A few weeks ago, I wrote this article:
https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/ricks-spaghetti-and-the-soulist-scientific-method-e58d023f3528
Thesis: Rick is teaching Morty the scientific method, and he’s also learning that your own subjective experiences can be part of that method.
And what happened this week? Rick started doing science on the afterlife, using Jerry as a test subject, because Jerry believes in heaven and can actually go there. Rick, as he directly says himself, cannot get into heaven because he’s too atheistic.
Season 7 of Rick and Morty has gone well above my expectations, and into my hopes and dreams for what this show can depict.
So what am I talking about, what’s the pitch here on why you should use this episode to inform your politics? Here it is:
The scientific method Rick uses in this episode is the soulist scientific method. Traditionally, most people who think of themselves as science-oriented use the material scientific method. Meanwhile actual trained and educated scientists and doctors tend to have a greater respect for magick than these people. These materialists, realists really, have a fundamental disagreement with Me on the nature of science. They believe that the world is absolute, and that our own subjective experiences cannot be independent variables in an experiment. This divide becomes pretty evident when we go into materialists’ investigations of magic, the paranormal, and religion. They believe in replicability by people of their own beliefs. And this… is wrong.
Imagine I’m conducting an experiment to see how far human beings can throw baseballs. The Guinness book of world records claims the answer is 130 meters. Ball players claim they can do about 100 meters. But I, a scientist, wish to replicate this experiment to confirm it. And I can only throw a baseball 30 meters. So I conclude that ball players and Guinness are wrong, and that baseballs can only be thrown 30 meters.
The mistake here is assuming everyone has the same capabilities. Realists make the same mistake. But instead of confusing physical capabilities like throwing a ball, they confuse perceptional capabilities. Different people perceive things differently. Spiritual people perceive religion, magick, and the paranormal differently than atheists. Atheists are not going to be able to directly perceive these phenomena. But instead of using spiritualists as they might use a microscope or a camera, to expand their perceptions, materialists trust only their eyes when it comes to the non-material. Thereby limiting their tools to only the most primitive.
What Rick is doing in this episode is using the soulist scientific method. He’s introducing the viewers to this concept. To the idea that you need spiritual believers for certain kinds of science. The atheist worldview isn’t going to cut it. You need diversity.
That’s pretty cool. And I hope it’ll motivate more people to take the soulist scientific method seriously, now that they’ve seen the concepts in a digestible format.
