I believe a science of superhumanity is possible; my belief is based on a mass of empirical data. We need to think carefully about this possibility. So far, despite their great achievements, science and technology have brought us to the brink of nuclear annihilation and climate catastrophe. But science also holds out a promise of human transformation and planetary revival The human situation is up for grabs, we’re at a crossroads. But there is a problem with the concept of truth..
Can a society with a twisted sense of truth long survive? Can we manage when basic factual truth is in jeopardy? We are, after all, hacking our way through an age of fake news. The fakery is pervasive. Capitalism, politics, spying, advertising, business, the infinite varieties of scamming and conning. This grand falsification process is mediated by our communication technologies. And ‘communication’ is changing. It is now possible to construct auditory, visual, and behavioral replicas of real people that come to life in digital space. AI ChatGPT and related programs enormously raise the specter of new forms of deception.
From all sides it seems the idea of truth is facing a crisis. To fend off the agents of falsification that plague us, beware the shysters constantly trying to con us. The general rule is, the bigger the capitalist entity, the more ruthless the likely deception. We should suspect the claims of certain politicians and their acolytes. By far the most spectacular is the phenomenon of the Trumpian base and cynical Republican affiliates. Truth here lies in bloody pieces thrown into our faces, thanks to the pathological liar and rapist, Donald Trump.
We’re not surprised by all the lying and chicanery that revolve around politics and the American gods of money and power. But what about science? Science, by definition, is an institution dedicated to knowledge and truth. We expect more from scientists when it comes to matters of truth. Follow the facts wherever they lead us is the ideal of authentic scientists.
But scientists are human beings and subject to forces that can deform their sense of truth. Some scientists are known to take bribes from corporate entities in exchange for endorsing—lying about—the endorsed product. The money motive for lying here is plain enough.
Scientists are sometimes paid or compelled to lie by the government for security reasons. For example, since 1947 the U.S. Government and scientific personnel actively concealed the truth about UFOs and UAPs from the American people for various ill-conceived reasons. So, when a psychiatrist like John Mack reported his research on alien abduction he was attacked by his Harvard compatriots. Since 2017 the Government has opened the question for discussion, and admitted the reality of an alien technology that regularly enters our airspace—a “technology” that clearly transcends anything known to current science. In fact, the presence of this super-technology operating with impunity in our midst is a topic of great significance—but oddly has retired to the files of YouTube and is rarely discussed in mainline venues.
There’s something else. A scientist may deny or trivialize a matter of fact because it has implications he doesn’t like. This is the more egregious sin against science. The example that comes to mind is the Big Bang Theory of the birth of the universe 13.7 billion years ago. This is the theory widely accepted by scientists today, especially in light of the most recent research. The theory at first was dismissed with contempt, for example, by Einstein, by Eddington, and by many of the leading lights in the field of cosmology. Why the contempt? The Big Bang seemed to imply something obnoxious to physicists firmly committed to materialism and atheism.
In 1927, Georges Lemaître published a paper that predicted the expansion of the universe of galaxies. There were observations beginning to suggest that startling fact. The idea of an expanding universe was not consistent with what Einstein, Eddington and others believed to be an eternal, static, steady-state universe.
Lemaître inferred that an expanding universe must have originated at a previous time from a super dense singularity of some physical reality. The universe exploded out of this physical singularity creating time and space, a universe that is still expanding and at an accelerating rate. Big Bang cosmology has clearly ousted the steady-state cosmology, in spite of the physicists that first rejected the theory. The atheists were appalled. In a broad way, the Big Bang seems consistent with Biblical creationism. But so what? The truth is that nobody has a clue to what really caused the Big Bang, if there was a Big Bang. The universe seems to be an effect with an unknown cause, but a reality with a finite history. Sorry, Einstein.
The atheist physicists had a hard time processing this cosmological surprise. Moreover, Lemaitre, in addition to being a brilliant mathematician and physicist, was a Catholic priest. But, as Lemaitre rightly understood and clearly stated, the Big Bang model of cosmic creation favors no religion. Nonetheless, the antagonism toward the theory was (and still is) weighty, precisely because it can be construed as having religious significance. But the resistance is not science; it’s ideology and fascist metaphysics.
There is another example of science in denial (or in retreat) from a mass of highly significant empirical data. In a way that exactly parallels the hostile reception of the Big Bang theory, most scientists (not necessarily physicists) have been and still are instinctively on guard and reluctant (at least publicly) to engage with the wide world of paranormal phenomena. Paranormal phenomena like levitation, precognition, instantaneous healing, the materialization of physical objects, indications of postmortem survival, and so on, are construed as supportive of mentalistic worldviews where miracles, life after death, and supernatural beings are treated as real. All this is rightly construed as a mortal threat to reductive scientific materialism.
Respect for factual truth needs to be instilled in the common consciousness. Without it we’re easily misled and manipulated. Materialist science would deny truths that may hold the secret of our evolutionary advance as a species. The unidentified beings the government lied about point to our potential evolution. For a more exact picture of what that may look like, see the data we call supernormal or miraculous—our extended mental, physical and spiritual powers. In a fact-based model of what is possible, we can contemplate an outline of our futuristic identity. My next post will sketch a more detailed picture of a fact-based futuristic version of our bedevilled species.
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