Mark Twain said that the problem with people is not that they don’t know, but they know so much that isn’t true.
Much of what we think we know really is belief. We believe all kinds of things that aren’t true, and what we believe we make real, through the self-fulfilling prophecy. As a psychologist, I have seen this many times, and researchers have validated the self-fulfilling prophecy in numerous controlled studies.
This has far-reaching implications for every facet of life, but especially science, which is supposed to be objective. The purpose of science can be defined as providing us with an understanding (knowledge) of how everything in the universe functions. In order to do that, scientists are supposed to investigate with no bias that would exclude some aspect about the subject they are researching.
However, there is a principle of science that contradicts this. Scientists insist that we must be able to observe and/or measure the thing being investigated in order to study it, and so in psychology the study of consciousness has been excluded because you can do neither — observe or measure it. All you can observe and perhaps measure is behavior, so the very thing that psychology should be studying is off-limits.
When I began working on my doctorate, this bothered me a great deal. Ultimately, I came to realize that much of science is a sham, because they a priori reject any possibility of so-called psychic phenomena, including interventions by divine causes or anything labeled metaphysical.
The only branch of science to admit that consciousness might affect the things they study is quantum physics. Scientists like David Bohm realized that the consciousness of the scientist was affecting the behavior of particles being studied, and that we must account for this in our science.
Not all quantum physicists accept this. There are those who stubbornly insist that this is woo-woo and should not be allowed. I submit that this is contrary to the spirit of scientific inquiry. True inquiry must be open-minded, allowing for whatever truth emerges to be acceptable.
However, we are prisoners of our beliefs or paradigms. Once we believe something strongly, anything that seems to contradict that belief is either deleted from our perception or distorted so that the evidence supports our belief. For that reason, many scientists do not achieve valid understanding of the things they study.
In pharmaceuticals, the placebo effect is considered a contaminant of the study of whether a drug or treatment is effective. If the patient thinks a drug being administered is going to cure a disease, it often does, even though that “drug” was a pill containing no active ingredient at all.
In this, science is culpable. If the person’s belief actually effected the cure, then that tells us something about consciousness that the pharmaceutical companies don’t want to allow — that their drugs are unnecessary, because consciousness of the patient can cure any disease without the treatment.
It is time for a revolution in science. It is time to quit pretending that science is free of bias or prejudice and admit that we are not the objective discoverers of reality but creators of a reality based on beliefs of what it is. Or else science must become the open-minded inquiry it claims to be, and admit whatever evidence accrues in their studies without censoring it or trying to distort it to be consistent with their world view.
