One of the creepiest things I have read in awhile is an article about someone who intends to create a powerful artificial intelligence and build a new religion around it. Good grief, what would be the point of that? It’s as if science has at last achieved a religious singularity! The fact that human religions create their own gods – and it never happens the other way around – is now being not only acknowledged, but celebrated.
Of course, this foolishness is just a logical extension of a current scientific pursuit. The search for ways to make human beings physically immortal is The Next Big Thing! Although it’s hard to see why anyone would want to be immortal now, when before long every human being is going to be a slave to conscious killer robots. It turns out, too, that even what seems to you and me to be genuine love is just a matter-based illusion that human beings evolved to experience because it enhances reproductive success. And perhaps worst of all, this scientific obsession with believing that the brain must generate consciousness is tying people in knots with the fear that advances in artificial intelligence are drawing us closer to the day when a machine configured to mimic a human being inevitably will develop consciousness, and soon thereafter our species will end at the hands of a smarter and stronger robot army.
Every one of these scenarios is nonsense. The human brain does
not generate consciousness. Instead, consciousness is the source of all matter, including what makes up your physical brain! This obvious truth seems at last to be dawning on a few more open-minded scientists, but their problem is that a century’s research has been based on the absolute certainty that the brain must somehow generate consciousness. By now, scientists are trying hard not to discover the truth about consciousness, since sadly that truth might threaten their careers. They are hoping not to rock the scientific boat until at least the day their own kids finish college.
So since the scientific stonewalling continues, it is time for us to say this bluntly. Mainstream science has allowed its materialist dogma to destroy whatever was left of the whole field of scientific inquiry. Not a single major scientific
discovery will be possible, ever again, until the scientific community accepts two facts:
- Any discipline that is based on a “dogma” is really just one more religion. It is no longer the pursuit of any kind of truth.
- The scientific insistence that consciousness cannot exist apart from the brain is an idiocy that by now has distorted every aspect of scientific inquiry.
That second insight is a gift from one of the best living scientific minds, the irrepressible Alex Tsakiris of Skeptiko.com. Alex is something of a legend in the field of consciousness research. He is a free-thinker who has spent the past decade in an open-minded search for the truth, interviewing eminent scientists and NDE experiencers and pretty much everyone in between. Like me, Alex began with a broader quest to understand what actually is going on, and his research has led him to where mine has led
me: to the realization that Max Planck was right. Alex’s book, Why Science is Wrong… About Almost Everything, nails it!
Dr. Planck, the winner of the 1918 Nobel Prize in physics and the revered father of quantum mechanics, left us with the gigantic insight that consciousness underlies everything. He said in 1931, “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.”
But as Alex and I have independently realized, the core problem with mainstream science is that it is stuck with the fallacious notion that reality is only material. It is as if for the entire past century we have been telling scientists that they can investigate the riddle of how this water-puddle keeps reappearing on the floor. Have at it! Study the floor and the walls, but it is against protocols for you to look at the ceiling.
This need to avoid understanding consciousness while assuming it must be generated by the brain has by now built major false assumptions into every aspect of scientific inquiry. As Alex Tsakiris says in his groundbreaking book, “the problem science has with consciousness has an impact on every aspect of science-as-we-know-it.”
And Alex shares with us a gigantic insight that seems to be dawning on scientists now, too – the fact that the whole notion of achieving scientific proof of anything is in itself a myth. All that we ever can find is evidence that this or that theory is on the right track, but even the theory of gravity has to be seen to be still just a theory. The authors of the article linked above point out that “No matter how good our measurements and observations are, there’s a limit to how good they are. We also can’t observe or measure everything.
Even if the Universe weren’t subject to the fundamental quantum rules that govern it, along with all its inherent uncertainty, it wouldn’t be possible to measure every state of every particle under every condition all the time.” And of course, the added fact that consciousness is fundamental adds a factor of uncertainty to the results of every bit of scientific research, since the basic consciousness that Dr. Planck discovered really can at any time alter anything. So in fact, scientists are about to discover that no definitive measurements are possible! Even worse, Dr. Planck tweaked the stubborn materialist scientists of his day by adding that “We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up to now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future.” You can almost hear him chortling as he wrote those words!
The problem with modern mainstream science is that it is sadly in its death-throes. Its adherence to materialism keeps it even now from realizing that the scientific method is going to need a complete redesign if further progress is ever to be made. Oddly, scientists seem to feel to this day that they are battling just religious dogmas, when in fact modern mainstream religions are as much in the clueless weeds as is mainstream science. Tragically, all that mainstream science is battling in the twenty-first century is humanity’s need to stop clinging to dogmas and begin to seek and find some objective truths.







































