This is my
final comment on instincto. The subject desserves no further comment as far as I'm concerned.
Instincto is one of the best examples, I know of, of what physics Nobel price winner Robert Laughlin calls an antitheory or ideological thinking..
A key symptom of ideological thinking is that it is stated and re-stated at will in such a way that it cannot be tested. By no means. It’s a logical dead end called antitheory because it has exactly the opposite effect of real theories namely to stop thinking rather than stimulate it.
Instincto stance functions as a typical antitheory called upon to « explain away » the occurrence of the complex emerging phenomenon of health or alimentary balance in nature as well as any related embarrassing experimental shortcoming or observation and legitimize at best highly questionable statements and at worse not even wrong ones. Wild animals perfectly balance their diet ? Instinct does it ! My diet doesn’t cure me or makes me ill ? Wicked or denaturated instinct is at work ! Our organism’s nutritional needs are complex and hardly known ? Instinct manages it ! Our organism needs a specific herb to cure it ? Instinct makes him to find it etc etc
-If ones tries to put on test of logical consistency any of Burger’s specific « theoretical » considerations such as the existence of « an original biotope our genetics had supposedly adapted to » or the nature of his so-called « alimentary instinct » and then argues that it doesn’t work actually one is told that either this concept is in fact not necessary and instincto is a fact-based method that doesn’t need any theory or/and the « theory » is readily re-stated at will in contradiction with its previous form and usually in a form of the « not even wrong » kind, i.e ; wishful thinking and unsupported statements that cannot be put to test in any way.. Of course even the first alternative is utterly vain and useless because it is false to believe that there is any experiment, instincto included, that does not need theory to formulate it. This is thus itself nothing but a cleverly disguised antitheory intended to evade the requirement of logical consistency.
-If one tries to put to independent experimental test the method itself and happens to report results at odds with the guru’s claims, one is systematically told that it’s bad experiment or practice and an endless string of pretexts are invoked to dismiss these observations. In other words only the guru himself can actually « test experimentally » his method and do good experiments
This situation is of course deadly for instincto’s status as a sound scientific matter. For it means that instinctobabble cannot be independently tested in any way and is therefore definitely sheer bullshit from a scientific point of view.