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SCIENCE IN DENIAL
Science is essentially an activity involved in investigating physical reality. This investigative process has been dominated for the past 200 years by a technologically oriented developing Western society. The Western scientific world view has become content with detailed description. All science has been able to do is to describe parts of reality and abstract out and copy those aspects that are useful in developing Western technology. Focusing on "how" things are and assuming a random accidental process while denying there is any "why," meaning and purpose has been stricken from the scientific world view.
The academic game: Physical reality has been taught in institutional halls of learning as being essentially a mechanical nonliving universe like a giant machine. This cold detached approach to investigating physical reality has become so entrenched in higher institutions of learning that it has become a game scientists have been taught to play, the rules of which they teach each new set of graduate students they initiate. One simply cannot break these rules without threat of being kicked out of the game.
Removing the blinders: Current day science has effectively blinded itself to seeing the true nature of a living experiential reality. The old investigative rules have to be broken because they no longer serve us. A new scientific model of physical reality is slowly emerging. A participatory model in which all is alive. A model that sees consciousness as intrinsic to nature. An investigative model recognizing and accepting the fact that living entities and the whole of reality exhibit self-reference, perception, and intelligence. Without perception of self and surroundings and without intelligent use of that information, physical reality could not exist.
UNENDING DYNAMIC FLOW
Knowing is a process. Knowing becomes manifest in the experience, in the activity. In the holistic view, things are doing, the organism is causal to itself, it has aliveness. An organism is always becoming. In order to be true to its own nature, the organism has to change and transform constantly. The basic property of physical reality is dynamic. We shall never understand life through looking at the fixed shape; the single leaf or flower is only a mile stone in a moment of the plant's development, a visible product left by life flowing on.
Mechanisms: The problem with the mechanistic science view is that it freeze-frames a moment in a dynamic process and then confuses the issue by dividing this static form into its parts. Scientists are notorious for believing nature to emulate our latest technological inventions. Mechanistic oriented scientists tend to ignore the fact that a mechanism is, by definition, the construction of an inventor, and therefore cannot exist as a natural entity. Mechanisms are not self-referential and cannot understand themselves as wholes. While mechanisms depend on their inventors for maintenance, repair, and replenishment, living organism maintain their continuity through a continuous renewal or exchange of information and materials within and between all their parts. If you walk away from a mechanism, you expect that it will not change since machinery is not likely to improve itself in your absence. On the other hand, if you leave a friend or other living entity, you hope it keeps changing in your absence, lest it die.
Hindrances: The biological sciences are limited by constraints imposed by the mechanic orientation of the physical sciences. Many properties and characteristics of living forms that surface in the biological sciences cannot be reduced to the mechanics of the physical sciences. Organisms are not billiard balls knocked about by random mutation and shaped by natural selection. They are self-organizing processes.
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