Unscientific ≠ Meta-Scientific

[Tim R]

When people watch Leo's series on "Deconstructing the Myth of Science", they might start to think that science is somehow "wrong".

It is, and it isn't. It depends on the context. And that's where people get confused. Remember Leo's video on relative and absolute truth? 

• "The sky is blue because it scatters light" is a relative truth.
• "Potatoes are part of the Solanaceae " is a relative truth.
• "The human body can't run a marathon in under 1 hour" is a relative truth. 

Science itself (and I'm mostly referring to the natural sciences) is a field so large and complex that you can't even grasp its extent and complexity. Science has penetrated the material world so deep that it's just ludicrous. You can go into any field, whether it's physics, chemistry or biology and from there look at all the sub-fields. And each sub-field has hundreds of sub-sub-fields, and each sub-sub-field has thousands of even more minute fields. If you would settle for some extremely specific problem, you could study it all your life and you wouldn't answer 1% of everything you could answer about it. 

People think that science deals with explaining reality. But most of the time, that's not true. Science doesn't explain reality, science builds models of reality. 

Science abstracts and divides reality, it conceptualizes it, it manipulates those concepts, projects them back onto the world and thereby manipulates reality. 

 

I often see people who are involved in spirituality- and consciousness work develop a very distinct disdain for science. Because as they start to dismiss materialism, they also dismiss science and they simply throw out the baby with the bath water, not realizing that "everything is consciousness" and "scientifically manipulating abstractions to manipulate reality" don't exclude each other.

"Atoms? They're not real!!" Until you look through a Cryogenic Electron Microscope. But what do you see? Atoms. Are you sure? Consciousness. Are you sure? Well, it's both and neither. See, both don't exclude each other. 

"Consciousness" is as much an abstraction as "Atoms", don't forget that. But what is, is not an abstraction. Just recognize that "consciousness" is also saying too much already. Don't get triggered by what I'm saying, try to understand. 

This is stage yellow/turquoise thinking. Can you reconcile science and consciousness? Can you appreciate the value that science provides?

Tldr

So the problem I'm seeing is that people confuse this meta-scientific perspective with a simplistic, ideological, unscientific perspective. True, there is no material world. But that does not mean that the unscientific bullsh*t  you broadcast is suddenly true. 

Using "absolute truth" to argue against "relative truth" is meaningless. Absolute truth is not a position relative to anything else, therefore you can't use it to argue "against something else". 

So either you play the game or you don't. But don't hover in between and ruin it for both sides. 

 

I hope you understand what problem I'm talking about in this thread. It's basically a problem of excessive stage green (and to some extent even yellow).

Don't be unscientific, be meta-scientific. 

[Mason Riggle]

@Tim R nice.

[Flyboy]

I eat, therefore I am.  Meta-bolism.  Try it.

 

Great discussion though 

[outlandish]

Really well put @Tim R your thoughts on this matter are very well laid out here, and I completely agree.

[lmfao]

6 hours ago, Tim R said:

So the problem I'm seeing is that people confuse this meta-scientific perspective with a simplistic, ideological, unscientific perspective. 

I get ya. 

6 hours ago, Tim R said:

It is, and it isn't

Shuzan held out his short staff and said: “If you call this a short staff, you oppose its reality. If you do not call it a short staff, you ignore the fact. Now what do you wish to call this?"

[Jodistrict]

On 5/12/2021 at 10:03 AM, Tim R said:

Science itself (and I'm mostly referring to the natural sciences) is a field so large and complex that you can't even grasp its extent and complexity. Science has penetrated the material world so deep that it's just ludicrous. You can go into any field, whether it's physics, chemistry or biology and from there look at all the sub-fields. And each sub-field has hundreds of sub-sub-fields, and each sub-sub-field has thousands of even more minute fields. If you would settle for some extremely specific problem, you could study it all your life and you wouldn't answer 1% of everything you could answer about it. 

This indeed is the most conspicuous feature of the modern period: need for ceaseless agitation, for unending change, and for ever-increasing speed, matching the speed with which events themselves succeed one another.  It is dispersion in multiplicity, and in a multiplicity that is no longer unified by consciousness of any higher principle; in daily life, as in scientific ideas, it is analysis driven to an extreme, endless subdivision, a veritable disintegration of human activity in all the orders in which this can still be exercised; hence the inaptitude for synthesis and the incapacity for any sort of concentration that is so striking in the eyes of Easterners.

--  René Guénon  "The Crisis of the Modern World"  

Edited May 13, 2021 by Jodistrict