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Originally Posted by Len Moran
We have discussed before that science requires a separation of subject and object and in a sense I think this is part of the preconditioning that you talk about.
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A crucial part, yes.
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At the classical level, separation seems to be inherent and gives rise to an idea that science is explaining reality as a separate entity to us as subjects - we can easily conceive of objective reality as actually being the "reality", along with space and time. But as you have pointed out so often, dig a little deeper at the classical level and it becomes clear that the subject object separation is artificial, but we carry on doing science successfully anyway.
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Right, it seems it relates to "how closely you look", or the difference between an
effective understanding and "the truth". When Greek philosophers, like Zeno, looked too closely at the classical models and tried to interpret their ramifications if they were "true", they ran into many of the same problems we encounter in quantum mechanics. The key difference seems to be that in quantum mechanics, the problems are harder to avoid, you pretty much have to confront them, whereas classically you get away with pretending they are not there.
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But it is successful because we have framed the questions in a way that can be answered by science, but this doesn't invalidate the discipline at all, it just places science within a category of enquiry that has domains of validity.
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Right, that's the key, we built science to do certain things, and it does not compromise the effort to recognize that-- it
informs the effort.
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The results we get are not to be thought of as probing the secrets of the absolute, but they are probing the secrets of our involvement with the absolute in a very objective way.
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Yes, that's well said.
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And I find this a very satisfactory way of looking at science, we don't have to become despondent at the likely failure of science to unearth the secrets of mind independent reality, instead we should embrace what science is able to achieve and will continue to achieve within its area of validity and not expect any more than this.
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We do all right-- for a bunch of smart apes.
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But I can only get such answers if I frame the question properly, but if I do that then I have lost my original quest for an ultimate truth, I have converted it to obtain a scientific truth.
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Everything is a projection. When we look at our surroundings, it would be insensitive to those who are blind to bemoan the limitations of using light as our probe; instead we revel at having sight. I think the ability to do science is just like that.
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So I would say the ultimate truth of mind independent reality is of a nature that can not be defined, perhaps all we should really hope to say about it is that "something" is there - and just carry on discovering very important "scientific truths".
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And any other insights we can get, even those that are not scientific. We just don't expect the latter to be testable-- they are just up to us. But that's an important part of freedom-- as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else or lower our value to the society (if we take it to the point of delusion).