Science is meaningless

[Boethius]

Let me demonstrate my contention with an example:

(1) Physics tells us that water consists of a series of molecules that contain two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.

(2) When I am standing at the side of a creek, bend down to the water, and cup my hands together to draw some water up to my face, there is no way in which the statement from (1) registers in my direct experience of the water that is sloshing around in my hands. In fact, in terms of direct experience I couldn't even tell that the water consists of molecules at all, let alone their precise composition. So a statement like (1) is a mere intellectual abstraction -- in terms of my direct experience you could tell me that water is H0_2 and I couldn't tell that you were lying to me.

Maybe you contend that I can look at water through a very powerful type of microscope in order to literally see the molecular structure of water. Well, with all due respect, what I can affirm is that when looking through this particular piece of scientific instrument I am able to see a particular image that (apparently) confirms this abstract claim you have made about the "scientific" nature of water, and yet it still doesn't tell me much of anything about my direct experience of water itself because the scientific instrument has been placed in between my eyes and the water.

I don't know, maybe all of this is obvious to people (in which case, apologies for making you read it all!) but I do suspect a large part of why we struggle to understand the "nature" of scientific truth claims stems from our inability to translate such claims into our direct experience of the world at large. Instead we are trained to walk around paying homage to a series of essentially abstract assertions about the nature of physical reality (60% of my body is water, most of my body consists of empty space, my brain consists of a series of neurons and synapses, etc). So it's not so much that scientific claims are true or false (though, to be clear I do accept the truth of them in an empirical sense). More it's that "most" scientific claims/statements are meaningless in terms of our direct experience of the world.

Thoughts?

[Blackhawk]

Science is meaningless?

Everything is science. You wouldn't been able to write that post without science.

We know that earth is round because of science.

Your toilet exists thanks to science.

Etc.

[kag101]

I think you're overestimating the power of direct experience.

It looks like it's moving, right? But it isn't. 

Our senses can fool us. So the scientific method is an attempt to be more objective. 

[Forestluv]

The map is not the territory, yet a map can be quite useful when navigating.

[StarStruck]

As meaningless as a knife when you are eating soup. But knifes can be important when you are eating something solid.

[Rilles]

Its not meaningless, it has just become too bloated and narcissistic, people seem to think science knows everything nowadays, they tend to forget the human biases.

There is nothing wrong with using concepts to manipulate reality but sometimes you want to look at a tree as just a tree and marvel at its beauty.

[Egzoset]

Try micro-dosing...

[Carl-Richard]

On 20.3.2021 at 11:56 PM, Boethius said:

So a statement like (1) is a mere intellectual abstraction -- in terms of my direct experience you could tell me that water is H0_2 and I couldn't tell that you were lying to me.

Are intellectual abstractions meaningless? Doesn't that make your words meaningless?  

 

On 20.3.2021 at 11:56 PM, Boethius said:

(2) When I am standing at the side of a creek, bend down to the water, and cup my hands together to draw some water up to my face, there is no way in which the statement from (1) registers in my direct experience of the water that is sloshing around in my hands. In fact, in terms of direct experience I couldn't even tell that the water consists of molecules at all, let alone their precise composition. 

Be careful to not throw the baby out with the bathwater . By describing water as H2O, you can make some predictions that can be validated in your direct experience. For example, you can know something about what makes you experience it as a liquid, a solid or a gas, or how much water your body exhales by burning x amount of sugar, or why it is able to dissolve polar substances like table salt and not non-polar substances like butter etc.

Does that mean that science has unlocked "the truth" about water? Absolutely not, but again, there are a few things you can say about water by using the models provided by chemistry, and these things can absolutely be meaningful to your life in a multitude of ways. Being critical of the limits of science is fine as long you know the limits of your criticism  

Edited March 21, 2021 by Carl-Richard

[Preety_India]

Science is meaningful. 

 

[Boethius]

33 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

By describing water as H2O, you can make some predictions that can be validated in your direct experience.

I hadn't thought about that. Like you could use scientific models to predict the first day of winter when water starts to freeze, which certainly is something that registers in one's direct experience.

For some reason this reminds me of how Native Americans were experts as recognizing natural patterns like how the agitation of certain animals predictably came before the start of bad weather. I guess you can, to some extent, develop a science that is based purely on direct experience without the aid of any scientific instruments.

33 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

Being critical of the limits of science is fine as long you know the limits of your criticism  

True!

Edited March 21, 2021 by Boethius

[tatsumaru]

20 hours ago, kag101 said:

I think you're overestimating the power of direct experience.

It looks like it's moving, right? But it isn't. 

Our senses can fool us. So the scientific method is an attempt to be more objective. 

Technically speaking, it is moving, however we don't seem to be able to experience that.
According to Buddhism we have more than our 5 senses and the 5 basic senses are incapable of penetrating reality, and we actually have a total of 9 senses with the last 3 actually being able to penetrate into the heart of things. Whether you believe that or not is irrelevant, but it could be a nice thought exercise to consider that we are not functioning at our maximum due to an obsession with scientism/materialism/objectivism/rationalism. Modern science is beginning to become less and less interested in actual facts and more and more infatuates with gambling (probability theory). This is a complete neurosis that is of service to no one.

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, Boethius said:

I guess you can, to some extent, develop a science that is based purely on direct experience without the aid of any scientific instruments.

It's without a doubt important to distinguish between direct experience and fabrications, but don't forget that your sense organs are also a type of instrument, in the sense that they're bound by certain mechanical limitations and that they're treated as data collecting devices in a scientific context. Whether or not the data stems from a mechanical or biological instrument, the scientist's job is to find the correct data interpreting instrument, which appears as an abstract pattern in the scientists' own mind.

Here is where you'll find the usual critique of science and its arrogant tendencies, in the idea that these abstract interpretative instruments are somehow not subject to the same level of limitations as the "physical" instruments, and that this instrument is somehow something more than a part of the scientist's own limited mind. Here the distinction between direct experience and abstractions becomes important, because the abstract interpretative instruments themselves do not infact exist in direct experience, but instead they're derived and "abstracted out" from it.

When it comes to creating a science based on less bad assumptions and that is more in alignment with the actuality of direct experience, that would of course involve deconstructing these discontinued materialistic frameworks and look to alternative ones where maybe pure insights into consciousness take center stage in front of physical instruments. However, once the frameworks have been established, you would still rely on various data collecting instruments to actually do science. Just as much as some theory has to supersede observation, other aspects of theory and observation exist in a dialectical relationship where changes are made along the way.

Edited March 22, 2021 by Carl-Richard

[Danioover9000]

@Boethius

On 3/20/2021 at 10:56 PM, Boethius said:

Let me demonstrate my contention with an example:

(1) Physics tells us that water consists of a series of molecules that contain two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.

(2) When I am standing at the side of a creek, bend down to the water, and cup my hands together to draw some water up to my face, there is no way in which the statement from (1) registers in my direct experience of the water that is sloshing around in my hands. In fact, in terms of direct experience I couldn't even tell that the water consists of molecules at all, let alone their precise composition. So a statement like (1) is a mere intellectual abstraction -- in terms of my direct experience you could tell me that water is H0_2 and I couldn't tell that you were lying to me.

Maybe you contend that I can look at water through a very powerful type of microscope in order to literally see the molecular structure of water. Well, with all due respect, what I can affirm is that when looking through this particular piece of scientific instrument I am able to see a particular image that (apparently) confirms this abstract claim you have made about the "scientific" nature of water, and yet it still doesn't tell me much of anything about my direct experience of water itself because the scientific instrument has been placed in between my eyes and the water.

I don't know, maybe all of this is obvious to people (in which case, apologies for making you read it all!) but I do suspect a large part of why we struggle to understand the "nature" of scientific truth claims stems from our inability to translate such claims into our direct experience of the world at large. Instead we are trained to walk around paying homage to a series of essentially abstract assertions about the nature of physical reality (60% of my body is water, most of my body consists of empty space, my brain consists of a series of neurons and synapses, etc). So it's not so much that scientific claims are true or false (though, to be clear I do accept the truth of them in an empirical sense). More it's that "most" scientific claims/statements are meaningless in terms of our direct experience of the world.

Thoughts?

1. Science tells me, with textbooks, teachers, graphs and 3d models, that earth is a round object flying through space, faster than a car's acceleration. 

2. I go outside, and from my direct experience, I don't feel being accelerated through space, so much so that my car travels so much faster than the earth, because the passing wind is forceful.

3. From lying down, my direct experience tells me that there's no roundness either, even I see many irregular shapes on the horizon. And the sun does most of the moving, so... the earth really is flat.

4. Science is evil and corrupt. Don't bother to prove me wrong or right, even your proofs come from science, so it's corrupt too along with evil you.

   Me taking your logic, to the nth degree with my right brain. Now I must rest, good night.

 

[Carl-Richard]

15 hours ago, Danioover9000 said:

@Boethius

1. Science tells me, with textbooks, teachers, graphs and 3d models, that earth is a round object flying through space, faster than a car's acceleration. 

2. I go outside, and from my direct experience, I don't feel being accelerated through space, so much so that my car travels so much faster than the earth, because the passing wind is forceful.

I hope you're not mixing up acceleration with velocity, but it's true that the Earth is infact accelerating on its journey around the Sun due to the eliptical shape of the orbit and Kepler's laws of planetary motion. However, the type of acceleration you experience in a gravitational field is not equal to the type of acceleration you experience in an accelerating car.

Imagine jumping off a cliff and into a lake. When you're in the air, it simply feels like you're floating, but you're somehow accelerating at a rate of 9.81 m/s^2 towards the lake. It feels nothing like sitting in a car. The acceleration of the earth around the sun is like that: you're in free fall, falling extremely fast, but you don't actually feel it.

Exactly how gravity is different from the type of acceleration you experience in normal everyday situations on Earth requires a comprehensive technical grasp of General Relativity which I don't possess. You'll have to read some physicist's explanation of it on Quora or something or make yourself content with my analogies  

Edited March 22, 2021 by Carl-Richard

[tatsumaru]

15 hours ago, Boethius said:

I hadn't thought about that. Like you could use scientific models to predict the first day of winter when water starts to freeze, which certainly is something that registers in one's direct experience.

For some reason this reminds me of how Native Americans were experts as recognizing natural patterns like how the agitation of certain animals predictably came before the start of bad weather. I guess you can, to some extent, develop a science that is based purely on direct experience without the aid of any scientific instruments.

True!

Boethius, you are assuming that your 5 basic senses are actually providing you with a direct experience.

[Boethius]

On 3/20/2021 at 11:53 PM, kag101 said:

I think you're overestimating the power of direct experience.

It looks like it's moving, right? But it isn't. 

Our senses can fool us. So the scientific method is an attempt to be more objective. 

Taking a cue from what tatsumaru wrote, I could say that my direct experience of this object is not as a static image. Depending on how one looks at it (depending on how and where one focuses one's sight while looking at the image) one sees it as moving in one way, moving in another way, static, etc. If I were being a bit playful, I might say that this is an image that has personality to it. And who or what could tell me I was wrong in that? Science? The Magic Eye books are popular for a reason ?

Edited March 22, 2021 by Boethius

[tatsumaru]

3 minutes ago, Boethius said:

Taking a cue from what tatsumaru wrote, I could say that my direct experience of this image is not as a static image. Depending on how one looks at it (depending on how and where one focuses one's sight while looking at the image) one sees it as moving in one way, moving in another way, static, etc. If I were being a bit playful, I might say that this is an image that has personality to it. And who or what could tell me I was wrong in that? Science? The Magic Eye books are popular for a reason ?

It's actually moving even from a scientific point of view, just not in the way that your eyes are perceiving it. No component that allows you to experience this image on your screen is static or fixed. It's all oscillating waves and vibrating particles. I would say that seeing it as static is an illusion as well.

[Boethius]

@tatsumaru I am wording everything in terms of a certain naturalistic framework wherein there is some objectively observable reality "out there" that is available to my senses.

I don't personally believe that to be true. I have, for example, observed that the colors of the world appear to be brighter on days when I'm happy than on days when I'm feeling down. And apparently science has provided some sort of "verification" than this observation about my subjective experience can be scientifically recorded:

https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/the-quirky-brain-how-depression-may-alter-visual-perception

But it's very trippy to consider that my perception of the world is somehow dependent upon my state of mind. Aside from cultivating a good mental, emotional, and spiritual life, I'm not sure it's very wise to try to alter how one perceives the "external" world. Though I might feel differently if I were committed to a Buddhist path that gets into that sort of stuff.

[Boethius]

15 hours ago, Danioover9000 said:

@Boethius

1. Science tells me, with textbooks, teachers, graphs and 3d models, that earth is a round object flying through space, faster than a car's acceleration. 

2. I go outside, and from my direct experience, I don't feel being accelerated through space, so much so that my car travels so much faster than the earth, because the passing wind is forceful.

3. From lying down, my direct experience tells me that there's no roundness either, even I see many irregular shapes on the horizon. And the sun does most of the moving, so... the earth really is flat.

4. Science is evil and corrupt. Don't bother to prove me wrong or right, even your proofs come from science, so it's corrupt too along with evil you.

   Me taking your logic, to the nth degree with my right brain. Now I must rest, good night.

 

I thought Jonathan Pageau put it well when he said "Earth is round and the world is flat". But if you start telling people the world is flat they tend to think you're a conspiracy nut, so I generally keep those thoughts to myself ?

[DefinitelyNotARobot]

Everything you want to be meaningless will be meaningless. Everything you want to be meaningful will be meaningful.