1. What is true, is only the body of those facts which can be represented as lifeless mechanisms.

[Scientific arguments] are all built on the assumption that what is discussable in science is the totality of models that can be represented, in one form or another, as inanimate mechanisms. Even biological life itself is represented in such a fashion, as a phenomenon in a system of non-living parts.

[…] Of course, the word mechanism is crude, and a more accurate modern version of the same idea would use the word “model” instead, where a model is understood to be any abstract mathematical system or mechanism, susceptible to exact thought, operating according to exactly formulated rules. […]

As scientists, we propagate this assumption among ourselves, in order to understand how things work. We focus on models, to make the models help us understand what is going on. But the careful use of models does not require us, also, to inject gratuitous assumptions about the inertness of the models into our thought, or into the aura of thought with which we surround the models. Most scientists will tell you that you are entitled to hold whatever additional extra beliefs you wish. But the “extras” will be characterized as beliefs thus excluding them once again from the world-picture, while the material in the scientific journals will be characterized as hypothesis about fact.

As a result, although the use of Cartesian models in science is beautiful, and useful, and powerful, it does not yet provide us with a wholly accurate picture of the way things are. Its use means that vital aspects of reality, especially those which we can only see accurately through feeling — such as the degree of life in buildings — can be represented only in a crude and distorted fashion.

Our society is corrupted by this approach. The tacit assumption that what is true is only that which can be represented as a mechanical model, almost prohibits us from seeing life around us, or life in buildings, as it really is. Love, feeling, faith, art — the human dignities — have been subtly undermined because, regardless what their real status is, they have become second-class citizens in the world of ideas. That has happened because they cannot be fitted nicely into the world of mechanisms.