Ego-- harmful delusion or pragmatic necessity?

[bennyboy]

And they work. That's the important bit. They work. "Other ways of knowing things" have not been demonstrated to work outside the head of people using them, in relation to objective truth. If they worked, they would be science too.

Science! I'm off to have sex with science now, brb.

I'm talking about the truth of reality, of course. Science does not pretend to be able to tell you what you "should" do, other than by using predictive models to analyse the results of your actions.

That depends what you mean by science.  Science literally just means "knowing."  However, science as we mean it today involves certain rules, like the ability to share objective observations, that don't really work for a sicence of the mind.  And by mind, I don't mean brain function-- I mean what it's like to experience and think.

For example, Wundt made careful observations, but (from Google): "Wundt analyzes the constituents of the mind by using a method called introspection, which involves the subjective observation of one's own experience. This became the reason why structuralism gradually faded out, based on the unreliability of this method."

So would you say that things you learn about your mind by watching your thoughts, attempting to control your feelings, etc. are science?  They certainly represent a kind of knowledge, but they are not easy to quantify in objective terms that can be shared reliably.