The Archives of Scientists’ Transcendent Experiences
Quote:TASTE is an online journal devoted to transcendent experiences that scientists have reported. It lets scientists express these experiences in a psychologically (and professionally) safe space.
Science is a wonderful profession: I've worked at it for almost 40 years, and love it. As a process for gathering and refining knowledge, it is so useful! But the process is practiced by people, not machines, and we are each affected by the conscious and unconscious hopes, habits and fears of our individual histories and cultural heritages. As Aldous Huxley so nicely put it, each of us is simultaneously the beneficiary and the victim of our culture.
Science and Scientism
As scientists, we have discovered a body of precisely observed factual data about the world, created a lot of good theories that make sense of much of that data — and we are part of a cultural heritage of scientism. Sociologists coined the term "scientism" back in the 1940s, when they realized that many scientists unthinkingly accepted many scientific theories as simple, unquestioned Truths, just like believers in any "ism," and thus we often acted like any prejudiced "believer," especially outside our immediate areas of expertise.
Transcendent Experiences
This all-too-human narrowness is a significant distorting factor when dealing with the area of life roughly called transcendent, used primarily in the sense of definition 1b above, "extending or lying beyond the limits of ordinary experience." TASTE is primarily about gathering data on transcendent experiences...
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
- Bertrand Russell
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