The Alterscience Project: Redefining Science Principles and Values
The concept of Alterscience presents a new interdisciplinary paradigm that acknowledges human and animal beings in their complexity and interrelationships. It encompasses biological, technological, scientific, spiritual, and affective areas of study as subjects of new knowledge. Altercience promotes a constructive criticism of science’s theoretical, axiological, and epistemological foundations, highlighting Mind and Spirit as primordial realities, reintegrating them into the cosmological fabric, and seeking to understand what materialism cannot elucidate.
The limitations of scientific thought, restricted to rigid paradigms, prevent new proposals from being conceived. So, science remains limited by refusing to examine anything beyond the spectrum of its paradigms or instruments.
Alterscience represents a convergence of philosophical, aesthetic, spiritual, moral, and scientific viewpoints, incorporating ecology, feminism, de-colonialism, class struggle, negritude, anti-racism, and anti-speciesism. It repositions science in a reconstruction process, aiming for an investigative approach receptive to diverse knowledge constructs. It fosters a research, theory, pedagogy, and experiential project that intertwines reasoning, philosophy, spirituality, and current and potential forms of intelligence.
Alterscience is proposed as a science that upholds the sanctity of life, implying the recognition that all living beings are sacred and possess inalienable rights to life. This perspective inevitably challenges the foundations of mainstream science. However, the mechanisms of colonization and control that facilitated the subjugation of many beings persist, tarnishing the reputation of science.
This behavioral logic of exploitation of life, implicitly validated by science, is insidiously outstretched to human beings who become tacitly regarded as machines, devoid of sacredness, without rights to life, dignity, and respect, thus being available to be influenced, controlled, experimented with, and exhausted.
The proposition advances a broad reflection on sciences and Alterciences, spurring newer projects: to specify new topics of knowledge; to devise alternative pursuits or methods of comprehension; to experiment with distinct agencies, instruments, languages, and modalities; to conceive multi- and inter-visualities and dimensionalities; to explore new structures for knowledge legitimation; to implement non-proprietary processes of information dissemination, application, and transformation; to research additional objects, realities, or dimensions to be known; and to reach and extend the beneficiaries of science.
The complexity of the subject requires intertwining art, science, literature, the social, the cultural, and the planetary, embracing critical thoughts and dissonant judgments in the production and sharing of collective information, converging into a form of sustainable knowledge and non-elitist pedagogical practices based on respect for life, nature, and diversity, beyond anthropocentrism.