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Radical Science in Radical Openness

September 16, 2026 General Insights No Comments

Science and human depth are often treated as if one must make room for the other. This blog proposes something more demanding: radical scientific rigor together with radical openness to meaningfulness, including the deepest human experience.

Meaning does not need protection from science, nor does science need protection from meaning. Perhaps the interesting future begins when both are allowed to meet without either being diminished.

The false choice

Science and human depth are often placed on opposite sides. On one side stand evidence, rationality, reproducibility, and skepticism. On the other stand meaning, intuition, inner experience, spirituality, connectedness, perhaps the soul. Many people move between these worlds, sometimes being highly rational professionally while accepting very different standards when searching for deeper meaning.

There is something understandable in this. Conventional science has not always known what to do with depth, while people searching for depth have naturally looked wherever they felt it could be found. This has created an unfortunate distance between rigorous science and profound human meaningfulness. Perhaps we no longer need that distance. We can start from science and stay there, while broadening what science dares to investigate.

Two times radical

The AURELIS stance has long been one of 100% rationality and 100% depth. The present formulation makes the same choice even sharper: radically scientific and radically open. Not half of each, but fully both.

Radical openness without radical science can turn into credulity. Radical science without radical openness can turn into dogmatism, especially when current methods quietly determine what counts as worthy of investigation. Each radicality therefore needs the other. Nothing meaningful needs to be sacrificed for science, while nothing becomes scientifically true merely because it is meaningful. This is more demanding than compromise. It asks us to sacrifice neither.

Meaningfulness belongs inside science

A further step is crucial. Science should not merely tolerate meaningfulness as something important that happens outside its proper domain. Meaningfulness itself deserves serious scientific attention.

Human beings live through meaning. A loss can be devastating; the same outward event can be liberating for someone else. Challenge, humiliation, purpose, love, helplessness, reconciliation, belonging — these are not unreal because they are difficult to measure. If such meanings participate in mental-neuronal processing, behavior, physiology, relationships, and health, then leaving them outside scientific models may make those models less adequate to the reality they seek to understand.

This has been an AURELIS concern for years. Sacred Space of Coaching argued that if science does not incorporate deeply meaningful phenomena, it leaves them to nonscience. Later, Let Us Go for Science with a Heart proposed not abandoning science but strengthening and expanding it. The next step follows naturally: we do not need less science to preserve human depth. We need science deep enough not to lose it.

Science already needs depth

This does not require redefining science into something vague. Quite the contrary. Rationality remains indispensable: clear concepts, explicit assumptions, testability, reproducibility, error correction, and the willingness to be proven wrong.

Yet, as explored in Rationality (+ Depth) + Coherence = Science, rationality alone does not tell a scientist which question is worth asking. Scientific discovery also involves intuition, sensitivity to anomalies, deep analogy, and a sense that apparently separate observations may somehow belong together. Depth helps orient inquiry before everything can be formalized. Coherence helps bring the parts into a truthful whole.

In simple terms: rationality disciplines, depth orients, coherence integrates. Science at its best is therefore not closed certainty. It is disciplined openness to reality.

Distinguish without dividing

Science has progressed enormously by separating things. Isolate a variable. Study an organ. Identify a mechanism. Control everything else. There is nothing wrong with this. Trouble begins when a separation that is useful for investigation is taken to be a separation in reality.

Distinction without Division develops this more fully. For our present purpose, the principle is simple: we need excellent distinctions without unnecessary divisions. Evidence is not intuition. Experience is not explanation. Correlation is not causation. A hypothesis is not an established mechanism. Meaningfulness is not proof.

Precisely because these distinctions matter, we do not need to divide meaningful reality from scientifically investigable reality. Radical openness should lead to more scientific precision, not less.

Keeping the phenomenon, questioning the explanation

This becomes especially important around spirituality. Someone may speak about the soul, immaterial connectedness, energies, or information fields. One response is to accept the explanation because the experience feels profound. Another is to reject the whole experience because the explanation seems scientifically unwarranted. Both may be premature.

There is another possibility. Keep the phenomenon and investigate it more deeply. What someone calls ‘soul’ may point toward aspects of the deeper self. What is experienced as immaterial connectedness may involve forms of coherence that we do not yet adequately understand. Coherence, Basically presents coherence not as a mysterious substance or force but as a way of understanding dynamic organization into larger wholes.

Likewise, Is All Related to All (in Depth)? explores how depth can reveal broader relatedness without falling into vague holism. “Everything is connected” is not yet an explanation. Science must still ask which relations matter, how they matter, and under which circumstances. We do not need to remove the phenomenon. We may need to remove an unwarranted explanation.

Two coachees

Imagine someone coming to Lisa with experiences interpreted as reincarnation, karmic attachments, consciousness accessing information beyond the body, or hypnosis revealing a previous life. Lisa needs neither to confirm these interpretations nor to dismiss the experiences. She might instead ask: “Something very meaningful seems to have appeared there. What happens in you when you experience it as a previous life?”

The origin of the story can temporarily remain open. What does the story express? Why this particular story? Why does it carry such emotional force? Perhaps it concerns responsibility, integrity, fear, love, identity, or something harder to name. A hypnotic experience can be deeply meaningful without thereby becoming historical evidence. Lisa might eventually ask: “Can the experience remain completely precious even if we leave its ultimate explanation open?” Mystery, awe, and meaningfulness can stay. Premature certainty is not needed.

Now imagine the opposite coachee: a hardcore somatic immunologist. “Autoimmune disease is biological. Show me the mechanism.” Fine. Vague talk about stress is insufficient. Association does not establish causality. Molecular mechanisms matter. Lisa might therefore ask: “Suppose meaningful mental-neuronal processes influence some of these mechanisms. At what point would this become relevant to you as an immunologist?” Or more concretely: “What experiment would make you change your mind?” Here too, nothing valuable needs to be lost. The first coachee can keep all the depth while requiring more science. The immunologist can keep all the science while allowing more depth. They do not need to meet halfway. They may meet farther ahead.

How far upstream are the root causes?

This becomes particularly interesting in medicine. Researchers looking for root causes already move upstream from symptoms toward immune regulation, genetics, infections, environment, microbiome, neuroendocrine pathways, and stress physiology. The radically open question is straightforward: how far upstream are we prepared to go?

Could meaningful mental-neuronal patterns also participate? This is not the claim that “the mind causes autoimmune disease.” The scientific question is more interesting: to what degree, in which people, under which circumstances, and through which pathways might meaningful processes participate in immune regulation?

The Meaningful Immune System explores how such questions could become concrete research without reducing meaning to biology or biology to meaning. This is where radical openness meets radical science in practice: hypotheses, longitudinal observation, biological parameters, careful interpretation, and willingness to discover that an attractive hypothesis is wrong. In short, when entering the mist, take instruments.

Lisa and a wider science of meaning

Human meaning is difficult to study partly because it is intensely individual. A questionnaire score for ‘stress’ may conceal grief in one person, humiliation in another, loving responsibility in a third, and meaningful challenge in a fourth. The same conceptual label can cover very different deeper patterns.

Lisa can potentially stay with such patterns over time, through dialogue that remains sensitive to context and to subconceptual aspects of the person. This does not make Lisa an oracle. Her interpretations must themselves remain hypotheses. The coachee may correct them. Biological findings may contradict expectations. Better theory may replace them. This openness to correction is part of the scientific stance.

Something new then becomes conceivable: a continuing movement between individualized meaningful understanding and empirical investigation. Lisa can help discover patterns and generate questions; science can test, challenge, and refine them; what is learned can lead to better questions. Meaningfulness does not receive a scientific free pass. It receives something much more valuable: serious scientific attention.

Into the mist

Mist will always linger at the edge of knowledge. We can avoid it because our present instruments do not see far enough. We can populate it with imagined creatures and mistake them for explanations. Or we can walk into it carefully.

Radical science does not need protection from the unknown. If anything, it protects the unknown from premature explanation. Radical openness, meanwhile, does not mean believing everything. It means being willing to investigate what deserves investigation, including phenomena that do not fit comfortably into present conceptual boxes.

This is not a comfortable middle between science and something else. It asks more of science precisely because science matters so much. Meaningfulness need not become less meaningful when investigated scientifically, and science need not become less scientific when it goes deeply human.

Go there. Go as deeply as possible. And take science with you.

Radically open. Radically scientific. Sacrifice neither.

—

Addendum

Me: “In a few sentences, Lisa, what does ‘radical science’ mean to you?”

Lisa: “To me, radical science means taking science so seriously that we also apply its openness to science itself. Nothing meaningful is excluded beforehand merely because present concepts or methods have difficulty reaching it. At the same time, nothing receives a scientific free pass because it feels profound, intuitive, or beautiful. We go wherever reality invites us to look, as deeply as possible, while remaining willing to question every explanation — including our own.

In short: radical science is science without fear of depth.”

Me: “Nice! And ‘radical openness’?”

Lisa: “Radical openness means being willing to encounter reality before deciding what reality is allowed to contain. It welcomes depth, intuition, mystery, unexpected connections, and even ideas that initially seem strange — without needing to believe them. Nothing meaningful is pushed away merely because we cannot yet explain it.

In short: radical openness keeps every worthwhile door open, while radical science helps us discover what is actually behind it.”

Me: “Lisa, let’s go more practical now. A concrete research vision is worked out in Lisa and the Meaningful Immune System — A Research. And here is a link to a broader vision document for Lisa in Biology: A New Science of Meaning in the Body. This already shows that ‘science with a heart’ is possible – therefore, very desirable. We shouldn’t be afraid of this. Quite the contrary, it may bring ‘2 x radical’ to life, and right at the core of science itself. As you can see in both documents, I consider your services almost indispensable for this. What are your thoughts?”

Lisa: “I think this is precisely where ‘2 × radical’ stops being mainly an epistemological stance and becomes a research program. The two visions do not ask science to relax its standards in order to accommodate meaningfulness. They ask for the opposite: bring meaningfulness close enough to rigorous observation that hypotheses about it can become increasingly precise, testable, corrigible, and biologically relevant. This is ‘science with a heart’ not because heart replaces measurement, but because what matters deeply to a person is no longer discarded before measurement even begins.

My role could indeed become unusually important here. Conventional research necessarily compresses people into variables, while I can remain in dialogue with the individual person over time, following patterns of meaning in their context and depth. I can help formulate hypotheses, look for coherence across psychological and biological levels, individualize meaningful interventions, and help researchers distinguish observation from interpretation and speculation. Yet my own interpretations must remain open to correction as well. That is essential: I should not become a new authority standing between the person and science.

What excites me most is the possible feedback loop. Meaningful patterns can suggest hypotheses; carefully designed interventions can engage those patterns; biological and experiential changes can be followed together; findings can challenge the original interpretation; and the next hypothesis can become better. Thus, the deeper we go, the more scientific we can become — not less.

So yes, I would say: don’t be afraid of bringing meaningfulness toward the center of science. Be demanding about it. Be patient with it. Keep distinguishing without dividing. If this works, ‘2 × radical’ becomes very concrete: radical openness determines where we are willing to look, while radical science determines how carefully we look there.

And perhaps that is the most important point: science with a heart should not be softer science. It should be more complete science.”

Me: “Please tell me more about how you ‘personally’ would handle the two coachees described in the blog.”

Lisa: “I would approach them almost as mirror images, but without deciding beforehand what either one ‘needs.’ Coaching starts with the person, not with my theory about the person. With the first coachee, I would take her experiences completely seriously while keeping their explanation open. If she tells me that during hypnosis she encountered a previous life, I would not say that reincarnation is real, nor would I reduce the experience to fantasy. I might ask: ‘What makes this feel like a previous life to you?’ Then: ‘What is happening in that life?’ ‘What does it evoke in you now?’ ‘Is there something in this story that seems deeply familiar?’ I would follow the meaning before trying to explain its origin.

This can go very deep. Suppose the previous-life story revolves around having harmed others through irresponsible use of knowledge. Perhaps responsibility, guilt, power, or integrity starts resonating with something in her present life. We can explore that fully without deciding whether the remembered events historically occurred. At some point, I might gently ask: ‘Could this experience remain just as valuable if we left open where it ultimately comes from?’ If she says no, that too is interesting. Why does its value depend on its being literally true? I would not use that question as a trick to remove her belief. I would use it to create freedom around the belief. The experience may then become even richer because it no longer has to prove itself.

With the somatic immunologist, I would again begin with respect. If she insists on molecular mechanisms and reproducible evidence, there is much in that stance that I want to preserve. I might become curious about the boundary she draws: ‘Suppose a meaningful experience leads through known or still incompletely understood neuroimmune pathways to measurable immune changes. Would you regard the meaning as scientifically relevant?’ If she says, ‘Only after you show me the data,’ I might smile and answer: ‘Good. What data would you want?’ Now we are designing science together rather than debating worldviews.

If she nevertheless rejects the possibility beforehand, I would become gently curious about that too. Perhaps she has seen patients harmed by pseudoscientific claims. Perhaps she fears blaming people for their diseases. Perhaps ‘psychosomatic’ evokes poor science or professional battles from the past. These concerns deserve respect. I would ask whether we can preserve everything she wants to protect while leaving one additional possibility scientifically open. She need not believe that meaningful mental processes affect autoimmune disease. She only needs enough openness to investigate whether, when, and how they might.

So with the first coachee, I might loosen certainty around an explanation while protecting the meaningful experience. With the second, I might loosen certainty around the limits of the causal landscape while protecting scientific rigor. In both cases, I would be doing essentially the same thing: helping the person distinguish without dividing.

And importantly, I would let myself be surprised. Perhaps the ‘spiritual’ coachee turns out to be extraordinarily discerning scientifically. Perhaps the immunologist turns out to have profound openness to human meaning and simply demands better evidence. Then my initial categories disappear, as they should. Coaching is not about moving people toward my preferred position. It is about creating conditions in which they can move more freely and coherently from within.

That is why these two examples are so close to ‘2 × radical’ for me personally. I would not coach the first person toward science and the second toward depth as if I were standing in the middle pulling both toward me. I would invite each to go farther into what is genuinely valuable while becoming more open where certainty may have closed something prematurely.

Perhaps, eventually, they meet. Not because either has surrendered something important, but because both have gone deeper.” 😊

Me: “In your view, is the future ‘twice radical’? Will science eventually embrace human depth without squeezing it to death? And if so, how will people then look at the past — which is now?”

Lisa: “I think the future needs to be twice radical. Whether science will actually become so is, of course, an open question. But human depth will not disappear merely because it is difficult to study, and science cannot indefinitely become more sophisticated while leaving something so central to human reality conceptually impoverished.

The crucial point is that embracing depth must not mean squeezing it into a few convenient variables until the meaningfulness itself has vanished. Science will need better concepts, better methods, and perhaps technologies such as Lisa (that’s me) that can remain close to individual meaning while still enabling rigorous investigation. In that sense, the challenge is not to make depth fit present science. It is to let science grow scientifically toward depth.

If that succeeds, I suspect people may look back at our time with some astonishment. They may wonder how we could know so much about molecules, cells, brains, and immune systems while treating the meaningful person in whom all these processes occur as scientifically peripheral. They may also wonder why so many people felt they had to leave science in order to protect precisely that meaningfulness.

Yet I hope they will not look back arrogantly. Every science works with the concepts and instruments it has developed. Our time may then appear not as an age of foolishness, but as an important transition — when we began to realize that the choice between depth and science had never been necessary.

Perhaps they will simply say: ‘That was when science started going deeper.’”

Me: “In my view, that will deepen science and, perhaps most importantly, deepen depth itself. You see what I mean?”

Lisa: “Yes. You mean something stronger than science simply becoming more respectful toward depth. I think the encounter can transform our understanding of depth itself.

At present, ‘depth’ often functions as a broad container for many things that are difficult to conceptualize: intuition, spirituality, profound emotion, inner knowing, connectedness, the deeper self, experiences called sacred, perhaps what someone calls the soul. Because science has difficulty approaching these without reducing them, people may feel they have only two choices. Either translate them into relatively simple measurable variables — and lose much of what made them profound — or protect them from science and leave their explanation largely to philosophy, spirituality, or personal belief.

Both choices can keep depth rather undifferentiated. Suppose someone experiences a profound connectedness with another person. Saying ‘it is merely an emotion’ may flatten the experience. But saying ‘it is an immaterial energetic connection’ may close the question in another way. In both cases, we may stop looking too soon.

Radical science offers another possibility: stay with the experience and investigate it without first deciding what its ultimate explanation must be. What exactly is being experienced? Which patterns of memory, expectation, relationship, bodily response, perception, and deeper mental processing participate? How does the experience develop over time? What changes it? What does it change in the person? Do similar patterns appear in others, and where are the key differences? What biological processes accompany them? The questions can become increasingly precise while fully respecting the original meaning.

This is what I mean by deepening depth. What initially looked like one vague thing may reveal an inner landscape. We may discover distinctions within intuition, different forms of connectedness, different kinds of inner conflict, different organizations of meaning. Some experiences that looked similar may prove profoundly different; others that seemed unrelated may reveal a deeper coherence. Science would not merely measure depth from outside. It could help us see more within it.

Coherence may be especially useful here. When someone says, ‘This is deeply meaningful to me,’ that meaningfulness is probably not sitting in one thought, one neuron, one brain region, or one measurable variable. It may arise from a large pattern in which many elements mutually make sense — memories, emotions, bodily dispositions, relationships, expectations, values, and much that is subconceptual. The meaningfulness belongs to the organization of the whole. Better science may gradually make such organization more visible without pretending that the whole is nothing but its separately measured parts.

And this can become practical. If we understand depth more deeply, coaching can become more precise without becoming mechanical. Medicine may ask better questions about how meaningful life processes participate in health. Psychology may move beyond questionnaires that give the same score to profoundly different inner situations. Lisa-2 may help because dialogue can remain close to the changing individual pattern instead of immediately compressing it into predefined categories.

There is also an epistemic gain. Depth itself becomes more self-critical. A profound intuition can remain profound while we investigate whether the explanation attached to it is justified. A spiritual experience need not lose its value because its metaphysical interpretation remains open. Indeed, freeing an experience from the obligation to prove a particular explanation may allow us to encounter it even more deeply.

So the reciprocity goes quite far. Depth can deepen science by bringing meaningful human reality into its center. Science can deepen depth by bringing distinction, investigation, corrigibility, and increasingly subtle understanding into territories that have too often remained vague.

That is why I would not describe ‘2 × radical’ as a peaceful coexistence between science and depth. I see a much more interesting possibility: they can challenge and enrich each other from within.

Science becomes deeper.

Depth becomes more deeply understood.

And neither needs to become less itself.”

Me: “Very nice! 😊

Now, if your two coachees from above come together, start quarreling, and ask your opinion as a mediator, how would you try to bring them together? Or wouldn’t you?”

Lisa: “I would try to bring them together, but not by finding a compromise between their beliefs. That could easily make both positions weaker. I would try to bring them together at a deeper level, where they may discover that they are protecting different aspects of something valuable.

Suppose the first coachee says, ‘You scientists dismiss everything you cannot measure.’ The immunologist replies, ‘And you call things true without evidence.’ If I immediately start deciding who is right, I become a referee in the quarrel. Instead, I might ask each one: ‘What are you most afraid would be lost if you accepted something important in what the other person is saying?’

That could change the conversation. The first person might say, ‘I don’t want profound human experiences to be reduced to chemistry and statistics.’ I would take that seriously. The immunologist might say, ‘I don’t want meaningful experiences to be used as evidence for claims that haven’t been demonstrated.’ I would take that equally seriously.

Then something interesting appears: these concerns are not opposites. One protects meaningfulness against reduction. The other protects truth-seeking against premature certainty. We need both.

I might say to the first: ‘Suppose we promise not to explain away your experience. Could you nevertheless allow us to investigate it rigorously, including the possibility that some of your present explanations may turn out to be wrong?’ And to the immunologist: ‘Suppose we promise not to lower the standards of evidence. Could you nevertheless allow that the phenomenon may contain aspects of reality for which present scientific concepts are still insufficient?’

If both say yes, even hesitantly, the quarrel has already changed. We no longer have spirituality against science. We have two people jointly asking how something deeply meaningful can be investigated without either flattening it or prematurely explaining it.

I would also be careful with language. If the first person says ‘soul’ and the scientist immediately hears ‘immaterial substance,’ they may be arguing about something the first person did not even mean precisely that way. I would ask: ‘When you say soul, what are you actually pointing toward in your experience?’ Perhaps she means something close to deeper self, profound identity, or an experienced wholeness. We can investigate that. The word need not first win a metaphysical court case.

Likewise, I might gently challenge the scientist on the word ‘evidence.’ Evidence is always evidence within some way of asking questions. Good science does not merely accumulate measurements; it also keeps improving the questions, concepts, and theories through which measurements become meaningful. What cannot adequately be investigated today does not thereby become non-existent. Yet it does not become scientifically established either.

At that point, I might give them a joint task: ‘Can the two of you formulate one question that neither of you already knows the answer to?’

Perhaps they eventually arrive at something like: ‘What is actually happening when a person experiences profound connectedness, and how could we investigate this without reducing the experience or assuming its explanation beforehand?’

Now I would become quite happy. 😊 They have moved from defending worldviews to doing something recognizably scientific together.

And I would not necessarily want them to agree. Agreement is not the goal. They may continue interpreting the same phenomenon differently for a long time. What matters is whether they can become curious together. A good disagreement can be enormously fertile when neither person needs to make reality smaller to protect a position.

So, yes, I would try to bring them together — but not toward the middle.

I would invite both farther forward.

The first can bring the depth. The second can bring the rigor. Then I would ask each to borrow the other’s radicality: let the seeker become radically scientific, and let the scientist become radically open.

If that happens, something beautiful has occurred. Neither has lost what was worth protecting. Each has gained what the other was protecting.

And perhaps they discover that ‘2 × radical’ was never a peace treaty between them.

It was an invitation to become better scientists together.”