Reality Isn't What it Used to Be

"The observer affects the observed." Do you remember when you first heard this slogan? Today it almost sounds like a cliché‚. It's become an obvious truism, shrugged off casually. Thoughtful consideration, however, recollects that the statement reflects a specific laboratory finding, a discovery that undermines basic assumptions about science, not to mention our most deeply held notions about reality itself. That familiar, worn-out slogan actually means that the world has evaporated beneath our feet and that we float without bearings in an indeterminate universe.

We live during the birth pangs of a new age. The old has not all passed from our habitual longings, and the new has not yet appeared for our embrace. We've heard rumors of a coming new "paradigm" but aren't sure what it is. Like a ruling principle, a paradigm governs how we ask questions about reality. We are used to asking, for example, "How does it work?" as we search for techniques to master life as we would operate a machine. An alternative paradigm might encourage us to ask instead, "What's the story?" Different questions yield different types of information, different worlds in which to live. We are feeling our way toward a new world by asking new questions. It's an exciting time for philosophers of science, who love to think about our methods for discovering (or creating) reality.

Such enthusiasm is very much evident in New Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science. Edited by Willis Harman, president of the Noetic Sciences Institute, which published the book, this collection of essays is a state-of-the-art collaboration of several learned magi. They have glimpsed the bright star of the new paradigm and are searching, philosophical gifts in hand, for what it heralds. I doubt, however, that many people will read this academic tome. I know when I stand upon my philosophy of science soapbox, my Atlantic University students soon yawn and nod politely. Anxious to live spiritually in the practical world, they wonder what all this talk of paradigms has to do with learning, for example, how to establish communication with angels.

Why everything! I exclaim. Descartes wondered, and so might we, how to distinguish what is true from what is false. Do you search your favorite authority (the Bible, the Edgar Cayce readings, the Collected Works of Carl Jung) for a quote that backs you up? That's what the Pope did when he used Scripture to denounce Galileo's invitation to look through his telescope to verify that the earth revolved around the sun, and not vice-versa as the Bible said. Galileo's heretical suggestion that we look for ourselves freed the truth of experience from the dogma of authority. The human spirit loves such freedom. Science was thus born of a spiritual impetus.

Over time, however, experience came to mean the evidence of the senses only. Reality became a fixed "thing." It was out there, separate from us but subject to our observation and experimentation. By its technological achievements science developed the very same smugness that originally led it to revolt from religion. Atomic fission, however, discovered (or created) a crack in the foundation of science and the world. "Reality," says Walter Anderson, "isn't what it used to be." The credo, "I'll believe it when I see it" is giving way to "I'll see it when I believe it." The paradigm of separation is yielding to a paradigm of oneness. The transition is called the "consciousness revolution."

The thinkers in this weighty volume are grappling with the puzzle, "If the observer plays a role in creating reality, how can we distinguish the false from the true? If we cannot (as many conclude), then with what ideal shall we replace the old god of "REAL TRUTH"? It looks as if the answer may be, "If it works for you!"

The Native American philosophy of science, we learn from Vine DeLoria, Jr., did not include a notion of abstract truth. All the knowledge held by these ecologically sophisticated observers was practical information used for walking a moral path through life. Their philosophy echoes an injunction made by Edgar Cayce to his followers respecting his own statements: "if you can't use it to make your life better, then forget it!" In a similar vein, Rhea White, a parapsychologist turned philosopher of science in the feminist mode (a body of thought becoming pervasive enough to deserve the title, "the mother of all new paradigms") concludes about reality: "Something is real to someone if it makes a difference in the person's life."