The trouble with Science

Sorry to revisit old themes, but if I can't explore the thoughts that bother me, fluttering around my head in a disturbing manner, then what's the point of having a blog? (Don't answer that, please.)

Science seems to be the religion of this era. When in doubt, we consult 'experts' or 'scientists', which are synonymous terms, it seems. And science has all kinds of good qualities, at least in theory. Precision, robustness, thoroughness, some kind of objectivity.

But many things cannot be measured by science, in any meaningful way. How, for example, do you measure love? Or any other feeling, for that matter? Is it possible to simply 'know' something, in an intuitive way? It often feels as though it is. Ironically, many scientific advances have come about through intuitive leaps: "I just knew that I should leave the calcium out of the experiment, this time." Can intuition be said to have any meaning, from a scientific point of view?

In fact many of the things that define us as humans are quite meaningless from a 'scientific' point of view, where we interpret science as rational and materialist. Social sciences attempt to measure such things as one's personal sense of worth and other nebulous qualities, but in fact are stymied by the personal nature of one's experience.

More fundamentally, being itself is a term whose meaning begins to fall apart when we question it. Being is experiential, rather than measurable. Consciousness is what they call the 'Hard Problem' in cognitive fields; there is no easy way even to define it clearly, let alone explain where it comes from. Materialistic thinking tends to regard it as an 'emergent' property of the complexity of living beings, though this creates an uncomfortable dichotomy between living and consciousness. In other words, you have to assert that there are living beings which are not conscious, but that at some level of complexity, consciousness arises.

There is another problem with science that I have mentioned before - see 'String Theory' entry. Clearly, there is a boundary between the categories of 'explained by science' and 'not explained by science', which, as science progresses, is enlarging, from one point of view. As we learn more about the world, that boundary increases in area, and thus what is just on the other side of that boundary is enlarged too. In other words, as we learn more, we see more that we don't know. Many learners will have had this experience personally, and it applies to the human race as a whole, too.

One interesting question is whether knowledge is finite in any way. As far as I know, nobody has ever found 'the end' of a branch of knowledge; there is always more complexity, more details, more questions that arise. The implication of that is that knowledge is infinite; that however much humans find out about their universe, there will always be an infinite amount more to know.

I suppose it is the arrogance of a science which supposes it has all the answers that is my motivation here: I would like to suggest that in fact we could say it has very few of the answers. In fact comparing the sum of human knowledge with all that we don't know, we could legitimately say that we know almost nothing, at least in a conventional 'scientific' sense. So in consulting our 'experts', we should bear in mind that their expertise could be within a rather limited sphere.

This brings me back to the validity of intuition in a decision-making process. Knowing so little, can we assume that we don't know things intuitively? Of course, that is no reason to assume that intuition is always correct, either. That seems to be an impossible to illuminate clearly. When we think about 'intuition', we might think of dramatic stories, like deciding not to go out, and then a chimney pot falls down where you would have been. Coincidence? Intuition?

But intuition is a more intrinsic process than that, something which is bubbling along the whole time sub or semi-consciously. Or is part of something that is, the awareness that governs everything we do or think. I'll have to come back to this last musing, as I haven't thought it through yet.