I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
– Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) from “Ozymandias” (1817)
New Scientist is a British popular science magazine. It’s charming and plucky and delightful in the way that a blind and deaf friend of yours might be: not entirely functioning, true, but always determined despite its limitations to do its utmost best. I read New Scientist always knowing that if only those earnest but blind-and-deaf scientists could see and hear what I can see and hear, they would be running rings around me!
This sense I often have that my beloved little mag that tries so hard could do wonders if only it could properly function was triggered in force by its November 20th edition. The title was simply, “Why?” And on its cover it asked thirteen questions that ranged from Why do we exist? And Why is there something and not nothing? Down to Why are we conscious? Why does time only move forward? and Why is the universe just right? If I had been an editor, I also would have wanted to ask Why is there all this dark matter and dark energy? But perhaps that question is still beyond the pale, when there isn’t yet a reasonable matter-based approach to answering it.
Of course, the scientists who write for New Scientist are neither blind nor deaf. They are just self-handicapped by their decision to work as part of the deliberately blind-and-deaf scientific research community. For them to fill that role requires, even to this day, that they obey the fundamental dogma of materialism; and that means that every popular-science publication is still a humor magazine. To read serious scientific articles and repeatedly come across problem after problem that even I can solve is laughable! But still, those of us who are free to do open-minded research have been able to do a great deal of building on what little the dogma-hobbled mainstream research scientists have been allowed to learn. And also, of course, this past century has been a heyday of matter-based technological research, which has had a fabulous hundred-year run. Only look at the fact that billionaires can now confidently talk about colonizing Mars, and you know that matter-based technology is indeed the science of the future!
But those who have chosen to chase Nobel Prizes as research physicists and astronomers have had a pretty dismal century. The materialist dogma that was imposed on them just over a hundred years ago has reduced them to doing the equivalent of trying to study just the walls and floor of a room, having had the ceiling declared off-limits because it is composed of a material which arbitrarily they are not allowed to see. And then, if they hope to make a living, they must stolidly spend their entire careers in attempting to discover some non-ceiling source for all that water on the floor. Therefore, we get scientists who are repeatedly forced to scratch their heads over inexplicable findings, like a universe that keeps behaving nonsensically.
Just over a hundred years ago, the university departments and the peer-reviewed journals chose to codify into a dogma what had been an informal separation between material and non-material fields of inquiry going back as far as Plato and Aristotle. They instituted “the scientific dogma of materialism.” And yes, at the time you could find those words in print. Adopting a dogma made sense, of course, back twenty-five hundred years ago, when people were first trying to separate out their earliest attempts to understand the material world without reference to the prehistoric religions that humans had invented as a bulwark against their superstitious fears. Back then, nothing was understandable and everything was magical, and placating the gods that we ourselves had created was our one slender hope against the howling dark. But then in the 1600s came the dawning of the Age of Enlightenment, which was an intellectual and philosophical movement that gave birth to a flowering of good ideas as varied as modern scientific inquiry and our American Declaration of Independence.
The answers that New Scientist‘s contributors offered to its thirteen questions in that November edition are as pathetic as you might expect them to be. In fact, you or I could largely answer most of those cover questions with one word:
CONSCIOUSNESS
If the editors had allowed the scientists trying to answer those thirteen questions to consider consciousness as the base creative force, then most of their questions would have been well answered. In perfect fact, it’s all extraordinary! Discovering the primary role of consciousness feels like turning on every light. You free scientists to study consciousness, and suddenly even a lot of seemingly unrelated phenomena begin to fit together and make sense. But when you insist that what is obviously primary and pre-existing must be just an artifact of the human brain, you create nonsense on a massive scale. Our dear New Scientist has so completely confused itself that it cannot even define consciousness. It calls it “something it is like to be,” which somehow arises in the brain. New Scientist has trouble defining reality, too, which ought to be more of a red-flag to the magazine itself than it seems to be.
How is it possible that there still is no working scientist in the Western world who is able to grasp how deadly stupid it is for them to handicap their work this way?
In point of fact, that century-old materialist dogma has already done humankind incalculable harm. It’s one thing for scientists to have to keep fudging their supposed cosmological “constants”. But to this day, their dogma requires that our minds must die when our bodies die, so scientists impose a ghoulish fatalism on all of humankind that turns out to be an outright lie. It even can be seen to be the likely cause of most of what is wrong with the modern world. Do you think that’s a stretch? We’ll talk about it next week.
And still, the scientific community continues to actively fight the possibility that human life might continue after our bodies die! As recently as 2016, New Scientist could do a whole special issue on death without considering the possibility that anything might follow it. And in 2020, it did an article suggesting that the only kind of immortality that ever might be possible would require artificially preserving some aspects of a dead person’s personality. Bill Nye, the reputed Science Guy, has just weighed in heavily against the possibility of an afterlife, even despite the fact that any actual scientist could tell him that it is impossible to prove a negative.
It’s time to call out and humiliate all this scientific nonsense. Researchers working for the past fifty years with a trove of abundant and consistent evidence have discovered with abject certainty not just that human minds are eternal, but also in complete detail not only what happens at death, but also where it happens, why it happens, and how it happens. We know a thousand times more about life after death than mainstream scientists know about black holes, non-terrestrial planets, and all the suns in the universe combined; and the only reason why the scientific community is ignorant of all this good evidence is its flat refusal to look at it. They were wrong to start this game a hundred years ago. At this point, they are worse than wrong: they are purveyors of evil as they continue to fight for the lie in the face of so much evidence that a bald-faced lie is what it is. The fact that after a hundred years there is no graceful way to end the scientific love affair with materialism doesn’t change the fact that it must end now.
But it didn’t have to turn out this way. That dogma was a bad idea, right from the start! Some of the greatest scientific thinkers of the twentieth century knew or strongly suspected that quantum mechanics had revealed that there was a great deal more to reality than what a study of matter alone could tell us. And they said so! If only the wisdom of our greatest scientists had been given even passing consideration!
In 1931 Max Planck said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
And Nikola Tesla wisely said, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”
What the scientific gatekeepers should have done was to skip all their faculty-lounge fantasies and firmly keep their fingers off the scale! Why were they so afraid to allow an open debate in the arena of ideas? Let all the various ideas about consciousness, death and the afterlife, whether there might be some sort of creator, and whatever humanity truly is gradually sort themselves out with the help of the greatest scientific minds, now immersed in research and free of all constraints. Had they just let that happen, we could as a whole have enjoyed a very productive and not a largely wasted century. Every idea in the end must rise or fall on its actual merits alone! This hundred-year detour into the scientific weeds didn’t have to happen. Eventually the truth was always going to win. And the longer they still wait to start to open their own minds and clear their consciences, the worse their reckoning will be.
Just as a side note, I have never before disputed Thomas’s frame-verse choices, but I was shocked by this one. Humiliating the pretentious is not our style! But he said that Shelley wrote his poem for precisely this situation, as a mirror for fools who think they can impose their self-important ignorance on the world. I suppose that to people who are still alive but are being summarily dismissed as dead, this fight with modern scientific lying about death might feel like a personal grievance.
I blurted to him, “What? Do you know Shelley personally?” After all, they were earthly contemporaries! He just smiled.
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
– Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) from “Ozymandias” (1817)