RE: No reason justifies disbelief.
March 24, 2019 at 9:47 pm
(This post was last modified: March 24, 2019 at 9:59 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
(March 24, 2019 at 4:44 pm)bennyboy Wrote: A science of mind might be a very personal thing, and there have in fact been schools of psychology based on introspection. However, science as we normally mean today it does not include personal insight.OFC it does.............? It just doesn't stop there. Mostly because that hasn't shown itself to be a prudent or productive course of action.
Quote:The Buddhists know the territory of mind particularly well, and I'd point to the Tibetan tradition of meditation as the best case in point. Now, you might not agree with their source attributions, but they know truths about what this or that state of mind is like and how to achieve it unlike anyone, including scientists.It doesn't matter whether or not I agree with them, I was pointing out that we have done scientific research on both the claims and the methods, that there was no barrier preventing it. It's not as if some invisible wall saddled up into the labs and pulled some buddhist gandalf shit on science, there.
Even if you don't agree that this is true, there is a whole category of questions which science cannot answer-- those about qualia.
What is it like to taste chocolate?
What is it like to watch the sun rise after sleeping on a park bench in the middle of winter?
What is it like not to have the answer to a question, and then have the answer enter into your awareness, fully-formed?
Science can talk around these questions, but cannot answer them. Knowledge of what things are like is in the experience of them, not in descriptions of brain function about them.
In any case, hasn't and can't are not interchangeable. I still wonder why you think this, and why/how you think you know this...and that's before I start to question the specific examples and suggest that, as with you misconceptions about empiricism, you may not have an entirely accurate picture of the competence of empirical observation and empirical methods in those regards...each of them, themselves, an invocation of an empirical observation.
Human experience is very literally the thing that empiricism claims all of our knowledge to be derived from..and it's difficult to see why our experience wouldn't be a good tool to explain or describe...our experience..particularly in light of how productive empirical means have been toward that very question - obviously with the caveat that we did not -stop- at the point of experience alone but applied a regimented process to it's contents? Personally, IDK that the process that buddhism employed is entirely unproductive (or other than empirical), but we didn't exactly meditate our way to the moon or to our current understanding of the brain.
Not that it would matter, as I've already commented on..because even if science couldn't, not hadn't, but couldn't answer some question...and even if all of science were wrong wrong wrong, that wouldn't demonstrate any other than empirical or any metaphysical answer was right, or that there was anything in either set. That's just not how that works.
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