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Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, Vol. 22, No. 5, 352-361 (2002)
DOI: 10.1177/027046702236887

The Real World of Modern Science, Medicine, and Qigong

William A. Tiller

Stanford University

Humankind is concerned with scientific enquiry becausehumans want to understand the milieu in whichthey find themselves. They want to engineer and reliablycontrol or cooperatively modulate as much of theenvironment as possible to sustain, enrich, and propagatetheir lives. Following this path, the goal of scienceis to gain a reliable description of all natural phenomenaso as to allow accurate prediction (within appropriatelimits) of nature's behavior as a function of anever-changing environment. As such, science is incapableof providing us with absolute truth. Rather, itprovides relative knowledge, internally self-consistentknowledge, about the relationships between differentphenomena and between different things.The goal of engineering, on the other hand, is tobuild on this fundamental understanding to generatenew materials, devices, structures, attitudes, moralities,philosophies, and so on, for producing tangibleorder, harnessing the latent potential in nature's phenomenaand expanding human capabilities in an ever-changingenvironment. In this context, medicine is tohuman biology as engineering is to physical science.As each of us rides the "river of life," the great consciousnessAdventure, we perceive events occurringaround us, but more often than not, we do not perceivethe total information content inherent in those eventsnor the true reality of those events. The latter point isso because what we take as the reality of an observationis actually a convolution between (1) what oursensory system actually senses and (2) our mindset orbelief structure that filters and/or selectively amplifiessegments of the basic gathered data stream. Further,only what we call the five physical senses are well-developedand integrated in our overall sensory sys-tem,so only a portion of the total available databecomes our basic internal data stream. We are thusalways making personal observations through the distortingand spectrally-limited lens of our mindsets,and we have no way at present to perform adeconvolution and perceive the pure informationinherent in our basic input data stream. By usingdesigned instruments to access information patternsin nature, we gain a more objective perspective ofthese events. However, we must always remember thatthese instruments were designed on the basis of thelogic of our average cognitive development and thereforeprobably also have only a limited access to thetotal information spectrum for these events occurringin nature. In particular, these instruments onlyrespond to positive energies.Over the course of the past four to five centuries, wehave learned how to conduct true scientific investigations,first under the rubric of classical mechanics and,more recently, quantum mechanics. Let us now look alittle more deeply to see what this means.

Key Words: science philosophy • Debroglie's Pilot Wave • human intention effects • multidimensional nature • medicine implications • biobodysuit


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