I just see science as sort of self referencing.
I personally think that it isn't nature, and super nature, it's more like nature, and sub-nature.....this universe is sub-natural, that is predictable behaviour that are thought of as laws, are a more basic emergence from the higher form of existence.....in the so called supernatural realm thought and feelings trump everything, but we fell from that, and now what we see as the physical world tends to trump our needs.....we have to supply our own needs using the patterns of behaviour of our environment.
I'm not attacking science 42, I just really believe that it is not, and never will be the whole story.
The thing that annoys me about this is that we understand that thoughts and feelings are processes fine-tuned by the brain after billions of years of evolution. There's nothing special or high-falutin' about the functions of life, and that includes thought and emotion. To science, the brain is essentially a supercomputer, and its processes are just as natural as the functions of the rest of the body.
About self referencing in science:
Sciences is about forming hypothesis and then doing experiments to validate or invalidate those hypothesis.
Then a scientist has the choice as what to believe, can all things be subject to scientific experimentation?
He/she doesn't have to believe this, but if they do then that's sort of self referencing, in that anything that can't be tested scientifically, is therefore invalid. And that doesn't seem logical...there is no reason to be sure that everything can be subject to scientific testing, it is simply a belief.
A self referencing belief, that they feel is backed up by the successes of science.
If I've explained that very well....I think I did better than I thought I would.
I'll probably still confuse people.
Naturally science self-references. Old discoveries are used to help evaluate new discoveries. Sometimes they are examined more closely and overturned; the luminiferous aether, for example, is now known to be an unnecessary and false explanation for the mediation of light through the vacuum of space. If science didn't reference and examine itself, discovery would be halted. That's the whole diminishing returns principle I was talking about earlier. Once you make a discovery, and understand another natural law, you never have to make that discovery again, and future progress is sped up. This can be seen from things as simple as the advancement of human technology to as complicated as the current clusterf**k of quantum mechanics knowledge.
A scientist, at least a scientist that doesn't just call themselves one and actually practices science, does not just choose what to believe. They believe in only what has been tested to be true. For example, Johannes Kepler first proposed that the heavens were arranged in geometrical accordance with the five perfect solids. When the calculations of himself and others proved this to be wrong, he begrudgingly accepted that he was incorrect, even though the idea was one he was incredibly personally fond of.
Why is there no reason to be sure that everything can be measured scientifically? I think that people often put too much credence into the idea of science as this big, hulking, solid thing, like a religion of its own. The truth is that science is just a process we use to understand the world better. Anything that exists can be measured scientifically simply because
it exists, and if it exists we can learn about it.
Let's say, for the purpose of hypothesis, that an afterlife exists. It is undetectable by any human instrument, and those who enter the afterlife can only affect the tangible world in indecipherable ways that cannot indeed be evaluated by science. Then yes, in this case, science could obviously not evaluate and come to the conclusion that an afterlife exists.
But by this logic, literally anything could exist. Do I need to bring up Russell's Teapot again? Or, if that's too measurable, perhaps I could say that every inanimate object out of sight of human beings makes faces at you when you turn your back. After all, anything that you aren't observing could be doing absolutely anything and you would never know. Hell, everyone around you could be a mechanical and lifeless illusion that only maintains the appearance of having their own conscious existence. Science, as a process, elects to take a step back and say, "these are all assumptions about how the world works. Sure, they could be true, but let's try to make as few assumptions as possible and only accept as reality that which can be demonstrated in reality. We can theorize about things we don't know, and agree or disagree about the validity of potential natural laws and realities, but we won't accept them as concrete and true until we can prove that they do what people claim them to do."
Just remember: plenty of scientists are religious, but if they are true scientists, they do not pretend that their religion is science. That's the key to this whole thing, I guess. Believe what you want, but don't try to infringe on the simple principle of demonstrating that real things are real and non-real things aren't, because that's all science claims to be and anything else isn't science.
