Western science

Western science has traditionally emphasized reductionism as the road to understanding. Reductionism, of course, is a process that involves the systematic labeling, categorizing and compartmentalizing of objects. Unfortunately, the western world has also somewhere along the line lost sight of the fact that the universe is ojjc, essentially unlmgmented, whole. 

Where Western science has heretofore been predicated on (1) static partitions of S2 (modulo our co-evolved senses and language), and (2) simple, linear chains of cause o effect, the generalized CA-based physics represents a paradigm shift to (1) causal webs, and (2) fully coevolving object interaction hierarchies and dynamic partitions. 

Thorndike, Lynn. Relation between Byzantine and Western science and pseudoscience before 1350. Janus 51, no. 1 (1964) 1-48. 

Bruno, Leonard C. The tradition of science landmarks of Western science in the collections of the Library of Congress. Washington (DC) Library of Congress, 1987. xi, 351 p. ISBN 0-8444-0528-0... 

Lindberg, David C. The beginnings of Western science the European scientific tradition in philosophical, religious, and institutional context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450. Chicago Univ of Chicago P, 1992. ISBN 0-226-48231-6... 

Chemical mineralogy has a long history in western science, stretching as far back as the observation by Libavius in 1597 that certain salts crystallized during alchemical processes could be identified by their crystal habit (Evans, 1966). Habit is a crystallographic term which refers to the characteristic shape... 

Pythagoras view that all reality can be expressed in numbers is one of the most important root concepts in Western science. Yet,... 

Because of the interest in and popularity of alternative and complementary medicines and healing practices, the scientific method is being applied to a wide variety of these remedies. Different types of studies seek to establish if and how individual, alternative medicines exert their effect. Clinical trials are being conducted to compare a specific alternative medicines with the accepted conventional medical standard of care for a specific condition thus, for example, an herbal extract may be compared with a pharmaceutical-grade drug to demonstrate unequivocally the safety and effectiveness of a product or practice. However, complementary and alternative medicine has only recently been deemed worthy of scientific scrutiny (for decades many natural remedies and practices were dismissed outright as being obviously inferior to Western science-based medicine), and many alternative therapies have not yet been... 

I believe that an examination of human history and our current situation provides the strongest argument for the need to develop state specific sciences. Throughout history man has been influenced by the spiritual and mystical factors expressed (usually in watered-down form) in the religions that attract the masses. Spiritual and mystical experiences are primary phenomena of various d-ASCs because of such experiences, untold numbers of both the noblest and most horrible acts of which men are capable have been committed. Yet in all the time that western science as existed, no concerted attempt has been made to understand these d-ASC phenomena in scientific terms. 

What has our tradition been In Western science it has been, since day one, a world without women. David Noble wrote a book about that.23 In fact, his book jacket shows Albrecht Diirer s very famous etching of Adam and Eve—without Eve. Noble had this glorious piece of Diirer s art retouched by Kathy Grove to take Eve out of the picture in order to symbolize, all too accurately, Western science. 

Western science derived from the intellectual context of monasteries and ecclesiastical schools and then moved into the universities, retaining almost all the vestiges of its beginnings in the monastery.24 The ideal was, and in some ways still is, that one is dedicated around-the-clock to the scholastic pursuit of knowledge, and to do that either one must be a monk (or exhibit monastic dedication) or have an infrastructure. For most of our recorded civilized history, that infrastructure has been a wife, or as Garvan Medalist Janet Osteryoung has mused, Every professional needs a wife. ... 

David F. Noble, A World Without Women—The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science (New York Knopf, 1992). 

The Invisible Landscape is the McKennas first attempt to wrestle with this revelation using the handholds of Western science and philosophy. They may seem to use these disciplines in an uncharacteristic and perhaps naive way, but what strikes me more is the ingenious and sometimes brilliantly intuitive application of these methods by two kids who were only in their early twenties. 

First, awareness is. Our basic ability to have experiences, to know that we are, to be aware of things, has never been satisfactorily explained in terms of anything else. Current Western science likes to assume that awareness will be explained as an aspect of brain functioning, reduced to nothing but some action of the brain, but this assumption is an item of current faith and fashion, not good science. Indeed, science itself can be seen as one among many derivatives of the action of awareness, such that we wouldn t expect the part ever to be able to explain the whole. 

Thus, liverworts were used to treat diseases of the liver. Western science has long since discredited the doetrine of signatures, although it is still advocated by various New Age and other pseudoscientific movements. 

Programs of human research in eastern Europe, China, and India have illustrated positive effects of seaberry therapeutic applications in limited clinical trials. Mainstream Western science, on the other hand, appears to be more skeptical, as the results are not typically cross-validated by studies in first-world clinical research countries acceptable to the FDA... 

The problem of the modern understanding of these facts probably arises from the nature of the methods of modern western science itself, it is, above all, a descriptive undertaking, and therefore a serial process rather than an experiential, iconic one. So in attempting to... 

Parenthetically, it must be noted that the concept of MAO inhibition is complex and hardly obvious to everyday experience. Indeed, it was not fully understood by Western science until about forty... 

Western science is now delineating a new concept of man, not as a solitary ego within a wall of flesh, but as an organism which is what it is by virtue of its inseparability from the rest of the world... medicines which science has discovered... may prove to be the sacraments of this new religion. The Joyous Cosmology, by Watts, A. 1970... 

Lindberg, David C. The Beginnings of Western Science (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1992). 

Just as Ayurvedic typing matches Western scientific understanding of brain-chemical types, so does the Ayurvedic understanding of circadian rhythms resemble the views of modem science. As we saw in Chapter 6, each period of the day has its own special energy. While Western science sees the day s rhythms in terms of adrenal hormones and other biochemicals, Ayurveda sees the day in terms of the relative activity of our different doshas ... 

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