I am a living Macroscope
Like Bronisław Malinowski, who was the first anthropologist to study any indigenous people while living among the people of the Trobriand islands as a fieldworker, I am a the first I believe “learned-ignorant” generalist who has lived among many different specialists at the university for 15 years+ while studying them as an outsider of science, intentionally for the last 8 years while never following a specialized curriculum. As Malinowski discovered how the kula ring effectively worked while visiting and studying many of the different tribes of the isolated Trobriand islands, these studies of mine among different “isolated” island-like specialized departments made me discover the shortcoming of the scientific method.
It is these multiple undirected sojourns and my personal curriculum of studies* that has unbeknown to me at the time structured my mind as a living “macroscope,” while acquiring a second general baccalaureate and one unspecialized Master’s degree in ZooAnthropoSociology.
*During one session at the UQAR (Université du Québec à Rimouski), at the beginning of the 80s, I was following courses in five different departments while enrolled in a general BA that I could earn by following three one-year certificates of studies, which I could run consecutively, giving me the liberty to be “eclectic” in my choice of courses.
My two BA are thus the result of an amalgam of subjects (See below) that I personally chose during my second BA to intentionally become a generalist, after reading in Spaceship Earth: Manual of operation, after my first:
Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking.” Buckminster Fuller (Spaceship Earth: Manual of operation, 1968)
It is because of him that I decided to become a generalist while searching for a Master’s degree program after a first eclectic BA equivalency, and a personal life which prepared me for this “mission.”
Here’s a pictural timeline of my self-concocted and seemingly disconnected curriculum of study, to find out, intentionally after my first eclectic BA equivalency, what is wrong with science that it cannot use the sum of humanity acquired knowledge to solve the problems created by progress:
These three subject matters, biology, psychology, and economy have unbeknown to me led me to look at human evolution from an unspecialized perspective. Indeed, 1) we evolved while first tentatively standing up as Australopithecus and fully as Hominid (Biology); while ever more becoming conscious of the objects of the Savanna. Like we are as individuals becoming more and more aware of the objects of our social environment during the first nine months of our postpartum gestation in a “social womb.” Then, as a species, 2) by becoming gradually more self-conscious as sapiens (Psychology), as we do in the next nine months of our growing up as individuals. And finally 3) by becoming species-conscious and organized Modern Humans (Economy), as we do also individually as terrible-twos while becoming socially-conscious and confronting our personal wants and emotions to the outside rules of society; which is where we stand in 2018 as a species, while electing all over the world terrible-two personalities as leaders. These are evidence that our two-year+ postpartum gestation “recapitulates our phylogeny.” And, as terrible-twos are cajoled into becoming nice-threes by a loving surrounding, I hope my theory will do the same with humans. And I know it will if I ever put it on paper and if it is ever accepted.
Then, I had the good fortune of being accepted at the Master in Sociology and Anthropology ten years after my second BA — without having followed one course in Sociology or Anthropology — by late Dr. Nora Chebotarev, God bless her, whose open-mindedness allowed me to work with a zoologist mainly, Dr. Denis Lynn during the four years I have been at the University of Guelph.
Here how these subject matters, Sociology, Anthropology, and Zoology, completed my “extraordinary” vision of evolution:
Indeed these three concentrations of my Master also follow an evolutionary pattern: at the beginning we were tree-apes (Zoology), then Homo habilis, erectus, and sapiens (Anthropology), then we consciously organized ourselves as a species (Sociology).
Finally, I wrote a major paper that was accepted for my MA, even if misunderstood by everybody at the time, but which has allowed me to perceive aspects of reality that no specialists ever saw before and will never until I formulate my theory of “General Evolution.” “ Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. Einstein
The broken triangle represents an early sketch of my “general theory of evolution,” De evolutionibus res naturas, which will not be understood until I specify the original assumption about the nature of time on which it has been built. Unfortunately, I cannot begin to openly speak about this early assumption of mine — by fear of being “burn at the stakes” by scientists — until my theory is formulated, since “it is the theory which decides what can be observed” (Einstein).
My initial assumption about the nature of time has indeed been concretized in my mind on a spread of almost twenty years, firstly by a meditative experience, a dream associating time with this previous event five years later, one episode of “horse whispering,” again five years later, and finally, later still, scientifically asserted by Bohm’s theory of implicate order, which explains and connects my prior-mentioned life experiences.
It is this rich assumption which totally annihilates scientific objectivity that has led me to formulate, while living among scientists, a "human paradigm shift" incommensurable with their present belief that science is objective. A belief, bound together by the scientific method, a method that is as relevant to control the force of nature that humanity has become, as the belief that we were at the center of the universe was for us to discover these forces. And this, for the same reason, inertia. For us, then, it was the mass of the earth which prevented us from understanding that all of reality is governed by the same laws, for us now it is the mass of "objective knowledge" accumulated under a method which prohibits us from formulating our existential problem in solvable terms.
This was far from being formulated this way thirty years ago, which explain why I was not accepted in any of the many universities I applied for my PhD study. I was indeed then unskillfully telling heads of departments that specialists are totally ignorant as regard of the existential problem that humanity is presently facing, and that they won't get it until I formulate my theory within a PhD program...
Here’s an example of what I was essentially telling heads of university departments:
“It needs but half an eye to see in these latter days that science, the Grand Revelator of modern Western culture, has reached, without having intended to, a frontier. Either it must bury its dead, close its ranks, and go forward into a landscape of increasing strangeness, replete with things shocking to a culture-trammeled understanding, or it must become, in Claude Houghton’s expressive phrase, the plagiarist of its own past.” Benjamin Lee Whorf(1956)
Here’s an example of what I was writing at the time following Whorf:
Let me tell you how I perceive the present knowledge crisis confronting humanity. First, I must acknowledge that I do not believe that “science has reached a frontier.” Science can reach nothing by itself: everything that is known is known by somebody. Science is the frontier. Scientists are the ones who cannot cross this frontier because they are too much at ease while making a good living within it. Without the true scientists of past-years who gave their lives to original research, though, there would be no such thing as modern science. We would still be a plague-affected species toiling for our daily bread. But still, I feel, with many others, that there is such a thing as a “knowledge crisis.” Modern science, disregarding Claude Houghton’s criticism, has indeed become “the plagiarist of its own past,” even while negating it as post-modernists do like terrible twos do in their negative phase.
Here is an example of a scientific activity that illustrates this idea. This particular plagiarism does not do any apparent harm. It is well done, and I am sure that it has a very positive influence on our youth. But it irritates me. It has to do with the TV program @Discovery.ca, which I stopped watching regularly, when I began to identify the host with Big Bird, the co-hosts with Elmo and Elma, the regular marine Biologist with Ms Piggy, the chemist from Montreal, with Cookie Monster, the young scientist who teaches us the value of experiments, with Oscar, and so on. I perceive the whole program as having been conceived, unconsciously, I am sure, like a Sesame Street for Grown-ups, with its engaging contests, its games, and its open friendliness. I must admit that I have the same regard for science in general.
And here’s what came out of my studies after having worked full time in absentia as an outsider of science for twenty years after my failed attempts to enroll as a PhD student:
I say “human knowledge from the point of view of evolution” to hint that what I am ready to present to the world as a PhD dissertation is a second Copernican Revolution which will put human knowledge at its place in evolution, in time, as Copernicus put the earth at its place among the other planets, in space.
How could have I worked full time in absentia whit no one backing me? I did it on a disability pension, having convinced my doctor that I had BPD (Borderline Personality disorder), without revealing that indeed I have a “borderline disorder” but that my problem is that I am on the right side of the border while science and all of humanity is on the other side.
Here’s a list of the subject matters that have structured my mind since I was 14 and enrolled in the Cours Classique starting in the 8th grade (Élément Latin). I am starting that early since I have been unknowingly at the time deeply influenced by authors from Rome and French Antiquity, from France Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Classical Period, E.g., Cicero, Pascal, Descartes, Voltaire, Balzac, Camus, and many other influential but forgotten-from-the-mass authors.
1st General BA equivalency: Six years of cours classique and four in Cegep (Collège d’enseignement général et professionnel).
Cours classique,(Incomplete) less the two last years of Philosophy. (1958–63)
Mathematics (Geometry)
Roman and Gallic Late Antiquity
Medieval Renaissance classical and early XXth Century literature
Physics
Cegep (1970–1974) I started at 25 and ended at 20. How could that be? I was married, and during my time at the Cegep de Limoilou, my kid was born. My fellow students were then asking me: “But, how old are you?” I was retorting: “How old do you think I am?” “18, 17, 19,” were the answers. So I averaged them, and at the end, I really felt like I was still 20, which gave me plenty of time to keep on studying the absurdity of humanity.
Psychology
Biology
Nursing
Philosophy
Mathematics (Calculus)
Independent Studies (Between BA) (1975–1978) Very productive years of independent research to keep my mind in shape to return to university full time:
Particles Physics(Entanglement in Scientific magazines relating Cern experiment for lay people)
Zoology (Ethology: Tinbergan and Lorenz)
Buddhism (Paramahansa Yogananda)
Second General BA (1979–1980)
Peripheral Region development
Economy
Social Animation
Environmental science
Ethology
Computer science (Programming languages: Fortran, Basic, Cobol, Assembly, Pascal)
Unspecialized MA in ZooAnthropoSociology (1989–1992)
Sociology and Anthropology while mainly working with a Zoologist, Denis Lynn.
If I have to mention all this, it is because there are no other ways to present myself as an “extraordinary” scientist (in Kuhn sense). If I had followed a regular curriculum focus on the advancement of knowledge, I would only have to say that I have a PhD in — — — — fill up the blank and my peers would recognize me; I have no peers, I always worked alone…I succeeded because I had original ideas. It wasn’t hard since I was working incognito in the belly of the self-unconscious normal-science beast itself at finding why it cannot solve the problems created by progress:
Here why I could work incognito:
An here is the schemas that I presented to Chebotarev which had me accepted at the masters degree programs at the University of Guelph:
Club of Rome Limits to Growth
My proposition of research for how to formulate the present needed human paradigm shift:
My PhD dissertation is provisionally titled, following Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, De evolutionibus res naturas: Know thyself as a member of Homo novus, a species in evolution. (Among many provisional others.)
PS English is not my first language, this text would have been written better and be funnier if it were.
