Words of encouragement from scientism

My point at the start of all this is that what science is studying, while it pays lip service to being "physical" and "matter", has turned out to be something nobody in the 19th century would have regarded as physical or matter. Nor does it match our naive intuitions about physical or matter (even if we can salvage hidden variables we don't get local realism, even if we have local realism it doesn't look like we will ever get it to match up to our intuitions about realism, solid matter is almost entirely empty space, etc.). If science went looking for physical/matter so no surprise that that's what it found, as Brian claimed, it should be pointed out that what it found is decidedly non-physical, non-matter with respect to the physical/matter it was looking for.

Since everything has taken place under those conditions, the investigation of mental/consciousness phenomena takes place under those conditions, as well.

Linda

Science is, in essence, a disciplined inquiry. It is not just what we generally call science - an inquiry into the nature of the physical world. Some Enlightenment scientists presumed that evidence for God and his handiwork would be just beneath the skin of the world. But the development of the lens - and hence the telescope and the microscope - did not produce this evidence. This led to the development of a substantially materialistic and atheistic notion of science - which incorrectly dominates how we think of it now.

As you point out, Linda, the investigation of mental/consciousness phenomena takes place under the same conditions as any other form of disciplined inquiry, but we don't call it science.

However we would be very hard pressed to deny that the yogi or the shaman engages in a highly disciplined inquiry. But is it science as we know it? No, and that's because we have allowed the definition of science to be narrowed and generalised to the point of being useless. We have bought the BS that makes it a thing. More than a disciplined method, it has become a body of knowledge and a set of beliefs and dogmas. We are far better off talking about sciences, and not Science.

There used to be boring debates about whether the social sciences were 'real' sciences, because they did not conform to the same approach to inquiry as 'proper' sciences like physics and biology.

The root of the word science is essentially to know, or knowledge. So the meaning concerns the legitimacy of knowledge - a political meaning really. What is valid or legitimate knowledge? Materialistic science is quite clear that legitimate knowledge is materialistic only.  But if we step away from the conceit and avoid being seduced by it, the pursuit of knowledge is a natural human activity.

The beginning of this thread offered a thought that existence/life is inherently meaningless. The error of this thought lies in the assumption that meaning is an attribute with an essential or necessary external value. But the deep metaphysical or mystical sense is that meaning is implicit in being. If you like, the 'meaning of life' is to come to know the 'meaning of life'. If we imagine a single divine being embracing all that is, it can obey only that great injunction - 'know thy self'. This is what we replicate at our level of being - as does all else.

What we now call Science used to be called Natural Philosophy. But really, since the Industrial Revolution, Science became an instrumental business concerning power and profit to human advantage - so deeper complexity and ethics were put aside as problematic and disruptive annoyances. That's been changing since the 1960s. Now the precepts of quantum physics are being accepted, complexity is being comprehended and the idea that consciousness as the foundation to reality is widely considered as maybe valid.

Anyone born after 1970s will have grown up imbibing increasingly magical and animistic ideas, as well as sci fi. Those influences have transformed what is it okay to think. We are on the tail end of materialism - maybe 4-5 generations away from it being consigned to the dustbin of history. 

Many of the dedicated scientists in the 19th and 18th century were committed Christians. Atheists have spun a completely BS tale about science and religion. Gould went so far as to make the absurd proposition that they are "non-overlapping majesteria". They are, in fact, more like Yin and Yang. Keeping them separate has meant that moral dimensions have been able to be set aside as optional extras, rather than fundamentally intertwined. The Enlightenment conceit was that humanity was the very apex of consciousness. In the absence of God humans were it. But back then we did not know complexity, well at least the educated town dwellers didn't. The ideal of secular humanity blended carry-over conceits from religion - human exceptionalism - a being outside nature and favoured by God. Scientific materialism adopted the exceptionalism as a given, and this suited industrialists who were grateful not to have responsibilities imposed upon them. Oddly it also suited the religious who could celebrate the bounty of the divine with no adverse consequences.

So we have the notion of science we have today because it has served our culture well by denying a spiritual dimension not controlled by the church and by denying the prospect of subtle and complex interconnectivity of lives and systems. It has served a vision of purely secular and material power and profit.

As a consequence we must be careful when we talk about 'Science'. Do we mean what we say? Do we say what we mean?