Anthony66 wrote: ↑Sun Aug 16, 2026 2:15 pm
It appears that you want to place SS outside of the empirical game — "no independent method should be expected to test its calculations, because that is never what it was claiming to do." Atlantis isn't a competing empirical date; it's a symbol for higher-order dynamics that lawfully shape the flashing experience, including shaping why the empirical convergences fall where they do. SS doesn't lose the calibration test; it declines to have entered it, and re-positions itself one level up — as an account of the very constraints that generate the empirical results in the first place.
In the number trick, convergence happens because the procedure discards the input. Whatever you start with — 2, 5, 9 — is annihilated by "multiply by 9, sum the digits": every input maps to 9, then to 4. The starting number contributes nothing to the output - the destination is fixed.
But in the scientific case, radiometric dating, dendrochronology, and ice cores do not discard their input — they are dominated by it. Feed a genuinely different-aged sample in and you get a different date out. The methods converge on a given stratum and diverge across strata that differ, tracking the difference faithfully. That is the exact opposite of the number trick, where no change of input ever changes the output. The trick's convergence is input-insensitive; the dating methods' convergence is input-sensitive. And input-sensitivity is the whole ballgame, because it's the signature of tracking-something-external: a procedure whose output varies with the world is, by definition, carrying information about the world, and a procedure whose output ignores the world isn't. One cannot use the input-independent trick to explain an input-dependent result.
But the moment SS says anything about the empirical world, as Steiner repeatedly did, it has re-entered the input-sensitive world where outputs co-vary with empirical inputs. The symbol-reading buys immunity only where it asserts nothing checkable; the biology asserts something checkable; the immunity doesn't cover it.
I suspect I'm probably coming down too hard on the particularly analogy used, rather than what you wanted to convey. Perhaps a better analogy might be the mapping of high-dimensional spaces in mathematics to low-dimensional space, like what one does with principle component analysis. The empirical world of our sense/intellectual life might be akin to the low dimensional PCA induced space, the full reality exists in the full high-dimensional space. One is not creating input independent problems with this analogy. Perhaps an even better analogy might come from the fields of mathematical topology and differential geometry where we have manifolds which are spaces embedded in higher dimensional spaces that may be curved or complicated overall but looks flat and ordinary (like familiar Euclidean space) when you zoom in on any small region — the way the Earth's surface looks flat locally even though it's a globe. Again our sense/intellectual life might be viewed as living on a manifold in this vastly richer full-reality space.
Whatever metaphor one might use, we still have the problem when SS makes contact with the empirical. It surely must meet the "local" empirical standards even if we understand it is capturing the dynamics of richer spaces. A high being bending the potential spaces of becoming should leave a trace down here.
Yes, these are also good analogies that highlight the core point: empirical facts and their lawful dynamics are
not independent of our cognitive perspective on those facts. We need to appreciate this properly. Let's imagine a hypothetical discussion.
A: I am looking into Homer and am wondering whether his accounts of history can be trusted. It seems reasonable enough that the Trojan War happened, that a man named Odysseus was involved, and that he tried to return home. I suppose all of that could be theoretically verified. But then Homer starts making claims about what this man encountered on the way home, and he begins describing mythical, giant beings. If we look to geological, anthropological, historical, etc., records, we have no evidence that such giant beings existed; and if we look to current science, we have no evidence that such beings could have existed. So why should we trust Homer's historical accounts?
B: There is a misunderstanding here. The giant beings described on the journey home are more like artistic symbols for higher-order inner realities, for psychological dynamics that are encountered by souls navigating deeper scales of existence that shape the historical plane. Thus, Homer was never claiming that physical giant beings existed as entities on the physical-historical plane that can be physically seen and possibly confirmed by digging into the Earth and finding giant skeletons; that was simply never his interest or aim. Instead, he was pointing to archetypal realities that influence the historical plane but are not contained within it (just as the waking dynamics that shape our dream life are not contained within our transforming sequence of dream images).
A: Ok, but then you are saying Homer is only interested in psychological experiences and their dynamics, and has no interest in the empirical domain of historical facts. You are taking him outside of the empirical game. So why should Homer be considered such an important individuality that we should pay attention to if we want to understand the objective structure and course of reality that we investigate through history and science?
B: Here, you are assuming there is a divide between "deeper psychological dynamics" and the "objective course of reality". For example, the wars people wage, the journeys they make, and the civilizations they develop are shaped by those psychological dynamics, and all of those events feed back into the objective course of history. We can't make any sense of the latter without understanding the former.
A: Yes, but that only applies to human civilization. What about those aspects of the Earthly environment and its history that are completely independent of human imagination and activity, like the earliest states of the Earth's landscape?
So we then arrive at the following situation. The fact that the deeper psychological dynamics heavily influence the course of human civilization - the interests people have, their ideas, the places they go, the technologies they develop and apply, and so on - is quite obvious. This relationship only becomes murky (for ordinary consciousness) when we begin
imagining a physical-historical plane completely independent of human volition, intelligence, and their traces. And as you rightly stated in a previous post, the content of such an imagination can only be "non-experiential". Or put in more phenomenological terms, it can only take shape within specific cognitive constraints.
But why should we imagine that any truth worth knowing, i.e., one that can provide deeper understanding of reality and lead to practical outcomes, can be arrived at 'non-experientially'? Why should we assume that the knowing perspective can be deemed completely irrelevant to the objects and processes known within the physical-empirical domain, when it obviously isn't irrelevant in any other domain of experience? (Note how this relationship was recognized by every careful-thinking epistemologist over many centuries and is increasingly recognized by careful-thinking natural scientists, especially over the last 100 years).
In that sense, the core realization is that no world is input-sensitive independently of our knowing perspective and gestures. The empirical outputs always co-vary with the inputs
through that perspective and its constraints. This shouldn't remain some interesting epistemological sidenote to our inquiries, but should become increasingly more concrete and seriously applied in those inquiries.
Once we become more sensitive to this reality, we also begin to see the game the ordinary intellect is playing with itself when pursuing these questions. I know that anyone can ask an LLM to provide a list of all the ways in which Steiner's research indications are refuted by natural scientific findings. But what are we actually doing here? Are we first going to the source material in Steiner's lectures and working through it to thoroughly understand what he was conveying, and then conducting our own natural scientific observations and experiments to test those indications? Of course not. We are indirectly relying on others' interpretations of his indications, and others' observations and experiments in the empirical domain. What are all the factors that intervene between these indirect sources and our confident conclusion that the supersensible research does not lead to better practical understanding and outcomes in the empirical domain? Notice how we would face the same problem if I asked an LLM to provide a list of empirical findings that could be interpreted as supporting some of Steiner's claims. In fact, if I ask it about the mistletoe cancer therapy, I am led to two studies that conclude:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18956494/
"Mistletoe therapy, a cancer treatment suggested by Rudolf Steiner in 1920, is a typical and specific anthroposophic therapy, but could become more important today in the field of mainstream medicine. This article analyzes some of the most typical effects of mistletoe therapy based on the experience of more than 100 cases. A few patients were chosen who appear exemplary of the opportunities offered by mistletoe therapy. Their clinical history demonstrates an improvement in clinical condition and performance status, better quality of life, improved psychological status, reduction of infective events, better tolerance of concomitant chemoradiotherapy, and even a direct reduction of tumor size. The conclusion is that the patients may be indicative for future prospective clinical studies designed to confirm a real efficacy of mistletoe in cancer therapy."
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2804713/
"Pooled analysis of clinical studies suggests that adjuvant treatment of cancer patients with the mistletoe extract Iscador is associated with a better survival. Despite obvious limitations, and strong hints for a publication bias which limits the evidence found in this meta-analysis, one can not ignore the fact that studies with positive effects of VA-E on survival of cancer patients are accumulating. Future studies evaluating the effects of Iscador should focus on a transparent design and description of endpoints in order to provide greater insight into a treatment often being depreciated as ineffective, but highly valued by cancer patients."
But if I am being honest, I have no direct familiarity with these studies, their methods, their findings, or any of the countless variables that could be intervening between them and my conscious perspective on the experiential flow. I have no idea who is funding them according to a preconceived agenda, or conversely, who has been working to prevent further studies in this direction according to a preconceived agenda. All of these things are completely outside my domain of direct experience, knowledge, and control. We need to be completely honest with ourselves about that fact if we want any chance of finding a more fruitful and productive way to attain direct and practical knowledge within the empirical domain. The inner principle of 'like cures like' that resides at the root of such therapies can only be known and verified through our orthogonal awakening into lucidity. Then we are no longer completely dependent on indirect, 3rd-person sources for our orientation to the input-output correlations of the empirical plane.
That is what we have referred to as 'facing toward the incoming flow'. If we think about it, the quantitative calculations of the historical sciences have almost zero relevance for what the conditions of the Earthly environment
will be and how evolution will unfold within those conditions. Using many different methods to date a particular stratum, imagined to exist in a vacuum of intelligent agencies, tells us nothing about the future conditions that are clearly unfolding within the context of such agencies. This is why we are continually surprised by wars, economic upheavals, epidemics, natural disasters, and other calamities: we are so focused on our receded, narrowly constrained mental pictures of historical reality that we have no orientation to what is
presently unfolding through its contextual structure. Again, careful natural scientists are increasingly intuiting this intelligent, cognitive-like contextuality of existence, as Levin does. It is increasingly evident that medical research, among many other fields, cannot be carried forward fruitfully without somehow accounting for and consciously working with that contextual structure. SS has simply provided the most direct and conscious method of doing so to date.
