A scientific paradigm shift: Taylor excerpt #2

Greg Taylor writes: The people of every time have tended to regard their science as the apotheosis of all knowledge, but time and again history has proven that not to be the case. In ancient times, we had the very sensible, to the eye of the observer, Ptolemaic system of astronomy which described the strange motions of the planets that revolved around the obvious center of the cosmos – Earth – only for it to be replaced by the heliocentric model of Copernicus. In the late 19th century, many scientists believed that the field of physics was almost complete: “The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered,” experimental physicist Albert A. Michelson announced in a speech in 1894, “and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.” A little more than a decade later, both quantum physics and relativity had completely upturned our models of how the cosmos works.

In his seminal book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, physicist Thomas Kuhn described these always incomplete and erroneous to some degree scientific frameworks that we live and work within at a certain time as paradigms, and the change from an outdated paradigm to a new one he named a paradigm shift. Within a paradigm, a certain model of ‘what reality is’ exists and dominates – and is somewhat self-supporting, as those embedded within the paradigm often believe that model to be the only possible ‘reality’, and thus reject alternative models and anomalies that don’t agree with that model. Over time, however, those anomalies accumulate, until a scientific revolution occurs that upends the previous model and supplants it with a new one.

In this essay, we will present a large set of anomalies that challenge the current scientific paradigm – in which physical matter is ‘reality’, consciousness is just a by-product of the brain, and we do not survive death – and suggest a new one.

The reason most people are not familiar with this mass of extremely convincing evidence is, as Kuhn noted, because ‘normal science’ is “predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like,” and it thus “often suppresses fundamental novelties” because they are subversive. So, in reviewing this evidence for the survival of consciousness beyond death, one of the highest hurdles that must be cleared is the bias of modern science’s negative opinion on the possibility. And one of the tactics used in suppressing the evidence, by skeptics invested in defending the current paradigm, is to only accept evidence from multiple replications of lab studies by scientists using ‘blind protocols’ (and, truthfully, even then they probably still wouldn’t accept it). However, this is not generally how science actually works when it comes to spontaneous, anomalous phenomena. In these areas, often it is eyewitness testimony that provides the most convincing and useful evidence. 

 

Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay may be downloaded with all its references at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.