Proving What We Already "Know"

[Belacqua]

Science can study anything better than buddhist meditation...even buddhist meditation...but that's only because meditation isn't studying - and it's a complete non starter if the goal is objective measurement.  Buddhists are, of course, also free to try and explain anything any way they want to, and they have...and we can compare the work of buddhism and the work of scientific inquiry and see what washes.  What I see here, in point of fact, is you pushing back against some scientific studies of consciousness, no less.

When I say "Buddhist meditation," let me say that's a placeholder for any organized system of introspection.  Buddhists refer to perceptions (including thoughts) as objects, and discuss their properties, processes for working with them and so on.  In a sense, you could call it "the science of what things are like," i.e. of qualia.  But I'm not a convert to Buddhist beliefs in general nor have much interest in the religious or cultural aspects of it.

Here of course your interlocutor shows the kind of casual, question-begging scientism that I was talking about before. 

He assumes that "to study" is always to study in the way that science studies, and that results to be meaningful must be objective and measurable. In this way he's able to rule out Buddhist meditation as something that tells us something useful.

You have made it very clear, though, that you're talking about experience. And the experience of meditation -- what it's like to the person doing it -- is of course something science can't tell us. 

I am confident (having spent some time at a Zen retreat outside Fukuyama) that it is possible to change and improve one's perception of things. The mind is often distracted and unclear, and this is something we can work on. 

There is a long and serious tradition of people talking about satori. It would be easy to dismiss this if we begin with the question-begging scientism. I think we aren't justified in doing that. 

Not having come anywhere near to satori, I can only rely on other people's accounts. If what they say has to do with "seeing behind a veil," it is not an epistemological barrier of the type that Kant describes. It is more a barrier of habit and narrowness imposed by one's own mind. In fact the gist of much Buddhist poetry is that once one has opened one's mind, one realizes that there is no veil. That what we're seeing is, at last, what there is. Western epistemologists will question this, of course. But those of us who haven't had the experience shouldn't judge what the experience is like, or what the value of it is.