterworth was real, but now I know that she’s just an actress in the bottle. Yes, I was even a smart-ass when I was an adolescent.
Looking back on this statement though, I think that it may be one of the most cogent things that I had said up to that point in my life. Modern Life is surreal. To take our own individual views of Mrs. Butterworth in any way, shape, or form as anything other than of immense developmental importance is to sell the power of advertising short. How should we define the players in the advertisements that we see, be they animated or otherwise? Are they fake, are they real, are they some sort of simulacrum of a simulacrum? By suggesting that Mrs. Butterworth is an actress in a bottle, I allowed her the power of humanity while not dismissing her absurdity or her position of being somehow “imaginary”. Do not write off the power of Mrs. Butterworth as she is a mighty adversary. Do not fuck with her clout. She means more to society as a whole than you or I.
Though I liked my view-point at the time, the fact of the matter is that my understanding of the situation has indeed changed again. I now know that Mrs. Butterworth is indeed “real”, as Philip K. Dick has been so kind to point out that, “reality is the only word in the english language that should always be used in quotes”. If you choose to scoff off Mrs. Butterworth, or God, or Karl Popper, you have missed their potential to fit into someone else’s “reality” structure and therefore their ability to shape the course of society. Of course, the converse is true at the same point, if you give these concepts (or people, if you choose to actually believe in Karl Popper in any way beyond the conceptual) too much power of determining your “reality” then you run the same risk that you do in not believing in them. Believe or don’t believe, but these things do have an impact in the society around you. We choose our fights, and maybe my desire to fight Mrs. Butterworth seems absurd to you, but at the same time, New York City has caused violent crime to go down by busting people for more petty crimes like jay-walking or marijuana possession in the fifth degree (look it up if you so choose, or ask me when you see me waving my arms and screaming incoherently about Amway on campus). If we only choose to fight falsification, or any other “big” topic, as a means to increasing our understanding of “reality” have we missed an opportunity to change the minds and beliefs of our culture by allowing Mrs. Butterworth to continue wreaking havoc on the minds of our impressionable youth? So, here is my call to everyone in the program to rally around the cause of stopping Mrs. Butterworth no matter what the cost. I will be posting a petition to the makers of Mrs. Butterworth to shut her up once and for all - this type of evil must be stopped! The best place to fight is in the realm of the inconsequential, because people are more likely to allow their world-view to be shaped by the inconsequential. If we don’t have an equally beautiful inconsequential message to our “big” message, who are we going to win but the people who have enough time to actually spend a great deal of time thinking, and those people are lame anyway.
Thank you, and god bless.

2005-06-10T18:47:00.000-07:00

A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic - Arthur C. Clarke.
My mother always told me that it wasn’t what I did, but how I did it that mattered. Saying this, I have always thought it funny when people asked me, “what have you been up to”, as opposed to asking “how have you been doing”? It also has always stuck in my mind how when someone sees a technology unfamiliar to them, they ask, “what does it do” and when someone sees an unfamiliar magic trick, they ask, “how did you do that”? In the mundane, we ask the “what” question, and in the amazing, we ask the “how” question.
These two types of questions may appear to be one and the same, but I am of the mind that they are not. In the quote above, when we think of these two concepts, we see that some truth exists in the comment, and some truth is lost in the comment. If we look at it from the “what” perspective, Clarke is indeed correct. A doctor is the product of technology, where an equally effective “medicine man” is a purveyor of magic. However, in the “how” perspective, the way that they are doing the same thing is entirely different and so distinguishable that our society comes to believe that aboriginal medicine is quack science and Western medicine is legitimate regardless of their effectiveness.
How is a question not of procedural steps, but is a question of the posturing of the actor while performing a procedure. It asks about the intentions of action, while it has become a commonplace way to just ask about the action. However, usage and definition are different ideas. The fact that we use “how” to ask about procedure, belies the richness of the word. And we all know that if we merely want to know about procedure, we can ask the same question using “what” with more directness. “What does that do” is a more appropriate question than “How does it do that”, or at very least, it is the most efficient way to find out what something does. How asks not only what “it” does, but also in the way that it does it - this can be mechanical or spiritual or psychological or intentional.
I believe that this is the actual shift between mainline psychology and humanistic psychology, in the same way that this is the difference between competing economic perspectives or any other ideological positions. The difference in “what” between ideas may be indistinguishable at times, but the perspective of intentionality is what divides them. It is also this “how”, this idea of intention, that is the issue that forces humanistic psychology to the fringe and allows mainstream psychology to thrive.
Our intention is to encourage the growth of the individual. In the words of the Gospels, we want “the student to surpass the teacher”. We do not strive to have our clients be an imitation of christ, or an imitation of us, but to surpass us. This is not a popular idea. It is one of the statements in Christianity that has been scourged from the Lexionary as the Orthodoxy removed the Heterodoxy from their midsts. Power systems look for ways to maintain their position, and they defend it to no end. People are taught through a number of different ways to accept this. Christ became the only son of god despite many Christian statements to the contrary.

2005-06-10T17:36:00.000-07:00

The Victorian mindset was ruled by a number of ideals, the two that I would like to focus on for their relevance to today are Calvinism and Mathusian scarcity. These two ideas worked together to push the idea of Prosperity Christianity. Calvinism became an ideology where the Elect were to be known by their success in the world, and the economic ideas of Thomas Malthus showed that scarcity of resources would eventually lead to a tragedy that would affect the society at large. As such, Calvinist Christians not only felt good about their abundance, but were also rather afraid to have anything less than abundance because when the problems inherent in a system of scarcity manifest themselves, there was a chance that those without would end up being sloughed off by a society where there was not enough to go around. As Victorianism waned, this idea began to be countered by several changes in thought that strove to change the paradigm away from a system of scarcity to a system which Buckminster Fuller called “ephemeralization”. This idea was that you can do more with less based on the advancements of technology. Unfortunately, the Great Depression occurred and we still have not gotten fully out of the Malthusian problem.
Though the history of the Depression looms over some members of our society still, we know that Fuller was correct in his characterization of technology as the synergetic mover away from the Malthusian problem of scarcity. We see it all of the time: Moore’s Law in computing continues to progress, showing that every few years the size of computer chips will decrease in half, while maintaining performance; commercial farming, for all its faults, shows that at least in potential, we can produce more and more food on the same amount of land due to advances in the technology of farming. I could show example after example, but it would not get me any closer to my premise. I will use one example though that is relevant to my aims here. In the world of industry, we have seen ephemeralization worked out with blinding success. In this recent economic recession, we have seen the economy get stronger and stronger in its recovery, but we have not seen many increases in jobs provided for the area of manufacturing jobs. We have seen the service industry also making less intense increases in employment, and though analysts often question this progress in the economy without a corresponding increase in employment, I think that now is the time that we are really seeing the promise of technology. Technology is working to cure almost every disease conceivable; it is increasing productivity; it is increasing output of resources without increasing the need for resources to acquire those resources; it is providing us access to more and more information, with less effort. Technology is essentially eradicating toil. The toil of disease, the toil of travel, and most importantly, the toil of work.
I write this paper for a bunch of psychologists because we all need to be aware of how the changing culture effects the individuals inhabiting the culture. With such a vast shift in the ways that technology affects the lives of its inhabitants, we must work to create a system which maintains the health of the individual while at the same time encouraging technological progress. By keeping the individual in focus, we ensure that we do not become slaves to whatever we think of as “progress”.
Let me start by saying that we cannot stop this type of progress, and that no matter what we try, there will not be as dramatic of an increase in this economic recovery in terms of manufacturing jobs as we have seen in other economic recoveries, and frankly, as Humanisticly minded individuals, we should applaud that. Meaningless work is a disease that traps the mind and encourages apathy. So many psychologists (Fromm, May, and others) have described the effects of apathy on the individual that I will not entertain that topic here, but the theoretical descriptions of this phenomena are rich.
The main problem with this situation is that we have no plan for how to deal with a society in which manufacturing jobs are a relic of a less technologically advanced society. Companies are more profitable, but the divide between the rich and the poor is growing, and social mobility is on the decline. This is a direct result of our technological improvements. It is not just manufacturing that will be the battleground for this era of the obsolescence of the human in the workplace. Service jobs are also being effected. From automated help numbers that respond to the human voice, to automated restaurants, to infinity, we are finding that most jobs that can be done my machines are beginning to be done by machines. Any job that you can imagine that could be done by a machine, in the near future, will be. Why would it be any other way? If you suggest that people “need” jobs, why? Clearly people need to be able to purchase goods, but do they really need the toil of having to work at a mindless factory job to, as William Blake states, “breed pestilence” through unfulfilled desire and increased apathy? Work is a four-letter word for a reason!
But alas, it’s not all rainbows and gum drops in our future. Employment may become an obsolete concept, but there is no one proposing an alternate system that will actually help people grow beyond the mindless jobs that they previously held. Well, let me correct that and say that no one with any power is listening to those people, and like the oil industry trying to make every dime off of every last drop of oil before they think about spending money of alternatives, the Fortune 500 and US government is not entertaining any outlay of capital to help off-set the loss of jobs from the rise of technology. By neglecting this fact, we are on the pathway to an unnecessary tragedy.
How interesting that the people who see the benefit of ephemeralization would still like to hold on to the Calvinistic and Malthusian foundations which reinforce their greed. Let me be clear in saying that a rising unemployment rate is indeed a positive indicator for the health of the technology of a society. Unemployment is not the disease, but a result of the cure. Sadly, our Calvinistic foundations not only make the rich feel great about their status, but it also makes us think that our climbing unemployment rate is also symptomatic of a disease in those that are being laid off. Clearly, all of these people are going to hell and are not of the Elect to have been laid off. So, the owners of industry feel great to have saved some money on replacing people with machines - no health care costs for the machines, no paid-vacation, no overtime, and no hourly wage. And, at the same time, the laid off feel guilty when they cannot find replacement work. To get that work, they would need to provide some capital (unavailable to them) to pay for further training and education to be the guardian of a machine or to learn how to program machines to replace other wage-earners in the economy, who will then need to repeat the cycle already set in place. Their apathy now becomes panic on both a financial and psychological level. In this situation, the psychology of the work force becomes even more dire, as we risk an increase in property crime and violent crime from an increasing lower-class population - unable to buy the bread they need, who would blame them for stealing it.
A short-sighted Industrialist may not see these problems, but they may see that an increase in an unemployment rate does lower the number of potential customers available to them. This also may be too far-sighted for the instant-gratification culture of the boardroom though. Nevertheless, I will hold up hope that an intelligently described treatise on this idea (beyond this cacophonic babbling that I am offering up) may sway the minds of those who could actually do something about this. The obvious problem is that, to maintain the economy, these corporations will end up having to pay for the people that they have laid off, no matter what. However, maybe by increasing ephemeralization we can pay less to have these people unemployed than we can with them as employees.
I do not want to fool anyone into thinking that I am talking about subtle shifts in our thinking to accommodate this shift in society, but the integrated circuit or splitting of the atom were not small shifts either, and we have continued on past those changes. I am suggesting radical changes in our thinking of the value of money and the idea of wealth. There are many options that have been outlined by many different thinkers on this topic, Buckminster Fuller only being one among many, and though thinkers that talk about the demise of the monetary system are often laughed at by Calvinist Capitalists, we are not at a point of laughing any more. We have an opportunity to change the system, and if we do not change the system we will continue to see a rise in unemployment without any system that is meant to protect individuals within that system. This will surely lead to an end to the technological progress that we have experienced over the past few decades. A society with high unemployment is a system with little buying power, unless there is a system in place which ensures that buying continues.
As Humanistic Psychologists, we should rejoice in the efforts to get rid of monotonous jobs, but at the same time, we should be helping to promote a system that ensures that in this decrease of monotony, our society helps foster growth beyond that monotony as opposed to regression to legitimate class-warfare. People with buying power but without jobs are not people that will regress to alcoholics on the couch as the Calvinists would like to think, but will grow on their own accord. If we could get beyond the hurdle of accepting that work is a disease that can be cured, we are then offering up to all individuals in our society the opportunity that, “if you didn’t have to work, what would you want to do?” Everyone has a dream, and without having to work, every individual could work towards their dream, and if we had everyone working towards their dream, who among us would believe that our society would suffer from it? Synergy is possible when all people are allowed to give all that they have to do all that they are possible of doing. This is not a pipe dream, but a requirement of an advanced culture of technological progress.
Technology offers us an opportunity, which we can either use to its fullest for the improvement of our culture, or which we could miss, thereby ensuring that our fate is less than beautiful. Psychology may not be the obvious place to start the questioning within society, but as we in Humanistic Psychology are supposed to be concerned with the human in its full context, this is not such a bad place to start the debate within the public sphere. It appears imperative that this debate takes place, and whoever should start it must be concerned with how this shift in society effects the individuals within it. Free education, free health care, and a living wage for all individuals is not communism but is a requirement of a technologically advanced society. When we get rid of the jobs of the “proletariat”, what else should we expect?

2005-06-09T13:56:00.000-07:00

In some odd ways, I appreciate the Protestant idea of a profession of faith. I don’t like that on every Sunday in every Protestant church that the purveyors of this faith repeat the same profession of faith in the way of some sort of magical invocation, but still, there is something to be said for the power of putting your ideas into words. To make concrete what is abstract though it may make trivial what cannot and should not be defined, also gives us a metaphorical sigyl of meaningless hoo-ha that represents what our unspeakable beliefs really are.
We can think of it in the way that Emerson speaks in Self-Reliance, “Today, speak in hard words what today thinks, and tomorrow speak in hard words what tomorrow thinks, though it may contradict everything you said today”. If we use a pop juxtaposition of the words written by Björk in Madonna’s song Bedtime Stories, “Words are meaningless/Especially sentences”, we can then understand not only that our words tomorrow contradict today’s words, but that also by using words, we have contradicted the unspeakable element to everything that we feel today.
So, as you can see, I do not feel encumbered by the problems of contradiction. If I did, I wouldn’t get up out of bed in the morning. If you point out the holes in my argument in this paper, I will only applaud you for displaying its strength for making you think and ponder things on your own. Criticize that, and I will continue to argue with you ad absurdium until you find the contradictions in your own argument and stop the argument because you just want to stay in bed for the rest of your life. If you don’t like contradictions, you will only find consistency, stasis, and comfort in the death bed.
So, to return from my jaunt into the world of the tangential, I would like to provide for you my present profession of faith, which is by its very nature an experiment in disinformation. Please allow me this juvenile expression to exist on this well-meaning stage (soap-box).
I believe in active/creative love as the cornerstone for all human experience
I believe that using the phrase critical thought is a corruption of what we are really doing in our work, which is creative thought. This corrupt phrase also assumes that when we make statements that they are True and that criticism, rather than creative dialogue, is the natural response to the assertion of our own authority towards Truth
I believe that deterministic conditioning is overcome by Will (over the course of this program, I will continue to point out the pun that I am using here because I am just that big of a megalomaniac, or fate has smiled on me with such a relevant name), and that Will in some magical mysterious way, must give way to to Fate
I believe that all movements involving self-determination will become commodified and become deterministic in themselves until we finally break free of the disease of work and the exchange economy (yeah, this is a huge statement that deserves it’s own paper, which will come post-haste)
I believe that subjectivity does not lead to Nihilism if we hold on to an idea similar to the heart of the Tao which is that, “the Eternal Tao is the Tao that cannot be named”. As such, even the Tao is subjective, though from some divine perspective, that Tao may indeed be unchanging and universal, thus entirely transcendent of all ideas of object, though no less whole or unifying
I believe in Systems Theory, Quantum mechanics, Transactional Analysis, General Semantics, E-prime, Dada, Humor, Altered States of Consciousness, Transcendentalism, English Modernism, Gnosticism as an Epistemological ground for thought, transcendence of every dichotomy, and self-mortification as a means of self-empowerment
Lastly, I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth, and in Jesus Christ his only son, our Lord.....wait, scratch that - it was so tempting though to get all into the power and appeal of group mind. WooHoo for idolatry!!
There you have it. Like everything else, it is incomplete and radically mis-leading as to who and what I “Truly” believe. Still, if we want to embrace the contradictions in life, and we want to combat the Determinism of mainstream fundamentalism, it’s high-time that we start to express our short-comings as well as our strengths “though it may contradict everything today has said”.
Love,
Will

2005-06-08T16:24:00.000-07:00

Before Einstein’s General and Special Theories of Relativity, science was the domain of high-determinism. We held up the notion that there could be scientific Laws of nature and we were searching for something beyond Newton’s Laws of Thermodynamics that could be universally applied and could be a means to figure Truth on a divine level. Sadly, even Einstein did not recognize the power of his own theories to overcome this determinism, and when Werner Heisenberg took Einstein’s theories to the next level to devise his Principle of Indeterminacy, Einstein famously stated that “God does not play dice” in the way that Indeterminacy and Quantum Mechanics would suggest.
Since that time, the idea of Indeterminacy spread like a wild flower across the full-range of human thought. At the same time that Heisenberg and Bohr and Schrödinger were taking Quantum Mechanics to be the preeminent scientific paradigm, General Semantics and Semiotics were applying the theories of Indeterminacy and applying them to language, literary modernism was using this idea and applying it to the form of the novel and the poem, questioning meter and narration and perspective and reliability. Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism all applied these concepts to the visual arts. Modernism grew into Post-Modernism and The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock was followed in time and thought by Howl.
With all of this growth in thought, and all of this shift from Determinism to Indeterminism, it is amazing and it is heart-breaking that in mainstream psychology the work that is being done is following a reactionary bent that is attempting to reclaim Newton in spite of the presence of Heisenberg. When we hear the arguments that psychology is not a hard science, it is from the mouths of critics and pundits that are holding on to a scientific fundamentalism that denies the past one hundred years of scientific advancement. These same critics also claim that Quantum Mechanics is not a true science, though it has brought us such disparate advancements as the atom bomb and the integrated circuit.
In The Gay Science, Nietzsche’s essay, The Madman does not just say that “God is dead”, but says that all metaphysics are dead, that essentially the idea of universal Truth described by words is dead. The concept of truth can only be thought of in lower-case terms, as an existential-operationalistic ideal, where truth is fluid and changing and in flux. The process of the mainstream of psychology is a stream that does not flow; it is a pond that will at some point evaporate. Despite the idea that we can neither have full internal and external validity at the same time, and that that is caused by Indeterminism in lab research, psychological researchers continue to hope that they will be able to break Indeterminism and say under the definition of Truth, that: low serotonin levels cause depression; states of mental unhealth are diseases which can be cured; the only things that matter are things that can be measured and observed, like behaviors. Accordingly, psychology, like unchanging Truth, is dead.
Unfortunately, we live in a culture of Fundamentalism which extends well beyond the stickering program of science books in Cobb County, where evolution should be handled critically, but the rest of the scientific endeavor should not be. Textbooks are Truth in the same way that the Bible is Truth, in the same way that capitalism is Truth, in the same way that the Laws of Newton are Truth. But as I said earlier, it was Indeterminacy that allowed us to have the computers today by which we disseminate information, and it is Indeterminacy that has led to so many masterpiece works in art and literature, and it is Indeterminacy that has allowed us to escape from the deterministic creator god who seems to be getting closer and closer every day to demanding blood-sacrifice for the “sins” of the world.
This all effects the Humanistic and Transpersonal movements by giving us a measure to which we must live and to which we can aspire in our own attempts to differentiate ourselves from the Fundamentalism of main-”pond” psychology - the great Dead Sea of our own area of study. We have split the atom a thousand times over in our own research: biofeedback, meditation, the non-local mind, LSD, MDMA, Hakomi, Gestalt, Transactional Analysis, applications of Systems Theory in the therapeutic setting, and we are just getting started. However, we have not done enough to show how the theories and methods of main-line psychology are based on a dead science that has been surpassed by radically new thinking and radically different methodological perspectives and that by holding on to the Industrialized system of HMO psychology, where we may have a more quantifiable product (or pill to be more appropriate) to sell to consumers, we are losing the opportunities that are present for the technology of Mind and the evolution of Will.
I appreciate every way that Humanistic Psychologists continue to split the atom and form new methods and perspectives by which we stop creating well-adapted slaves and allow people to be fully human, but at the same time, I think that it is imperative that we use the tools of all of the myriad advancements in the world around us to attack the foundation of the easily commodified medical model of psychology to show that where drugs and cognitive behaviorism may be effective in the short-term that they may be inherently problematic in the long-term when we think of them as a “cure”. In our culture of instant-gratification, this will be a hard sell, but it is only through sacrifice that anything of value was ever won. This battle will be fought by Humanistic and Transpersonal psychologists, and we cannot expect the stagnant pond of Fundamentalism to recognize this on their own. Their path is determined, and ours is not. When we choose a path that shows the folly of Fundamentalism, we will truly see that God, in all its shapes and anthropomorphic guises will give way to the Mystery which is always changing, always unfolding, and provides us with maybe no answers but a richness to life that arises from the questions. Science in particular, and society in general, will be better-served when it is focused on the questions as opposed to focused on the answers. It is in our DNA to continue to raise these questions; let us act to continue this tradition.

2005-06-08T15:43:00.000-07:00

You often see in movies a situation where a person has had an ultimate sorrow or tragedy befall them, and they let out a scream that seems neither quite pained nor joyous. This scream is the scream, I believe, of understanding. It is a contradiction, and try as we might, there are few situations when this type of scream is appropriate, though I think that somewhere within us all, we are all searching for the opportunity to concretely experience the feeling of pain and joy all at once and to scream in response to that contradiction - not out of pain or of joy, but out of determination.
Once upon a time, in my own life, I had just such an opportunity to scream in this Hollywood fashion, and it has stuck with me ever since. The situation was not that important for this exploration, but the feelings that arose from that situation were immensely relevant to this discussion. I found myself in a hopelessness whose depths I had never experienced before or since. I questioned my purpose, my meaning, the very value of my being, and I tip-toed across a very delicate edge that I wish on no one. Thankfully, my melodrama was not to be experienced alone. For the people that do not experience this sort of feeling with the company of others, I feel very sorry, and hope that their own strength of character and hope for a better future is greater than my own so that they can navigate that edge and come out on the side of life and be stronger in having done so.
Nevertheless, as hopelessness and mortality crept through me, I was on the phone with my brother, who, for me, is the joyous prankster, coyote-god bodhisattva that you read about in a thousand different mythologies from a thousand different peoples. Always able to take life seriously enough to not take it too seriously, he refuses to take my melodrama as the end-all-be-all truth to my own existence. So, as I was lamenting a life where everything was lost, and where no one was there for me, instead of dismissing my plot by ensuring me that he was there, or that things were not as bad as they seemed, he allowed me my melodrama and my determined outlook, and decided to fuck with it in the way that it deemed to be fucked with, namely he pointed out that a life lived where everything was lost and no one is there, is indeed a life where everything is possible and no one holds authority over you.
I do not wish this level of hopelessness upon anyone, and I am not sure how such a statement would make anyone else feel, but for me this was my Hollywood scream moment where hopelessness and opportunity collide and for once all of the deterministic elements of society that were around me, the expectations of others, the hope to succeed according to someone else’s plan, the idea of who and what I am supposed to be, all dropped. The billiard ball world of cause and effect magnificently dropped for me. I had been living in the world of causation similar to the world figured by mainstream psychology, always insisting that things should make sense, always hoping that one day we can find a method which works for all people for all time, with the hope that we can develop a predictive science where it does not matter how many variables are in play at once, we can control each of them. This sort of belief system (or, as Robert Anton Wilson abbreviates it, BS) limits a person to a deterministic view of the world that is neither representative of the uniqueness of each experience, nor does it allow the possibility of change. It fosters more BS that being well-adapted means being static, even though we live in a world of flux.
Since that moment, I have dropped the BS that I was holding that “caused” me to be in that sort of hopelessness, or at least, I have allowed that BS to be a part of a greater BS in which determinism is always in flux with indeterminism on many different levels of my self (you can take the idea of self as just some more BS piled high on other types of BS ad nauseum if you so choose). I have had the Hollywood scream of so many actors throughout the history of film, calling out in an indeterminate determination, knowing not where I was going, but deciding that the path way ahead of me will be different from the one behind. I believe that in this scream, which is neither primal nor stylized (as the Hollywood descriptor that I keep choosing to attach to the word would suggest), we find not a pure hopelessness, or a pure expression of hope, but rather the deepest contradiction that exists within us all that bridges both of these ideas.
If we assume a world on either a pure determinism or a pure indeterminism, we lose the idea of Will. My own present BS is that the expression of Will (please forgive the on-going pun with my name) is only possible when we see the walls around us, and we choose to bounce off them, in the hope that we can bounce higher and higher along the walls until we either bounce right over them, or find a ceiling. As I see it though, no one has found the ceiling as of yet, no matter what type of BS they are spewing, and if they have found a way to bounce over them, they have not found the words to describe how they do it. I suggest this idea of the interplay between this dichotomy because with a pure determinism, we only find walls, and with a pure indeterminism, there are no wall for us to bounce against. There is hopelessness in walls and hopefulness in bouncing against them, but we must have both to make any progress in getting off of the ground.
So, find your walls, hit them hard, and then you may be able to find a way to bounce against them, and in that moment scream like the Hollywood star that exists within you from the very heart of your own Will. In so doing, you will never need to scream like that again.

2005-06-06T19:49:00.000-07:00

John Keats is famed for the line, “Truth is beauty and Beauty truth”, but where he says that that is all we need to know, I find that another truism works well with this, namely, that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. If we were to use Aristotelian logic to go along with these two quotes we could say that truth is in the eye of the beholder, and just for shits and giggles, I think that I’ll refrain from my usual disdain of Aristotelian logic and say that my own combination of thoughts is true - at least, to me (to make sure that I’m consistent with my own thinking).
With this in mind, I would like to talk for a moment about some similarities that I have noticed and others have noticed between the scientific method and the creative process that goes beyond just a few poetic truisms. In the scientific method we go through a process of forming a hypothesis, determining the instruments to test the hypothesis, testing the hypothesis, and drawing conclusions from the work. This is not too different from the creative process, where a person finds an inspiration through encounter, determines the medium that would be most appropriate for the display of their idea, and actually completes the work. It appears as no coincidence that scientists are always looking for an elegant theory to describe everything. An ugly explanation of something is like an ugly painting - it resonates with no one’s sense of truth or of beauty.
However, an ugly painting is still a painting, but if you look at the writings of Karl Popper, or you hear the bemoaning mainstream psychologists yearning to be a hard science, you would think that an ugly theory is no longer science. At the heart of it, Popper’s ideas of falsefiability suggests that we cannot call an ugly theory science. He agrees with mainstream psychology, and his apostles would also suggest that ideas like the unconscious, denial and so forth are concepts that cannot be proven false, and so they lack all claims to being science.
It’s an interesting idea, but it’s an idea that needs further consideration before we allow ourselves to accept and adopt the self-defeating posture of the mainstream of the APA. Surely, if someone said this about art, we would all laugh at the top of our lungs thinking that anyone could be the arbiter of what is good art and what is not art at all because it’s final product is not up to snuff. Art is a process, and it may not be for everyone, but it is nonetheless not to be considered as only the final product. An artist does not paint a masterpiece in their first attempt, and a scientific theory that has any traction does not come about in a split second. Of course, Popper would disagree with this, as he suggests that science should not allow ad hoc explanations for previous theories. Essentially, he thinks that the primary and secondary processes of the creation of the final theory must be firing at full-strength at the same time, right from the start, for the theory to hold any sense of scientific authenticity.
Of course, by his own admission, to meet these criteria, we have to throw out Relativity, Quantum Physics (and all particle physics for that matter), astrophysics, psychology, and essentially anything where there is more than one variable present. From my reading on the subject, I can only find taxonomy as an example of a science in Popper’s view, but I have to admit that I am hardly as well-versed in his theories as I would like to be (just for the ability to make fun of him more turgidly). And seriously, since when is taxonomy been touting its place as the only true science in the world, and when have you heard string theorists do anything other than blast people for claiming that they are not scientists because they haven’t found an experiment to prove their oh so elegant equations?
Ahhh, but this brings us back to psychology. As science progresses, and quantum mechanics has gone to create the atom bomb, the circuitry of modern computers and has shown the possibility of a non-local connection between all matter, all while being dismissed as a pseudo-science, psychology has bowed down to the philosophical P Popper and flagellates it’s own theories and theorists if they don’t follow Popper’s system without deviation. The problem with this is that Popper’s system essentially amounts to a scientific fundamentalism, and frankly is one of the key components of the shift of science from an ever-evolving creative process to one in which science is now Science, and the church of Sciencism has become unquestionable, even though it’s rigidity is exactly what makes it unsustainable.
Cobb County recently showed its fundamentalist Sciencism ignorance in it’s recent book stickering program, and where all the press was pouncing on them for their critique of evolution (which was a well-founded critique of them), they missed the more fucked up part of the problem with stickering the books to say that students should be critical of the theory of evolution. The bigger problem was the fact that that is the only theory that they said should be handled critically. If we have accepted Popper to the degree that we no longer think of science as a creative pursuit, and we now believe that science is truth, unchanging and unwavering, then we have truly lost sight of what science really is, and we have created a new religion. Children in Cobb County have bigger religious problems than just the Christian Right’s opposition to Evolution, they have the problem of thinking that everything else in their textbooks is unquestionable.
Before the fundamentalism of Science, all theories could be revised and added to, and all things were published with the idea that they could be critiqued and mulled over, and generally were inspirational. Now, people attack and defend a theory based on it’s adherence to the principle of falsefiability. If it passes that barrier, it’s science, and if not, screw it. It’s no wonder that this concept arose after the school of Quantum Mechanics took off. This theory has at its core the Principle of Indeterminacy, which essentially states that by observing one variable in a situation, you can only determine a probability for how this will affect a second variable. In psychological application, the Principle of Indeterminacy basically means that you cannot have full Internal Validity at the same time as External Validity. The proponents of this idea wanted to say that because of this, there was no such thing as objectivity. Of course, they did not say that science was consequently dead, but that it was in the position that it had always been in: as a subjective creative act that was always evolving, and always inspiring further experimentation, and that the notion of scientific laws was outside of the realm of the scientific method. Does this really matter though when we can use the results of experiments to derive new technology? Quantum mechanics is inherently operational in nature, and encourages its fluidity to its core.
Popper, though, cannot accept the idea that a universal truth cannot be discovered through the scientific method. Taking this back to art though, it would be laughable to think that an artist could somehow paint a universally beautiful painting. There are no laws in art, but Popper and the self-hating psychologists proposing a list of acceptable therapeutic methods within the APA would like us all to believe that such a thing can exist within science. They would have us believe that contrary to Alan Watts’ statement that “the menu is not the meal”, that you really can experience the fullness of the universe through a theory or equation. They want to take a bite from the menu, and taste a nice cold lamb sandwich with mint jelly and so forth.
So, what I suggest is that we all share a laugh together and fight the fundamentalists in the same way that the progressives, liberals and moderates are fighting the Religious Right in the political realm: do nothing, and let them have their way. Oh wait, then we really would have mandated therapeutic methods, a policy of drugging people to help them maintain a state of being that is well-adapted to society, and a culture where we aspire not to greatness, but to conformity. Creating a new therapeutic method or investigating psychedelic drugs in inner-city subcultures will do nothing if the university system has accepted a narrow view of what is acceptable science, and if the APA along with the health-insurance industry has determined what constitutes what psychology is, and how it will be done. The foundation of their system is more widely accepted and promoted than is ours because it is easier to sell as a product (or a pill, as the case may be), and if we do not work on our foundation, and getting it into the minds of people in our society, all of our work on the cosmetics of the humanistic movement will be for nothing. Indeterminacy gave us the computer and the atom bomb, Sciencism’s determinism has given us Prozac and the disease model of humanity. Which would you choose if you were a consumer?