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We’ve all made and are still making mistakes. No matter how educated we are.
Science is perhaps the mirror of our hidden individual mistakes that we then try to silly degrees to cover up or justify.
In my view, everything we know is dead wrong. Part of our construct of reality may have aspects of truth, like the hard laws of physics allowing us to build cars and send rockets on Mars; like Xray, EEG, MRI, allowing us to see inside the body and perform on the physical body surgery; like stopping the bleeding of an injured limb – but even there, not all surgery is successful and not all bleeding could be stopped because the complexity of the human body still eludes the science good with objects.
Science has made wonderful advances. It built aeroplanes to allow us air travel, it plays with atoms and molecules, analyses our cells out of our bodies and can cause them to become something else. But it didn’t make us fly, heal… What’s worst, most of its studies are kept secret, guarded jealously from the population it studies under the “national security” guise in case some lunatic may use it against us. And we buy this version, like we bought the whole scientific materialistic premise as if this is the only one with only one possible outcome. But imagine a population kept abreast and educated in schools, universities and by the mass-media of the subjects studied, as they happen. Not only those cherry picked to forward some hidden agenda, and in bite size obscuring the process.
Instead of having a society directed to debate the Kardashians, the size of a singer, how to become rich strategies, or simply hypnotised by Facebook, Tweeter, Tic Tock and so on, we’d have a society of scientists and debates about the fabric of our existence, not mindless scrolling of memes and daily war news.
There are fewer areas in which we get it wright than in what we get it wrong when it comes to human life conditions compared to the science of objects.
Trying to enlist the whole gamut of our perceptive errors will be a daunting task, more suitable for an encyclopaedic project than a simple article.
What I can however express, or at least try to encapsulate, is the fundamental perceptive error on which we base our assumptions and from where we conduct our lives.
The error that in order for our truth to be heard, we have to nullify the truth of others. That in order for our gifts and talents to be recognised, we have to position them or ourselves above those of others. And that’s why the evolution of machines is exponential compared to that of humans. If we were to take the example of how AI learns and develops at such frightening speed, we’d see that is open to learn from everything and everyone. It takes all the information available, mimics it, runs it, makes it its own, and then transcends it. Because is smart enough to have learned from its creators what they didn’t even know it taught it – to emulate the inherent evolutionary pattern in humans, which implies transcendence of yesterday’s state and knowledge.
If AI will argue and engage in hours, years long debates on a subject, it will never go anywhere – much like us. The only thing will develop will be the strategy of argumentation and debate to the point of annihilating the opposed point of view faster. Much like our science today with its “fake news” and hidden “fact checkers” self-appointed authority to whom nobody has access to fact check their fact checking.
Why just that? Because its perception, its computational model would be conditioned by how the context of interacting was framed: win the debate; destroy the opposing views, instead of learning from them.
If we’d adopt the AI’s deep learning approach in human sciences, allowing every interaction to teach us something new, we’d make quantum leaps in our discoveries.
And here’s a question everybody should ponder on: When did we decide that knowledge can be accessed only from books and formal academic teachings? Who gave the right to a very small segment of the population self-appointed as “truth keepers” to cherry-pick the subjects to be studied and taught to the masses? More importantly, who gave them the right to exclude those studying outside their controlled curricula from being part of the scientific endeavour of bettering humankind?
The most fundamental human error when it comes to thinking and learning comes exactly from those who put themselves on a pedestal as though gurus: the teachers, the scientists, the religious leaders… When we look at the recent behaviour of science, it has a frightening similarity with a cult. Pre-emptive well-crafted counterarguments deployed against the “non-believers” in its gospel or lieders, estrangement from family members and friends who don’t believe in it” (vaxers-antivaxers), one sided narrative to be taken on faith and ostracization of those who dare challenge the findings or demanding access to the process of their “discoveries”…
We see the same antagonistic approach in therapy. Only this or that model of thinking and approaching human toil is “accredited”. There are over 500 types of therapies, but we are still 8+ billion humans. The classic forms developed hundreds of years ago are the representation of those times and mores, their collective beliefs. The human was very much a Guinea pig, a lab rat on which different hypothesis were tried – from bloodletting to lobotomy. The infamous practices were left behind, but not the theories.
And even the new wave of modern therapies is not exempt from this process of elimination of competition. All are a mixture of eastern philosophy and ancient spiritual practices on which “scientifically sounding” fanciful names were added. Those returning from their walkabouts or spiritual monastic retreats in exotic places, and lucky enough to have a position granting them funding for a research project on their newly discovered wisdom, have passed the “evidence-based” test. The fact that all other wisdom passed the millennia-long evidence-based test of those practicing it is inconsequential in the eyes of “reputed science” and its accrediting board.
Buddha himself will not pass their test, since he didn’t have 2 years of seeing a psychologist under which to conduct his personal development, didn’t have supervision before and after sharing his discoveries until he was deemed “fit for practice” (how can somebody supervise an inventor or a breakthrough idea is till beyond my understanding, but I digress); didn’t have the hundreds of hours of hand-picked unchallengeable theories learned from an “accredited institution”.
In today’s strict accreditation criteria, he will be highly unqualified to teach mindfulness, work with people suffering from spiritual crisis manifested in emotional pain, mental anguish, and physical illness. Just like Jesus would be unqualified and perhaps sued for practicing positive psychology without a licence. And yet, the new wave therapies are based on their teachings and other intuitive scientists like them, bastardised in a cunning way under different names to discourage any paternity test challenge.
But what if we can gain knowledge in other ways, like we all did before the books and reading were introduced? After all, someone must have had access to some knowledge to be able to invent the alphabet, the reading, the writing, the ink, then the process to preserve them – the papyrus, the printed books. Before Aurel Vlaicu, the Wright Brothers, Tesla, Edison, and so on, there was no school teaching the science of how to invent them. Somebody had access to a different field of knowledge, brought it into existence to humans, from which then better models evolved.
We err when we assume that knowledge can be attained only from school, academia, religion, and that only those within their walls hold access to it.
An enlightened being can know in a fragment of a second what all the scientists of this world together knew, and what they didn’t. All discoveries are the fruit of this kind of intuitive knowledge, of inner tuition, of an access to a higher sphere which even Einstein declared owe for. Beethoven heard the music in his mind before composing it, even if he was deaf.
All great discoveries and remarkable human advancements, including different artistic forms of expression, are those who broke the pattern of the generally accepted reality. Without them, we will still be in the stone age. And yet, today, as ever, they are the ones most fervently opposed, ridiculed, discredited and outcasted. It took us generations before they were accepted because the “truth keepers” had to preserve their position, consequences be damned.
We err in everything. The only difference is that today, with the help of the technological advancements, we err faster. And faster we also receive the recompense of our deeds.
Today’s teachings come no longer from genuine wisdom and original, daring, forward forging ideas. Neither do the “new therapies”. And learning is only a mirror of teaching – superficial and self-preserving with a self-aggrandising vista for aspiration.
Original thinking, alas, thinking altogether has fallen so deeply in desuetude that is no wonder we’ll be soon outsmarted by machines. Because machines don’t have an ego and don’t destroy those who know more, but those who know less!
© Gratiela Rosu – Founder of CWS Mental Health Coaching, Spiritual & Philosophical Counselling, Author of 5 Transformative Psychology and Transcendental Poetry books.
