Submitted by Andrew McCarthy MD, Oct 7, 2007 06:34

I know what I have said here is a bit upsetting to psychologists/ neurologists, to physicists, to mathematicians, to biologists, to politicians, and especially to the process of schematizing everything in general. I sincerely apologize to all of you. I am not trying to ruin your fields. But they are first art forms. Science, underneath all the numerical data, is the measurement of the poetry of our current existence. Every profession is also thus. You cannot separate out the poetry from what you measure. And if you do, you kill its poetry which is what life is about in the first place. Life is not about its component parts but the whole. Thus my being upset at the idea of radical rationalism.

Rationalism is a taking apart the whole of life and thus explaining it in measurable parts. And that does make sense in one way for one must explain things in specifics. Yet specifics must then return to the whole and it must include what one cannot measure. Math is wonderful as is physics. Biology is fascinating especially when one studies nature and how the plants and animals survive amidst each other and the weather. And who is not fascinated with economics and social dynamics as well as our entire political maelstrom? Well I lived with one of the smartest men of all time, my father. He was a geological and civil engineer as well as a staunch Democrat. He was involved in politics his whole adult life. He worked with three Presidents and countless Senators over the years. And he knew numbers better than anyone. (He always had a slide ruler in his pocket and could arrive at the most esoteric answer to questions that seemed so complicated to us.)

And it was both he and my mother who taught me about the whole of existence and why it is so important. It is this wholeness that makes man not just a collection of rational parts but into an integer. It gives us our indivisible integrity My parents taught me that no matter what field you go into, or what you do to become successful, that you cannot forget the question of existence itself. And they told me to get my education with that in mind. And thus I have always wondered about what I am learning. Is this learning keeping me on the path they set for me? And it is why I have always been questioning what I learn. It is why I agree with Drury. It is why I agree with the founders of our great sciences. Our life is more about questions than answers except for one thing- existence itself. I do know consciously that I exist and what matters is my whole being. It is what I call my integrity.

And thus the phrase 'I think therefore I am' is a phrase that gets at what my parents were trying to teach me. And it is why I came to this website in the first place. I am amazed that we have not re-examined this statement in a real scientific way for it is here where we find our integrity. It is here we discover our poetic creation. Descartes lived in a time that saw time as constant as well as moving at a rate that gave it constancy. It therefore made sense to see matter being hurled through time. The constancy of time gave matter a sense of solidness. We throw a rock and we see it move through space and time. Voila we have certainty. We have enlightenment!

But Einstein changed all of that as have so many other basic scientists. Our solid world has become one of energetic orbital quanta giving perceptions to our consciousness via biochemical reactions in our sensory neurons. Thus mass is energy at its source. But energy is not always mass. And time seems to move, not at a constant speed, but at a variable speed. (And can time really be variable?) And thus I question what Descartes put down as our bedrock for objective reason. Time is far from constant and mass is certainly not solid. Thus the phrase we rely on changes from "I think therefore I am" to "I think I am therefore I am I think". Thought becomes humbled by its own uncertainty except for one thing- we do have a consciousness that can either be haughty or humbled by what it is presented. It is here where we find our integrity.

And thus it is my perception that Socrates was the one correct here, not Descartes. Socrates knowledge was that he knew Man's Knowledge was imperfect. He knew that he did not know. But that meant that his thinking was something quite different than what Descartes came up with. And science is actually more with Socrates now than Descartes. Time is not constant. (It actually is immeasurable as per Peter Lynds' work.) In addition mass is nuclear as well as ethereal as Hiroshima so tragically demonstrated to us. And it is why the idea of cognition as some kind of mechanical entity only has a terrible falsity to it. It too must believe in what Descartes reasoned but it cannot be if time is not constant and matter is ethereally in motion. Cognition believes in the exact opposite. It must have real matter and real time but such, since Einstein, is not the case. The hypothesis has been crushed.

Your silence to what I have said was expected. I have lectured on this many times in the past. I have thought people, especially men and women of science would be interested in these questions of mine. Yet I have been met with silence time and time again. Perhaps it is because I am wrong. Perhaps my reasoning is faulty. If so I would love for someone to point out my failures of thought. But no one has except to say I must simply be wrong. I have to be wrong is what they say. But what if I am right? What does that say about us as thinking beings? Do we really search for the truth?

I will leave you all now. But first I will tell you what personally happened to me because of what I posted here. I received a call after my first posting. It was a gentleman who thanked me for taking 'on atheists' who believe that life is all mechanical. But I must say I did not do this to take anyone on, even if I have. I have just wondered about man's integrity and whether he really wants to keep it whole? Or does man really prefer to ration away our whole and to destroy what really is important? Well perhaps I should not have given my name. Perhaps I should have kept a name such as Physician X or Dr. 1765387 or something like that. But I did not do that because it would have meant I was hiding from my thoughts. And consequently I have not had one reply to what I am trying to say. Instead I have been linked to Joe McCarthy and McCarthyism. I have been told I am just flat out wrong. And that is OK. Sticks and stones are sticks and stones…

But this week something else happened to me. I put my trash out in the alley way Wednesday morning. I talked with my neighbors as I did it. On Wednesday evening I came home and noticed my two bags of trash were taken while no one else had their trash taken. Perplexed I pointed it out to my neighbors. I told people at my job. It is an upsetting thing to have someone take your trash. Now all they got was my trash. And all it was is trash. But who would take someone's trash? And thus we live in a world where people do such things. And I am not saying that my trash was taken because of what I said here. But still it does beg the question- how does objective reasoning as truth stop people from stealing your trash? And it makes my point very real that we are in trouble unless we begin to face the reasons why people would steal trash in the first place…

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