Walkie-Talkie #12 ‘What Can Molehills Teach Us About Science and Our Paradigm?’
- filipvk
- 20 hours ago
- 2 min read
Dear friends,
In this Walkie-Talkie number twelve, I find myself back in the sculpture park near Antwerp, and I invite you on a little thought exercise, inspired by the many molehills scattered across the park's lawn, betraying the presence of our little underground friends.
In the first part, I explain how we can see molehills, and especially our rather fruitless battle against them, as a good analogy for our constant attempts to control nature and the desperate struggle to protect our ‘designer nature’ from all kinds of disturbances. But in doing so, we forget that every ‘intruder’ into our order is a vital link in the living ecosystems of which we ourselves are also a part – including the little moles, as well as the insects and ‘weeds’ that we are so keen to eradicate in our industrial agriculture.
But we can go a step further: what if we see the neatly maintained lawn as a metaphor for our current worldview (that of materialism, see the previous Walkie-Talkie 11). We collectively try our best to protect that lawn from disturbances, because the neat, flat grass gives us peace of mind and the feeling that we understand and control the world.
The molehills that pop up everywhere can then be seen as the many data points that appear in multiple branches of science, data points that increasingly indicate that this materialistic worldview is actually unsustainable.
Empirical results are popping up everywhere that thoroughly disrupt the neat “lawn” of contemporary materialistic dogmas (because that's what they are), just like the moles that have upset this neat lawn in the sculpture park.
Whether it is evolutionary biology, quantum biology, neuroscience, the study of consciousness, quantum physics, or the study of ESP phenomena (Extra Sensory Perception), data is emerging everywhere that radically contradicts the notion of materialism and points in the direction of a new worldview in which consciousness becomes an ontological basis for reality. A worldview in which matter is not the only thing that really exists, and in which forces other than just the measurable elementary physical forces may also be at work.
But doesn't science take these new data points into account? Not really, and science philosopher Thomas S. Kuhn explained why in the last century.
In his classic standard work on the philosophy of science, ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ from 1962, Kuhn explained how the scientific community tends to unite around a generally accepted paradigm and rather defend it against new data that threaten that paradigm. This continues until the amount of new data becomes so overwhelming that a kind of “dam burst” and rapid upheaval, or “paradigm shift,” follows.
And this is what currently awaits us: a rapid and, in all likelihood, enormous paradigm shift that will radically change our view of the world. This shift will also enable us to enter into a new relationship with our environment, as this new paradigm will allow us to look at ourselves and the world in a whole new way.
Thank you for joining me on this walk, and see you in the next episode.
All the best,
Filip
