For the advance of human knowledge, science is based on paradigms, as observed by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolution. By paradigm, he meant a conceptual lens, a worldview, that helps us explain what we observe. Kuhn pointed out that while paradigms allow advancement of knowledge they also exclude other ways of looking at the world--ways that can also yield understanding.A vantage point thousands of years old is currently discounted by scientists, except for perhaps those quantum physicists who have sought elsewhere to explain phenomena such as the wave function collapse. Erwin Schrödinger comes to mind as one of them. He could make no sense of the collapse unless consciousness somehow participated in observation. "Some of you, I am sure, will call this mysticism," he said, but for him, so be it.
