Why Science is Wrong

How John von Neumann's Catastrophe of Infinite Regress proves that Science has officially swallowed its own Tail

WHY SCIENCE IS BULLSHIT, AND WHY TEENAGERS SHOULD TAKE ACID

BY CROW QU’APPELLE

Robert Anton Wilson is one of my favourite philosophers, and I consider him one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth centuries. For some strange reason, he really doesn’t seem to get the respect that I think that he deserves.

Although he certainly has his fans, I rarely see Robert Anton Wilson’s name mentioned by serious political thinkers. Although I can understand why his thought would be beyond the pale for mainstream society, I don’t understand why he is so overlooked by anarchists or conspiracy theorists. Perhaps his interest in psychedelics and the occult has led to him being viewed as a fringe thinker.

Recently, I reread his masterpiece Prometheus Rising, and I was struck not only just by how brilliant it is, but how important his ideas are. I can only imagine how much better off humanity would be if his ideas were widely understood and accepted.

In all honesty, I really think that it’s high time that the world caught up with him. A lot of his ideas are extremely relevant to the pressing questions of our times, and if we want to bring a new political movement into being, we would do well to absorb some of his key insights.

For this reason, I’ve decided to make it my business to distil some of his key ideas and present them to people who are unfamiliar with his work.

This is the first in a series of essays which will involve the ideas of one of the most lucid and erudite author on the subject of metaphysics.

Specifically, I will be presenting his ideas for an audience which is more interested in politics than in mysticism, psychedelics, and other such exotica.

If I’m piqued your curiosity, I recommend watching a 2003 documentary about him called Maybe Logic. It’s a good introduction to his ideas.

Who was Robert Anton Wilson?

Robert Anton Wilson was one of the greatest psychedelic philosophers of all time. He continued the work of Aldous Huxley, Albert Hoffman, Gordon Wasson, Alan Watts and Timothy Leary.

Arguably, he concluded the whole intellectual endeavour of understanding the psychedelic experience, and wrapped the whole she-bang up with a ribbon and a bow. This might sounds like a big exaggeration, but hear me out.

What I means that I think he followed the rabbit hole damn near all the way down to the bottom. There is a point where we reach the limits of what can be known.

The most intelligent thing that I have heard a politician say came from Donald Rumsfeld, of all people. May he burn in hell, of course, but his most-mocked statement is an executive summary of the conclusion of all metaphysicians.

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know.

We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.

Ancient cultures knew this. In Lakota, the Universe is referred to not only as the Great Spirit, but also the Great Mystery.

As Terence McKenna famously said:

“The universe may not only be stranger than we suppose, it may be stranger than we CAN suppose.”

So far as it comes to the psychedelic experience, I think that what LSD can teach us about consciousness has already be learned, and that Robert Anton Wilson’s articulation is the clearest that I know of.

I highly recommend watching the following video, which is basically a 7-minute executive summary of decades worth of psychedelic research.

Pretty mind-blowing, eh? You see what I mean? If all this stuff was common knowledge, we’d be living in a whole different world.

RAW liked to quote Albert Hoffmann, the chemist who discovered LSD, who wrote an essay in 1982 in which he said that “the main thing that I have learned from LSD is that there is no objective reality separate from us”.

In other words, the observer cannot be separated from the observed, meaning that any statement that we can make is a statement about our own perceptions. This is a revolutionary idea, because it basically necessitates a major paradigm shift in our methods of inquiry into the nature of reality. Incidentally, this may be need to happen before we can make sense of quantum physics.

If you ask me, here’s a reason why physics has been at an impasse for the past hundred years. It’s because the materialist conception of reality is simply false. The data has been in on that one for quite some time. Look into Bell’s Theorem or Neumann’s Catastrophe of Infinite Regress if you don’t believe me.

Incidentally, Robert Anton Wilson was also the most insightful writer on the subject of quantum physics that I have ever read. He came to believe that the psychedelic experience and quantum physics were saying the same thing.

RAW uses a parable by a mathematician named J.W. Dunno to describe the problem.

A painter, who had escaped from the asylum to which he was (justly or unjustly) confined, decided to paint the field in which he found himself. Finished, he looked at the result and realized that something was missing: namely, himself and his canvas, which were part of the field. So he started over and painted himself and his canvas in the field. But, examining the results with philosophical analysis, he realized that something was still missing: namely, himself and his canvas on which he was painting himself and his canvas in the field. So he started a third time.. .and a fourth....ad infinitum.

He goes to say that physics, as well as linguistic, mathematics and psychology, had been stuck in a hall of mirror since Schrodinger demonstrated that quantum events are not "objective" in the Newtonian sense. He writes:

For fifty years since then, physicists have been struggling to build a system that will get them out of this Strange Loop. The results have been as funny as a Zen koan.

For instance, Niels Bohr proposed the Copenhagen Interpretation, which merely says, in the manner of Godel, that our equations do not describe the universe really. They describe the mental processes we have to put ourselves through to describe the universe.

After noting that most physicists want to find a way out of the aforementioned Strange Loop, Wilson states that it is quite impossible to do so, explaining that:

Dr. John von Neumann proved that there was no way out. This is technically known as Von Neumann's Catastrophe of the Infinite Regress, and it merely shows that any device that will get us out of the first Strange Loop (the Copenhagen collapse of objectivity) will just lead us into a second Strange Loop; and any way out of that will lead to an inexorable third Strange Loop; and so on, forever.

Everybody is still trying to refute von Neumann; but nobody has been successful.

As far as I am aware, there have not been any major breakthroughs in physics since Robert Anton Wilson wrote Prometheus Rising. Correct me if I’m wrong.

We’re still stuck in the hall of mirrors, because science just hasn’t figured out what mystics, shamans, yogis, and arhats have always known - the universe is conscious, and we are in an energetic relationship with it, and it responds to our thoughts, words, and actions in a way that we will never be able to fully understand.

The reason for this is simple. The eye cannot see itself, the sword cannot cut itself, and the mind cannot know itself.

Personally, I agree with the Gnostic perspective that matter comes from consciousness, and not the other way around, as most scientists seem to assume.

Personally, I believe that we are part of a super-organism that you could call Pachamama, or the Gaian mind. We are all microcosms of that super-organism, and through us, it is able to perceive itself.

We are part of a conscious energetic matrix, and as far as I can tell, the likeliest explanation for our existence is that we serve a role in perception, cognition, the interpretation of experience, and the transmission of energy. I suppose our function is analogous to brain cells, but we should take care not to take the metaphor too seriously. Anthropomorphizing super-organisms can cause a lot of problems.

RAW explains:

Simply accept that the universe is so structured that it can see itself, and that this selfreflexive arc is built into our frontal lobes, so that consciousness contains an infinite regress, and all we can do is make models of ourselves making models... Well, at that point, the only thing to do is relax and enjoy the show.

In my writing, I continually reiterate my belief that we create reality with our beliefs, and I’ll continue to hammer that point home, because I really, truly mean it.

I don’t just mean metaphorically. I mean neuro-physiologically. The reality that you perceive is a cognitive model created by your nervous system to allow you to sort through all the data available to your senses in order to allow you to navigate space-time and focus your attention in order to perform complex tasks.

Most people don’t know this, and I think the world would be a better place if they did. That’s why I think that teenagers should take LSD.

Really, the ultimate message of LSD is that you can create the reality that you want, and the sooner people learn that lesson, the better.

Many people experience reality as something that happens to them, or the setting for the activity of people, plants, and animals. These people tend not to consider inanimate objects to have any type of consciousness.

The truth, however, is very different. I know that Shakespeare said that all the world’s a stage, but I beg to differ. The way I see it, all the world’s a story.

Most of you won’t believe me when I say this, but reality is fictional. It’s a story that we tell ourselves about ourselves and the world around us. In a sense, reality is a spell that we are constantly casting.

Once you understand this, you understand that reality can be anything that you want it to be, and it’s your responsibility to make your life awesome.

If you can dream it, you can do it, because the dream is the doing and the doing is the dream. We are continually co-creating our reality together, and if we knew who and what we truly are, we could consciously dream a new world into being. Thus the psychedelic experience leads one to ask themselves an all-important question - “What reality do I want to create”?

Obviously, anyone with any sense is going to want to spend as much of their lives doing the things that they enjoy doing.

In other words, once you figure out how to use your mind to create the reality you want, it becomes obvious that the point of life is to enjoy it.

In the words of Kurt Vonnegut:

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.