NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/rec/martial/16146

Internet Message Format | 1992-12-22 | 5.2 KB

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From: [e-mail] (Todd I. Stark)
Newsgroups: rec.martial-arts
Subject: Re: More ki/qi/chi & science
Date: 22 DEC 92 16:12:01
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
Lines: 96
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
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Summary: Buddy can you s'paradigm ?  Criteria for a new framework.


[e-mail] (Stephen Chan x4485) writes...
>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Todd I. Stark) writes:

Seems our positions are not so diverse as first appeared in some areas,
but I think there is still one fundamental point of disagreement.

>>The failure of Ki to be the dominant topic of
>>interest in scientific journals in most fields is hardly a matter
>>of ideological oversight.
>
>    Actually, many of those fringy ideas are slowly creeping into the
>realm of respectability - I saw a news piece on new funding for meditation,
>yoga, hypnosis and related stuff by the NIH. But I would tend to suspect that
>they will discard the qi paradigm for a more respectable western paradigm. Or
>maybe (like in acupuncture) they will adopt the the techniques without a
>satisfactory theoretical model to explain the phenomena.

There are a few people doing very solid experimental science on
specific anomalies of nature, and a number doing interesting things
in other areas related to consciousness and such.

There are specific criteria that need to be met, however, when a
'paradigm shift' is to occur.   One is that the new model has to adequately
predict the same things as the previous model did, if it is to replace
it, in addition to the new phenomena.  Another is that it must explain
why the old model worked so well explaining the things it did explain.

For 'Qi' to succeed as a scientific model, it would have to either be a
special case law that is not overlapping with existing models, or would
have to be a superset of existing ones.

Other than that, it is collection of phenomena and not a model to be
taken whole as a 'law of nature.'   This is the way Relativistic
Physics works, it takes Newtonian Physics as a special case subset and
explains why the Newtonian laws seem to apply so well most of the time.

Showing that you can blow a candle out from across a room with your
eyes, or demonstrating that there is 'something real going on'
along qi meridians is just noticing anomalies.  The jump from that to
accepting an entire doctrine of universal life force as a scientific
model is a huge one, in logical and mathmatical terms.

(Maybe) we can agree to say that the process of science produces a limited
view of nature that's very powerful in certain areas, and weak in others.
And a body of theory that is similarly good for some things and not as good
for others.  And finally that the intellectual faculty for doing
theoretical science is driven by emotional needs, like any other
human faculty.

>    Have you relegated "qi" to the realm of metaphysics? And why is that?

I'm sorry, that's a piece of philosophical jargon.  I was using the term
'metaphysical existence' in the more traditional sense of
debating the nature of 'metaphysical essences,' not in the sense of
denigrating its reality.  Scientists may indeed attribute a sense of
reality to their particle zoo, or whatever, because of the nature
of the psychology of discovery, but they don't (usually) write about it
in professional discourse, they write about descriptions, not essences,
for the most part.

In fact, there is a movement subscribed to by some researchers that
uses special language (Bourland's 'E-Prime') to describe experimental results
in operational terms, to avoid the semantic confusion of having to
worry about whether a gluon exists, or whether a photon is a particle
or a wave.  I just mention it as a relevant curiosity, I don;t know how
many people actually write in E-Prime.

>    I'm arguing that scientific circles suffer from conservatism, and that
>they are not as purely rational as the "scientific method" would indicate. I
>don't think I took the position that science is dominated by ideologues (but I
>*will* say that ideology is a factor in most institutions)

>    I'm arguing that scientific circles suffer from conservatism, and that

To whatever extent that is true, (and of course it is), _that_ isn't the reason
why Qi doesn't appear in your physics textbook, imo.
It is probably the reason why some researchers might not spend as much time
studying Chinese doctors and Yogis as they did for a while in the 60's, when
the social and economic factors were more in favor of this sort of
experimentation.

>--
>    Stephen Chan
>    uunet!srg!schan or uunet!srg![e-mail]

                    thank you very much for the dialogue,

                    todd

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| Todd I. Stark                  [e-mail]           |
| Digital Equipment Corporation                     [phone]           |
| Philadelphia, Pa. USA                                                       |
|  "I'm in a hurry, I don't know why.  All I really gotta do is live and die" |
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