Isn't the exclusivity of Scientific Verification accepted on faith?

[cladking]

Semiconductors do what they do because they are SEMIconductors...

Even a barbarian could substitute almost any word in place of semiconductor and be exactly right, eh?

 

[Sapiens]

Even a barbarian could substitute almost any word in place of semiconductor and be exactly right, eh?

Yes, a barbarian likely could ... not much need to speak Greek there.

 

[tayla]

So things like aesthetics, morality, opinions, etc are the 'spiritual realm'?

Or are you claiming something other than those things?

In my view, everything non-material resides in the spiritual realm. The list includes: souls, spirits, consciousness, life, ideas, concepts, beauty, goodness, morality, holiness, God, memories, will, hope, emotions, dreams, visions, hallucinations, etc. Everything that is not specifically matter interacting via the material natural laws.

In my view, there is nothing more that can be said about the structure and function of the spiritual realm other than listing aspects of reality which are not material.

 

[tayla]

So, you mean 'not observable at all', right? If something is observable at all, it is observable by science. That's sort of definitional.

Someone can see a flower and say so, but all that is visible in an MRI scan is that some part of the brain was active. Someone can say they see Hitler in person and are speaking with him, but all that is visible in an MRI scan is that some part of the brain was active. The same for memories. Science might be able to say I am remembering, but it can never reveal the content of my memories.

There are things which are observable, but not observable by science. Science is limited to the material realm but there are things that don't reside withing the material realm and which science cannot speak about.

 

[Polymath257]

In my view, everything non-material resides in the spiritual realm. The list includes: souls, spirits, consciousness, life, ideas, concepts, beauty, goodness, morality, holiness, God, memories, will, hope, emotions, dreams, visions, hallucinations, etc. Everything that is not specifically matter interacting via the material natural laws.

In my view, there is nothing more that can be said about the structure and function of the spiritual realm other than listing aspects of reality which are not material.

And how do you know, for example, that ideas aren't the result of matter interacting via natural laws? Specifically, the matter in our brains? THe same for emotions, thoughts, hopes, visions, hallucinations, consciousness, concepts, beauty, etc?

Do you consider light to be spiritual? How about radio waves? sound?

I think you greatly underestimate the power of matter interacting via natural laws. We can *point* to places in the brain where, for example, language is processed. We can point to where planning happens. We can, now, even 'read' certain thoughts by looking at EEGs.

 

[Polymath257]

Someone can see a flower and say so, but all that is visible in an MRI scan is that some part of the brain was active. Someone can say they see Hitler in person and are speaking with him, but all that is visible in an MRI scan is that some part of the brain was active. The same for memories. Science might be able to say I am remembering, but it can never reveal the content of my memories.

While that is true now, to a large extent, it isn't even completely true now. And, there is no reason to think it will remain true as we learn how to probe the brain better.

There are things which are observable, but not observable by science. Science is limited to the material realm but there are things that don't reside withing the material realm and which science cannot speak about.

And we can *already* read certain thoughts from brains via EEGs. We can *already* hook up brains to machines to give people use of artificial limbs. We can *already* show where language is processed, and fear, and other emotions.

I think you are being *way* too pessimistic concerning what information we can get from the brain. There is *every* evidence that ideas and emotions, and all of this are actually physical processes in the brain. So they are most definitely NOT out of the realm of the material.

 

[joelr]

Actually my contention is with those that enshrine science and reject other methods outright, without having given the matter any thought. There is no obvious reason to outright reject non-scientific methods of verification, or at least to insist we ought.

What other method? I think if you took something like "intuition" and did a plot graph to see how accurate it is it would likely follow a similar line with "random guessing". So I'm not sure there really is any other way to gain knowledge that ends up being correct.

 

[joelr]

We know machines will break. "Prediction" would require we know the cause and time. This is one of the things being engineered now days; making sure machines break as soon as the warranty runs out.

Our sun is of a type that will become a red dwarf in ~+5 billion years. But we can't be certain that it will occur on any specific day or that nothing will intervene. We can't even be certain that it doesn't belong to some sort of subtype that will behave differently.

I believe a great deal of ancient literature is in reality rewritten from more ancient language that couldn't be translated. Vocabulary was the same but the formatting that created meaning was lost (this formatting was ancient science). These re"translations" were confused renditions of things that had been real.

Most of our world is a product of various confusions.

Of course science itself isn't confused because reality affects experiment but our understanding of science is confused because the very words we use to discuss and understand it are.

As to predictions, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics shows us that past a certain point of accuracy there are things we can never know. It's divided between position and momentum. The more we know about an objects position the less we can know about it's momentum. On a large scale this isn't as obvious but the more fine tuned your prediction is the less you can know.
So even if you had a super computer with information about all the mass/energy inside the sun it could only predict future events up to a point that does not violate this law.

The words we use to describe science may have some uncertainty but the hard sciences use a much more precise language, mathematics. And it's as fine tuned as possible. Up until the limits of the uncertainty principle actually in some cases. Sometimes much less (like Newtonian gravitational equations, good for space ships but not good enough for understanding the error in Mercury's orbit).