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The Center of the Universe
William S. Moxley
Foreword
It is perfectly natural that man himself should
be the most unintelligible part of the universe. |
Alan Watts |
MAN HIMSELF is the last frontier. The so-called
hard sciences, the sciences dealing with objects, atoms and
molecules to stars and galaxies, or with numbers, energies,
fields and innumerable abstractions, are nearing a degree of
perfection unimagined in the wildest fantasies of the medieval
alchemists. Yet sciences dealing with man himself, despite the
confident tomes warping the shelves of our libraries and
bookstores, remain in a state of rapid evolution, to put it
kindly. There are even fundamental differences of opinion as to
why the study of humankind is so difficult.
Nowhere among the sciences of man do we find
controversy and confusion more rampant than in the study of the
mind. Some, who profess to study only the hardest of objective
facts, have proposed that the mind is nothing but a computer
program. Another school of thought would eliminate mind
altogether. For several decades the academic tyranny of
Behaviorism made it practically obscene even to mention such
words as consciousness, belief, intention or free will in a
scientific journal, a state of affairs which stifled progress in
psychology for half a century. Now it seems, as Jimmy Durante was
fond of remarking, "everybody wants ta' get inta' de
act." Several top-rate books and a great many articles have
recently appeared, taking up such subjects with a vigor typical
of the aftermath of some prohibition or repression, in this case
a repression of ideas whose development in the work of such
pioneers as William James came to a halt at the beginning of the
20th Century.
It is not my intention to berate the many
authors and researchers who have struggled with such problems
over the past several decades. They have faced the most difficult
problems ever faced in the scientific search for truth, and hard
results have been difficult to achieve. Such wide-open fields in
fact provide, and have historically provided the greatest
opportunity for the scientific revolutionary, who should well
know the risks involved in exploring uncharted territory. But I
do wish to stress that with all the so-called progress that 20th
Century science has achieved, there remains a rather large and
important area of understanding that is still in the stone-age of
development: man's understanding of himself; and it is the
difficulty of the subject, not the intelligence of the professors
which is the problem.
With difficult subjects however, we often find
with hindsight that fairly obvious leads were ignored at critical
periods of research: a few strange ideas advanced by some
outsider or non-expert, or some heresy proposed by an iconoclast,
seemingly to cause dismay and discord and without serious value
to ongoing work. Or perhaps anomalous experimental results were
cast aside, ignored as irrelevant or the result of some
undetermined experimental or methodological error. All great
truths begin as blasphemies, noted George Bernard Shaw. As
established experts in a field seldom publish blasphemies, we
might learn something from history and pay more attention to
outsiders, non-experts and the like, for if their suggestions
really are worthless, this should not be difficult to prove, if
the theories and models of the established discipline are in
order and working efficiently. The historian of science Thomas
Kuhn pointed out that scientific revolutions are almost always
initiated by young workers, or those new to the field they
revolutionize. It may be objected that the non-expert has
insufficient grasp of the fundamentals, or is not fluent enough
to distinguish superficial anomalies in a field from important
ones, or is lacking in a command of the accumulated technique of
the discipline thus making the likelihood of his work being the
catalyst for an ensuing scientific revolution negligible. Such
objections would be significant in well-developed sciences: we
would not expect a non-chemist to revolutionize even a small
corner of the field of chemistry, or a truck driver to provide
deep new insights in quantum mechanics. But in a field in which a
generally agreed paradigm seems a far-distant dream, a field
still in the stone-age of development, the outsider, or a
well-read amateur, may well be in a position to supply the key to
revolution. For one thing, he has no great intellectual
investment in one competing school of thought or another. In a
field of study ripe for fundamental change where reputations and
careers are on the line, we might expect the entrenched experts
to be the least likely candidates to introduce revolutionary
hypotheses.
In the following pages I propose a rather
wide-ranging theory concerning man, his mind and brain, behavior,
his evolution and anthropology, his sociology and psychology,
religion and apostasy, myth and metaphysic, sciences and
certainties, and it will already be obvious that no writer can
possibly be an expert in such a wide selection of topics. But my
theory may amount to more than armchair speculation if I have
discovered and developed one of the important clues largely
ignored by the experts, one of the leads which with hindsight
will be seen to have provided the key to a revolution in
understanding. Of course my lack of expertise in the subjects I
need to examine must predictably lead to criticism from the
professionals; no doubt I abuse their terminologies and
misinterpret some of the finer points of their disciplines, or
worse. But I believe that the errors noted will be, for the most
part, technicalities, or simply part of the ongoing controversy
in a given field and inconsequential to the overall theory I will
present.
In constructing this theory, and in the present
description of the results of my inquiries, I have tried to live
up to the view expressed by Aldous Huxley, when he saw his
position as one of bridge-builder between areas of knowledge that
had previously been too separated or independent, one body of
knowledge ignoring or even rejecting another for no reason other
than tradition, or as a result of the peculiarities of the way in
which students become trained and indoctrinated in a field. Thus
the durability of the theory I have shaped will be a function not
of the accuracy of fine details which will have to be filled in
or corrected over time, but of the overall concept of the theory
and its ability to combine and predict: Combine disparate aspects
of present understanding and predict future observations and
trends in this primary area of man's search for truth. And if it
is a good theory, it may also provide an understanding which
could assist in improving the condition of man, the relationships
between his societies and nations, and the increasingly fragile
bond linking him with his only available home, the planet Earth.
I have tried to write a book which will not only
hold the interest of a wide audience, but contribute to
understanding both by professionals and laymen alike. Thus there
are some autobiographical passages, hopefully entertaining and
illustrative of yet another, hidden side of the cultural and
social upheaval of the 1960's, but the story line is also the
history of the ideas which led to the theory and so is intended
as an enticement for the non-technical reader to think about some
scientific subjects he has probably very little knowledge of, or
interest in. For professional readers, or those laymen who
already are following some of the current debates in the subjects
dealt with here, I have tried to construct the more technical
parts of the book so that they flow smoothly, and are
unencumbered by the myriad definitions and explanations that
would be essential for the non-technical reader. For him, I can
recommend that the more difficult passages may safely be quickly
scanned, and the terms and ideas expressed therein may be better
understood by referring to the Glossary provided at the end of
the book. But a thorough understanding of some of the more
technical evidence for the theory should not be necessary to
grasp its overall intent or scope.
Although it is customary at the beginning of a
book to thank the friends and co-workers who have contributed to
the author's completion of his task, the many persons who have
been instrumental to my own work shall remain unnamed with the
exception of other authors whose works are listed in the
bibliography. I will not single out any names here for special
thanks either, as I have had very limited contact with them
except through their published works. Reasons for these
conditions should soon become obvious from what is to follow.
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