Artur Matuck

Alterscience 

critical propositions for contemporary science

Research Project by Artur Matuck 

 

Presentation

 

The concept of Alterscience introduces a new paradigm that recognizes human beings in their social, artistic, and intellectual complexity, involving their biological, technological, scientific, spiritual, and affective areas as the subject of new knowledge, transcending the physicality typical of modern science but without denying scientific facts.

This research project raises the hypothesis that a critical analysis of contemporary science would be relevant for contemporary culture, for science itself, as well as for society, humans, animals, the environment, and even the planet as a whole.

The analysis would be derived from different perspectives: philosophical, ecological, aesthetic, legal, spiritual, and moral; it would also be complemented by contemporary theories such as feminism, de-colonialism, blackness, anti-racism, indigenism, and anti-speciesism. The proposed criticism, seen as constructive and innovative, would resituate science in theoretical, experimental, philosophical, moral, and paradigmatic reformulation.

Although we must recognize the important role of modern science as a civilizing force, especially after the Enlightenment, it can now be confronted in its fundamentals, in its exclusive and totalizing rationality, in its self-validated practices and experiments, and in its technological and societal derivations, its applications in industry, commercial or military, and its direct and indirect effects on the social fabric, subjectivities, the environment, nature, and the planet.

 

Objectives

 

This research project intends to establish a new field in universities and culture, proposing a long-term and comprehensive process. Its objectives involve implementing study, communication, and collaborative research strategies to inaugurate a continuous reflection on contemporary scientific thinking, paradigms, practices, and assumptions.

Its main purpose is to institute a singular thought proposing a critique of contemporary science, a reformulation of the current paradigm, aiming to establish possible common points between science and other philosophical and spiritual traditions.

This new field of research and communicative performance will be called Alterscience and understood as a science that respects life, the planet, ancestral knowledge, intuitions, and subjectivity.

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Justification

 

Challenging alterscientific research about the complexity of the universe, knowledge, and human beings is already being conducted, but only at the edges of institutions. They have repercussions only in intellectual environments receptive to innovations and are, therefore, scarcely publicized or debated. Furthermore, they are not known as 'Alterscience,' a recent term that this research project intends to inaugurate and institute as an established concept.

Certain limitations of traditional scientific thinking, restricted to paradigms rarely discussed, prevent new proposals from being absorbed. Science remains limited in this way, albeit challenged, for not accepting observation, investigation, or consideration of phenomena beyond the spectrum of its instruments or that do not fit into its rigid culture or dominant assumptions.

The recognition of supra-physical phenomena in the form of psychic manifestations that act on matter or paranormal phenomena, considered sacred, disturbing, or epiphanic, or even the acceptance that living beings, human and animal populations, vegetation, water, and even the planet itself have inalienable rights, would imply a confrontation of the fundamentals of this historically determined science derived from positivism and physicalism.

The current paradigm of this institutionalized science insistently perceives animals, plants, forests, rivers, the planet itself, and even some human beings as physical mechanisms, devoid of sacredness, without rights to life, dignity, and respect, and therefore available to be controlled, experienced, exhausted and even commercialized.

Recently, some fields of knowledge - such as cosmology, neuroscience, and quantum physics – have started to propose social, cultural, and techno-scientific transformations, willing to recognize and discuss alternative paradigms of conduct, experimentation, attitudes, and theoretical foundations, approaching the propositions of an Altercience.

Paradoxes and contradictions are evident when science develops technologies to make known the invisible, micro or macroscopic, virtual or computational dimensions before scientific evidence and imagery are faced with insights that prove to be existential, poetic, sacred, aesthetic, epiphanic, or supra-sensory.

This observation should lead to a necessary investigation into the nature of many life and cosmic phenomena that are not revealed nor understood, even denied, when a rigid positivist science observes them.

However, not only in science but also in the arts, literature, religions, and philosophy, culture is transformed and seeks recognition for ancestral wisdom, the religiosity of traditional cultures, and contemporary forms of spirituality, thus expanding the confrontation with an inflexible science that aims to have an immutable paradigm.