Obviously Story

Controls, Loopholeism and the Obviously Story

By John Taylor; 14 January, 2006

My friend, though nominally an Anglican, holds to anti-religious, New
Age style beliefs. He strongly believes in meditation and the power of
consciousness. I try to narrow him down as to what he means by
consciousness, but I cannot. Consciousness is everything and it is
nothing. Fine. This week he handed this new book from the Port
Colbourne library to me for my evaluation, "Power vs. Force" by Dr.
David Hawkins. Here is a capsule summary, taken from Hawkins' website,
of what this good doctor believes,

"All human endeavor has the common goal of understanding or
influencing human experience. To this end, man has developed numerous
descriptive and analytical disciplines: Morality, Philosophy,
Psychology, and so on....Regardless what branch of inquiry one starts
from - philosophy, political theory, theology-all avenues of
investigation eventually converge at a common meeting point: the quest
for an organized understanding of the nature of pure consciousness..."

Or perhaps more to the point, enquiry is a quest for understanding of
what these people mean by consciousness. Hawkins thesis in this book
is that you can reliably answer any "yes or no" question by performing
a simple experiment, a parlor trick that I remember playing in class
as a pupil in grade school. You ask the test subject to hold out an
arm; if the answer to the question is "yes," the arm will be strong,
stiff, immoveable. If no, the contiuum of consciousness will be
disturbed and the subject will be mysteriously weakened. To listen to
Hawkins the boldness and simplicity of this idea is a sign of genius.
Lest there be a shadow of doubt about this, he reassures the reader:

"To explain that which is simple can be difficult indeed. Much of this
book is devoted to the process of making the simple obvious. If we can
understand even one simple thing in depth, we will have greatly
expanded our capacity for comprehending the nature of the universe and
life itself."

This reminds me of Silvie's "Obviously Story," which she told to
Thomas and myself on the road to Niagara Falls a couple of weeks ago.
She has become story obsessed in recent weeks and whenever we wonder
where she is we know to look down in Grampa's basement apartment where
she will inevitably be composing another story on his computer. Her
Obvious Story, though annoying after a while and completely lacking a
middle, much less an end, is surely her most original work to date.
Here is how it went:

"One day there obviously was this obvious bluebird who obviously got
out of bed one morning and obviously looked outside at the sun and
said, "Obviously it is going to be an obviously sunny day today..."

The story went on and on without apparent letup until it seemed like
it was going to take us right up into the very spray of the falls. At
last I broke in and asked her if she knew what "obvious" means and she
answered, "Yes, obviously." What does it mean then? Her answer was,
shall we say, somewhat at variance with the dictionary definition. But
that did not at all take away from the value of Silvie's story.

Unfortunately, his not knowing or recognizing the definition of words
like "science" and "consciousness" does take away from the story told
by Hawkin -- not to be confused with Hawking, Stephen, who is a real
scientist who made real discoveries -- nor is Silvie raking in eight
hundred dollars for current seminars and five hundred dollars for
videos of past seminars plying her expertise. Not that I deny this
doctor's ability to heal spiritually, Baha'is accept that some people
have a gift of healing and, if you accept what Hawkin says about his
medical career, he has an amazing ability to cure even catatonics by
communing with their spirits. Unfortunately, experts, even experts in
less mysterious disciplines than faith healing, cannot reliably judge
where their own expertise loses viability. Hawkin is a rather extreme
example of this. Oh for a drop of humility!

According to Hawkin this simple and obvious straight-arm divination
technique will correctly answer any yes or no question in the world.
If that is so, why cannot someone with a few dollars to burn divine
the right stock or the right lottery number and become an instant
millionaire? There had to be a catch. Reading the prefaces and
introduction to the book superficially, no refutation sprang
immediately to mind. So I Googled his name and, no doubt by design,
only sympathetic material popped up. I got around that in seconds by
including the word "skeptical" in my keyword phrase. The Skeptical
Enquirer is a very useful scientific watchdog against this kind of
quackery, and more than enough material welled up from my browser and
spilled out of my monitor and onto the floor around my chair.

I will not bore you with the long history of dowsing and such
divination systems, or go into why they seem to work but do not. They
always mysteriously disappear as soon as you apply the Sine Qua Non of
the scientific method, the control, in this case the double blind
control. Hawkin's technique, suffice to say, is not new. A term
covering both dowsing and the "straight-arm" technique was devised by
William James way back in the 19th Century: "ideomotor based systems."
In this phenomenon peoples' nervous system somehow responds to subtle
cues from the unconscious. Unfortunately the direction pointed to by
this "consciousness" is not exactly reliable.

I found the following reflections on a personal encounter with the
psychology of these scientific poseurs both affecting and interesting,
though, and will quote some of them here. To get the whole story, go
to the "Quackwatch" website. Our story picks up just after double
blind test results utterly blew out of the water an attempt by two
chiropractors to demonstrate the "weak or strong straight arm"
ideomotor divination technique.

"When these results were announced, the head chiropractor turned to me
and said, "You see, that is why we never do double-blind testing
anymore. It never works!" At first I thought he was joking. It turned
it out he was quite serious. Since he "knew" that applied kinesiology
works, and the best scientific method shows that it does not work,
then -- in his mind -- there must be something wrong with the
scientific method. This is both a form of loopholism as well as an
illustration of what I call the plea for special dispensation. Many
pseudo- and fringe-scientists often react to the failure of science to
confirm their prized beliefs, not by gracefully accepting the
possibility that they were wrong, but by arguing that science is
defective.
"Another variation of this special dispensation was illustrated by the
reaction of a dowser that Barry Beyerstein and I tested on an edition
of the television program Scientific American Frontiers, hosted by
Alan Alda. The dowser had agreed in advance to a double-blind test
that he felt would prove his powers, but failed the test. Mr. Alda
felt some compassion for this dowser, and discussed the failure with
him. The dowser admitted he was disappointed but he felt that the
outcome simply revealed that science had not yet matured to the point
where it could cope with dowsing."
(http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/ideomotor.html)

It is amazing that even with 12 years of primary and secondary
education concentrating on assiduous training in mathematics and
science that so many still delude themselves with superstitious
nonsense. The main criterion of science, the controled trial, is laid
out in the first book of Daniel. It is nothing new, nothing obscure.
The double blind control is far more simple and obvious to anyone
familiar with the basics of science than such expensive quasi-science
and non-evidence based medicine, yet we prefer to ignore it. So many
good minds, so much time so many billions of dollars wasted by wilful
ignorance. When I was young there was an excuse to live in denial
because refutations were hard to find. When I was 17 years old I was
deluded by Ayn Rand's quasi-scientific philosophy and I had to comb
through shelves of library books to find a convincing refutation. But
how long did it take me yesterday to find and read a detailed
refutation of Hawkin? About twenty minutes with the ubiquitous Google
search engine. There are no excuses anymore.

If science is in this bad state, what hope is there for religion? In
public education systems we are lucky to have one course on world
religions throughout our schooling. Is it any wonder that the basics
of faith are so poorly understood? Look at this poor dowser, he
clearly wants to believe, and both religion and science are failing
him as much as he is failing them. It is so important for us all to be
clear on what the criteria of evidence are for religion.

Religion and faith are by definition untestable by science and
objective reason but that does not mean there is no testing involved.
Some criteria for faith discoveries are good moral effects, words not
ending in words but in action, love for the general good, an
appreciation of holism, and the desire constantly to ask for more
evidence, to long for more questioning. Faith is the control of
controls, it prompts us to ask: What is the control for my faith
reflection? What is the double blind test for my faith? A good example
of such an evidence-based faith control is the Gayatri Mantra that we
looked at yesterday. Every male Hindu upon coming of age memorizes
this:

"Let us bring our minds to rest in the glory of the divine truth (or
sun). May truth inspire our reflection." (Introducing Hinduism, p. 13)

Turn your mind and your reflections to truth and you see truth work,
you both feel and act enlightened. And mostly, you long for more
enlightenment, you want to self criticize to better yourself. You love
light and turn to it incessantly. How does that help? Well, what
happens when it is dark, when there is no sun? We bang into each
other, or we get lost. When it is bright we find our way and learn to
unite. Hence the Master's faith criterion, unity.

"Therefore unity is the essential truth of religion and when so
understood embraces all the virtues of the human world." (Abdu'l-Baha,
Baha'i World Faith, 245)

Another criterion of evidence based faith is virtue. In ethics with
Alistaire McIntyre and so-called Virtue Theory there is a growing
understanding of the value of faith in forming virtue and the value of
virtue in forming society. If not for subjectivity, there would be no
sociology. The Master talked about this too.

"We must strive with energies of heart, soul and mind to develop and
manifest the perfections and virtues latent within the realities of
the phenomenal world, for the human reality may be compared to a seed.
If we sow the seed, a mighty tree appears from it. The virtues of the
seed are revealed in the tree; it puts forth branches, leaves,
blossoms, and produces fruits. All these virtues were hidden and
potential in the seed. Through the blessing and bounty of cultivation
these virtues became apparent. Similarly the merciful God our creator
has deposited within human realities certain virtues latent and
potential. Through education and culture, these virtues deposited by
the loving God will become apparent in the human reality even as the
unfoldment of the tree from within the germinating seed."
(Abdu'l-Baha, Baha'i World Faith, 267)

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com