Biodynamic wine
Is it all black and white, is it all false and scientifically baseless?
When quietly observing peoples discussions on Biodynamic viticulture and winemaking and its validity as a technique and method one can’t help but notice how such debates are often highly polarized. There are people 100% pro biodynamics who take a on type of utopian like view ‘I am a naturalist’ and anything man made is somehow impure, separate from nature or even considered evil, with no room for tolerance for any other ways. There are also types who say there is 100% no evidence to support biodynamics, it’s all hocus pocus, and it is to be rejected and ridiculed at all cost, often those who smugly take on the identity ‘I am a scientist’ or 'i only deal with the facts'.
There is enough in scientific literature to help understand the limitations of human knowledge. No one can claim to have a monopoly on understanding nature, or the relationship between man and vineyard, one must apply the sharpest and most insightful science to help further develop our understanding. None but a fool is right in his beliefs and opinions, for he who believes he can exist without folly is not as wise as he or she thinks they are.
“Everyone calls barbarity what he is not accustomed to.”- Michel de Montaigne (1533 –1592), influential writer of the French Renaissance
The 100% all pro-biodynamic, and the 100% all anti-biodynamic person will, while living in the ruse of self-righteousness express the tendency to see themselves in a more positive light than the other, and will believe they are superior in some way shape or form, whether it be in ideas, thinking, scientific background, or even morals. This is partly due to their projected ideals, values, belief structure, and conditioning. According to the ranking of your values, beliefs, and conditioning, you will seek and avoid information.
"When your colleagues aren't up on it, they're down on it."- Linus Pauling, American chemist, peace activist, author and educator. Listed as one of the most influential chemists in history and ranks among the most important scientists of the 20th century. Pauling was among the first scientists to work in the fields of quantum chemistry and molecular biology. Pauling is one of only four individuals throughout history to have won more than one Nobel Prize.
The Reticular Activating System is the attention centre in the brain, connected at its base to the spinal cord where it receives information projected directly from the ascending sensory tracts. The brainstem reticular formation runs all the way up to the mid brain. The RAS is a very complex collection of neurons which serve as a point of convergence for signals from the external world and from the internal environment. It is the part of your brain where the world outside of you, and your thoughts and feelings from "inside" of you, meet. When your highest values are perceived to be supported it awakens you to fulfil them and allows you to draw in the relevant information from your environment. When your highest values are perceived to be challenged it sedates you from fulfilling them. The RAS is the key to "turning on your brain," and seems to be the centre of inner inspiration and outer motivation. The Reticular Activating System is the centre of balance for the other systems involved in learning, self-control or inhibition and motivation. When functioning normally, according to the hierarchy of your values it provides the neural connections that are needed for the processing and learning of information, and the ability to pay attention to the correct task. With information that supports your core higher values and beliefs you will naturally be prejudiced towards, and those that challenge your core higher values, you will be prejudiced against.
One of the leading figures in natural philosophy and in the field of scientific methodology in the period of transition from the Renaissance to the early modern era, Sir Frances Bacon in his book ‘Novum Organum’ once stated: “The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion…draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects or despises…in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate.”
No matter what the issue under discussion, both sides of the issue are equally convinced that the evidence overwhelmingly supports their position. This surety is called the confirmation bias – whereby both parties seek and find confirmatory evidence in support of already existing beliefs and ignore or reinterpret disconfirmatory evidence. This bias is unconscious and driven by emotions. When this occurs, the orbital frontal cortex processes the bias emotions, the anterior cingulate processes moral accountability judgments and the ventral striatum processes rewards and pleasures for being right, dopamine, oxytocin, etc...
Both critics and supporters alike seek for conclusions they want and reward themselves when they find them. Skepticism is the antidote for the confirmation bias. Be a skeptic not becaue you do not want to believe, but because you want to know. The scientific method discriminates between true and false, reality and fantasy. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence – double blind studies – the built in self-correcting method.
Antinomy, in philosophy, is a contradiction, real or apparent, between two principles or conclusions, both of which seem equally justified; it is nearly synonymous with the term paradox. Immanuel Kant, the father of critical philosophy, in order to show the inadequacy of pure reason in the field of metaphysics, employed the word "antinomies" in elaborating his doctrine that pure reason generates contradictions in seeking to grasp the unconditioned. He offered alleged proofs of the two propositions (thesis and antithesis). Kant used antinomies to infer that space and time constitute a framework imposed, in a sense, by the mind. Kant's "Copernican Revolution" stated that things revolve around the knower, rather than the knower around things. He resolved the four antinomies by drawing a distinction between phenomena (things as they are known or experienced by the senses) and noumena (things in themselves). Kant insisted that we can never know the noumena, for we can never get beyond phenomena.
Reality is that, which the senses realize or perceive. Behind the entire phenomenon we identify with our senses is the actuality or that which is. Your thoughts about reality are what prevent you from knowing the truth about actuality. The actual truth is unknown. All we can do is define it as the exact correspondence between subjective order of our conceptions and perceptions and the objective order of the relationship amongst things, minds, knowledge. From the materialistic and mechanistic viewpoint, anything that human senses or extensions of senses cannot conceive or perceive is abstract superstition. If that were so, relative to the infinite, reality is non-existent.
The method of negation and subsequent construction by the Swiss astronomer and physicist Fritz Zwicky states, “It is wise to look for statements, theories, or systems of thought that pretend to absolute truth, and to deny them. It is almost certain to be wise, for it is extremely unlikely that anyone knows the absolute truth about anything. Negation is fruitless unless it opens up new vistas and new approaches to observation and theory for creative investigators to explore.”
What that means is that no matter what we describe as truth, there is going to be some taint of affirmative, and so also a negative to balance it. We can only asymptotically, logarithmically approach that number, that truth point. What he’s saying is that no matter what we affirm as true, every exploration of truth that man has undertaken has some form of negation attached to it. Plato described this in his writings called ‘The Dialectic’ – there is always a dialectic opposite along the journey. The Greeks used to say that on the journey you have a, b, a*, b*, a**, b** (prime), and it just continues in a spiralling circle between positive and negative. In other words, we never get rid of one or the other; we just keep approaching more integrative states. In quantum physics today they say that when we get to Planck’s length and Planck’s dimension, they merge. We don’t actually know what goes on beyond it, and that is the paradigm that has impeded new understanding in quantum physics. In my opinion that’s just another concentric sphere they’re going to break through, and string theory is the first step in that. String theory takes us beyond Planck’s length and speculates on what is beyond it – maybe we have a whole other world out there where all the forces of nature can be somewhat unified. I believe that is so, because it doesn’t make sense to have a finite on that.
"During the active phase of disputes a dialectic takes form. It is assumed that one idea must be right and the other wrong. And while dialectics are very important in science — Hegel argued that only in their presence does the necessary friction exist for progress — the choice between two seemingly inimical views is sometimes more illusory than real."- Stephen S. Rothman, Lessons From the Living Cell: The Limits of Reductionism
It is unwise to believe all one is told. It is equally stupid to believe nothing one hears, or to believe that when one hears a simple truth it is too well known to bother about at all. Back and forth we go between all or none. If I were to say, “This is all the truth, and this is it,” that would be stupid and you’d be crazy to believe it. If somebody came along and gave a teaching and when you asked me what I thought, I said, “There is absolutely no truth in that,” that wouldn’t be correct either, would it? Because it is existing, and if it exists it has something of value that’s teaching a lesson towards truth. If I said, “It’s all true and there is no distortion in it,” that wouldn’t be it either because it’s in language and symbols, and those things are not complete in their wholeness. Those extremes are illusions.
“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.” - Charles Darwin, (1809- 1882) English naturalist.
There are times when ‘alls’ and ‘nevers’ can work, when they do have applicability, but only in universal statements and not relative statements. There are relative statements and universal statements and, as far as we have been able to determine, one of the laws of the universe is that conservation always occurs. Conservation is a universal law, so the universal statement that all things are conserved is approaching, but never attaining, relative truth. We can use the term ‘all’ there because it’s a universal statement, unlike happiness and sadness which are emotional states and relative statements.
In theory scientists proclaim themselves ready to follow the facts wherever they might lead. But, in practice, the social mechanisms of the scientific community, the institutional imperative, sets limits beyond which its members in good standing may cross only at their “peril”. When eminent authorities announce their rejection of certain categories of evidence, others hesitate to mention similar evidence out of fear of ridicule. Thus, “anomalous” evidence gradually slides from dispute into complete oblivion. In science there are certain theories that are followed in text books and are what’s taught, believed, promoted, marketed and funded. Certain theories are researched and funded and believed in because some noted authority said it, and everybody else jumps on for the ride. It’s not always necessarily true, it’s just the existing paradigm, and the same thing occurred in Galileo’s time, Copernicus’ time, Gordano Bruno’s time, and Charles Darwin’s as well.
The Heliocentric solar system was known since ancient times Pre-Galileo, though the knowledge had remained the private property of elite in the inner chambers of the temple. Control of information is recognized as a tool for oligarchy. As a political application an instrument of oppression: ignorance is bliss. And bliss is an easier political handle then the brooding dissatisfaction of the inquisitive mind.
Many of the greatest ideas in science have waited centuries for even indirect confirmation.
Just as Nicholas of Cusa, looked at infinity and promptly declared, ‘terra non est centra mundi’, the earth is not the center of the universe and the church did not yet realize how dangerous and how revolutionary, this idea truly was.
Just as the Greek philosopher Democritus postulated that matter was comprised of atoms in the fourth century B.C. and in 1906, more than two millennia later Ludwig Boltzmann committed suicide in part because he was mercilessly ridiculed for believing in such atoms, for which there was no direct proof.
Just as Copernicus’s heliocentric system after struggling for nearly a century against the dictums of the Church, finally began to find acceptance.
“I place myself in a certain opposition to widespread views on the mathematical infinite and to oft-defended opinions on the essence of number.” - George Cantor (1845 - 1918), German mathematician
Avogadro’s law was first proposed in 1811 by Amedeo Avogadro, a professor of higher physics at the University of Turin for many years, but it was not generally accepted until after 1858, when an Italian chemist, Stanislao Cannizzaro, constructed a logical system of chemistry based on it.
In the first half of the 19th century the theory of evolution was mired in conjecture until Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallance, compiled a body of evidence and posited a mechanism – natural selection – for powering the evolution machine.
Svante Arrhenius uncovered the relationship between electricity and chemistry in 1883, but was doubted and rejected by the scientific community of his time. Only after gradually winning over the minds of the scientists for twenty years did he finally receive his Nobel prize in 1903.
The theory of continental drift, proposed in 1915 by Alfred Wegener, was not accepted by most scientists until the 1960’s with the discovery of midoceanic ridges, geomagnetic patterns corresponding to continental plate movement and plate tectonics as the driving motor.
Einstein’s particle theory of light was not accepted for two decades. Eight, eleven and seventeen years after the publication of Einstein’s paper even respected physicists such as Max Plank, Robert A. Millikan and Neils Bohr were still rejecting it.
Charles T.R. Wilson’s cloud chamber method for making the paths of electrically charged particles (electrons and positrons) visible by condensation of vapour was not acknowledged and accepted for 15 years – not until a deeper understanding of the atomic structure had been obtained.
John Michell, an amateur British astronomer proposed the idea of an object with gravity strong enough to prevent light from escaping in 1783. In 1795, Pierre-Simon Laplace, a French physicist independently came to the same conclusion. J.R. Oppenheimer’s prediction of the existence of a black hole was first published in 1939, but no one took him seriously for many years.
Yoichiro Nambu, Holger Bech Nielson and Leonard Susskind co-founded string theory in 1970, which was initially derided but eventually became 40 years later the leading candidate for a unified theory of nature.
Barbara McClintock’s discovery of mobile genetic elements, which she published in the 1940s and 1950s was not recognised for more than 30 years.
James Clerck Maxwell’s discovery that visible light was one of the electromagnetic waves travelling at the speed of light (not instantaneously) was so revolutionary that his idea was ignored for many years in the physics departments of most universities. His professors stuck to teaching the classical physics of Newton.
How unwise it is to confine human intellect to a tiny corner of knowledge and convince oneself that it is not wise to go beyond. Scoff not at strange notions or isolated facts, let them be explored. Don’t ever think you’re done. We haven’t even explored the solar system, let alone the galaxy, let alone a galaxy cluster, let alone a galaxy super cluster, let alone a great void, let alone great wall, let a alone a great foam of a local area of the observable universe. And somebody sitting on the planet who is not even visible from the sun and certainly not visible from the centre of the Milky Way says ‘I know’ on the planet is not even visible in the universe. We are seedlings of infinitesimal smallness growing, and learning, I’d rather say that I am learning and have had a moment of awareness based on the awareness of the limited data that I have got that may or may not even be so and that I’m a growing individual growing having relative insight. Keep growing don’t ever be done. As long as you’re green your growing as soon as you’re ripe you rot.
No matter how many experiments you may carry out to verify a claim, you can never exclude the possibility that another repetition of the experiment might yield a different result. Hence, empirical evidence can never establish a mathematical fact. Man ultimately cannot understand, represent, or prove any kind of experience or phenomenon; scientific theories, models, or impressions can only approximate the true nature of things. Fortunately, the errors involved in these approximations have often been small enough to make this approach meaningful and useful. The value of any physical theory depends upon its practicability in real life; and the most that man can say about this or that theory, is not whether it is true or not, but only whether it works, i.e., whether it does what it is supposed to do. It takes but a little honest searching to discover that many well-known “facts” are not so. Statements you initially believe to be true often turn out to be illusions. As Plato immortally stated, "all men (people) are liars".
The Sophists of Ancient Greece used to say true knowledge could not be had, so useful opinion was what was important. That is, we can never get truth, so all we can do is approach it with higher-refined opinions. There are no absolute truths; there are more highly probable opinions. There is no infallibility; we’re all on a journey, making hypotheses. The thing is, if your hypotheses explore a lot of ologies, and all the ology’s correlate and become congruent, you increase the possibility that what you’re speaking is closer to a truth, and you have more refined opinion. That’s called a specialist or a master of opinion – someone who has diversified and connected their specialty to enough fields that they’re almost a generalist, so they start overlapping, and it’s hard to refute them.
The conflicting theories of many philosophical fields or philosophers held no hope that true knowledge was possible at all. Few can endure open-ended questions, so many decide their mono-poled position and defend their side. Most people cannot live continually in the question, they sooner or later come to; “Well, this is the way it is, and don’t tell me no. That’s the way it is!” Human ignorance has ever stood in fear of the unknown. Often fear is not of the unknown but of losing the ‘known’, the unknown does not incite fear, but dependence on the known does. The mind accepts a pattern of existence, and tenaciously clings to it. As by a driven nail, the mind is held together by idea, and around the idea it lives and has its being. The mind in this state of fear is often never free, pliable for it is always anchored; it moves within the radius, narrow or wide, of its own biased locality. From its position it dare not wander; and when it does, it is lost in fear.
We all do that to some degree and at some level, and that becomes our Peter Principle of learning. But as long as we can continue to live in the question, we can continue our learning process. However, there are some things that are pretty solid principles, and the more you accumulate those solid principles the more you can build a certainty upon them.
"One can only get answers in terms of probabilities to questions with a 'definite' yes or no answer." - Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
The academic muddiness of material science becomes painfully apparent in a veritable whirlwind of: Tendencies, Paradoxes, Uncertainties, Approximations, Probabilities, Generalities, Correspondences, Virtualities, Temporalities, Spatialities, Relationships, Correlations, Dilemmas, Unsteady mysterious, physical constants, Relative terms, e.g., instantaneous, simultaneous, sooner, later, now.
Individualized perceptions and responses are highly dependent upon each individual’s earlier or presently occurring environmental stimuli; that is, those stimuli that have been experienced, or those that have been trained for. These perceptions, bias mental conditioning, and responses are dynamic and modifiable, social and individual constraints. Any received sensory stimuli or informative input becomes more blurred or abstract as it passes from one portion of man’s neuroendocrine system to the next; knowing this can help man understand these imperceptions.
Man’s physical perception depends upon constantly monitoring the multiple barrages of impulses from intero-, proprio-, and extero-receptors, and the local or general sequestering and filtering of these essentially contrasting and differing inputs; he can then select the quintessence, or the relevant versus non-relevant new or imagined information. Perception depends on how the neuroendocrine system tunes into, sorts out, screens out, accepts, rejects, relays, analyses, and finally decides whether the stimuli are desirable, undesirable or to be ignored and discarded.
As Aldous Leonard Huxley explained in his Reducing Valve Theory: “Man’s consciousness, like an adjustable valve, is set to allow only a very small fraction of stimuli reaching man to register in man’s mind.” The deceptions of man’s senses are the truths of his perceptions, and the beginning of his internal representations. This attentive biasing and unattentive habitual process limits man’s physical perception. Past experiences, past perceptions and past beliefs and conditionings are all stored in the memory mechanisms of man’s consciousness, and man is constantly superimposing them onto his awareness of the moment. Therefore, man’s life is a function of his minded attention, or of the bombardment of sounds, sights, touches, smells and tastes, from which he selects some information as a basis for action, ignoring all the rest.
What men hear, see, feel, smell, or taste is how they are; and how they are determines what they hear, see, feel, smell, or taste. Man’s perception reflects his ascending evolutionary nature. Sensory attention implies the selection of one sensory stimulus from the sensory environments, at the expense of other sensory stimuli. Man is apparently working with an impress of imperceptions, illusions, or biased distortions, and a distorted reality reveals distorted answers. What man experiences is not reality, but rather man’s dynamic illusory interaction with it.
As Albert Einstein and Nobel Prize winner in physics Hendrik Lorentz have shown: “Common sense can be wrong, since it would tell men that the speed of light should change relative to something moving away from or toward its source, but regardless, it remains 186,000 miles per second.”
The physical properties which man senses in his internal and external environments are enmeshed in his own perceptions, not only psychologically but ontologically as well. These imperceptions, illusions or distortions must be expected to arise in any perceptual system, because they occur as imperfect solutions to those problems faced by a data handling system dealing with ambiguous sources of information. All sensory channels are normally subject to illusion, with respect to time and space (time-space). Illusions can occur in any of man’s sensory channels, and they can cross over between senses.
The illusional representative system of audition demonstrates that man filters, screens, accepts, rejects, fills in, deletes, generalizes, distorts, assumes and relays the majority of all superficially structured forms of linguistic or other auditory stimuli. This occurs in a form most representable to himself. In other words, each man hears what he does because he is what he believes, and what he believes is who he is and what he’s done. For instance, the term loudness refers to a private sensation in the consciousness of man. It is purely subjective, as contrasted with the more objective quality of intensity, and is not directly measurable with instruments. Loudness increases with intensity, but there is no simple linear relationship. As an example, a parent may waken at the sound of a child crying in the night, but sleep through a thunderstorm. Loudness is only relative, and is a quality which is subjectively modifiable. The mood receptivity or sensitivity of each neuron is constantly changing and is under volitional respiratory control. In addition, pure tones of the same intensity, but of different frequencies, do not necessarily produce sensations of equal loudness. This rings another bell in man’s understanding of his seldom-tampered-with illusions.
Using another example the illusional representational system of vision, it can be seen that due to the inherent spectral absorbsion of man’s yellowish ocular lens, he is limited from consciously visualizing the ultraviolet spectrum. Due to such inherent ocular limitations, like his limited neurophotoreceptors, and integrated neural pathways, the radiant energy which is visible to man’s eye comprises only an infinitely small, narrow band in the spectrum of the harmonic radiant energy that pervades man’s existence. Although man can perceive a single photon of light, it must be understood that it takes time for photonic light to travel from an external event to man’s eyes. It is impossible for man to perceive the instantaneous or exact moment anything happens in the universe. Man does not know things as they truly are, because he settles for only his limited sensory impressions, and their resultant illusionary constructions of “reality”.
Man has many misperceptions, and a number of limited conscious perceptions, of his environments; these imperceptions leave him living in an illusion. As Emeritus Professor of Neuropsychology at the University of Bristol, Richard Langton Gregory has indicated: “Pictures are ambiguous paradoxes.” In other words, they are perceptually real but not actual. As Dr. John J. Bonica (anaesthesiologist and pioneer in the field of pain research) notes in his description of the most ubiquitous symptom of all, pain: “Pain is a private sensation of hurt.”
The distinction between man’s “in here” intrinsic and “out there” extrinsic environments is also an illusion, for where can man say the separation lies? Heisenberg the German theoretical physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932 and the Max Planck Medal in 1933 said: “What man observes is not nature itself, but nature exposed to his method of questioning.” There are no clear-cut distinctions between man’s subjective and objective perceptions, and because of this, man cannot be defined or confined. Ergo, all is illusion.
William James, the father of modern psychology stated “Man has no eyes but for those aspects of things which he has already been taught to discern. The only things that man commonly sees are those which he perceives, and the only things he perceives are those which have been labelled for him, or those stamped in his mind.” You can’t see beyond that which you are, in a sense. Each act of your perception is a hypothesis based on your prior experience: your world is made up of things you expect to see, hear, or smell, and any new sensory event is perceived in relation to what you already know.
The only rational thing humans know is how little reason they have. Most of the time we have emotionally charged thought processes instead of true reasoning. Ask people about some important contemporary issue, and what you often hear is more emotion than thought. Most of us emotionalize our thinking, and that means that when we think we are biased to one side or the other.
“It’s not that we know so little, but rather that we know so much that simply isn’t so.”- Paul Dirac, (1902-1984) British theoretical physicist and a founder of the field of quantum physics.
Wisdom is not the realization of how much we know; rather it is the realization of how much we don’t. When we stop and realize how little rationality we really have, that is the beginning of real reasoning. Those who take the time to do that usually end up leading themselves through paradigm shifts that all the others got stuck in. They then become the new paradigm, which those who come later will challenge and go beyond. So whoever has the most certainty, which means someone who has thought out and brought together most dualities, rules the next level until someone comes along and takes the questions that they couldn’t answer to the next set of dualities. They solve paradoxes by going to metadoxes (union of opposites), using that to take them to the next level of understanding, and whoever solves the most paradoxes leads, in the game.
Article: David W Burch, Photo: Pascal Marchand, Jeff Burch, and David Paul Burch with Biodynamic flowform and horns
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