How to argue against science from a metaphysical perspective?

[fanta]

How to argue against science?

I am a bit frustrated that scientists have so much authority in our society, when they are pretty clueless about what is going on. I think narcissism in academia is holding society back. Science could be so much better than what it is today. I saw Leos video on science, but at the same time I would like to be able to to argue against science with very concrete and specific examples that layman and scientists have a hard time arguing against. Does anybody have some arguments against science?

 

These are some of my points:

• A lucid dream is as physical as reality. The phenomenological quality of the sensory modalities are the same, and are sometimes even better (for example brighter colors). A dream is just as physical as normal waking state. But the physical laws are not the same. It is for example possible to swim in space
• In a black hole, all of our models and scientific understanding breaks down. This shows that science have limits
• Science dosent work after we are dead. Again, limited
• Science is based upon fundamental assumptions that haven´t been tested empirically. For example cause and effect. If there is a cause and an effect, there must be a cause for our universe and that cause needs to have a cause which will regress into infinity.
• Language is based on the fundamental assumption that there is a sender and a receiver. 
• Logic and rationale are human qualities which is placed upon reality. Reality isn’t logical nor rational. All science is based upon logic.

[Carl-Richard]

These are arguments less against science and more against people who hold science as a religion.

As for my arguments, it depends on what sciences you're talking about. Sciences that study humans quantitatively (e.g. sociology, anthropology, psychology, medicine, political science) infamously have problems with replicability (can you repeat the study and get the same results?) and generalizability (do the results apply more generally to the world and not just inside the particular study?).

Many (ex-)scientists have made strong criticisms about these problems, some even claiming that they're practically unsolvable and that this kind of quantitative science is a lost cause, while others are more optimistic and constructive, while some are in denial and keep doing what they've always done.

There are many sub-problems that feed into the two main problems, and some of them are summed up by the concept of "questionable research practices", while others relate to for example limitations with methodologies like null hypothesis testing. There has been a great effort to address these problems though, through initiatives like open science, file drawer journals, preregistrations, etc.

Qualitative sciences (e.g. interviewing people about their feelings and experiences) bypass many of these kinds of problems, but they're less able to make precise predictions, so you lose something there. "Hard sciences", particularly those that are largely independent of humans (e.g. physics, chemistry), have less of these problems. For them, the problems go back to again holding science as a religion (basically physicalism), which bleeds into the culture through the idolization of pop science communicators ("the scientific priesthood") and is upheld by modern society's disconnect with wisdom and spirituality.

Edited March 2 by Carl-Richard

[KoryKat]

Well my Dad is an Atheist , engineer tech   - pretty rational minded Team Science guy... Talks crap about religion for example...

 

He believes in science..HE BELIEVES IN SCIENCE LIKE A DOGMA. He's worshipping science like a religious cult.  The cult of science.

 

I showed him the facts he said he would need to see.. he didn't pay any attention.

GOOD FKIN LUCK 🤞

 

[Yimpa]

Who says you need to argue..?

[fanta]

On 28.2.2024 at 6:43 PM, Carl-Richard said:

These are arguments less against science and more against people who hold science as a religion.

As for my arguments, it depends on what sciences you're talking about. Sciences that study humans quantitatively (e.g. sociology, anthropology, psychology, medicine, political science) infamously have problems with replicability (can you repeat the study and get the same results?) and generalizability (do the results apply more generally to the world and not just inside the particular study?).

Many (ex-)scientists have made strong criticisms about these problems, some even claiming that they're practically unsolvable and that this kind of quantitative science is a lost cause, while others are more optimistic and constructive, while some are in denial and keep doing what they've always done.

There are many sub-problems that feed into the two main problems (replicability and generalizability): questionable research practices, null hypothesis testing, etc. There has been a great effort to address these problems though, through initiatives like open science, file drawer journals, preregistrations, etc.

Qualitative sciences (e.g. interviewing people about their feelings and experiences) bypass many of these kinds of problems, but they're less able to make precise predictions, so you lose something there. "Hard sciences", particularly those that are largely independent of humans (e.g. physics, chemistry), have less of these problems.

Yeah. when you learn about science in academia they always say it's about probabilities. But the way that it is used in society and understood by people in general is that scientific evidence is truth. Science if models of subjective phenomenology. 

I think that you can sort the different sciences into "tiers" of accuracy of the models. The more concepts you lay over each other, the more the data will be distorted. The more factors involved the harder it is to draw a conclusion. Classical physics for example will be easy to replicate because what you measure will often be constant. There are som outliers like quantum mechanics, but the mathematics and physics of sending a rocketship to the moon will mostly be the same. These sciences are mechanical. And it has only one layer. In medicine, you have "objective" parameters you measure in the body. On top of this you have the persons unique biology, enoviremental factors and genetics. This are two layers of distortion. In psychology you could have the persons genetics, enoviremental factors, culture etc. The more correlating factors, the more distortions.

Regarding the replication crisis, I think that this is a big red flag. But when I discuss this with scientists it's just being brushed off like nothing.

The way I see it is that a lot of science is actually relativism. And a lot of value disappears and insight disappears when you compress information.

On 1.3.2024 at 9:41 PM, Yimpa said:

Who says you need to argue..?

The reason to argue (but which is also low vibration), is that when you discuss something that isn't scientifically proven you just meet a wall of scientist or science fanatics saying "is it proven?", "could it be placebo?", "I don't believe that if its not based upon science" and it get brushed off like it is nothing. I think this is kind of sad...

 

[Ishanga]

I would say most science today is dogmatic, and controlled by corporations, they give the scientist money to support their research, and disregard anything that does not support their corporate power play and greed..

Some science, and scientist are more metaphysical, Donald Hoffman for eg just watched a podcast with him and John Vervadke, in the end Donald being the scientist said that in simple terms he see's himself as the Grand Intelligence that is the creator/creation of this universe, which is the same thing Sadhguru says in simple terms and language...

[tuku747]

On 3/1/2024 at 2:41 PM, Yimpa said:

Who says you need to argue..?

 

[Carl-Richard]

23 hours ago, fanta said:

Yeah. when you learn about science in academia they always say it's about probabilities. But the way that it is used in society and understood by people in general is that scientific evidence is truth. Science if models of subjective phenomenology. 

It's a problem of naive pop science, but also it's a larger epistemological problem of naive realism. You're not born questioning your assumptions. You first have to acquire them and test them out. It's a stage we all must go through, and in many cases, it's the norm, especially when trying to appeal to the younger parts of the population, which pop science does.

 

23 hours ago, fanta said:

I think that you can sort the different sciences into "tiers" of accuracy of the models. The more concepts you lay over each other, the more the data will be distorted. The more factors involved the harder it is to draw a conclusion.

Those factors would be called "auxiliary hypotheses" in the literature. When testing a hypothesis, often there is a myriad of smaller underlying hypotheses that need to be granted to confirm the main hypothesis, and these are of course not themselves tested (only sometimes indirectly by comparing a large amount of studies), which is a problem. Examples would be the type of measurements used (e.g. self-report questionnaire vs. physiological measures), the general study design, etc.

One approach to solve that problem is to simply reduce the amount of auxiliary hypotheses you need to confirm the main hypothesis (and more generally the theory the hypothesis is derived from; "theory-testing research"). That also means you get closer to the Popperian "scientific ideal" of making your hypotheses falsifiable, which they generally and practically speaking aren't in the human-related sciences, because you can always blame the auxiliary hypotheses when your hypothesis goes wrong ("ah, it's probably the differences in sample size, the different type of questionnaires used, the variability in the sample", etc.).

That's really how most science goes in these fields: "The hypothesis didn't pan out? Well, it's probably not the hypothesis or the theory that is at fault. Let's generate a slightly different hypothesis and try again! When we find a positive result, we'll publish that so we can get more funding and continue being scientists." ("discovery-oriented research"). By the way, negative results are generally not published outside file drawer initiatives (because it's not interesting), which feeds into this problem.

 

23 hours ago, fanta said:

Classical physics for example will be easy to replicate because what you measure will often be constant.

Yes. Other than the "religiosity problem" I pointed to earlier, with fields like physics, the problems become more theoretical than empirical, and it's generally a problem of complexity: what does your theory actually tell us about reality?

In physics, you might be able to predict quite accurately how two objects move relative to each other, but what about 5, 10, 20 objects? Similarly, in biology (which is of course related to humans, but it's nevertheless a fun example of the problem of complexity), we've sequenced the entire human genome, meaning we know all the genes that goes into a human, and these genes code for proteins that make up the human. But how exactly do the proteins go about making up the human? The genetic code is one thing, the morphological code is another.

So complexity is not just a problem in human-related sciences, but in the human-related sciences, it additionally manifests much more in the empirical realm. It's essentially because in physics, you're more able to ignore the complexity by choosing to study and test hypotheses for simpler things (2 objects vs. 20), while in say psychology, you're always stuck with studying humans, which are of course complex.

 

23 hours ago, fanta said:

Regarding the replication crisis, I think that this is a big red flag. But when I discuss this with scientists it's just being brushed off like nothing.

It's their job, and their default position is to be optimistic. And again, there are promising initiatives for increasing replication rates and more generally improving the state of human-related science. However, the real "black pill" here is not replication but generalization. Even if your studies are 100% replicable (meaning somebody repeats the study with the exactly same setup and gets the same result every time), does that mean your results will hold when you slightly tweak some of the factors? Not at all.

Like I said earlier, some people actually argue that generalizability is an unsolvable problem that invalidates all human-related science. But you could counter that and ask "surely, some studies generalize pretty well?". Even though the exact results of the study don't generalize, maybe they partially generalize (there is "some" effect). But how can we know that? Well, you can't know for sure, but doing a large amount of "conceptual replications" (replications where you tweak some factor relative to the original study) could give an indication. It will never be 100% proof (because that requires virtually simulating the entire universe), but I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that you're at least getting closer to an answer than not.

Edited March 4 by Carl-Richard

[Razard86]

On 2/28/2024 at 0:43 PM, Carl-Richard said:

These are arguments less against science and more against people who hold science as a religion.

As for my arguments, it depends on what sciences you're talking about. Sciences that study humans quantitatively (e.g. sociology, anthropology, psychology, medicine, political science) infamously have problems with replicability (can you repeat the study and get the same results?) and generalizability (do the results apply more generally to the world and not just inside the particular study?).

Many (ex-)scientists have made strong criticisms about these problems, some even claiming that they're practically unsolvable and that this kind of quantitative science is a lost cause, while others are more optimistic and constructive, while some are in denial and keep doing what they've always done.

There are many sub-problems that feed into the two main problems, and some of them are summed up by the concept of "questionable research practices", while others relate to for example limitations with methodologies like null hypothesis testing. There has been a great effort to address these problems though, through initiatives like open science, file drawer journals, preregistrations, etc.

Qualitative sciences (e.g. interviewing people about their feelings and experiences) bypass many of these kinds of problems, but they're less able to make precise predictions, so you lose something there. "Hard sciences", particularly those that are largely independent of humans (e.g. physics, chemistry), have less of these problems. For them, the problems go back to again holding science as a religion (basically physicalism), which bleeds into the culture through the idolization of pop science communicators ("the scientific priesthood") and is upheld by modern society's disconnect with wisdom and spirituality.

The only reason Scientists have problems with replicating studies is a result of personality and psychological issues are intertwined with states of consciousness and this is caused by the chemical factory of the entire human body. Do you know how many sciences are excluded that need to be included for proper human psychology to be understood?

We would need to include endocrinologists, Neuroscientists, along with clinical psychologists and that is just the starting point. There would have to be an acceptance of mysticism as part of science and a unification of yogic practices as part of the science of the human. So we would merge the study of being with the physical world and this would inevitably start bringing in the dietary experts on nutrition as well. So the biggest factor in problems with replicability is because the studies are missing vital factors and thus cannot replicate the results on a wide scale.