1. What Ronald Laura says is wrong and dangerous.
From the website of RPL I extract this core of his philosophy of science- wrong, and stupid, and dangerous. (http://www.dr-ronlaura.com/philos.html)
“My view is thus diametrically opposed to the orthodox philosophical view of knowledge and technology which holds that neither knowledge nor technology is 'good' nor 'bad' in itself; it is only how they are used, so the argument goes, that makes them good or bad.
Against this, I am urging that because the conventional and covert rationale which drives technology is to manifest power over nature, its deployment will inevitably lead on the on hand to the degradation and exploitation of nature, while on the other to our alienation and increasing detachment from the world of nature and the earth which sustains all life.
One of the major reasons why our form of technological instruction in schools is so obsessed with reducing the things of the natural world into reconstructed forms or manufactured things is that the more chemicalised, decomposed and inert we can make the world, the easier it is for us to predict its behaviour and thus secure a modicum of power over it. Indeed, at first blush it does seem that we have succeeded in making the world predictable and thus more amenable to subjudgation by reducing and then redescribing the natural world in terms of the statistical and mathematical representations intended as a substitute for it.
Once the reduction is complete, we make this abstraction of the natural world more concretely predictable by reconfiguring our statistics in graphs, grids, and tables replete with abbreviations, acronyms, and even pseudonyms designed to give the illusion of life to our reconstructions of nature, whose technologised forms are actually increasingly synthetic, artificial, inert and unreal.”
Of course we all want to be able to predict and control our environment. If we cannot do this, we are unable to act at all. We become passive victims. All ‘knowledge’ is useless if it does not enable us to somehow predict and control what is going on around us.
Science is distinguished in being the radical democratic form of knowledge. It is the form of knowledge open to everyone. There is no gnosis, no hidden way to truth only known to the alpha males or alpha females of the tribe. Anyone can do it.
Like Feynman said:
How to Discover a New Physical Law
First you guess.
Don't laugh, this is the most important step.
Then you compute the consequences.
Compare the consequences to experience.
If it disagrees with experience, the guess is wrong.
In that simple statement is the key to science.
It doesn't matter how beautiful your guess is or how smart you are or what your name is.
If it disagrees with experience, it's wrong.
That's all there is to it.
What does Ronald Laura posit in opposition to this egalitarian method of seeking truth? He does not offer the valid mystical insight that the ultimate nature of reality is unknown and unknowable. He is not content to bow humbly before the vastness and wonder of-all-that-is, conscious of how inadequate his mind is to grasp it all.
No, he offers the only alternative that has ever been offered to science. And he offers it with all the dogmatism and all the irrationalism with which it has usually been offered. The alternative to science is submission to authority. Believing what someone else tells you. In this case, what he tells you. That's why he has all those testimonials to the effectiveness of his body-building system on his website.
2. Where Ronald Laura said what he said on Saturday May 3rd 2008 was an abuse of his position.
We came to hear him give a talk cogent to the abstract I have quoted below. I have been informed that he did get around to talking about it eventually. But first, he spent a long time outlining his stupid wrong and dangerous philosophy, with all the rhetorical eloquence and all the alpha-male authority-figure symbols at his command. That is not what was advertised.
On Friday May 2nd 2008 I gave a talk about the Greenhouse Effect and Anthropogenic Global Warming to a group of foreign students finishing their English studies before beginning their degree programs (volunteers are called for to lecture every year so the students can practice their note-taking in practice lecture situations).
As you know if you have ever been to this site before, I have very strong and idiosyncratic views about what should be done about Anthropogenic Global Warming. The students I spoke to still have no idea whatsoever what those views are. I told the coordinator I was going to talk about the science, and that's what I did. I talked about the same settled science and gave the same talk outlining the very solid theoretical basis and the reasonably solid experimental basis for Anthropogenic Global Warming that someone with diametrically opposite views to mine would have given.
I would consider it an abuse of my position as a perceived authority figure to get up and foist my individual philosophical or political views on an audience who are listening to me because of my expertise in another field. That would be unprofessional behaviour.
4 comments:
I really appreciate it when people become upset about things they believe in. One can only hope that this enthusiasm is instilled in the students by making them think critically not only about science but whatever they see around them. Without this enthusiam we are all doomed, in the long term.
Having said this, I should say that I hold somewhat different views about antropogenic climate change.
Klaus
Oddly enough, I also appreciate people becoming upset about things that they believe in, even if their beliefs are opposed to mine. The opposite of any strongly held belief is not really the opposite belief, after all, but indifference.
"The opposite of any strongly held belief is not really the opposite belief, after all, but indifference."
Yes, exactly, and that is the root of the rot.
Klaus (more perhaps in early June)
I personally know Prof Ronald Laura and have read his books and talked to him. I trust evidence.
He is a multi-talented genius with impressive left-and-right-brain calibre, who is conversate in 14 languages, a world-class record weight lifter, champion car racer, poet, ordained priest, natural energy healer, studied in Harvard, Oxford & Cambridge, being ex-Dean of Dept of Education, University of Newcastle for 2 terms and now teaching 23 PhD candidates without giving normal lectures. He has 4 gifted children who have turned into sucessful law firm partner and medical doctor etc at young age.
His philosophy may be too advanced to be understood by average people. As a natural healer, he is connected to the universal energies in the Nature but at his teenage time, he had to hide his gift because people did not understand and find it weird. However, he combined energy healing (which he used the phrase MindPower) into bodybuilding and that's why it was so effective. That is also why he stressed that too much emphasis on technology (with negative electromagnetic waves and side effects) will affect our inborn nature and connectiveness to the Nature. Why gifted children are gifted may not mainly attributable to genes, but their connectiveness to the Morphic Field where all information lie in holographic forms and where creativivty and inspirations are from. This is the trend of quantum physic scientists - what we call Consciousness.
Gifted children are more intuitive and thus more creative and learn fast. But they are rarely understood because our schooling stressed on the logical mind and technology too much.
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