What makes Scientology a pseudoscience and separates the reactive mind from real scie

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Nope. Not too scared of hypodermic needles either, if that's the connection you were thinking of.

Go back and read your copy of Dianetics -- Some Crap I Made Up Before Breakfast. You should be able to find LRon's references to knitting needles. Unless "The Church" has been "correcting" that document as well later ones. My edition is one of the earlier ones.

 

[marplots]

Go back and read your copy of Dianetics -- Some Crap I Made Up Before Breakfast. You should be able to find LRon's references to knitting needles. Unless "The Church" has been "correcting" that document as well later ones. My edition is one of the earlier ones.

Is that the bit about abortions and memories of being attacked in the womb?

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Is that the bit about abortions and memories of being attacked in the womb?

Looks like your copy is the same as mine.

Per LRon's fantasies there must be huge numbers of people with a terrible phobic fear of knitting needles. I'm surprised that they haven't been outlawed.

 

[HSienzant]

I enjoy picking apart ideas and if there is a disproof of the reactive mind I don't know about I want it.

Wrong question. No one has to disprove the reactive mind anymore than one has to disprove there's a teapot orbiting Jupiter right now.

The burden of proof is on anyone claiming there is a 'reactive mind'.
Or a teapot orbiting Jupiter.

Imagining something is real doesn't make it real.
Claiming something is real doesn't make it real either.
Saying there are tests that demonstrate it doesn't make it real either.

What evidence exists for this concept, other than stuff Hubbard claimed but did not prove?

Hank

 

[Crocoshark]

Go back and read your copy of Dianetics -- Some Crap I Made Up Before Breakfast.

I've only read the first few chapters ("book one"), because Hubbard writes like an insufferable, pompous psychotherapist from the 50s. I actually got tired the last couple times I tried to read him. Scientology would blame this on a misunderstood word but I think it's because I'm tired of hearing the same stuff repeatedly and think the way he writes is awful.

But luckily I found a PDF of the whole thing I can search

Is this what you're referring to?

"And the act of vomiting because of pregnancy is
via contagion of aberration. Actual illness generally results only when mother has been interfering with the child either by douches or knitting needles or some such thing. Such interference causes the mother to become ill and, from an actual physical standpoint, is much harder on the mother than on the child."

If this is it, I don't quite understand why I'd be expected to have a fear of knitting needles. Wouldn't it only apply to mothers who've used them in abortions and children who've survived such attempts?

Wrong question. No one has to disprove the reactive mind anymore than one has to disprove there's a teapot orbiting Jupiter right now.

I was mainly asking because someone said there were many instances where the reactive mind was demonstrably wrong. I don't think Russel's teapot is demonstrably wrong, which was the whole point of using a space teapot for that analogy.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

<snip>

Is this what you're referring to?

"And the act of vomiting because of pregnancy is
via contagion of aberration. Actual illness generally results only when mother has been interfering with the child either by douches or knitting needles or some such thing. Such interference causes the mother to become ill and, from an actual physical standpoint, is much harder on the mother than on the child."

If this is it, I don't quite understand why I'd be expected to have a fear of knitting needles. Wouldn't it only apply to mothers who've used them in abortions and children who've survived such attempts?

<another snip>

I only asked if you had the fear. The entire quote is intrinsically insane. You attempt to actually analyze it. Don't bother, LRon was only waving his arms around. Do try and read some of his fiction before he did his World Shaking research and discovered Dianetics. Typewriter in the Sky is not a bad read.

 

[Crocoshark]

I only asked if you had the fear.

No, you stated what logical conclusion you thought something he said would lead to. You attempted to actually analyze it first, than when I responded asking about your own conclusion you try to call me out like I was the first to talk about where an "intrinsically insane" paragraph does or does not lead.

Do try and read some of his fiction before he did his World Shaking research and discovered Dianetics. Typewriter in the Sky is not a bad read.

Really?

My initial reaction to the suggestion of reading anything written by Hubbard is that there's weird erotic fan fiction online that would be a less wasteful use of my time, but alright.

My mom got Battlefield Earth recently and I didn't get into it. I don't think it did a good job of introducing its world and the genre's not my thing.

 

[marplots]

I thought Battlefield Earth was pretty good. I've read it twice.

 

[Crocoshark]

I probably have an anti-Hubbard bias that those on this board don't actually share; I've been exposed to the same ideas and same writing style so often that it feels like a theologian dedicating a lifetime to just studying the bible over and over, and I'm kind of averse to spending any length of time reading anything with his name on it.

I'm basically here to watch Dianetics burn.

 

[Beelzebuddy]

Well, "engrams" only refers to memories of real life pain and unconsciousness. Growing up in Scientology, I think you realize that it's perfectly possible for anxieties to be caused by something *other* than past trauma, and even if you still think the reactive mind is plausible, it becomes one of multiple explanations, though an avid Scientologist may speculate that you're example connects to past experiences of having been in traffic jams.

Maybe the difficulty you're having in distinguishing the reactive mind is exactly why it can be so easy for a Scientologist to believe in. You know past trauma can have negative effects on people; everything from orphaned elephants to serial killers' childhoods provides confirmation, you just have your own version of the mechanics. But looking at examples like that, you don't think about it the specifics 'cause in Scientology it's up to the traumatized individual to find the cause between specific incidents and specific "abberrations". All you know as an observer is what everyone knows; that the stuff they went through screwed them up.

Probably worth noting that "unconsciousness" is something imagined as existing in degrees; a sick person is more "unconscious" than a healthy person, but less unconscious than someone totally blacked out. In auditing you go over a past incident over and over, trying to recall more and more details until you are conscious of the entire memory, remembering any details you forgot. The unconsciousness of those forgotten details or entire forgotten incidents is supposedly what's causing your problem.

Both of the hilites are classic pseudoscience false memory tricks. If you want to give someone a rock solid faith in horse crap, make them come up with their own justification for it and go over their memory again and again until they "remember" the horse crap being there the whole time.

Battlefield Earth wasn't a good story, but I've read worse. Stripped of coded subtext it's just Mary Sue protagonist, generic evil aliens, ridiculous plot contrivances. The second part was worse; with the Intergalactic Bank trying to foreclose on the Earth being a thinly-veiled author rant about whatever mortgage issues he was having at the time.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Just to clarify. My comment about knitting needles was a joke. Albeit requiring a somewhat convoluted decoding. If LRon is to believed (snicker), somebody, somewhere must have a terrible fear of them.

Typewriter in the Sky had good reviews at the time it was published -- prior to LRon's invention of a religion. It is interesting to see how he thought before he "discovered" Dianetics.

 

[Marcus]

Out of curiosity, how might engrams; the theory that wrods and stimuli in moments of pain and unconsciousness cause negative symptoms later on, have evolved with advances in the fields you've listed? I know in concept you're absolutely right, but in practice I'm having trouble coming up with examples.


That's not very convincing when Scientologists feel Scientology has helped them overcome their problems or given them heightened awareness or uncovered vivid memories that feel as real as actual memories. Even if Hubbard said starting a religion was a reall

I admit, I never saw body thetans as a post hoc rationalization before, even though I acknowledged they made "clear" meaningless.

To be clear, body thetans are only used to justify the fact people still have problems when they go "clear", there's plenty of other justifications for different negative results; misapplied tech probably being the biggest one.

I'm a little late to the party, so I'm starting with a week old post.

LRH had lots of fabulous claims for the superpowers that would be acquired by anyone who put up the money to go clear. Eventually enough people went clear that these claims became unfeasible, so they were phased out and the emphasis put on paying for the OT levels, one after the other. With OT3, Hubbard went totally scifi, relying on the fact that anyone who had reached this level had spent so much money that they were so totally invested in the fantasy that they would be reluctant to give it up.

When Hubbard exhibited his first "clear" at Shrine Auditorium , Los Angeles, August 1950, she was supposed to have perfect recall, and was also a physics major, but was unable to remember a simple physics formula. When he turned his back she was unable to recall the color of his tie. (Marvin Gardner, Scientific American).

Following this event, Dr. Joseph Winter and Arthur Ceppos, the publisher of Dianetics, resigned from the Board of Directors of the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation (New York Times, "A piece of Blue Sky", Jon Atack)

I don't have any links, this was all before the net.

 

[xjx388]

I am also late to this party, but Scientology is one of my pet interests.

Let's start with the very basic concept of Scientology: the engram. When you strip away all of Hubbard's bluster, you are left with a concept that is actually pretty interesting -this idea that past moments of unconsciousness are recorded in a deep part of the mind and then exert an influence upon the person. The problem is that this interesting idea 1)is more or less ripped off from others (Freud, Jung, Korzybski and others) and 2)There is absolutely no evidence that it actually describes anything close to the reality of the human mind. Take the next basic concept, The Reactive mind and the Analytical mind. Again, just reading it as it is, it SOUNDS plausible that the Reactive mind is where these engrams reside and the Analytical mind is basically your everyday conscious mind. But again, this is just a crude rephrasing of Freudian psychology (which itself has fallen into disfavor) and there is zero evidence that any of it is true.

Hubbard wasn't writing for scientists. His goal was to come up with something that was plausible to the layman, create a therapy around the theory and charge people an arm and a leg to undergo the therapy. He made numerous claims of scientific legitimacy yet not one shred of that evidence has ever turned up. The only conclusion is that he never actually did any experimentation; he basically just took other people's ideas, changed them up a bit and started his own therapy with nothing behind it but unfounded claims. He is really no different than modern day psuedosciences like PowerBalance bracelets, Deepak Chopra's "philosophies," or homeopathy.

Any real science requires evidence that lead to hypotheses that lead to experiments that lead to more evidence that lead to more hypotheses . . . and no evidence is accepted that can't be repeated by others. There is absolutely none of this in Scientology: Hubbard's word as it was conceived by him at the time he wrote it is considered the final unalterable truth. And anyone who questions this is labeled Suppressive and cast out, sued, harassed, etc. THAT's why it's a psuedoscience.

But you aren't going to convince anyone who is deep into Scientology with that.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

I'm a little late to the party, so I'm starting with a week old post.

LRH had lots of fabulous claims for the superpowers that would be acquired by anyone who put up the money to go clear. Eventually enough people went clear that these claims became unfeasible, so they were phased out and the emphasis put on paying for the OT levels, one after the other. With OT3, Hubbard went totally scifi, relying on the fact that anyone who had reached this level had spent so much money that they were so totally invested in the fantasy that they would be reluctant to give it up.

When Hubbard exhibited his first "clear" at Shrine Auditorium , Los Angeles, August 1950, she was supposed to have perfect recall, and was also a physics major, but was unable to remember a simple physics formula. When he turned his back she was unable to recall the color of his tie. (Marvin Gardner, Scientific American).

Following this event, Dr. Joseph Winter and Arthur Ceppos, the publisher of Dianetics, resigned from the Board of Directors of the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation (New York Times, "A piece of Blue Sky", Jon Atack)

I don't have any links, this was all before the net.

Thanks for jogging my memory.

I first heard about Dianetics: Etc. Etc. from Martin Gardner's Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science which I must have read about 1959 or so.

The entire Dianetics article is online here:

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/gardner/

It's an interesting read still, considering how the future unfolded.

As far as knitting needles are concerned. Quoting Gardner:

In Dianetics, you learn that the embryo is capable of recording engrams immediately after conception. How these records are made, since the embryo does not develop sense organs until late in its history, remains a profound mystery. They take place on a cellular level, involving some unknown type of change within the protoplasm. According to Hubbard, life in the womb is far from Paradise. "Mama sneezes, baby gets knocked 'unconscious.' Mama runs lightly and blithely into a table and baby gets its head stoved in. Mama has constipation and baby, in the anxious effort, gets squashed. Papa becomes passionate and baby has the sensation of being put into a running washing machine. Mama gets hysterical, baby gets an engram. Papa hits Mama, baby gets an engram. Junior bounces on Mama's lap, baby gets an engram. And so it goes."

It is also very noisy in the uterus. "Intestinal squeaks and groans, flowing water, belches, flatulation and other body activities of the mother produce a continual sound.... When mother takes quinine a high ringing noise may come into being in the foetal ears as well as her own -- a ringing which will carry through a person's whole life." Moreover, the uterus is very tight in later prenatal life. If Mama has high blood pressure, "it is extremely horrible in the womb."

In addition to being knocked out by blows, coughs, sneezes, vomiting, and so on, the poor embryo can also be rendered unconscious by the violent pressures of the sex act, and -- understandably -- by attempted abortions. Throughout his book, Hubbard reveals a deep-seated hatred of women, but this hatred is most clearly indicated by his obsession with what dianeticians call "AA" -- attempted abortion. When Hubbard's Mamas are not getting kicked in the stomach by their husbands or having affairs with lovers, they are preoccupied with AA -- usually by means of knitting needles. "Twenty or thirty abortion attempts are not uncommon in the aberee," Hubbard writes, "and in every attempt the child could have been pierced through the body or brain." These experiences naturally produce the worst engrams because they are usually accompanied by verbal expressions charged with emotion. Since all these remarks are recorded literally by the embryo, they create engrams capable of causing great damage in later life when they are fed as data to the conscious mind.

(Highlighting mine.) No wonder millions of people have this terrible fear of these awful instruments. They should be banned by every civilized country. Or at least only licensed for use in authorized Knitting Clubs.

 

[Marcus]

I've only read the first few chapters ("book one"), because Hubbard writes like an insufferable, pompous psychotherapist from the 50s. I actually got tired the last couple times I tried to read him. Scientology would blame this on a misunderstood word but I think it's because I'm tired of hearing the same stuff repeatedly and think the way he writes is awful.

One wonders where he came about his bit of knowledge (and hatred for) psychotherapy. During his brief college career (leaving after being placed on academic probation in the second year) he didn't take any related subjects.

 

[Marcus]

The entire Dianetics article is online here:

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/gardner/

Thanks! I'm a fan of Marvin Gardner, but in 1959 I was only 3 years old.

 

[Lukraak_Sisser]

One thing that still sticks to my mind is the intake / free whatever from Scientology I once did as a student when I was bored on an afternoon.

It consisted of 200 ish multiplechoice questions, which all could be answered with yes / maybe / no.
And the questions were all broad, sweeping questions without any actual clarification.
Things like 'a child cries, would you hit it?' Without any indication of the age of the child, the reason for crying, the length etc.
While I might be tempted to smack a 10 year old crying for 1 hour because (s)he did not get a third cooky, I would never hit a one year old with a burn wound.

So I truthfully had to answer most questions as 'maybe'. Surpisingly the test showed me as a person utterly unable to make up his mind, who did not know what he wanted with his life. Good thing they had a course for that, I could start for the low price of....
When I pointed out the questions were totally unscientific I got shouted at and I would come back once my life was a total mess. (that was 24 years ago, still waiting on it).
I told this to some friends, so they took the course too and answered mostly yes or mostly no. One was diagnosed as a hopeless optimist that did not know when to stop, the other as a near-depressed lost case that never saw the bright side in life. But fortunately for both a course was about to start...

 

[Crocoshark]

-this idea that past moments of unconsciousness are recorded in a deep part of the mind and then exert an influence upon the person. The problem is that this interesting idea 1)is more or less ripped off from others (Freud, Jung, Korzybski and others) and 2)There is absolutely no evidence that it actually describes anything close to the reality of the human mind. Take the next basic concept, The Reactive mind and the Analytical mind. Again, just reading it as it is, it SOUNDS plausible that the Reactive mind is where these engrams reside and the Analytical mind is basically your everyday conscious mind. But again, this is just a crude rephrasing of Freudian psychology (which itself has fallen into disfavor) and there is zero evidence that any of it is true.

Could you tell me more about the idea outside the context of Scientology and its fall into disfavor?

One wonders where he came about his bit of knowledge (and hatred for) psychotherapy. During his brief college career (leaving after being placed on academic probation in the second year) he didn't take any related subjects.

My Dad says he actually wrote up his stuff for psychiatrists but theyrejected him so he turned to the masses and kept a life long grudge about it, which, knowing how science works and how other theories fought to be accepted, is ridiculous.. It's like if you turned in a manuscript for a novel, got rejected once, and spent the rest of your life weaving conspiracies about the evil publishing agencies that hate you.

It's probably also helpful for Hubbard to keep his followers from looking at any other field of psychotherapy, lest they see a resemblance.

 

[marplots]

My Dad says he actually wrote up his stuff for psychiatrists but theyrejected him so he turned to the masses and kept a life long grudge about it, which, knowing how science works and how other theories fought to be accepted, is ridiculous.. It's like if you turned in a manuscript for a novel, got rejected once, and spent the rest of your life weaving conspiracies about the evil publishing agencies that hate you.

The longer you spend on this forum the more believable that will be.

 

[Crocoshark]

Oh I believe it. I was saying his behavior was ridiculous. It sounds as if he found out he got crticized and he just fell apart; a real scientist would stay and burn the opponent's criticisms to the ground, not lose the battle and come home crying.