THE DAILY BELL: BIG MONEY AND PUBLIC CONSUMPTION SCIENCE
October 25, 2013 By
This is probably one of the most important articles ever to appear in The Daily Bell, or for that matter, anywhere else, but we’ll get to why I think this to be the case, after the article itself:
No, Economist (Magazine): The Real Problem of Big Science is Big Banking
The Daily Bell has put its finger on a central philosophical problem of modern “big science,” namely, the promotion and evolution of a kind of “public consumption” science in each of the scientific disciplines that have, as their underlying connective meme, the theme of scarcity and zero-sum games, with “winners and losers.” And this meme, in turn, has, as its underlying assumption, a commitment to philosophical materialism as the be-all and end-all explanatory paradigm into which all “science” must fit or conform. I think, as I compose this blog, specifically of the work of biologist, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, and its simple posing of questions that challenge those exclusively materialist assumptions with his hypothesis of a “morphogenetic field.” Dr. Sheldrake asks a simple question: how is it that two groups of a species, completely isolated from each other, will transmit information to each other with no apparent means of physical contact? How does one group of a species on an isolated island transmit a solution or learned behavior, to a group of the same species on another island, and having no physical contact with it? This is not a merely hypothetical or rhetorical question on Dr. Sheldrake’s part. It is something that has been observed. For his part in forming the question and offering a tentative conclusion – a kind of immaterial biological version of photon or quantum entanglement, but on a much more macro-scale of entire population groups – he has been villified, attacked, spurned, and in general, treated less than courteously by many of his scientific colleagues.
He has, in short, challenged the materialist assumption reigning in much of biology. And so it goes across the board.
Indeed, as a general statement, it could be asked why non-materialist assumptions or approaches seem so often to be challenged by “big science” and hence, more importantly, by Big Bank Money? Is there a connection between the two? The behavior of major money interests in promoting such memes in science raises the question of whether they are interested in real science, or only that science that tends to support their own cosmology, a cosmology designed to reinforce their monopoly on the creation of monetized debt.
I would, indeed, suggest that this is the real and deeply hidden connection, and it is an historical one. I have written often about what I have called the “Topological Metaphor of the Medium” and more recently about its almost limitless creation of “debt-free” information. As I wrote recently in Financial Vipers of Venice, we find the financial elites of the day busily engaged in the suppression of this version of the metaphor, and the substitution, in its place, either of limitless creation of fiat monetized debt, with all the sacrificial systems and ideologies connected with it in the suppression of the individual person and his or her creativity(the thing of real value), or the substitution of systems of bullion-based finance, again in an effort to impose limits and zero-sum games.
I would respectfully suggest, then, that The Daily Bell is indeed on to something, but would suggest that the roots of it go much deeper. Not for nothing did medieval and Renaissance Venice become the home of the original Malthusianism, and the first (wildly inaccurate) estimates of the “maximum carrying capacity” of the population sustainable by planet Earth, but also this corrupt oligarchical republic was the home to the suppression of that Metaphor, and its advocates, by the most brutal of methods (like being burned alive). It was home, too, to the original “cult of materialism”, in its dogged defense and use of Aristotle. For those aware of the story the Daily Bell is so aptly exposing in this article, the story goes back, not just to JP Morgan’s suppression of Tesla, but at least as far as the Middle Ages, and to the life and death struggle that Venice waged against the re-emergence of that Metaphor. It won that battle, but only temporarily… but that’s another story.
No, Economist (Magazine): The Real Problem of Big Science is Big Banking
The Daily Bell has put its finger on a central philosophical problem of modern “big science,” namely, the promotion and evolution of a kind of “public consumption” science in each of the scientific disciplines that have, as their underlying connective meme, the theme of scarcity and zero-sum games, with “winners and losers.” And this meme, in turn, has, as its underlying assumption, a commitment to philosophical materialism as the be-all and end-all explanatory paradigm into which all “science” must fit or conform. I think, as I compose this blog, specifically of the work of biologist, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, and its simple posing of questions that challenge those exclusively materialist assumptions with his hypothesis of a “morphogenetic field.” Dr. Sheldrake asks a simple question: how is it that two groups of a species, completely isolated from each other, will transmit information to each other with no apparent means of physical contact? How does one group of a species on an isolated island transmit a solution or learned behavior, to a group of the same species on another island, and having no physical contact with it? This is not a merely hypothetical or rhetorical question on Dr. Sheldrake’s part. It is something that has been observed. For his part in forming the question and offering a tentative conclusion – a kind of immaterial biological version of photon or quantum entanglement, but on a much more macro-scale of entire population groups – he has been villified, attacked, spurned, and in general, treated less than courteously by many of his scientific colleagues.
He has, in short, challenged the materialist assumption reigning in much of biology. And so it goes across the board.
Indeed, as a general statement, it could be asked why non-materialist assumptions or approaches seem so often to be challenged by “big science” and hence, more importantly, by Big Bank Money? Is there a connection between the two? The behavior of major money interests in promoting such memes in science raises the question of whether they are interested in real science, or only that science that tends to support their own cosmology, a cosmology designed to reinforce their monopoly on the creation of monetized debt.
I would, indeed, suggest that this is the real and deeply hidden connection, and it is an historical one. I have written often about what I have called the “Topological Metaphor of the Medium” and more recently about its almost limitless creation of “debt-free” information. As I wrote recently in Financial Vipers of Venice, we find the financial elites of the day busily engaged in the suppression of this version of the metaphor, and the substitution, in its place, either of limitless creation of fiat monetized debt, with all the sacrificial systems and ideologies connected with it in the suppression of the individual person and his or her creativity(the thing of real value), or the substitution of systems of bullion-based finance, again in an effort to impose limits and zero-sum games.
I would respectfully suggest, then, that The Daily Bell is indeed on to something, but would suggest that the roots of it go much deeper. Not for nothing did medieval and Renaissance Venice become the home of the original Malthusianism, and the first (wildly inaccurate) estimates of the “maximum carrying capacity” of the population sustainable by planet Earth, but also this corrupt oligarchical republic was the home to the suppression of that Metaphor, and its advocates, by the most brutal of methods (like being burned alive). It was home, too, to the original “cult of materialism”, in its dogged defense and use of Aristotle. For those aware of the story the Daily Bell is so aptly exposing in this article, the story goes back, not just to JP Morgan’s suppression of Tesla, but at least as far as the Middle Ages, and to the life and death struggle that Venice waged against the re-emergence of that Metaphor. It won that battle, but only temporarily… but that’s another story.
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