Research Vision

Our behaviour and outlook on life is in many ways dependent on our views on what we are and what the nature our world is. These views are shaped by our answers to the most fundamental questions we can ask, such as: 'what am I?', 'what is this world?' and 'why are things the way that they are?'. These questions are the fundamental puzzles that flow from self-awareness, and the answers we find are fundamental to motivating and guiding our actions.

Western society's current default answers to these questions are largely shaped by the views of modern (western) science. Science has tremendous strength in its predictive powers, and has improved our lives in countless ways. However, many feel that the way in which orthodox science answers these basic questions is fundamentally unsatisfactory, since it seems to ignore many aspects of our own experience of ourselves.

Do these questions have answers?

One of C-FAR's core views is that the fundamental questions do have 'right' answers, and that there is an actual and final truth to be discovered. We experience the world in terms of complex persistent structures, and this indicates that there are rules governing the way things work. Without such rules, fundamental elements cannot have properties, and such properties are required to create stable structures. It follows that there is a 'natural' way that things go together.

New knowledge always leads to new technologies. Deeper knowledge of how the world works and how we relate to it will lead to new applications and lifestyles. Some of the evidence that we are studying in C-FAR indicates that the world's structure is richer, subtler and more inter-connected than materialism suggests. On this basis, we anticipate that a deeper understanding of our place and role in the world will lead to applications and lifestyles that reinforce positive social values and promote environmental balance.

Feng Yulan has argued that the function of philosophy is to help us find a basis for specifying an 'ideal' life against which to measure (and understand) our own. In our view better answers to fundamental questions will provide this basis, and thereby inspire and motivate conduct that is compassionate, moral and self-fulfilling.

So, based on the view that the fundamental questions have answers and that it is desirable to seek them, one might ask how to seek them in a rational way, making best use of the tools and methods available to us today. The next section describes our strategy for tackling this problem.

Although we in C-FAR currently hold the views described above and below, we consider we can hold these without sacrificing scientific objectivity or open-mindedness. Our views were developed on the basis of rational introspection and balanced evaluation of the range of evidence available to us. We expect these views will change and develop as our work progresses, but for now they reflect our current position fairly, and they underpin our strategy for reaching our objectives.

Strategy

We are convinced that it is possible to find good answers to the fundamental questions by using the right intellectual tools, and taking into account the appropriate evidence. We feel that the new tools and data available to us give us an advantage that even our recent predecessors did not have.

• Tools

For a start, we support the Western approach to science (analytical & reductionist) and the Chinese approach to philosophy (rational & pragmatic). We see great potential in the fusion of these two lines of thought.

Any extended view of what we are, what the world is, and whether it is all about something or other, has to be founded upon the Western orthodox paradigm. We believe that the models used in western science, mathematics and computer science are particularly relevant in analysing these issues (e.g. systems thinking, hierarchical models, object models, reductionist models, network models)

• Data

We hold, on the basis of the reported experiences of people whose integrity, mental health and observational care we hold in high esteem, that certain phenomena occur that appear to be inexplicable within the scope and parameters of the laws of nature as understood by current science.

Furthermore we hold, based on the assessment of individuals whose scientific and philosophical competence we regard highly, that investigating such evidence may lead to new insights into the nature of reality at a fundamental level. In these matters we differ from those who consider this evidence to be inevitably due to hoaxing, error or delusion, and who investigate it only to understand why people would tell or believe such lies, or suffer from such delusions. While we agree that the study of human frailty is an important undertaking in science, we hold that the evidence at issue here has a value that goes beyond the study of human psychology.

We see the investigation of anomalies as a productive means for extending the competence of science, because anomalies point out the places where current scientific models fail. So, the evidence and experimental results from anomalies research can serve as aids to lateral thinking within orthodox science. Anomalies provide significant clues, and provided the end result is a testable hypothesis, we see only benefits to be had from taking these observations into account.