syscourse and “but science SAYS--”
If there’s one thing in syscourse we could convince people to accept, it’d be:
Requiring “scientific proof” of a subjective internal experience is more ableist, anti-science, and harmful than that experience could ever be.
Science isn’t meant to be an ideological attack dog.
Science falls into three branches: natural, social, formal. Natural = earth/space, biology, physics, etc. Social = psychology, history, etc. Formal = math, computers, etc. Applied sciences are things like medicine. Formal sciences aren’t empirical.
Let’s focus on natural and social sciences for now, since they do the empirical evidence thing. Natural science is about what you can see, taste, touch, hear, and put into a lab to study. It involves hypotheses, and being able to test them, retest, replicate results, etc.
This is why science doesn’t really play with things like religion. It can’t prove there is or isn’t a god, because it can’t– at present– put “god” into a lab and study them. It can however stick a human in a lab and see what the brain does when people pray!
Religion is a subjective internal experience, but science CAN test physical stuff like brains. Science can see what parts of the brain light up when you do, feel, or think XYZ. Science can’t always tell you what that data MEANS… but it can get the data and move on to guesswork.
A hypothesis is a guess. Testing is what scientists do to see if it’s right. If the data shows the guess might be correct, they retest and see if the data can be replicated. They then report findings. A visual:
If it can be replicated consistently, a hypothesis might become a theory. Or even a law! Here’s another visual:
This is how we got the theory of evolution, the theory of relativity, Newton’s first law of motion, etc. Because science took things that could be seen, tested it to death, and either made logical inferences from buttloads of evidence or actually observed the thing in action.
Social science is a bit more wiggly, but the same idea applies– it’s something that was seen and recorded (history) or that can be put in a lab (psychology) and studied. Let’s focus on psychology, for reasons. :P Psychology, as a science, focuses on a few things.
What they can see on brain scan and blood work– ruling out tumors, toxins, etc, or seeing how a brain reacts to XYZ, for example. What they can see in behavior– if someone is agitated, catatonic, harming themselves, etc. What that person reports– hearing things, losing time.
The first two things are physical stuff that can be seen, recorded, studied. The last? Nope. If someone claims to hear things, you can get a brain scan of what’s going on when they hear things. But you can’t say they are or aren’t hearing things, because you’re not in their head.
How does all this apply to plurality? We’re in the hypothesis stage. Science hasn’t “proven” much of anything about plurality. Yes, some systems have been put in a lab and studied as much as they could be studied, but there’s a lot of data that is internal experiences–
And there’s a lot of aspects that can’t ethically be studied. For example, the concept that only trauma causes systems to form. It would be difficult to study for a lot of reasons, but ethics is a huge hurdle there. Traumatizing kids on purpose is usually frowned upon.
What CAN science do? They can take traumagenic and endogenic systems, and scan their brains during things like switching, or see what it looks like when parogenic systems focus on creating a system member, or compare all that to (self-proclaimed) singlets.
But science can’t prove that a system didn’t form the way the system claims it formed. Science can take down the system’s history, and observe their brain and their behaviors, but they can’t see what’s going on inside the system’s head and how or why they operate as they do.
The best science can do is “this system reports a history of no trauma, their brain scans are consistent to what we see with switching in other systems, and we can observe changes between system members”… for now, anyways.
None of what science currently has on plurality is enough to push any one idea past the hypothesis stage. Science can, and does, say that trauma is “usually associated” with disorders like DID and OSDD. But that’s correlation, and–
Only in regards to systems who have, for some reason or another, ended up in a medial setting.
Science has yet to fully explore beyond plurality as it exists in medical settings, because there’s been little reason or demand for it to do so. Why waste the money and time?
Thus, there’s little “scientific proof” of nontraumagenic systems… not because they don’t exist, but because the studies haven’t been done yet. There’s been no reason to study systems who, by and large, don’t seek medical help for their plurality.
Requiring systems to “scientifically prove” their existence is absurd, at best. SCIENCE doesn’t even require “scientific proof”– all that is required is self reporting, because science accepts “yeah this is probably a thing” and that it’s mostly outside science’s wheelhouse.
Demanding “scientific proof” of a system’s existence is ableist because it implies that only things that can be physically studied are “good enough” to “count”. It implies self-reporting isn’t good enough, and that internal experiences don’t “count”.
Demanding “scientific proof” is anti-science because it displays a serious lack of understanding in [1] what counts as scientific proof, [2] what can be scientifically proven, and [3] the entire scientific method. It’s a fundamental ignorance of what science can and can’t do.
Demanding “scientific proof” is harmful because it does nothing to help systems, the plural community, or singlets truly seeking to understand. It just sows division, hatred, misinformation… and does bigots’ work for them. Not to mention the distress over being fakeclaimed.
And ultimately, it can be turned on “system exclusionists”, too. Because guess what. There’s little “scientific proof” ANY type of system exists. Again, most “proof” of systems existing at all is held together by self-reporting, duct tape, and tiny pool of good therapists.
Trauma-formed, not trauma-formed, y'all are in the same leaky boat heading towards sharp rocks. “Science proves” that systems are probably a thing, because systems SAY SO and because there are some funky brain scans showing SOMETHING going on that singlets don’t usually have.
Science is supposed to be for examining the physical things we CAN study, and helping us understand the world around us. It is beautiful, but it has limits, too. Sometimes those limits shrink as science evolves, and gets better funding and better tools. Sometimes not.
Regardless, it doesn’t exist and function as a weapon to be used against people who have something going on in their heads that science can’t fully see or study– and probably never fully will. Science isn’t something to unleash on fellow systems as a “gotcha”.
Especially considering the fact that NO SYSTEM is in any position to do so.
"Scientific proof" puts ALL systems of ALL origins in the same damn boat. And y'all can either start handing out lifejackets and start paddling, or sink.
