Is Science Compatible with Mysticism?

[Open_Minded]

Finally, within physics not only do we have vast disagreements about what quantum theory is or involves (and by extension any unified theory), we have theories like the various multiverse theories. Many or most of these probably can’t ever be verified empirically, and were constructed mathematically. All of quantum physics involves a sort of quasi-empiricism as any description of a quantum system irreducibly statistical. Every model of every quantum system is a mathematical description of a system which is never observed/measured.

And yet - much to the dismay of many - quantum mechanics works.

 

[Mr Spinkles]

Legion I think you fleshed out all the caveats and qualifications to Sunstone's single sentence. But to within the degree of accuracy usually expected of any single sentence, Sunstone's point is valid.

 

[Windwalker]

Legion I think you fleshed out all the caveats and qualifications to Sunstone's single sentence. But to within the degree of accuracy usually expected of any single sentence, Sunstone's point is valid.

To what end? That we can dismiss ideas that we don't like because they are not empirically verifiable? That's what he said. We can "safely ignore them", further making references to Leprechauns and whatnot.

 

[Open_Minded]

That said, if we ignore things that can’t be verified empirically we lose most or all of the sciences.

There is another dimension to this - a dimension I mentioned earlier in the thread.

"Knowing silence" is a natural part of being human and can manifest itself in a myriad of ways. Honestly before technology brought us continuous "surround sound" knowing silence was a daily part of life for most humans.

But ... yes... intellect can be approached in the same way. For instance, in one area of science, mathematics.... needs silence. Mathematics is a language all its own. Many see it as the "language of the Universe". It requires attention to the "spaces in between" as it were as well as to the actual equations on paper.

There is empiricism - but even within concrete realities there is also the necessity to acknowledge and honor that which cannot be verified empirically.

 

[Mr Spinkles]

To what end? That we can dismiss ideas that we don't like because they are not empirically verifiable?

Sunstone said we can safely ignore claims which are not empirically verifiable when discussing the mind. Maybe "safely ignore" is a bit of an exaggeration, but at any rate if you propose a hypothesis that can't be verified, not even in principle, then I can propose a counter-hypothesis that your hypothesis is wrong. We can argue the merits of these different hypotheses, but that would be like rowing against each other--water gets splashed around, and little progress is made. Look at the endless pages wasted in debates between the early Christians and pagans, for example, on the nature of heaven. We can convince ourselves of anything and without empirical verification we simply cannot know if we are right.

 

[Aamer]

This makes little sense to me. It would be far better that God plant himself right inside of his creation, right inside you and I. That way, there is no need of any 'proof'. No intelligent God would create such a book, knowing that it would be the cause of discord and suffering amongst men due to belief or unbelief. The mystical experience of divine union avoids all that. It's teachers have means of directing others along the path so they can see for themselves, via their own direct experience what the true nature of Reality is. The divine nature never coerces, never threatens, never needs to prove itself to anyone. Those approaches are clearly understood as coming from man, not God, by those who have awakened.

You miss the whole point. According to my belief, which comes from Quran alone, the sole purpose of our existence is to worship God. Everything else is secondary. Way down the list. If God wanted to show himself to us, there would be no need for faith or free will. We would all believe. The entire test is believing without seeing. But all the clues and evidence is there to know God exists for those who care enough to seek the truth. There are many proofs in Quran. But you don't need a Quran to believe in your creator and worship him. Look around you. Think about how the universe works in perfect balance and harmony and it's clear that there is a master designer behind it. The Quran is great for me and many others because it's the direct word of God so that we can know him better. I believe in this book because of the scientific and mathematical proofs it contains. But you don't need it to believe. Your existence and the world around you is enough to believe without seeing. Science only confirms this. How did it all start? According to Einsteins law of motion, a stagnant object will remain stagnant unless an outside force acts upon it. So you can't create something from nothing magically. Something has to initiate the process. So if we can agree that there is a creator behind this. The next question is... Why has he kept himself hidden from us? To test our faith. What other reason could there be?

 

[Windwalker]

You miss the whole point. According to my belief, which comes from Quran alone........

Then what if I may ask, does this have to do with the relationship between mysticism and science? You reject both. Do you consider yourself either a mystic or a scientist? If not, how does this pertain to our discussion?

 

[Sunstone]

Sunstone said we can safely ignore claims which are not empirically verifiable when discussing the mind. Maybe "safely ignore" is a bit of an exaggeration, but at any rate if you propose a hypothesis that can't be verified, not even in principle, then I can propose a counter-hypothesis that your hypothesis is wrong. We can argue the merits of these different hypotheses, but that would be like rowing against each other--water gets splashed around, and little progress is made. Look at the endless pages wasted in debates between the early Christians and pagans, for example, on the nature of heaven. We can convince ourselves of anything and without empirical verification we simply cannot know if we are right.

Exactly.

 

[Aamer]

Then what if I may ask, does this have to do with the relationship between mysticism and science? You reject both. Do you consider yourself either a mystic or a scientist? If not, how does this pertain to our discussion?

I believe in dualistic mysticism. But I'm thinking for most people, at least for myself, there has to be a strong degree of faith to reach that level of connection with our creator. Science and clues that our creator gave us increase faith which can lead to a stronger spiritual connection. So I believe in both mysticism and science with Quran being the backbone of my faith. It's all connected.... If that makes sense. Peace.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

Mystics do not need to seek 'confirmation of their ideas'. Their experience itself is confirmation of the nature of Reality. Ideas do not enter into it, because then you would be talking about doctrine, which requires belief, neither of which is part of the mystical experience. Not being part of the experience, confirmation of the validity of doctrine is not called for. Doctrine, at some point, requires either defense or offense. The mystic requires neither to just see things as they are. Having said that, it is quite true that, when new scientific discoveries emerge which coincide with mystical experience, the mystic points this out, simply because there is no means of rational proof of his experience that can be demonstrated to the ordinary man. The only means by which such experience can be validated is for the ordinary man to experience it for himself. In that experience, there is nothing to prove, nothing to believe in, nothing to 'figure out', nothing to defend or die for. There is only this immediate, living Reality within which you find yourself at the present moment, and that is everything.

I suppose if one is a lazy mystic and is entirely unaware that our senses can deceive us.

I don't see the two as being that compatible. Science demands empirical data and considers personal accounts to only be better than nothing, whereas mysticism dwells more on the experience and the individual and collective, which is something that science often times cannot explore, at least for now.

 

[atanu]

Science can be seen as telling us about the universe, to use your term. I believe that position implies methodological naturalism. To assume that science -- or anything, including mystical experiences -- tells us exactly what the universe actually is, is to dabble in madness. Also known as metaphysics, about which very little, if anything, can be known for certain.

But brother do you see that you are actually condemning science, since its only goal is to know the universe etc..Whereas primary goal of a mystic is not that.

 

[atanu]

You're missing the point. Things that are empirically verifiable must be dealt with. Things that are not empirically verifiable can be safely ignored. That's just the way it is.

Godel's Incompleteness theorem says it cannot be determined within the system whether P is true. From that POV, any mental endeavour to know the objective truth within the mind-sense system is doomed.

As long as an endeavour generates lasting peace and joy it is worthwhile. And in this, IMO, wisdom is important rather than empiricism.

 

[atanu]

I feel that uncle is playing devil's advocate.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Legion I think you fleshed out all the caveats and qualifications to Sunstone's single sentence. But to within the degree of accuracy usually expected of any single sentence, Sunstone's point is valid.

I started that post with a qualification for that very reason. I actually started with a much longer section with caveats and qualifiers to my own post, but when I hit "submit reply" I got an error message saying that network activity was too high and I should try later. Which means my whole post was deleted. So when I re-wrote it I was much shorter, as I had already put in so much time and got nothing in return. Most of that is likely a good thing, as I write too much and it meant a much less detailed reply to address a single sentence.

However, it also meant that I didn't include all qualifications I wanted. In particular, I didn't include the main reason for responding (it took some time to decide to do so): a perhaps clinical level of compulsion when it comes to accuracy, nuances, and details.

If I weren't a believer in the scientific method, I'd be doing something else, both occupationally and with my free time. Most studying I do I call a hobby, as it isn't necessary for what I do.

One unfortunate side effect is that I have too many details for too many topics for someone who has a compulsion when it comes details and accuracy.

This is also related to my general agnosticism (the result of a blend of skepticism with uncertainty), as part of the compulsion to study comes from a desire for greater certainty.

So on the one hand, I have the fact that I do think that empirical inquiry, logic, rationality, etc., is the way to approach everything, whether historical, scientific, or religious.

On the other hand, I have my skepticism/uncertainty. Which means I question my own degree of certainty about another's system of knowing, or what they believe, or how it is they determine things like truth or accuracy.

The more I have learned and experienced, the more doubt I tend to have about many things.The lab I worked had a director and therefore members (the grad students and doctorates) who strongly oppose a theory of cognition I think is probably correct. An entire seminar consisted of the director having everyone, including the PhDs, read various studies conducted to support the theory I think more accurate (embodied cognition), and then have us try to tear them apart. Many of the criticisms I didn't think were very logical. At one point, when we were reading some of the better, more recent research supporting emodied cognition, the director himself admitted that it was fairly difficult to come up with an explanation that fits the classical cog. sci. view, but that even were this the case, it would be because our methodology (mostly the various experimental designs used in neuroimaging) was flawed. However, the methods he was refering to are used by everybody, in that whether one belies cognition is embodied or not, neuroimaging and behavioral research methods don't change.

Basically, when the evidence doesn't fit the theory, then we need new methods. So I asked him at one point one decides that it is the methods which are flawed, rather than the theory. He replied it's whether you have a lot of good reasons to expect the experiments to show something but they don't.

The problem, however, is one pointed out by guys like Quine. We have excellent reasons to think that the brain is responsible for cognition. We have excellent reasons to think that it is the result of electrical signals generated in neurons. We have some evidence to support that a single neuron can generate a "meaningful" part of some neural activity. We have good reasons to think that most of what the brain does relies not on a neuron firing as part of a network (like a computer bit), but that information or "neural code" is correlations between spike trains of neurons, and that most neural firing is noise. The more complex the issues becoome, from temporal vs. rate enoding, to how coordinated networks work, to how these networks relate to input systems, etc., all the way to how people think, the more room for error there is. Which means that the "good reasons" one has for a theory of cognition are only "good" insofar as one has decided a series of ever more complex findings should be interpreted in a particular way.

I am bombarded by news reports of studies, and although I've yet to see one which doesn't distort the research, I've seen plenty for which the actual research was flawed. And it is times like these that I think about the various philosophers of science who were/are, I think, usually wrong and the more radical they were/are the more wrong. Yet there are very important elements to some of their work, and I chose the example I did not just because it is my field or (in the case of the lab director's comment) my experience, but because it highlights the few (I believe) criticisms by guys like Kuhn, Quine, etc., which have an element of truth and are currently seriour problems.

One is that because cognitive science is no longer so much an interdisciplinary field, but is an umbrella category which covers many interdisciplinary fields, there is a lot of different work done and people with many different backgrounds doing it. In particular, there are a lot of psychologists and social psychologists now doing neuroimaging studies, especially fMRI. Even if we leave the proton spins of hydrogen atoms and how this relates to brain hemodynamics, why cerebral blood flow is a good proxy for neural activity, and how nuclear magnetic resonance can create image, we're still left with some very sophisticated mathematics that very few researchers using fMRI scanning understand. The first is how the raw data is processed to get brain images. Most researchers have a set of possible programs they can run and (hopefully) a good idea about when to run which. Some parts of this are not much of an issue, as they don't vary much between subjects or experimental designs. Others are more important.

A much bigger problem, and one that is essential across the board, is how one can test the data from the processed images. That is, given that I now have images showing brain activity, how do I determine whether or not it shows anything? This involves a selection of one or more statistical methods and/or mathematical models. And thanks to your average requirement of two math course (an intro stats course during undergrad years, and multivariate stats during graduate), along with coming across the names of methods used in the literature, researchers know which names of various mathematical/statistical techniques are related to the work they are doing. They do not know much about the actual math, but they are able to plug data in, select "PCA" or "SEM", select which features to include, and out comes the results. They now have (usually) one or more alpha levels, and if a certain value is achieved, that is interpreted as statistically significant. Why? Because the probability that they would have gotten these results by accident are very small.

Of course, that's only true if they actually understood the underlying logic behind using the mathematics they did, which would require understanding the mathematics. And they don't. But thankfully, even if there happens to be someone who reviews the study and knows a lot about mathematics, many of these studies use models/methods which make it impossible for the reviewer to know whether or not they were used correctly. Because it's easy to say "structural equation modeling" or "dynamic causal model", but without having the raw data and knowing exactly what the researchers did (e.g., did they actually say how they defined prior covariance? or did they just say "...and obtained a positive Lyapunov exponent") the reviewer is unable to determine the validity.

Then there is the issue of design itself. In the volume Foundational Issue in Human Brain Mapping, there is an entire section entitled "The Underdetermination of Theory by Data", a phrase taken from the philosophy of science and a serious problem in the neurosciences. Because even with excellent design and all the right math and perfect subjects and so forth, so much depends upon what theoretical frameworks were intrinsic from the start.


So independent of my own personal problems with compulsions, inability to write a brief post, incapacity to stop myself from writing 1,000 lines based on one another wrote, the reason I thought it important to respond to that 1 line (and to your response to me) is because I believe that the certain limits and/or failures in the empirical approach are partly responsible for some of its negative evaluation.

Even if this is not the case, I believe it is extremely important for those who do research and/or those who (like me, you, and sunstone) think that empirical methods are the best methods for understanding the nature of reality and should be used when possible to know keep in mind how this can fail and why.

And the examples I gave in my response to what can be safely ignored are the best examples I know of to underscore the importance of keeping these things in mind.

 

[atanu]

per se[/i], but rather whether or not conflating terms and concepts used in one area of discourse have (or have the potential to) distort both the ideas of those who have perhaps misunderstood how they were used and those who might come across them in this thread (or elsewhere).

You are always welcome Legion. I acknowledge your point as correct. My intention was only to cut short the whole meandering discussion.

I am fortunate enough to have a bit of a diverse background, in that while my primary focus and my career has to do with science (and the brain), other degrees and fields I've studied concern ancient texts, religion, history, and so forth. A great many mathematicians can tell you what this or that individual from ancient Greece or India or China or the Middle East said about some math topic. For the Greeks, it's almost always geometry. Very few have actually read the texts they refer to. I have. And while I can barely read sanskrit and I cannot read Japanese, Chinese, or most eastern languages, I can read Latin, Greek, Hebrew (Hebrew not as well as I'd like) and have read texts in other ancient languages. So I do have some idea what people were talking about a few thousand of years ago. And infinitity in general was a serious problem cross-culturally.

On the other hand, high school calculus gets into infinity, and undergraduate mathematics gets into different kinds of infinite spaces. Most of the discussion about infinities and infinite space has been within the past few centuries and in the West. Perhaps the notion of infinite space means something else entirely elsewhere, but infinite space is essential to multiple branches of science. Basic quantum mechanics would be impossible without it, as would probability.

Again, I respect your knowledge of diverse fields and more importantly your wisdom. For the concept of 'infinite', Vedas use a word called 'purna' ('full'). On this I wish to introduce you to a very significant verse from the Upanishads.

Om. That is full; this is full. This fullness has been projected from that fullness. When this fullness merges in that fullness, all that remains is fullness. Om. Peace! Peace! Peace!

Science aims to know this fullness through study of the forms in this fullness. It is good. But, IMO, what we study are only the images or the manifested objects, source of which are elsewhere. For example (a bad example though), we may study a building and try to understand its owner or we may directly ask the owner.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

And yet - much to the dismay of many - quantum mechanics works.

In many ways, it doesn't. Theoretically, everything should be governed by quantum mechanics, because everything is made up of elementary particles and obeys the same fundamental forces. Quantum mechanics describes a world which violates everything empiricism told us was true (e.g., that an object cannot be in two places or states at once). And on small scales, as paradoxical as QM might appear, it has (as you say) worked. The MRI scanning I talked about in my previous post is a result of it working. Yet after decades of having physicists working with quantum systems and physicists working with much larger systems (all the way to astrophysics and cosmology), we still don't know why basically all of reality is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, yet quantum mechanics states and processes which we never perceive or experience. We're learning more and more, but one of the things we're learning is that the seeming paradoxes of quantum mechanics can occur not just at the subatomic level, but with molecules. And what we are getting is a number of specialists arguing about different models and an inability in many cases to determine what is correct:

"For many purposes, the measurement problem in QM can be ignored by experimentalists and theoreticians alike. Not surprisingly, it was ignored by a large segment of the physics community, and the opinion was once widespread that this problem is merely a Scheinproblem. I vividly recall the occasion of a lecture on the measurement problem given in the early 1970s at The Rockefeller University by a Nobel laureate in physics. The reaction of the audience, composed largely of theoretical physicists and mathematicians, was distinctly cool if not unfriendly. The skepticism was directed not so much at the proposed solution as to the notion that there was a problem to be solved. After the lecture, the laureate remarked ruefully: "I suppose that I will have to do something new to restore my reputation." Today his lecture would likely get a different reception, at least judging from the fact that The Physical Review, the most prestigious journal in theoretical physics, now routinely publishes articles on this topic. The implied change in attitude reflects a recognition that the measurement problem poses a fundamental challenge for QM, although how to state the challenge is controversial. On the one hand, the problem can be seen as revealing that there is something rotten at the core of the theory because of its inability to give a satisfactory description of what occurs in the interaction between an object system and a measurement apparatus."

That was all the way back in '95, from Earman's Bangs, Crunches, Whimpers, and Shrieks: Singularities and Acausalities in Relativistic Spacetimes (Oxford University Press)

And like many sciences, "works" can mean many things. After all, classical mechanics "works", and is used. But it is not accurate. Artificial intelligence (or computational intelligence) research "works", in that we have developed increasingly sophisticated tools for classification, cluster analysis, statistical learning, etc., which have vastly increased our ability to do lots of things (e.g., parsing lingusitic input or facial recognition). However, as far as actually creating programs or machines capable of understanding anything (the goal here), we haven't come much closer than we were decades ago, and it is perhaps time to think that we're going about it wrong.

The same seems to be the case in physics. Just like work in A.I., the cognitive sciences, etc., we're still making progress and amazing accomplishments. On the other hand, there are certain issues that have more or less been trivialized and which are now becoming a larger problem. When one is describing systems using mathematical models which have no clear relation (i.e., no one-to-one connection between the symbols used to represent the system and the system itself), eventually one runs into the problem that mathematical models can be altered according to mathematical rules in ways that become paradoxical if one is unable to show how the models cannot describe the systems.

 

[godnotgod]

Science can be seen as telling us about the universe, to use your term. I believe that position implies methodological naturalism. To assume that science -- or anything, including mystical experiences -- tells us exactly what the universe actually is, is to dabble in madness. Also known as metaphysics, about which very little, if anything, can be known for certain.

You are still looking at the issue through the filter of rational mind. Metaphysics is philosophyical in nature; mysticism is not, so mysticism is not metaphysics. The mystic is not looking at some object through the mind, applying thought, and then calling it 'reality'. As I stated, the mystical experience is that of divine union; that is to say, where the distinction between 'self' and 'other' becomes obliterated. Mysticism is not an experience about reality, looking at it from the outside-in; it is the experience of Reality itself.

Methodological naturalism makes a point of excluding God, and in so doing, does what religion does: to separate what they call the 'supernatural' as compared to the 'natural', when, in reality, these are only concepts. What we know for certain is that, as far as we can see, there is only one world, not two, or more, and this is it. Any conjecture about some 'other realm', is a 'substantial, delusive idea', as Suzuki Roshi tells us. There is no 'supernatural' realm as compared to a 'natural' one: there is only this Reality we currently find ourselves in.

You seem to be saying that science is incapable of uncovering the true nature of the universe, so it's claims that it will someday achieve an 'understanding' of the universe is false. All it can hope to do is to tell us 'about' the universe, in the same sense that a technician who disassembles a piano can tell us all about how the piano works, but cannot tell us what the Mozart Piano Sonatas are. If you want to know what music is, you need to experience it first-hand; you need to stop analyzing and just listen. Likewise, if you want to know what the universe is, you need to apprehend and experience it directly. In fact, you are experiencing it right at this very moment, all the time, but most of us are not attentive to our experience. Our minds are elsewhere, either indulging in the past, or looking 'forward' to some imaginary future, both of which rob us of the experience, or our analytical mind is busy dissecting it. We are conditioned to see the present moment as a fleeting, elusive nano-second that has no substance, like the middle of an hourglass.

When analysis ceases, so does any thought of an 'analyzer', and along with that, the notion of 'self' and 'other'. As the Hindus say, 'like dye dissolved in water'.

 

[godnotgod]

You miss the whole point. According to my belief, which comes from Quran alone, the sole purpose of our existence is to worship God. Everything else is secondary. Way down the list. If God wanted to show himself to us, there would be no need for faith or free will. We would all believe. The entire test is believing without seeing. But all the clues and evidence is there to know God exists for those who care enough to seek the truth. There are many proofs in Quran. But you don't need a Quran to believe in your creator and worship him. Look around you. Think about how the universe works in perfect balance and harmony and it's clear that there is a master designer behind it. The Quran is great for me and many others because it's the direct word of God so that we can know him better. I believe in this book because of the scientific and mathematical proofs it contains. But you don't need it to believe. Your existence and the world around you is enough to believe without seeing. Science only confirms this. How did it all start? According to Einsteins law of motion, a stagnant object will remain stagnant unless an outside force acts upon it. So you can't create something from nothing magically. Something has to initiate the process. So if we can agree that there is a creator behind this. The next question is... Why has he kept himself hidden from us? To test our faith. What other reason could there be?

But there is not necessarily a creator behind this, but a creative intelligence within it, 'this' not necessarily being real. You jump to conclusions that God is hidden in order to test our 'faith', but even that makes little sense. God, in fact, may be playing a cosmic game of 'Hide and Seek' for the sheer joy of it.

I have seen some of the 'proofs' of the Quran, and am not convinced.

The sole purpose of my existence is to experience this eternal Present Moment to the fullest extent possible, and that translates to my discovery of the divine nature within, which is Absolute Joy. Worship and suffering are optional.

This is not a question of belief, but of seeing Reality as it actually is. If you cannot see Reality as it actually is, then you will see it as it is not, and that is why you need to formulate a belief.

 

[Aamer]

But there is not necessarily a creator behind this, but a creative intelligence within it, 'this' not necessarily being real. You jump to conclusions that God is hidden in order to test our 'faith', but even that makes little sense. God, in fact, may be playing a cosmic game of 'Hide and Seek' for the sheer joy of it.

I have seen some of the 'proofs' of the Quran, and am not convinced.

The sole purpose of my existence is to experience this eternal Present Moment to the fullest extent possible, and that translates to my discovery of the divine nature within, which is Absolute Joy. Worship and suffering are optional.

This is not a question of belief, but of seeing Reality as it actually is. If you cannot see Reality as it actually is, then you will see it as it is not, and that is why you need to formulate a belief.

Our scope is limited in "seeing reality as it actually is". If we were having a discussion 1000 years ago and I told you that there are these microscopic things called germs and they can make you sick, you probably would have laughed at me. Because it wasn't something tangible that you could touch and see. But that doesn't mean there was forces beyond our comprehension. That doesn't mean germs didn't exist. As for me jumping to conclusions, perhaps I am. But I'm not jumping to conclusions blindly. My conclusions are based on weighed evidence. Peace.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

My intention was only to cut short the whole meandering discussion.

But that's all I can do!

Again, I respect your knowledge of diverse fields and more importantly your wisdom.

Thank you (although we might disagree on whether my knowledge is worthwhile or that I have any wisdom). To misquote Shakespeare here, "I thank you. I am not of many words, but I thank you."

For the concept of 'infinite', Vedas use a word called 'purna' ('full'). On this I wish to introduce you to a very significant verse from the Upanishads.

My grandfather, whom alas suffered from several strokes such that even though he died after I had begun to become interested in languages, he was not well enough for me to learn from, had quite a library. As I have a fondess for books and langauge like he did, I inherited many, including S. Radhakrishnan's The principal Upaniṣads: Edited with Introduction, Text, Translation and Notes. I confess that although I've read much of it, I have done so at various times and have always found it to be rather above my head. Also, I skipped the invocations, so I have never come across what you quoted from. I also inherited his A Vedic Grammar which made far more sense to me (I also have the New Testament in Sanskrit as well as his dictionary of Sanskrit, and tried at one point to use these to become more proficient, but for reasons I can't recall I didn't stick with it very long at all). However, my knowledge of Sanskrit is too limited for me to grasp the nuances of any Sanskrit text, but especially a religious one.

The translation I have also uses the word "full" to translate पूर्ण/pūrṇa in the line
पूर्णमदः पूर्णमिदं पूर्णात् पूर्णमुदच्यते

However, I'm don't know how that translates into the concept of infinity. Again, my knowledge of Sanskrit is next to nothing, but one of the first things I learned were the numerals. There was, then, a concept of numbers beyond that in some language (where we find numerosity, rather than numerals; i.e., there may be a few numbers, but most of the words relating to counting are akin to the English words "a few", "several", "many", etc.). And there's the fact that for me, I think of infinity in terms of abstract spaces, functions, set theory, and so on. It seems clear that पूर्ण is different notion than that.

Science aims to know this fullness through study of the forms in this fullness.

I'm not sure I follow. As you pointed out when you brought up infinity, the sciences "rarely see the infinite space" (which, if I understand you, refers to the "fullness" in Isopanishad 1. Do you mean that science is reductive? That it seeks to understand the whole in terms of its parts? This I would agree with.

For example (a bad example though), we may study a building and try to understand its owner or we may directly ask the owner.

"But I, being poor, have only my dreams" (Yeats)

I have no access to the owner, nor do I know that there is one.