I don’t think science is a good framework for non-scientific things. If you wrap spirituality in science, you kill whatever substance you had by reducing it to something mundane and mechanical.
I find it somewhat difficult to understand exactly what you mean here and in the rest of the comment. Could you maybe define the terms “science”, “spirituality” and “non-scientific things” as you are using them here?
What you seek is joy, fulfillment and wisdom, so why not aim at that directly? Using science to fix the problems that science caused feels a bit like putting out a fire using fire. Let me also warn you that meta-science is worse than science. The more degrees of separation to reality, the worse you’re off mentally.
Are you recommending here that people should not use science in their attempts to pursue joy, fulfillment and wisdom?
And when you say “The more degrees of separation to reality, …”, what is the thing that you are talking about that is being separated from reality?
I think that science is a way of thinking and a way of doing things, as well as a way of encoding something else. If I were to describe a beautiful painting just in writing alone, then I would have encoded the image in text, reducing something visual to something linguistic. But in that process, the image would be completely destroyed, so this “encoding” is impossible. Likewise, if I define science, the definition would be a pointer at best, and not science itself.
My understanding of spirituality is something like psychological well-being and tacit knowledge and wisdom. This is rather vague perhaps, but communicating wisdom is inherently difficult, and the text is only, at best, a pointer. If you replace your intuition of substance (like your personal experience of love) with your scientific understanding (that love is ‘merely’ chemical reactions), your brain might lose faith in its own experience, regard it as empty, or destroy the subjective value associated with it.
What I’m describing here is how the mind relate to its own sensory inputs, ideas and associations, which are all more fundamental to your brain than your conscious beliefs (for instance, even if you believe that a phobia of yours is irrational, your mind may still believe it).
Are you recommending here that people should not use science
I think science can be used to the extent that it can help, but that people often consider science to be universal, or attempt to “encode” everything as science so that they feel at home working with the problem (when the only tool you have is a hammer… ). If your aim is well-being, then well-being should have a higher priority than science. Too often, I see that people are unhappy, unfulfilled, and unwise because their perspective on life is too objective, too logical, and too rigid. These characteristics apply to logic and math and scientific thought, but not to human life. You may miss this if you think that math and logic are more fundamental than life, or that things are only “real” if they can be encoded and reasoned with.
what is the thing that you are talking about that is being separated from reality?
Your perception. If you see a cat with your own eyes, that’s a direct experience. At first it’s raw sensory input, then your brain categorizes it as “a cat”, which is an idea. If you later remember that you saw a cat, then your memory is a pointer to the experience you had. We seem to use more and more pointers, and forget that they’re pointers. For instance, you may think that science is good in itself, but it’s only good because we can use it for things which we consider valuable, so it’s these things that we’re actually aiming at, and not science. (I do realize that this is no longer a disconnect with your perception, but the distance between concepts and ideas, thought of kind of like a graph of nodes and edges, in which distance can be defined)
Another example of a disconnect is when people say “lying is bad” instead of “the consequences of lying are bad” or when they say “X is bad because it’s illegal” instead of “X is illegal because it’s bad”. These may be obvious enough, but our culture definitely have a lot of shorthands which people don’t realize are shorthands, and a lot of derived ideas that people mistake for the root that they stem from. I believe that Simulacra Levels and their Interactionsmay be a consequence of this
I find it somewhat difficult to understand exactly what you mean here and in the rest of the comment. Could you maybe define the terms “science”, “spirituality” and “non-scientific things” as you are using them here?
Are you recommending here that people should not use science in their attempts to pursue joy, fulfillment and wisdom?
And when you say “The more degrees of separation to reality, …”, what is the thing that you are talking about that is being separated from reality?
I think that science is a way of thinking and a way of doing things, as well as a way of encoding something else. If I were to describe a beautiful painting just in writing alone, then I would have encoded the image in text, reducing something visual to something linguistic. But in that process, the image would be completely destroyed, so this “encoding” is impossible. Likewise, if I define science, the definition would be a pointer at best, and not science itself.
My understanding of spirituality is something like psychological well-being and tacit knowledge and wisdom. This is rather vague perhaps, but communicating wisdom is inherently difficult, and the text is only, at best, a pointer. If you replace your intuition of substance (like your personal experience of love) with your scientific understanding (that love is ‘merely’ chemical reactions), your brain might lose faith in its own experience, regard it as empty, or destroy the subjective value associated with it.
What I’m describing here is how the mind relate to its own sensory inputs, ideas and associations, which are all more fundamental to your brain than your conscious beliefs (for instance, even if you believe that a phobia of yours is irrational, your mind may still believe it).
I think science can be used to the extent that it can help, but that people often consider science to be universal, or attempt to “encode” everything as science so that they feel at home working with the problem (when the only tool you have is a hammer… ). If your aim is well-being, then well-being should have a higher priority than science. Too often, I see that people are unhappy, unfulfilled, and unwise because their perspective on life is too objective, too logical, and too rigid. These characteristics apply to logic and math and scientific thought, but not to human life. You may miss this if you think that math and logic are more fundamental than life, or that things are only “real” if they can be encoded and reasoned with.
Your perception. If you see a cat with your own eyes, that’s a direct experience. At first it’s raw sensory input, then your brain categorizes it as “a cat”, which is an idea. If you later remember that you saw a cat, then your memory is a pointer to the experience you had. We seem to use more and more pointers, and forget that they’re pointers. For instance, you may think that science is good in itself, but it’s only good because we can use it for things which we consider valuable, so it’s these things that we’re actually aiming at, and not science. (I do realize that this is no longer a disconnect with your perception, but the distance between concepts and ideas, thought of kind of like a graph of nodes and edges, in which distance can be defined)
Another example of a disconnect is when people say “lying is bad” instead of “the consequences of lying are bad” or when they say “X is bad because it’s illegal” instead of “X is illegal because it’s bad”. These may be obvious enough, but our culture definitely have a lot of shorthands which people don’t realize are shorthands, and a lot of derived ideas that people mistake for the root that they stem from. I believe that Simulacra Levels and their Interactions may be a consequence of this