This article is a continuation of an exploration into what it means to practice Human Design as a science. Part 1 can be found here:
https://www.humandesignlifecoaching.com/blog/2022/3/9/the-science-of-differentiation-being-a-human-design-scientist-part-1
Thanks for returning to this read, as we dive into the question of what it means to be scientific in our experiment of Human Design, and in practicing it professionally as ‘The Science of Differentiation’. In Part 1, I introduced the scientific method and connected it to our individual experiment with the Type, Strategy and Authority formula. I also mentioned the concept of ‘pseudoscience’ which is the main critique the Human Design system inevitably receives with regards to required markers for it to be accepted as a science. In Part 2, we’ll be exploring each of these criteria, namely ‘verifiability’, ‘falsifiability’ and ‘bias’, to see where our limitations might be at.
I could not locate the audios, but in one lecture Ra explained that he felt confident to move forward on his path because the system could withstand scrutiny and therefore he as a messenger could too. In another lecture, he also explained that Human Design could never be free from the pseudoscience label, because there are so many components (especially at the foundations) that could never be proved.
We would never be able to find the evidence necessary to substantiate them. This is the paradox we find ourselves at as practitioners. We have a formula we can empirically test (this is explained below), but we can never prove its origins, the underlying basis that explains why it works the way it does. And for strict scientific critics this is enough to categorically dump the whole thing.
In the previous article, I put forward an essential question to reflect on, for anyone who remembers nothing else from this article series: ‘Is what I’m saying true and how do I know?’
For scientists, it is necessary to investigate what the evidence is that verifies their claims. Not only that, but to consider if others can run experiments independently to test and verify these claims too. This is what would create an intersubjective consistency that allows us to agree on what the 'objective world' supposedly 'is'. It is what allows us to create a framework for how things function and how we can best cooperate within that mutual understanding.
Now if you've been in Human Design for a while, you may already sense that there is a catch in this. Human Design more than anything else is about your uniqueness - a realm that only you have access to experiment with in any meaningful sense. Nobody else can run independent experiments with your inner world. Only you can.
And there is another dimension to this: the knowing of the mysteries of existence, as far the mechanics of Human Design go, is contained within the Individual Knowing circuit, which is not directly about proving oneself. The only Individual circuitry that runs through the Willpower of the Heart Center is the Centering Circuit through the Channel of Initiation (51/25). It's part of the Mystical Way: the leaping beyond the mythology of the Tribe. Separating oneself from the existing belief systems and support structures that bind the community together in its ritual practices, in order to make direct contact with the Higher Self alone. Being the first to go beyond the horizon of what the Tribe can embrace and include, hurtling oneself into the unknown. Then potentially returning to the Tribe with innovation that is sourced from one's own mutative individuality, after having successfully contacted the Spirit that lives in Matter, having survived and integrated the shock.
This Channel is the only Individual Ego that has the will to prove oneself. Which is not something that can be demanded from the Individual Knowing circuit. If you're a mutative creative artist, you know what happens whenever your creativity becomes subject to the pressure to prove your worth: the magic vanishes - and it's not you anymore.
This is what I continue to observe in myself too writing these articles, and this series in particular. I rewrote and edited this article after posting it because it felt out of tune when I read over it again. I saw my own openness getting a bit too jacked up on 'Being an HD Scientist' to the point of distortion, though I didn't catch this when I published the article at first. I was coming at it from an angle that nobody had really asked for, and as I went through it, I didn't feel well held as a reader myself. The narrative didn't flow and it seemed I had blurted to soon.
Science is about proving the validity of patterns that explain reality. And to leverage those patterns in order to move safely into the future together. The Cross of Explanation is rooted in the (43/23) Channel of Structuring. This is the Life Force of rational explanation. It's my Cross too, and I suppose this article series is an attempt to get to know myself better more than anything else. To see more clearly this interplay between my Individual Knowing and Logical Collective Channels, the inner tension that is there between them, and to try to unpack it in a universalizing way. Key to this Channel is voicing yourself at the right time and not before...
And so let's move into the next concepts with that tension in mind: the scientists that confuses and conflates proving the pattern with proving themselves. This is another stepping stone in the discourse about individual vs collective truth.
"Science of Differentiation: Human Design is the study of our uniqueness, our differentiation; a science which is verified through our own personal experimentation with its tools for living; it is not a belief system."
(The Definitive Book of Human Design (2018): 435)
In light of this definition, we'll now cover verifiability, falsifiability and bias step by step.
Verifiability: for evidence to be verifiable, it is commonly understood as something that must eventually be measurable ‘empirically’. ‘Empirical’ evidence means that we can perceive it directly with our senses, confirming accurate predictions of noticeable change.
The importance of this is that the evidence has a causal ground in the material world into which we are physically embedded, by which we are affected and which we seek to affect - where ‘reality’ is most persuasive. Our explanations should not rest on something ephemeral or purely spiritual in such a way that our only option is to believe it or not. Otherwise this could be a basis for superstition, lies and deception or plain falsehoods leading to all sorts of exaggerations rooted in ignorance like witch hunts, etc. One example of this would be the claim that Winter is cold and deadly compared to Spring because a particular Goddess descends into the underworld during that time of the year. Though poetic and perhaps of metaphorical / mystical / spiritual value, or ritual value within a communal mythos, it isn’t empirically testable. Another example would be sensational rumours or hearsay that becomes a wildfire. We can see plenty of that in the misinformation age that we're in right now. We no longer know what external sources to trust.
“Empiricism in the philosophy of science emphasizes evidence, especially as discovered in experiments. It is a fundamental part of the scientific method that all hypotheses and theories must be tested against observations of the natural world rather than resting solely on a priori reasoning, intuition, or revelation.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empiricism
Ra Uru Hu emphasized that Human Design was an empirical science that needed to be verified through one’s own direct sense perception of life as they experiment with the formulas, observing and predicting change. And true enough, through the Type signposts and the shifting patterns in our relationships we can do that. We can test the proposed formula to see if it works. Though what we may not be able to verify empirically are the underlying ‘mechanics’ that are suggested to be the cause for why it works the way that it does. They were a mystical revelation, after all.
We’d need to be able to physically locate and correlate a neutrino produced by the sun moving through a Gate activating specific biochemistry in a body that leads to change in thinking and behaviour… Has anyone got the budget or means for that (ethically)?
Having said this, there is a power in Human Design that enables it to overcome this particular limitation in an intriguing way to still make it compelling. This is the power of the mechanical logic that underpins the accuracy of its keynotes. What's so compelling about it as a practitioner is that once you get skilled at the art of its poetry, you can invoke the logic to analyse or reflect upon any phenomenon in a way that describes it holistically and within a context that has direct implications for you as a unique individual. It can be used to understand the world around in a way that was simply never so accessible before.
What's compelling for both practitioner and client is that the accuracy of it is a felt at a physical level. The body recognizes what is being said in a noticeable way. Sudden shivers, sudden profound relaxation, crying, and other sorts of physical responses that can come in sync with a mental breakthrough as the keynotes are spoken. Which is strange because the language is generally speaking complex and far out. Yet it is intimate and capable of touching one's subjective perceptions about the world in a way that not only explains things that have always been noticed but remained mysterious before, but also that it touches the physical experiences of the body as it moves through the world. It describes mechanically the experience of being either physically at odds with or seamlessly in the flow within one's context. Moreover, it describes in detail how this functions precisely for the individual. It explains why copy-pasting strategies from other people into one's own life has very very little qualitative effect. And it provides something tailor-made to suit you instead.
All of these things can be verified as an individual measurement of 'what works' and 'what doesn't work'. That's basically the code hidden in every line description (not just the third line). And this to me seems more enlivening than trying to first verify if the whole neutrino business is actually true to begin with. If I can read a line from the Rave I'Ching and hear it come out of my friend's mouth, without them even knowing anything about Human Design; and I can ask them questions about that based on the chart in a way that helps us connect and understand each other... especially if it's about a trait that really annoyed me and felt like I wanted to change about them - then, hey isn't that neat? Making that available to people, starting with myself, is probably a much quicker and practical step towards widespread peace than the endeavour of building a new enhanced particle accelerator.
Falsifiability: Ra was a 26th Gate who loved to make bold claims rooted in what he individually ‘knew’ to be true in his bones. And this could alarm people into identifying his claims as persuasive and dangerous exaggerations. The falsifiability of claims means that they should be logically testable with available means. If we cannot verify aspects of the system directly, nor run an experiment that could contradict our predictions or hypothesis, then we have no scientifically meaningful way of knowing whether the claim is actually true or not. It’s fully untestable.
The main example used to illustrate this notion is Karl Popper’s statement “All swans are white.” This is a hypothesis that could be either logically ‘verified’ by observing all swans – which we do not have the means to do. But on the other hand, the claim could be ‘falsified’ by observing a single black swan.
A strong distinction is then made between what is considered to be ‘science’ and what is not on this basis. If claims made within Human Design cannot be technically falsified, if we cannot logically test their validity by finding contradictory evidence using available means, then it is not a scientific claim.
So if we think about that for a moment, we can see that many aspects of the Human Design system cannot be falsified. Ra knew this and therefore, as far as my interpretation of it goes, his focus was to prove at least the scientific validity of Type - out of which the Strategy follows, serving as the basis for the proposed decision-making formula. The next step then would be collecting empirical evidence for the Inner Authorities rooted in people’s personal experiments. These are things that could in a way be measured through sufficient statistical analysis, correlating and predicting patterns.
So ultimately, the scope is brought back to the individual, which is both the practical bottom line of the Human Design system as such, and also where the empirical evidence for any of it is going to come from. How we collect and evaluate that data could accumulate into a resource base for making scientific claims (or not).
For yourself, you can verify or falsify your proposed decision-making formula and evaluate its legitimacy by following it (or not) and checking the outcome against what it predicts. The limitation to this, however, is the all-pervasive ‘confirmation bias’ that each individual is hyper-prone to - and that scientific critics can hear almost instantly in the subtle shifts of intonation in your voice from many miles away with their acute sensitivity.
Bias: there are many kinds of biases, but one of the more prominent ones that we are concerned with when it comes to scientific experimentation is the so-called ‘confirmation bias’. This essentially means that we are prone to interpret our findings in a particular way that is most convenient to us and would serve to confirm pre-existing beliefs or what we’re already hoping to get out of it. There is an outcome we already have in mind, consciously or subconsciously, and we will warp information to conform to that outcome in order to bring it closer to fulfilment.
This can lead to distortions of evidence, paying disproportionate attention to that which seems to confirm and verify, while ignoring or even eliminating contrary evidence or attempts at refutation and falsification. This can lead to major mistakes in many professions, such as medicine or urban planning for example.
If you're reading this and you've already taken the Living Your Design course, then you're probably familiar with the concept of the Not-Self and how it works. You can probably see how it lines up with long-held confirmation biases. These are the strategies and ways of thinking that keep us stuck in life following the same mistakes over and over again. It serves the purpose to keep our system stable, which is adaptive in terms of not falling apart under constant survival stress, but it also prevents us from actually growing and developing as ourselves.
When this influences our interactions with others and impacts them, there's backlash eventually. And the tricky thing is that we're blind until suddenly we are not. We've all got our shadows and distractions out and about that help us cope with the uncomfortable intensity in the openness - and we don't get to sidestep their consequences.
One way of dealing with the problem of cognitive biases in science is that our experiments should be open to logical challenge - in particular by field ‘experts’. Investigation should be made in order to test how solid our explanations really are and whether the evidence is sufficient. We may say that we were frustrated because we didn’t trust and follow our perceived gut response, but does that explanation hold up when it is probed more deeply? And can it be probed at all?
Are there any other expert authorities on you and your decision-making process? If there are, how empowering is that really and what is their agenda? And perhaps the more relevant question: would you like to be probed?
Again we're getting in contact with this strange relationship between the collective logical process and the integrity of individuality. In order for something to be collectively accepted as a scientific truth, you need a panel of experts who all agree on a pattern due to its predictability, which they need to investigate and measure in significant detail within the context of existing knowledge. (Imagine a group of scientists deciding amongst themselves that you're wrong about your life...)
The individual in me is already sighing: 'Ain't nobody got time for that!' The Collective in me is saying: 'Yes, wouldn't it be interesting if we could reliably measure the gut responses of a whole batch of Generator's according to Channel variations?'
Nevertheless, biases and shadows are part of the game. I’m quoting one of my teachers in neurobiology here: ‘We’re biased to believe that we’re less biased than others!’ (Steve Hoskinson) And we have to come to practical terms with that. It is legitimate for a group of scientists to point out I'm wrong when my subjectivity has a significant sphere of influence.
If you take on the Human Design decision-making formula during a desperate and stressful time in your life (in the same way that many people turn to medicine or any other kind of ‘solution’ to their life problems that is being sold on the market), wouldn’t there be a psychological incentive to maintain a sense of security and mental stability by perceiving that ‘it works’ when all else has failed? Wouldn’t there be a bias to believe that you’re doing the right thing?
This is the kind of thing critics are afraid of and for good reason. In the end, we're all concerned with the consequences of decision-making and having the ability to see what we're getting into. For example, if you’re following Human Design’s Primary Health System, you are moving into pioneering territory - not a well-tested and scientifically proven miracle cure-all. Your experiment may end up on the list of 'things that didn't work'.
This modality is so counter to conventional dietary regimen advice and healthcare practices, that it can be a really radical step to take. If you’ve been experimenting with it for a long time and you aren’t really finding your health and wellbeing improving – but you persist anyway, then there may be a confirmation bias driving the process rather than careful attunement to your own body.
Quoting the Definitive Book: "Primary Health System (PHS): Discipline within The Human Design System that studies the Form's cognition; a dietary regimen which best supports each person's complex and unique brain development."
If anyone knows to what extent we have got brains scans or EEG readings that track someone's PHS trajectory, I'd love to hear about it.
Personally, I find PHS a component of the Human Design System where we need to get as scientifically sound professionally as we possibly can, collecting and evaluating data properly. And to my knowledge, this isn’t really happening currently. (If I’m wrong about this, someone please correct me.)
So having presented these three concepts, I’m bringing it back to the essential question of this inquiry:
‘Is what I’m saying true and how do I know?’
Knowing then that you and everyone else have certain biases at work might foster greater attention to what you and others express, or at least where it's coming from.
At whatever level you’re practicing the Human Design System, the points outlined above emphasize at least one major thing: it’s probably in your own best interest to be as scientific about your experiment as you can be.
And I'm breaking away here from what I had written in the previous version of this article because I was getting preachy. What I really meant to say with being 'as scientific as possible' is to pay very careful attention to your process, to consider the evidence you're really seeing versus what you think you're seeing, and how you actually come to know this mysterious thing called truth. To watch your mind distort things and bring that into the light. And perhaps, to document your observations following the scientific method if you feel inclined to make your experiment scientifically useful for others.
(Or, your know, 'Ain't nobody got time for that!' and enjoy your life.)
This is a simple orientation of mind to the unfolding of your life as it is, tracking what happens all the way through the cycle while the known and the unknown dance with you and things are revealed. I'm not suggesting you get your lab coat, read René Descartes and start dissecting your partner in order to measure their gut response from the inside in order to prove it.
Just as much, it's about evaluating honestly how you really move through life and being clear for yourself about where your authority is. To be scientific in this sense is to assume a direct relationship to truth, not externalising it to a third party who gets to plaster their 'expertise' across your life. However, this also means recognizing that you don't know what you don't know, and that well-founded expertise can be valuable information. It's a measured pattern that you can put into context, and that you can take or leave and see what happens. It's also about understanding that if you want to make claims that are scientifically applicable to the Collective, it's going to have to undergo scrutiny before it can have legitimacy.
So much of the work of understanding this term 'the Science of Differentiation' is disentangling the misguided personal proving from the logical collective process of establishing the patterns. What is a scientific pursuit in Human Design is to correlate scientific findings with what is described in the mechanics, given available means. Given the way in which the HD community is not very well organised around this, I don't see it as scientific by conventional standards. Right now, we've got individuals worldwide connecting the dots amongst each other in small groups and through online platforms as they share the patterns they notice in their lives. It's a myth-making in progress, which includes some really incredible stories that may point any one of us in a direction we could follow and check out for ourselves. And we'll live and die by that.
If at this point you're doubting about moving forward with it at all, I’d say that’s a good checkpoint to be at. It’s an opportunity to evaluate exactly what it is that has driven you and motivated you in this direction. This is an opportunity to get clearer with yourself that when you do make the decision to proceed, you are responsible for yourself, and that it’s time to really start paying attention to your decision-making process and its consequences. You won’t be the only one in the Human Design boat, but you’ll be the only one on your unique path.
For whatever it’s worth to you, my perspective is that each individual as a whole aligns with an underlying advantage that is deeper than their mental motivation. Even if it may be unsustainable and detrimental in the long-term or near future, whatever you’re getting involved with, however you’re getting involved in it - it serves you at some level of your being given your circumstances and conditioning; things you came by innocently and are not your fault.
Everyone's innately doing the best they can given what they've got.
In the previous version of this article, I continued to elaborate on the importance of 'bias' as a concept to understand, and I went down a thread of trying to get at the distinction between the individual decision-making process vs the collective logical decisions-making process. I then introduced Rupert Sheldrake as a perspective to explore so as to see if we may have a ground for relating to the Human Design system not purely as a pseudoscience, however appropriate that label might still be. There's another side to the story of bias in terms of how it accumulates into dogmatic power structures, which includes scientific institutions that get to dictate what is acceptable and what is not. But we'll get to that.
I think this is long enough now and will close Part 2 here. We can cover the other material in Part 3.
There's an open invitation for you to share your perspectives with me here and have a discussion.
Would you like to leave a comment below?
Thanks for reading,
Hagen
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