In the previous chapter, ‘MQ-5: Money makes the world go round?‘, we moved up to the level of mythquakes that can often cause serious damage beyond the immediate locality of the collapse of that specific belief. Here we start to explore deeper beliefs and deeper assumptions that in reality are no more stable than those myths about money – and hence have even greater potential for destruction when they break. The example here is around core cultural-worldviews such as belief in the validity of the purported ‘truths’ of science or religion  - in other words, the generic structures that underpin shared assumptions about how the world ‘really works’.

This chapter contains the following sections [all notes-only]:

• Science and religion
• The religion of science
• Religious wars

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

MQ-6: The meaning of life

Richter 6: Strong earthquake. Can be destructive in areas up to a hundred or more kilometres across. Equivalent to around one megaton of TNT. Around one every three days on average.

Mercalli VII: People have difficulty standing; drivers feel their cars shake; loose bricks and tiles fall from buildings; furniture may break; slight to moderate damage to well-constructed buildings, significant damage to poorly-constructed buildings.

Mercalli VIII: Drivers have difficulty steering; chimneys fall; branches break; foundations may fail; cracks may appear in wet ground or on hillsides; water-levels in wells may change; poorly-constructed buildings suffer severe damage.

Science and religion

[Science vs religion - both are variants on the same story, "god created in the image of man", self-worship and self-aggrandisement.]

{Science and religion are often posed as opposites, but in fact both assume a fairly rigid concept of ‘order’ – their only disagreement is about what that ‘order’ really is. In that sense, they’re again like Tweedledum and Tweedledee – arguing about the position of the deckchairs on the Titanic. There’s also a disturbing similarity in that both seem to build a strongly self-centric view of the world: religion often pretends to a world created by some kind of deity, whilst science pretends to some purported ‘objective order’, but at the back of it, there’s still a strong flavour of ‘priesthood’, ‘the special ones’, ‘the only ones who know’. This over-certainty in the ‘rightness’ or righteousness of self is an almost certain guarantee for future mythquakes, either at a personal level – such as the all-too-common occurrence of moralistic evangelists being ‘caught in the act’ in decidedly non-moral behaviours – or, unfortunately, at a much larger scale.}

[impact of the story: difference between linear vs circular view (one-way life versus many [un]happy returns)]

{One key example of how worldview impacts decisions at a deep level is the comparison between a linear concept of ‘one chance at life’ – typified by the Semitic group of religions, Judaism, Islam and Christianity – versus a reincarnation ‘many-lives’ concept – typified by many Eastern religions, by Celtic traditions, and in the designs of many computer-games! At a personal level, there can be severe mythquakes when these two fundamentally different story-types collide, though these collisions are not necessarily destructive. For example, Western doctors often find working in ‘many-lives’ such as India forces them to re-think their entire worldview, their concepts of ambition and compassion and so on; yet Indians have said that they like having the Western doctors there, because they get things done – they don’t wait around until the next life for something better to happen! But there can also be a dark side to this: ‘many-lives’ cultures can place a low or even very-low value on each individual life, and can embed dysfunctional relationships such as caste-structures into the society on the assumption that each person ‘chose’ the respective life and social position; and some ‘one-life’ cultures – typified in its extreme form by some of the US-style evangelist cults – even aim to destroy all life beyond their own, because they cannot conceive of anything having any reason to exist beyond the span of their own ‘one life’.}

The religion of science

[Science as religion, e.g. the Skeptics; "my place in heaven is dependent on the number of souls I can convert to the true faith" « deep uncertainty in the 'truth' of the story]

{Scientists often purport to be against religion, and that their own work is beyond religion, but the ways in which they act often is essentially religious in flavour and in its zeal to ‘correct’ other’s ‘heresies’ and the like. The Skeptics Society is one well-known and often-infamous example, and frequently unscientific – sometimes to absurd extremes – in its assaults on purportedly ‘non-scientific’ ideas; the fervour for atheism by Richard Dawkins’ and his followers provides frequent echoes of the most extreme evangelical cults, including ‘conversion’ to ‘the one true faith’ of atheism. Psychologically speaking, that which is attacked often represents that which one actually is, hence much of so-called science probably has its roots in deep-seated fears about uncertainty – and hence yet another guaranteed source of serious mythquakes.}

Religious wars

[Real risk of serious damage - obvious in the case of explicit religious wars, less obvious when the religion is less explicit, as in 'the enlightenment', or Darwinism, or monetarist economics.]

{Any definition of ‘the truth’ is inherently fragile, hence a common tactic is to attempt to prevent mythquakes by trying to force all others to the believe the same ‘the one truth’. This is the source for all religious wars, and although it’s inherently futile – especially in the longer term – a lot of lives may be lost in the process… The Semitic religions are some of the worst offenders in this regard – particularly Christianity and Islam, both of which explicitly seek “not to bring peace but with the sword” to ‘convert’ others by force – but history shows that at some point every religion has fallen for the same mistaken ‘solution’ to the mythquake problem. Secular ‘religions’ are no better, either: the destruction wrought by Darwinism, by monetarist economics or by ‘scientific management’ and similar delusions may be less overt at times, but the impacts on people’s lives have probably been no less at all.}

As David puts it, “WOW!!!” – very impressive indeed, and definitely reminiscent of the system shown in the sci-fi film Minority Report. What worries me, though, is that there’s a significant risk of a serious term-hijack here. As a “wearable gestural interface” to contextual information available via the net, ‘SixthSense’ is certainly an innovative form of augmented reality; but that’s all it is – it’s just clever technology, not ‘sixth sense’ in the traditional meaning of the term.

Probably the closest definition of ‘sixth sense’ would be “access to information which is not available directly via touch, taste, sight, sound or scent”. So any form of indirect sensing – such as plain old telephone or television, just as much as internet data-sources – is technically a kind of ‘sixth sense’. Another often-cited component is synaesthesia, any kind of cross-merging of the senses – so that aspect of the definition would apply to SixthSense too, because it cross-maps the indirect net-derived information with that arising from the immediate physical world. But not only is there a real danger of IT-centrism – where the technology becomes the sole centre of attention, ignoring the purpose for that merging of information – but we also risk assuming that we should constrain the meaning of ‘sixth sense’ to the available information solely to that which already exists in accessible form on the net. If we do the latter, without full awareness of doing so – in other words, if we fall for the implied term-hijack – we could entrap ourselves within three potentially lethal problems:

• we may shut out other information-sources, including possibly our own senses – “lost in cyberspace” etc
• we may limit ourselves only to what is already known – risking loss of insight or innovation
• we may be unable to test or verify the reliability or trustworthiness of the ‘augmented’ information-sources

From a human perspective, it’s essential not to limit our sources of information, because each can both provide unique information of its own, and also provide cross-checks against the sources, This is a key theme in enforcing transparency via the ‘social web’, for example. But it also brings us to the more traditional meaning of ‘sixth sense’, via the often strange concepts – or experiences, rather – such as psychometry, remote-viewing, telepathy, dowsing and the like. Generically these are often classified as ‘inituive skills’ – where the word ‘inituion’ literally translates as ‘teaching from within’. I’m well aware that self-styled Skeptics and other followers of the fundamentalist religion of ‘scientism‘ may have difficulty with any such notions, but as it happens, I’ve studied dowsing or ‘water-witching’ for several decades now: my first book, a kind of ‘teach-yourself guide’ nowadays known as The Diviner’s Handbook, was first published way back in 1976, and has been continuously in print ever since. This perhaps seem a bit of a surprise if you’ve only only known me as an enterprise-architect, but as far as dowsing is concerned, I’m generally regarded as one of the world experts in the field – particularly in its intersection of theory and practice as methodology. I do know what I’m talking about here: most self-styled Skeptics don’t. (At which point I’m reminded of Isaac Newton’s retort to astronomer Edmond Halley when the latter mocked his extensive writings on astrology: “I have studied the subject, sir, and you have not!” )

The point there is that in all of these intuitive-skills there’s a clear gradation from straightforward physical synaesthesia (one that for some people does quite literally resemble IT-based augmented-reality) all the way through to what we might describe as ‘good question…’; most people seem to make a big fuss about the ‘good question’ end of the scale, but in practice it’s the more ordinary world that is more important in most dowsing work, and, crucially, it is a learnable skill, dependent on much the same disciplines as for any other skill-based technology. (More info on that in my book Disciplines of Dowsing, co-authored with archaeologist/archaeographer Liz Poraj-Wilczynska.) Because this is technology, not science, it’s not ‘fraud’ for such intuitive information to come from any mixture of sources: it’s just information. (Though it’s often important to be able to identify which source the information arises from, so as to be able to verify the information-value – a theme we’ll return with the third point above.)

If we only limit ourselves to known sources of information, we’ll be unable to discover anything new. Often, for example, we’ll come across instances of a tactic I describe as “In order to remember something you never knew, first set out to forget it”. The mathematician Henri Poincaré provides one famous anecdote of this kind:

The circumstances of the journey made me forget my mathematical work; arrived at Coutances we boarded an omnibus … At the moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformation that I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-euclidean geometry. I did not verify this, I did not have the time for it, since scarcely had I sat down in the bus than I resumed the conversation already begun, but I was entirely certain at once.

This is a key theme in one of my favourite books, William Beveridge’s The Art of Scientific Investigation, which explores the use of chance, the use of intuition, the hazards and limitations of reason, and suchlike concerns in the process of scientific research. (Another example quoted in Beveridge’s book is Kekulé’s well-known story about how he discovered the ring-like structure of benzene: at the end, he urges his fellow-scientists, “Gentlemen, we must learn to dream!”) So the science of science itself is still something of a mystery: a century or more later, we still don’t know much about how these processes work, but we do have a much clearer understanding of how they can be worked – in other words, the technology and methodology, rather than the science. To quote Louis Pasteur, “In the field of scientific endeavour, chance favours the prepared mind”; yet if we arbitrarily constrain our sources of information, we’re limiting our chances. An open mind matters here – and ‘open’ in every sense, too.

Finally, by what means can we test and trust the information from these ‘augmented’ sources? Much of the self-styled ‘New Age’ teachings, for example, might perhaps be described not so much as ‘channelling’ as an open drain: no cross-checks of any kind, and far too often just ‘received truth’ for the gullible and self-deluded. But is much of what’s on the internet really any better? Google Maps’ interpretation of British post-codes is notoriously variable in its accuracy: I’ve sometimes found it to be half a mile or more off-target, especially in the smaller towns and villages. As a desmonstration of the technology’s potential, the SixthSense presentation was brilliant – but I really do have serious doubts as to how well it would work in practice. As with cloud-computing, Enterprise 2.0 and the rest of the current hype-wagons, there are some really serious questions about security and data-quality and the like that will need to be addressed before it could be trusted for use in any non-trivial real-world application. And as with other IT-hype term-hijacks, that’s exactly what usually doesn’t happen, because the hype is itself used to block out any visibility of those broader issues.

So yes, SixthSense is an excellent demonstration of net-based augmented-reality’s potential: but it’s important that we don’t let the hype and excitement block out the broader, richer, traditional meaning of ‘sixth sense’.

The literal translation is ‘one who accepts no ruler’, but it’s not quite as simple as that. There are two radically different forms, at opposite ends of a spectrum: one insists on ‘rights’ without responsibilities – what I call ‘kiddies’ anarchy’ – the other on responsibilities alone (because there are no ‘rights’ – in essence, so-called ‘rights’ are a self-centred delusion), as typified by principle-based anarchist groupings such as the Quakers.

I suppose what makes me a natural anarchist – preferably of the latter kind – is that I don’t belong. I’ve never been able to ‘belong’ to anything: a perpetual Outsider. Which, to say the least, is not a comfortable place to be, but it seems to be who I am. Oh well.

I don’t belong to any company: I’ve never been an employee, I’ve only ever been a contractor, a consultant, or an independent business ‘owner’. I don’t belong to any specific discipline, either: I’ve not so much had a career as careered. Which means that I’m good at linking across businesses and domains and skillsets – the quintessential generalist – but it again means that I never settle anywhere.

I don’t really ‘belong’ to any place, any country. I have dual citizenship, for a start (British and Australian); I’ve now lived (vaguely inhabited?) on three separate continents; and (despite that Australian anthem “I still call Australia home” etc), I’ve never felt anywhere to be ‘home’, the place where I belong.

Same with ideas and theories. I would agree strongly with Paul Feyerabend‘s dictum that in science “the only approach which does not inhibit progress (using whichever definition one sees fit) is ‘anything goes’”. Like Isaac Newton (though I hope without quite his level of vituperative irascibility!) I’ve probably written and published more on ‘alternative realities‘ than I have on anything else: as a author and theorist, I’m almost certainly better known as a writer on dowsing and related subjects than I am on my current main field of the architecture of the whole enterprise. Busy adapting some of that material right now for mainstream archaeology: as with the idea of ‘Slow Science’ (and yes, I need to find out more about that), it seems they’re at last starting to grasp the importance of balancing the objective analysis with the subjective ‘experiencing’ – I have a joint paper on that coming up in the next issue of the archaeology journal Time & Mind, for example.

And same is true at a social level:I don’t belong to any defined group. I’ve been an occasional member of some society, or a cluster of people playing folk-music, perhaps, but that’s about it. After a fairly short time the internal politics and the narrow focus begin to pall: it’s time to move on. Again. Always moving on. (Might explain why I’m endlessly moving-on on mywould-be holidays, I guess: can’t seem to settle anywhere. Oh well.)

And it’s also true at a personal level. It’s a painful fact that I share almost nothing with my parental family other than accident of birth: again, I don’t feel I belong, and never have – I’ve wanted to, for as long as I can remember, but that feeling was never there. Not excluded, as such; just no way for the ‘in‘ of ‘included’. A quiet absence of connection, rather than its active rejection, I guess: a nothingness. Same also applies to the direct personal side: I have no family of my own, and despite variously-unsuccessful attempts over the decades, I’ve now lived alone for almost three-quarters of my adult life – and as I approach my sixties, I see less and less chance or, now, even hope, that that would change. In an all too literal sense, out of touch with the rest of the human race. Again, it’s not an active absence, an active rejection, as I know it is for some others: it’s more like a subtly-closed door, a fog which prevents any way through, leaving me always as the Outsider, watching from beyond. That so-accurate Welsh term hiraedd describes it so well – “a longing and a grieving for that which is not, has never been and shall never be”. The loneliness – an all too literal ‘aloneness’ – never really stops hurting: it does fade into the background most of the time, fortunately, but it never actually ceases to make its presence felt. Gives me a better overview than most people have, I suppose – but that’s about the only ‘advantage’ that can be said for it. Hey ho.

Anarchist by nature. It’s who I am, I guess. My apologies to all, then, for being who I am.