Well, science is based on the rational interpretation of our five senses. Other ways of understanding the world include our five senses but also rely on other phenomena, such as our dreams and emotions, and then are subject to somewhat rational but mostly irrational personal and subjective interpretations. Note that irrational is not the same as incorrect, and I don't consider it a pejorative.
I guess as a primary example, art is non-scientific, but it is an equally valid way of communicating the understanding of our experience to others. We understand beauty. The meaning of symbols in our society seems unlikely to ever come under some scientific theory but forms a very large part of our experience. The search for meaning in life is not a scientific one.
It is probably true that science is the only objective, factually accurate, rational, logical, and methodical approach to understanding the world. This does not invalidate other approaches, since we are more than objective, factually accurate, rational, logical, and methodical beings. Your subjective experience is yours and yours alone and totally resistant to the scientific method.
Given the incredible variance in available descriptions of "the conscious experience", I would posit that "consciousness" itself exists only as a mental grouping and nothing distinct.
As an exercise: explain what exactly constitutes a "car", including the point where such an item officially "stops being a car" during the process of disassembly. Show your work.
Where does that demarcation line fall? Is there anything to consciousness besides the experiential phenomenon?
To illustrate: there is no such thing as the movie "It's a Wonderful Life", just a series of individual frames that our eyes and brains perceive as a whole unit only because of perceptual and cognitive limitations (basically, compression). We know far less of anything beyond the present moment - speaking of individual experience - than most believe. I posit that "consciousness" exists as nothing more than a cognitive compression artifact.
Do you regard the subjective experience of being concious as a something that can be adequately described by detailing neurological processes? As in, I know you might argue that a specific combination of atoms will correspond to a specific mental state. That doesn't really tell you anything about the subjective experience of being in that mental state though.
Mathematics is separate from science (at least in the modern sense, to the same degree that philosophy is separate from modern science). It's also a form of rational thought, and relies heavily on evidence -- just not empirical evidence. It relies upon reason and proof, but not experimentation or observation.
What does that mean? I intuit that your program has bugs, therefore it has bugs? I intuit that there is an alien race living on Mars that is able to disguise itself as red rocks?
I do not see how intuition gives you anything other than -- maybe, and only maybe -- a smaller set of hypotheses to test scientifically.
That's fine, but your intuition is incorrect. Additionally, as has been pointed out, this kind of comment is simply dismissive. If you have an argument to make about intuition, I would be interested to read it.
Any dismissal on my part was probably in response to your near-wholesale dismissal of intuition. I thought I was being clever by using my intuition directly as a case in point relevant to the conversation to demonstrate that it is useful for sensing and hence understanding other people's feelings. I wasn't very nice about it, I certainly wasn't clear, and I was also wrong about the feeling. I apologize.
In the midst of beating so mercilessly on that drum, you're missing the more interesting question being asked here: will science ever include emotions and intuition (and other neurologically explainable phenomena such as dreams) as a means to collect valid and objectively true experimental data? For the longest time we've had only our five primary senses, with an overwhelming focus on our sense of sight.
If you can give an example of how such data can be used, you could make a case for this, but putting "emotions" and "intuition" in the same sentence as "valid and objectively true...data" is, I think, all the answer you need. If you are studying emotions, then of course reports of emotional responses are useful data. If you are studying intuition (as has been done in great detail in studies of how chess players make decisions), then intuition is useful data.
It is not clear, at least to me, how an astronomer looking at Saturn and saying "Gee, how pretty" is going to lead him to a better measurement of Saturn's gravity. It is not a matter of what big brother Science wants. It is a matter of what is useful in answering the question being asked. Draw a line between beauty and gravity measurements and show a reliable connection and you have done all you need to do to convince people to apply this data.
The original question was, "What are some [legitimate] examples of non-science ways of understanding the world?" and the answers given were largely things that aren't very useful as validating mechanisms under the scientific method, e.g. dreams, intuition, emotion, irrational thought, consciousness, and [subjective] experience.
The point here is that just as non-science is useless for understanding the world in objective scientific terms, science is useless for understanding the world in non-scientific, subjective terms. This seems to follow from the definition. You cannot apply the scientific method to create art, but art is nevertheless created to communicate an understanding of the world.
To experience an emotion is to understand the nature of existence at a personal and subjective level. Science cannot give you this. You cannot know the 'truth' about what anger feels like by reading it in a book, you have to feel it for yourself. This kind of truth is non-scientific.
> science is useless for understanding the world in non-scientific, subjective terms
This is only true in so far as "subjective" things are poorly defined. Give me any subjective principle that is clearly defined and laid out and we can talk about scientifically.
> You cannot apply the scientific method to create art, but art is nevertheless created to communicate an understanding of the world.
This is false. People use scientific methods to create art every day. Record labels use machine learning and data analysis to understand what people find aesthetically pleasing in music and then go that route when they select bands to fund and songs to spend advertising money on (they have been doing this since the 1970's). Hollywood does intense studies of people and their tastes to guide script choices. They also use science directly to build art. Take Pixar for example. Blue screens.
Science is everywhere in the creation of art. Paint and pigment, we can go that basic, are the product of science. Understanding of light and art and perspective directly progressed art during the Renaissance, as did Leonardo's work on anatomy.
We seem to have incompatible worldviews. I understand and agree with your points about what science is and can do. But I do not share what appears to be an absolute devotion to science. I'm really quite confused, I cannot even fathom existing for a second in this world with what I understand to be your mindset.
Are you basically saying there is no point to any understanding of our lives that does not count as science? Or are you saying that it is impossible to have such an understanding? Is each and every artform a subdiscipline of science? Is making art fundamentally the same thing as performing scientific experiments?
Where do you believe that you got your opinions about the supreme utility of science? Were they derived using the scientific method?
I'm not asking these questions to attack you, I'm just curious. Maybe there's something I'm missing.
Hehe, I'm not trying to convince you. I suppose I shouldn't be posting, then.
Really, I'm not certain you would be convinced even if I did a better job, though. All I'm really looking for is less of a skeptical "explain it to me in terms of science" viewpoint, and more of a "huh, interesting" response. I've never seen someone even try to work with me when discussing these things. It's always shut down so they can claim their Internet points.
Do you really have nothing to offer about how intuition is useful or legitimate as a "way of knowing"? You want to just say the word "intuition" and have us respond, "huh, interesting"? Talk about intellectually engaging.
> Claims without evidence don't help to increase understanding.
Where is your evidence for this?
Humor aside, this is absolutely not the case. Traditional religion stems from human intuition, a natural sense of reality that was shaped my many, many years of evolution. A process of trial and error.
Trial and error, of course, is the natural equivalent of the scientific method. Continuous iteration and refinement.
If anything, our intuitive sense is more refined than our sense of reason and tells us much about the world around us that our capacity for reason simply does not.
Yes, they are. But I have spent a chunk on my life investigating the claims of major religions and when you start poking around you not only find out there is absolutely no evidence to back them up, but there is plenty of evidence that they man made.
So, religion and faith comes down to bending yourself, making yourself suspend your disbelief and accepting premises without seeking any evidence. It comes down to wishful thinking really.
> when you start poking around you not only find out there is absolutely no evidence to back them up, but there is plenty of evidence that they man made.
You have no capacity to determine if something is true without the process of trial and error. This is the founding principal of the scientific mindset and is the basis of the scientific method. Form a hypothesis, test the hypothesis, repeat.
How do you "test" a religion? Not with any feeble investigation by your primitive rational mind. You try the belief system.
If it makes you happier, if it makes you a better person, you've found a winning formula. If it gives you good results, you win. It is entirely irrelevant whether it passes some "truth" test concocted by your imagination.
It either has real, relevant results in your life or it doesn't. Religion is a way of life, a guide for living ... not merely a creation mythology.
If you bother asking, you will find the overwhelming majority of human beings on the planet get this, understand it, and will actually tell you just how it improves their lives.
Unfortunately, engineers seem to be brain-damaged in some specific way that prevents them from thinking in this manner. You need to work on that. It's not very scientific.
First of all I'm a mathematician, in my 40s and I can think for myself quite well, thanks. Second, it is perfectly possible to reach true statements and falsify well false ones without experiments, like we do in math all the time.
But more importantly for this discussion, religion is not some guide for moral living. If it were so, there would be no problem with religion. No, religion is all about absolutism, it is a totalitarian world view by definition. It is argument from certainty. Religion comes down to some people claiming not only they know with absolute certainty there is a god, but they also know his mind, what he wants us to do. It is about gods that care about human beings, that interfere in their lives, that tell you what you should do, what you should eat, on what days, who you may sleep with and in what position, gods who break the known laws of nature for their people, god who stops the motion of the sun around earth so certain people in the Bible can finish their work, god who takes "our" side in a war, a god that gives itself body so it can kill it to save the humanity.
And how do they know? Personal revelation of course, god told them something (often times contradictory to what he told others). Yet, no ordinary evidence is ever offered for these claims, let alone extraordinary evidence it would take to prove the claims.
Religion (and I'm referring to the three monotheistic ones, the three desert dogmas) are claiming that without this absolute divine supervision we would not know right from wrong.
So, if religion is just a way of life, and if you don't accept the required dogmas wholesale, in what way is it a guide for you? If you get to pick and choose out of all the required supernatural dogmas, does that not show that your morals in fact don't come from religion, but you already know what is good and what is right? Of course, morals and our civility to each other predate religion. We would not have gotten this far without it.
And seriously, believing something as absolute because it makes you feel good is a definition of delusion. Can you be any more dishonest with yourself? But some of us care about what is actually true.
And besides what religion you get indoctrinated into has nothing to do with the truthfulness of your particular religion, but more to do with where you were born, and the religion of your parents.
> No, religion is all about absolutism, it is a totalitarian world view by definition. It is argument from certainty.
This strikes me as scientific fundamentalism. Many religions seem to incorporate a great deal of questioning and reflection, like Wicca and Buddhism.
> And seriously, believing something as absolute because it makes you feel good is a definition of delusion.
Few people could conceive and systematize people as tending to become trapped in a cycle of appetites and fears, and deduce ways of thinking to help escape from the cycle. The Buddha could. You need not accept every letter of dogma to improve yourself with Buddhism, any more than you need to accept alchemy to learn from the teachings of Newton.
