Reproducibility in Science
Rupert Sheldrake has been through the institutional and political wringer. An established biochemist, he published on plant physiology and hormones in the 1970s, but after a decade or so of work decided the accepted methods in biochemistry and in science generally couldn’t address the problem of biological morphogenesis, which seemed to require causes on another scale. In 1981 he proposed a testable idea to decide if higher-scale causation exists in biology.
Sheldrake’s hypothetical landed as a deep offense to established science. Sir John Maddox at Nature effectively ruined Sheldrake’s standing in the scientific community, where he became “dangerous to know.” The looming idea at work in this social dynamic, of course, was the theosophical doctrine of “occult science,” the idea that the cosmos plays a direct role in human life on earth and that exact, even positive knowledge of cosmic causes in nature and mind is possible. The problem with theosophy is its methods, notwithstanding our contemporary proposal on natural language conversation, don’t at all fit well with normal science, its paradigm and its institutions. Theosophy requires self-knowledge.
There has emerged, however, a contemporaneous result in the grueling and contentious self-inspection of science and scientific institutions. Both Peter Thiel and Rupert Sheldrake are now pointing out an ongoing failure of experimental science to make appreciable progress. The problem appears to be a general distractedness from independent reproduction of results, in principle the cornerstone of science. Institutional scientists these days appear to be more interested in maintaining a safe zone around their interests, which have to do with things like livelihood and financial viability, and less interested in the adventure of discovery. They focus on publishing obscure points in peer-reviewed journals instead of spending resources on the excitement and fun of working out new paradigms.
We think society needs science to come up with a new paradigm, and we think we have a good one. Nobody is testing a theory of conversation, despite the obvious importance of conversation in everything anybody can point at. Conversation constitutes consciousness. Once science comes around to discovering what conversation really is, society will follow everything it does.
