Scientific bypassing

Rationality at the expense of reality

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” ~ Isaac Asimov

You’ve probably heard of spiritual bypassing. But have you heard of scientific bypassing? Probably not, because I made it up. And yet, I do believe it’s a real thing; a pervasive and troubling thing, at least as corrosive as its spiritual alter-ego. But just wait until you meet neuro-scientific bypassing, because there’s only one thing we like more than spiritual robes and buddha statues: Images of brains with colorful blobs.

Alright, here we go.

Spiritual bypassing

John Welwood coined the term spiritual bypassing, which he observed in his Buddhist community in the 1980s. He described it as follows:

Spiritual bypassing is “…the tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.”

Spiritual bypassing often looks like a person floating a few feet (or more) off the ground, highly identified with their spiritual ideas, states, or practices, without being able to meet you human to human. It often feels like condescension and looks like ungrounded-ness. They give all their energy to the decorated shrines and statues in the garden, but miss the weeds and therefore also the roses under their noses. All bypassing is a subtle form of dissociation from some aspect of what, unavoidably, is.

Here are a few illustrative scenarios:

Overemphasis on the Present: Tom's childhood was marred by neglect. Every time the memories surface, his friend Mike quickly interjects, "Why dwell in the past? Just focus on the now!" The statement feels like a slap to Tom, making the shadows of his childhood even darker, as if they're chasing him while he's told to sprint forward without looking back.

Detachment Misuse: Sarah shares with her partner, Alex, that she's been feeling incredibly lonely and disconnected during the pandemic. Alex, having recently read about detachment in a spiritual book, responds, "All of this is just an illusion. Don't get attached." Sarah feels a chilling coldness, as if she's shouting into a void, her words echoing back, devoid of warmth or understanding.

Repression in the Name of Enlightenment: Carlos feels a surge of anger when a colleague takes credit for his work. But, recalling a spiritual talk that labeled anger as "unspiritual," he swallows it down. Each time it happens, he shoves the anger into an imaginary box. Over time, this box feels like a ticking bomb inside him, its muted thuds growing louder, threatening to explode.

For many of us engaged in a spiritual practice, the notion of bypassing and the related idea of spiritual materialism have become useful tools for pointing at a problem that can be hard to articulate. It gives words to something that we know is a little ‘off’. I hope the notion of scientific bypassing will do some of the same work: Help us put words to something we know is annoying, immature, and problematic.

Scientific bypassing

It’s kind of amusing that we’ve overlooked this idea considering how similar it is to spiritual bypassing. Even just saying the words - “scientific bypassing” - I think you can get a feel for what I’m getting at:

Scientific bypassing is the tendency to use scientific ideas and theories to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.

This often looks like a person who’s rather stuck in their heads, spouting confident stories about the way things are, but without being able to connect; without being able to meet you as an ordinary human. They keep awareness looping around clever scientific concepts to avoid confronting life as it appears now, because it might hurt too much.

Sadly, and I say this with genuine sympathy, it often represents a disconnection from one’s heart. Usually, there is something too painful just under the surface, as it is with any kind of bypassing or dissociation. I know from experience.

To put it a bit more technically:

Scientific bypassing is the overweighting, overemphasis, and overconfidence in the reality of maps over experiences, bodies, and feelings. Like spiritual bypassing, it is also basically hubris. One is the ego-identification with spiritual concepts or past experiences. The other is the ego-identification with scientific ideas and the cultural milieu they represent. Both get in the way of a genuine pursuit of truth because they close our minds and bodies to surprises: To new information.

Here are a few scenarios:

Intellectual arrogance: Dean is well-read in physics, history, and biology. He feels proud about what he knows and tends to think that he understands more about the nature of the universe than the average person. When Dean talks to his friends, they often don’t feel like Dean is really listening. It seems like he always brings up irrelevant things; like he’s just trying to prove how much he knows rather than having a genuine conversation. His friends often feel tired afterward and so stop reaching out. In the quiet moments, Dean feels lonely.

Explaining away emotional needs: Anna, a developmental psychologist, often neglects her children's emotional needs, justifying it by citing research on independence and self-sufficiency in child development. When her children express feelings of abandonment or loneliness, she counters with theories and studies, leaving them feeling invalidated and unseen. Her scientific explanations serve as a smokescreen, masking her inability to confront her own shortcomings as a parent. It's as if she's viewing her children through the lens of a researcher, not as a mother whose love and presence they desperately need.

Avoidance in the name of science: John is experiencing a deep depression. He reads about serotonin levels and believes that if they can just “fix” this imbalance, everything will be fine. John believes that he doesn’t need therapy, emotional support, or to address underlying psychological causes. When his partner, Jane, says that he needs to talk to someone about how his father used to hit him, John says that it has nothing to do with his depression because it’s all just chemicals.

This last example leads nicely towards a sub-type of scientific bypassing that deserves it’s own discussion because it’s just so delectably tempting for the intellect.

Neuroscientific bypassing

“You’re nothing but a pack of neurons” ~ Francis Crick.

What is it?

Neuroscientific bypassing is the tendency to use existing theories about the brain to sidestep or avoid having to deal with the existence of human experiences that would challenge one’s beliefs.

Here’s a quintessential example: The existence of lucid dreaming was at one point ridiculed by scientists. Their fixation on their model lead them to reject the phenomenology of countless people. Later, robust evidence for lucid dreaming was found. It turned out lucid dreamers can control eye movements from within the dream state, which makes it possible to communicate their lucidity despite other physiological signals confirming that they’re still asleep.

But the point is this: It was absurd that the scientists preferred (overweighted) the concepts floating around their heads when thousands upon thousands of people reported that the phenomenology existed. The hubris of the map bypassed the facts of shared human experience. This is obviously bad for our maps, bad for science, bad for empathy, and bad for truth.

Here are a few scenarios:

Neuroscientific dismissal: Frank explains to José that he had a truly transformative experience on a meditation retreat recently. He says he’s never experienced anything like it, that it’s really changed the way he sees his life and he feels much more at peace. José, not being able to relate to the experience, responds: “Well, you probably did something weird to your neurons, so it’s just a hallucination.” Frank feels like José misses the point and is left feeling empty and misunderstood.

Biochemical belittling: At a dinner party, Lisa shares her feelings about falling deeply in love. John, eager to showcase his knowledge, interrupts, "You know it's just a rush of oxytocin and dopamine, right?" By reducing a profound human experience to mere neurotransmitters, John bypasses the depth of Lisa's emotions and the cultural, personal, and historical nuances of love.

Boring oversimplifications: In a literature class discussing Virginia Woolf's intricate narratives that bring to light unusual nuances of human experience, a student, Alex, comments, "Didn't Woolf have bipolar disorder? Maybe her writing style is just a result of her messed up brain." By attributing Woolf's brilliance solely to a neurological condition, the depth, phenomenological insights, and impact of her work are bypassed.

“Your emotions are nothing but biochemical storms in your brain” ~ Tony Robins.

In essence: Neuroscientific bypassing happens when we mistake existing models of the brain for reality, which allows us to bypass the experiences of our neighbours that might undermine our narrow view. Although things are getting better, we still see evidence of this kind of bypassing today.

I’ve also been guilty of all versions of bypassing at different points in my life, so I get it. And we should want to ‘see the evidence’ for ourselves. But we can’t be lazy about it. Anomalous experiences are discarded until of course one encounters it themselves, or the zeitgeist changes it’s attitude. Until then, the hubris of (neuro)science permits them—instead of maintaining healthy openness—to discard experiences they don’t understand. It’s a very immature thing; an epistemic failing.

All experiences are worthy of explanation, even if that explanation—given enough data—is that it is a delusion. Even the delusion exists and is worthy of explanation. Waving our hands in protest that something ‘does not exist’ because we don’t understand it, just isn’t going to cut it.

In a way, writing here on substack is my small effort to try and be sincere about experiences that I think exist, but that are currently anomalous, and try to look at them. It is, after-all, the surprising results in experiments that contain the most information. It is the anomalies in experience that teach us the most about how the mind works. It has always been anomalies that stimulate scientific progress and paradigm shifts.

At the risk of being placed in one or two ‘neural loony bins’ existing in the minds of scientific bypassers, I recently shared some of my own deeper contemplative experiences in an interview on a popular YouTube channel. These events totally changed my world, so how could I not share them?

It would be a personal ethical failing, like a doctor who hid away the discovery of a medicine for fear of being judged. It also points to one of the really big remaining experiences that we have no useful scientific explanation for: spiritual awakening. When we eventually realize what we’ve been bypassing here, it’ll make our arrogance around lucid dreaming appear like a candle next to the sun.

One thing is guaranteed: If we condemn experiences into the shadows of our theories, we will never arrive at a true or useful understanding of the mind, body, and brain.

Thanks for reading,

Ruben