Beyond the Looking-Glass – Objectivity: The Mythical Border Between Science and Scientists

Objectivity: The Mythical Border Between Science and Scientists

with Jeffrey Dunne

Saturday, March 8, 2025
9am PST / 12pm EST / 5pm GMT / 6pm CET

Beyond the Looking-Glass, Session 3 of 6

This event is LIVE. All participants will receive the RECORDING.

The premise of modern science is that it focuses on studying objective aspects of reality. It is on this basis that the scientific community claims that science is a sieve for fundamental ‘truth,’ i.e. establishing fact and weeding out subjective opinion. What has been forgotten along the way over the past few centuries is that the concept of the ‘objective’ is itself subjective. To wit, the measure of objectivity is consensus, i.e. things upon which the majority of people agree are considered ‘objectively true,’ with the remaining perspectives treated as ‘subjective,’ or even ‘subjectively biased.’ As a consequence, the defining of ‘objective truth’ and ‘objective reality’ is actually a process of sharpening the delineation between what is considered acceptable observations and experiences versus those which are rare and consequently shunned, even to the point of calling them false and claiming the people who have them must be either lying or insane. Yet uncommon experiences, whether one calls them anomalous or denies them entirely, continue to occur, and the body of documented evidence of their legitimacy is now overwhelming. If we are to move science forward—in fact, if we are to recover from the growing disfunction of a global society being told that people are nothing more than biological computers—we must open the aperture of what phenomena are deemed worthy of scientific study and recognize that the distinction between the objective and the subjective is nothing more than an arbitrary line in the sands of statistics.

Dr. Jeffrey Dunne is President of the International Consciousness Research Laboratories (ICRL, www.icrl.org), an organization dedicated to understanding the nature of consciousness for the betterment of humanity.  Beyond his work with ICRL and several decades of research at the Johns Hopkins University in fields ranging from acoustics to data science and AI, Dr. Dunne is an award-winning playwright and author.  His recently published novel, Nexus, weaves the concept of syntropy with the implications of the nature of consciousness into a story that speaks to the challenges humanity is facing, sharing a vision for finding a healthier, more balanced future.