Responsibility assumption

Responsibility assumption is a doctrine in the spirituality and personal growth fields holding that each individual has substantial or total responsibility for the events and circumstances that befall them in their life. While there is little notable about the notion that each person has at least some role in shaping their experience, the doctrine of responsibility assumption posits that the individual's mental contribution to his or her own experience is substantially greater than is normally thought. "I must have wanted this" is the type of catchphrase used by adherents of this doctrine when encountering situations, pleasant or unpleasant, to remind them that their own desires and choices led to the present outcome.

Enfolding objectivism and the scientific method

Responsibility assumption is notable for its ability to fold within its own contours the reservations held toward it by the opposing doctrines of objectivism and materialism. In answering the criticism that convincing scientific evidence has never been shown that would objectively support the doctrine's existence, adherents of the total responsibility version of the doctrine counter that the appearance of such objectively overwhelming scientific evidence would itself violate the doctrine, due to its effects on unwilling observers. Analogizing the doctrine to an extreme application of quantum indeterminacy in which the observer not merely affects the outcome of the observed phenomenon but indeed completely controls it, adherents argue that it would be impossible for any skeptical observer to be presented with overwhelming evidence of the doctrine's validity (or of anything else, for that matter) if the observer does not mentally desire to receive it.

Related Topics:
Objectivism - Materialism - Quantum indeterminacy

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Proponents thus conclude more generally that the scientific method and the seemingly objective observations underpinning it can never resolve the larger metaphysical issues of an observer-driven subjective existence. They reason that if causation is always mentally driven by the observer, then the placebo effect is the only real effect there is, and the seemingly objective reportings of science are simply a description of those mental effects which multiple minds and/or a super-mind have agreed to respect in common.

Related Topics:
Scientific method - Placebo effect

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