Self, Realities, and the Transcendents 317“9x6” b2726 Self and the Phenomenon of Life: A Biologist Examines Life from Molecules to Humanityfact that they are also a part of our stream of consciousness. In contrast,
events observed in our waking hours are invariably taken as real, for they
either stay the same day after day or can be logically connected from one
day to the next.
The sense of one’s self does not fluctuate widely from day to day.
There is a famous parable in the book Zhuangzi (Chuang-Tzu). The
story goes like this. One night Zhuangzi dreamt of being a butterfly, flit-
ting and fluttering happily. Upon waking up in the morning, he was dis-
appointed to be a man. He then questioned his real identity: was he a
man dreaming he was butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming it was a man? We
can judge for him that he finally realized he was a man, because being
a man occurred every day while being a butterfly happened only once.
But what if his butterfly dream came every night? Then he would have
a hard time deciding.^1
Scientific knowledge is an expansion of common sense. Scien-
tists build instruments to extend the range of observation and extract
information by correlating one variable with another while holding all
others unchanged (the experimental method). In this manner scientists
do a better job than ordinary people in using derived physical reality to
fathom the hidden primary physical reality. Scientists build models to
fit the experimental data. These models are based on an overall frame-
work called “paradigm,” which is to be changed (paradigm shift) when it
is no longer internally consistent, as what happens during a scientific rev-
olution (such as the Copernican revolution of planetary movements and
the Einsteinian revolution of space–time and gravitational concepts).^2
Ever since the optimistic vision projected by Francis Bacon in the
seventeenth century, scientific knowledge has been expanding at an
exponential rate, giving us a sense that science could one day solve all
the problems facing humankind and answer all the questions man will
ever ask. While this may be true with the utilitarian power of science, it
may not be so with regard to the fundamental understanding of nature.
Our model of physical reality is never final; it is subject to change and
revision as new information arrives. Thus, there is always an epistemic