Science is Calling Itself Dead

Sean McClure
2 min readMar 21, 2024

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Criticizing science requires no transcendent authority. Nothing grander than the pursuit of science itself.

Today’s scientist uses the straw man of magic and mysticism to discount anything that does not conform to their outdated take on reality. They cover the blatant failings of their reductionist paradigm with prestige, award and that hollow word called “rigor.”

Science itself, when validated as a process, already shows us the fatal flaw introduced by the “Enlightenment.” Extraction, isolation and refinement take us away from what is observed, not towards it.

Society assumes a natural flow from discovered pieces to human experience, yet no such connection exists. The layman believes in something wholly unscientific, promulgated by a self-serving scientific enterprise that has made far less progress than its annals would suggest.

Science takes credit for what uninformed toil gives us. But society is told the exact opposite, believing analysis, research and theory are what bring forth our progress. This fiction is so deeply ingrained that scientists themselves cannot smell their own folly.

It is not magic that makes the complex world unexplainable, it is the fully distinct properties that emerge at the scale of everything that has physical consequence. No amount of digging can uncover a causality that isn’t there.

There is no path from pieces to properties. There are no atoms of behavior. No line has ever been established between the guts of physical systems and the surfaces and essences of everything that is.

Science already claims this paradigm dead. Not magic. Not mysticism. Science.

Anyone interested in the mechanics of our world is forced to speak a dead language, and look through a mirrored lens that only reflects back the remnants of expired theories and bad analogies.

We have so severely misplaced concreteness that precision itself has become little more than a parlor trick.

There is nothing intellectual about dismissing the critiques against science as mere magic or meaningless abstraction. That is a crutch, a distortion, a pathetic misrepresentation of science itself.

Those who load up on contrived categories and precise symbols to “explain” our complex world are the real ones reading the tea leaves. Divining the interpretation of this world through the detached mechanics of “rigorous” analysis is the real mysticism.

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Sean McClure
Sean McClure

Written by Sean McClure

Independent Scholar; Author of Discovered, Not Designed; Ph.D. Computational Chem; Builder of things; I study and write about science, philosophy, complexity.

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