'What Else Is True?'

Starting from a scientific world view, we ask the question `what else is true?' Our explorations are aimed towards a world view that incorporates the insights gained by science, without subscribing to a reductionistic interpretation that posits science as covering all.  In particular, we inquire into the relationships between science and ethics and aesthetics.

The five of us have arrived at our common `what else' question from different backgrounds, namely theoretical astrophysics, cognitive psychology, philosophy of science, and comparative religion. We have chosen to start from science for two reasons. First, science offers the most successful example of detailed and verifiable knowledge built up in a coherent fashion over a time span of many generations. Second, science offers the standard description of reality used in our culture, whether taken seriously, or embraced in the form of a naive type of scientism, or attacked in an attempt to overcome what is considered to be its negative side-effects.

We also have in common a disappointment with the whole range of easy answers to the `what else' question, that pop up whenever discussions veer to consciousness, spirituality, and values. The underlying notions mobilized in those discussions are what we want to investigate in detail, before even trying to attack the big questions. At the same time, we want to keep our eyes firmly fixed on our main question, since we share an optimism that we can gain some degree of real clarity, by discussing it from different points of view.

Finally, we share a way of thinking that gives experience priority to theory. In the spirit of a Socratic inquiry, we want to leave our goals and our methods open to question, but we intend to let experience be the ultimate arbiter over dogma. We want to look into the nature of `experience' and its relation to theory, as well as to the reality that theory and experience point at. As part of our investigations, we intend to evaluate attempts (some unconscious) to use science to define "the world," and assumptions that it could define the world.

Our starting point is that we do not know what science is, let alone what (that part of) reality is that science is considered to describe. What we do know is a sense of how science is done, in practice, and how these activities are interpreted by ourselves and others. From this type of starting point, already quite different for each of us, we will first ask the question `what is science', and what is true about scientific insights, before delving into our main question `what else is true'.

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