Science Data | The Poesie of Igor Goldkind

Mysticism: The Phenomenology of Truth

The Church of Science makes no philosophical claim to ‘Truth’ but instead provides useful approximations based on its ongoing peer-review methodology. What is reliable information by way of science is the result of similar enough results from replicated experiments that are strictly controlled and abide by the parameters established by a long succession of scientists. Their hand-me-down story is called epistemology.

The Church of Science makes no philosophical claim to ‘Truth’ but instead provides useful approximations based on its ongoing peer-review methodology. What is reliable information by way of science is the result of similar enough results from replicated experiments that are strictly controlled and abide by the parameters established by a long succession of scientists. Their hand-me-down story is called epistemology.

In the end, all it tells us is that under such and such of circumstances, it is most likely that these results will be achieved regardless of who you are or where you are as long as you abide by the parameters of the experiment. This consistency of results is what allows us to make engineering choices based on scientific ‘truths’. It also comprises the institutionality of these estimations into the moneyed corridors of academia and research facilities. If Science is the ideology then Engineering is the practice.

When people say they believe in scientific ‘fact’, they usually mean engineering applications of the science. No one bothers to question the science behind the combustion engine as long as their car runs reliably. And as long as a biochemical can be turned over for profit.

But the key phrase here is ‘approximations of truth’. More Absolute truths, such as the understanding of ourselves and the objects in themselves requires a different kind of perspective outside of the scientific framework. One in which the observer and the point of observation is taken into account in the observation.

This involves a separate methodology as structured as scientific methods but with different aims and thus different kinds of conclusions. The overlooked discipline is that of Phenomenology, coined by the mathematical genius turned philosopher and teacher of the great Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl.
Husserl believed that our understanding of phenomena was completely based on our disposition towards the apperception (or the incorporation of our perceptions into our existing body of knowledge i.e. our understanding of the perception).

Although a mathematician, this view of truth as being determined in the perception of the observer as much as the thing-in-itself (which can never be truly perceived apart from its set of traits and characteristics) This principle is a natural extension of Kant’s Idealism, for which Time and Space are far from objective physical phenomena and more akin to categories of perception and apperception. In effect, shared psychological states of awareness and their accounts.

This is precisely where Phenomenology collides with post-Modernism, Einsteinian physics (Relativity) and Freudian mapping of the unconscious (the Unconscious being simply everything that we don’t know at any given moment or did know but forgot).

This post-modern relativism owes a great deal to the mystical and alchemic traditions to which it shares a common ancestry with science. Science after all, derived from mystical and alchemic experimentations by mainly monks (of a different church), who upon separating from the spiritualism of the Church, (thanks to that first and great secular martyr, Giordano Bruno), continued to pursue their quest for god’s Truth. That which could be perceived, measured and recorded.

Mysticism (unlike Spiritualism), is not superstitious; rather it engages with the world in pursuit of solving mysteries unknown and unsolvable by science. Mysticism poses questions science would never bother to ask and then attempts to answer them. Metaphysical questions such as ‘Who am I?’ outside of my name and a social construct? Why am I here and who really lies behind the many masks that I wear and why do I wear them in the first place?

Why is there this world or reality rather than another?

Psychoanalysis and Psychology at their best are not sciences at all, they are merely methodical enquiries into the nature of the mind (although the current bias towards quantifiable and numerical conclusions might make one think otherwise). They are a result of mystical enquiries into the nature of the mind and how it shapes our most intimate and fundamental perceptions of the world we live in; the space in time we briefly occupy before dying. Medicine is yet another example of a supposed science that in fact is based on a field of knowledge that predates scientific methodology.

Nor is mathematics strictly speaking a science; yet it is by far more predictive of the unknown and un-experienced than science could ever hope to be.
This issue is a is crucial in the face of the current data-fixation of human experience as well as the current bias of valuing quantifiable truths over qualifiable ones. Just because you can count something accurately doesn’t mean you understand it better. Or can better predict what happens next.

How Phenomenology Works

The truth is never in the data as such, it’s in the interpretation of the data, as long as you’re perceptive enough to factor in the interpreter. Human judgement is not quantifiable and yet it is the seat of all interpretation. We are living in a world of intermediaries of the truth, much as Luther rejected the filters of the Catholic Chruch and the Vatican for the sake of a direct, unmediated connection to God, we are all also in the position to understand our reality, our lives and our existence unfiltered by data driven conveption, but by our direct experience of the subjective lives that we lead.

There is the true path of Mysticism, the parent of Science.