Science as such has no intrinsic value like life, like love, like blissfulness. These are ends in themselves. Science is only a means. This is the most essential thing to be understood
Well this is simply scratching the surface of an ageold philosophic problem: Are Knowledge and Wisdom valuable themselves or are they only ways for happiness. Some people are certain all human actions aim for happiness but I personally have sometimes difficulties explaining why I read certain books and pump myself with knowledge I will never use. Sure partly because it makes me happy but why does it do that if it has no value alone.
Science is concerned with providing you the means to make life richer, profounder, more comfortable, more healthy. But science can do just the opposite too; it can be destructive, it can move in directions which are anti-life. Hence, science cannot be left only in the hands of the scientists. Something higher, something which is an end in itself must be the decisive factor in determining in what direction science should move, in what direction it should not move.
Well another part of science is the ethical side. One of the greatest Finnish philosophers Georg Henrik von Wright presented the technological imperative. Everything that can be done (technologically) will be done. For example most physicists whose research made nuclear weapons possible tried to prevent the creation of such things and still failed.
But science is not blind. It is guided by something. Have you ever heard of Western Philosophy? Now let me tell you there is nothing new about philosophy of science.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science
Have you ever seen a chair doing scientific research? or a table? The scientist has something which things do not have: consciousness, life, being. But the problem for the scientist is that his methodology limits him. He has a limitation, he can only work on something which he can dissect, which he can set to work upon, which he can put in a test-tube.
Not really. A lot of people consider mathematics scientifical even though it does not concern objects directly. You don't need a mathematics laboratory or dissecting.
Also while chairs don't often do scientific research, researchers don't often get sat on. Comparing non-living and living objects in this matter is not useful.
Now, you cannot put your own consciousness in front of yourself. You cannot divide your being the way you have divided matter - into molecules, then into atoms, then into electrons. And they go on dividing.
Scientific method is a bit more advanced. This is the main limiting factor of study of mind but not an obstacle. Also why should we be so introspective? Theory of Mind is something that children learn naturally around the age of four or five.
Being is indivisible. There is no sword which can cut it in two.
So he is only repeating what Descartes had already thought of 300 years before him. He tried separating mind and matter as different substances just because he thought they had different qualities. While it is somewhat true mind is still not separable from matter.
There is no method by which we can experiment upon consciousness; hence, science completely denies the existence of consciousness
Non Sequitur. There is no logic behind that. Plus this guy propably hadn't heard of such tiny little things that a lot of people have put their lifework in like for example: Cognitive science, Psychology, Neuroscience, Philosophy of Mind (centuries of both a priori and a posteriori research) also linguistics, anthropology and study of artificial intelligence crosses the study of counsciousness.
And this is all is based on our current philosophical analysis of materialistic philosophy of mind (mostly Emergent, and reductionist)
And things are utilitarian, their whole purpose is to be used ... by whom?
Now why is that?
Another assumption based on pretty much nothingness.
Again seeing purposes where they aren't... how human.
Are things using things? clothes wearing clothes? food eating food? houses living in houses?
Do beings be (are beings?)
Does existance exist? do rocks play rock music?
Pointless play of words. Semantics has its part in linguistics too. With pure syntax you can create meaningless frases but it doesn't prove them.
So the actual content: food, clothes and houses usually don't do a lot of things.
This is quite close to how Aristotle imagined things thousands of years ago. He thought all being have a telos, something they are for. Pen is for writing and pigs are for eating. He did ask what is the thing humans are for. He separated us from all other beings by our ability to reason (which modern study suggests is not as unique as we think). Now do we think about humans? yes we do!
The scientist is in a real dilemma. If he accepts consciousness, being, life, then he is accepting something higher than his reach, something which is beyond his methodology. And of course a scientist, as a scientist, cannot accept anything which is not proved in his lab - not only by himself but by thousands of other scientists around the world.
I can see why people didn't like him. He is jumping to false conclusions once again.
Why couldn't a scientist accept something that is not empirical? He already assumes a lot of things about his own work that didn't come from his lab. For example the thought that he can create good test results in his lab that tell things about the reality. If he accepts induction as a good way of reseach and comes up with it through induction he is once again begging the question.
Empirism has to be proved by rationalism before it can be put to use. You can't perceive the reliability of perception.
And like I already mentioned consciousness and mind are scientific terms just like molecule or energy.
When the same conclusion is reached through millions of experiments, always the same, without any exception, then it becomes a scientific truth
Once again philosophy of science is ignored.
Scientific method is not simple induction. Plus science is more than physics. If social studies didn't have their own scientific method we would live in a positivist culture. I am glad that Positivism died a long time ago. If it hadn't I couldn't study most of the things I do.
It was not so in the beginning. Just a hundred years ago scientists were very adamant, stubborn, absolute about their findings, because whatsoever they were finding was without exception. But within these hundred years all that absoluteness has disappeared. Every day, new facts are being discovered which go on dismantling the old theories.
Another scratch of a surface of an old philosophical problem. The advancement of science. Thomas Kuhn has however dealt with this problem quite well. Have you ever heard paradigms?
Now a new standpoint has arisen; that is, that science can only be temporarily, hypothetically accepted. Nobody can say of anything that the same will happen tomorrow. We can only say that, up to now, whatever we know, this is the conclusion out of it. Anything new being added to it is going to change the whole conclusion.
Great... Here comes David Hume's "just because sun has risen every morning so far it doesn't mean it will rise tomorrow"
Nothing new. For example proving gravitation true is pretty difficult too. How do you prove objects will keep falling to the ground (toward a greater mass) every single day in the future too.
The dilemma is that science cannot accept being, life
As far as I know majority of the branches of science are based on it. Biology, psychology all of social studies...
You can cut a man in thousands of parts, you will not find life anywhere. In fact, you cannot put him back together again. Even if you glue him together again, life will not come back.
He wouldn't have been much of a scientist. The definition of life might seem a bit tricky. Still the meaning of life isn't as big as it thought of. We exist because of our genes and we live only for them. The only goal life has put to us is to help our genes (and nowadays more and more often our memes too) to survive.
Life itself, Deoxyribonucleic acid. It is there. Well actually DNA itself is pretty much dead but is the key to evolution and continued existence of life.
What is life? How can science accept it?
Life can be defined in multiple ways.
Actually I could have replaced the last few chapters with a definition from wikipedia (not that I place trust on such authority. If the definition would have sucked I would have replaced it with my own.)
wikipedia wrote:Life (cf. biota) is a characteristic that distinguishes objects that have signaling and self-sustaining processes from those that do not,[1][2] either because such functions have ceased (death), or else because they lack such functions and are classified as inanimate.[3][4] Biology is the science concerned with the study of life
It is beyond the scientist's grasp. So if he accepts it he accepts a limitation of science - and he accepts something higher than science. Then science cannot be the decisive factor in human life. This is against the ego of the scientist.
I just don't understand how existence of something greater than science would make science lesser than it is. Err how about the reality it studies? Even though knowledge might be valuable science still exists for us and because of us (Instead of us existing for it)
I accept that. But life is not a by-product, because when you put the parts together it does not appear again. You cut off the head, and then you fix it back - you can call Leeladhar, you can do perfect plastic surgery - but still life will not appear. Hence the scientist cannot even say that life is a by-product, that consciousness is a by-product. He will still have to prove both.
Again old scientific information. It is quite possible to create life from materia. I am quite exited about synthetic meat actually. And how about organs that you can grow back on yourself? I think that is quite cool.
Karl Marx said that life and consciousness are both by-products. But he is not being logical, he is being simply a fanatic materialist. It is so clear.
Yeah great don't insult the argument insult the person. Ad Hominem is one of the most despised argumentation forms among philosophers. This is it in it's purest form. Basically it goes like this:
Person A gives an argument
Person B notes about some quality in person A and then igores the argument completely because of the quality in the person.
I might demonstrate that on you. You are an idiot so you are wrong no matter what you just said. Of and feel free to take this demonstration out of context. It's the next worse thing you can do.
The second problem in the dilemma is that the scientist has to deny himself. The moment he denies being and says the world consists only of matter - that is, only of things - then who is he? He is a thing.
Yes. I am materia. I am a body made of matter. I am physical and chemical processess in my brains.
Now whats wrong with that?
Argumentation please!
This is very strange: a few "things" are researching, finding great truths - dangerous, fatal, decisive - and other things are doing nothing. If we are all things, then perhaps while you are sleeping, your chair is trying to experiment upon you, looking into you, trying to find out what kind of thing this is. And the chairs must be publishing periodicals, research papers, getting PhDs, BScs ....
Non Sequitur. We are also animals but that doesn't mean we can breathe underwater like fish. One thing in common (being material) doesn't mean a lot of things in common (mind). How am I like a chair?
We are both matrial but we are both different.
But it is strange that only men, not even animals, are scientists. Animals have life but they are not consciously alive; hence they simply go on living a biological program
Ah great more Descartes
You know the guy used to cut rabbits just to demonstrate they don't have human feelings.
Man is the only living organism on the earth who has a totally new quality - consciousness. The walls in this room are not conscious of you. They are not conscious of themselves either. They don't know they exist, they don't know that anybody else exists. Man is very special; he knows others exist, he knows he exists.
This is actually also true of many non-material beings (as in the third world of Karl Poppers three worlds)
Art knows it is art and philosophy knows it is philosophy (in the third world)
The scientist has to deny the greatest prerogative of man. He has to say that he is also a thing among things. Strange! Scientists also when they are not scientists - because nobody can be a scientist twenty-four hours a day. It is not like religion. A person cannot be religious for a few hours in a day, or a few hours in a week. Either he is religious or he is not.
Not really.
So here he assumes Religiousness is permanent? a constant stable state? A lot of people change their opinnions. Don't get me wrong science and religion don't have lot in common but this certaintly not what separates them.
SO:
Religiousness is overwhelming, reaches to every pore of your being; it is not a profession like being a doctor, an engineer, a scientist.
Whoa he realised nouns and adjectives are different!
Matter and Consciousness
The first thing is that in this world, matter and consciousness are not two separate things. What we call matter is consciousness asleep, and what we know as consciousness is matter awakened. In reality matter and consciousness are not different; they are different manifestations of the same thing.
Existence is one, and that one is godliness or brahman or whatsoever you want to call it. When that one is asleep it appears as matter, and when awake it is consciousness. So don’t treat matter and consciousness as separate entities; they are only utilitarian terms. They are not really different.
So once again a religious structure - no argumentation.
He just says this is how things are bacuse they just are. Presumptions from nothingness. Ockham's Razor does fine on these.
Even science has come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as matter. How amusing it is that fifty years ago Nietzsche declared that God is dead, and fifty years from now science will have to declare that God may or may not be dead but matter is certainly dead. As science goes deeper and deeper into matter it finds that matter is no more and only energy remains, only energy is.
While science is still defining what matter exactly is it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Just like it has been said: From philosophys standpoint it doesn't matter wheter matter is waves or energy or particles as long as it is matter.
What remains after the explosion or splitting of the atom is only particles of energy. And what we know as electrons, protons and neutrons are particles of electricity. In fact, it is not correct to call them particles, because particles imply matter. The scientists had to find a new word, which is quanta, which has a different connotation altogether. Quanta is both a particle and a wave. It is difficult to comprehend how something could be both a particle and a wave simultaneously, but quanta is both. Sometimes it behaves as a particle – which is matter; and sometimes it behaves as a wave – which is energy. Wave and energy are behaviors of the same quanta.
When science dug deep it found that only energy is, and when spirituality delved deep it found that only spirit or atman or soul is. And soul is energy. The time is just around the corner when a synthesis of science and religion will be achieved, and the distance that separates them will simply disappear. When the gap between matter and truth has proved to be false, the gap between science and religion cannot exist for long. If matter and consciousness are not two, how can religion and science be two? The separation of science and religion was dependent on the separation of matter and consciousness.
Oh no it's pseudo-science crap! Run for your lives
This is even worse than the time a "quantum physicist" proved how quantum physics allows twins to read eachothers minds
To me, only one is; two simply don’t exist. There is no place for duality; so the question of matter and consciousness does not arise. If you like the language of matter, you can say that everything is matter. And if you like the language of consciousness, you can say that everything is consciousness. I for one prefer the language of consciousness.
and now children it is Spinoza time. Mind and matter are different wrinkles in the same carpet hurrah!
If you are trying to see light through your ears you will not be able to see it, and the ears will say, “There is no light.” If you try to listen to music through your eyes you will not be able to listen, because your very method excludes it.
Oh how very perceptive...
I just wonder where all this is leading. Most of what he says seems to be similar to the rhetorics of populist politicians. No need for argumentation when you can say things that either sound nice intuitively or are so damn Tautological...
Science says: Consciousness is illusion, body is the only reality
More misunderstanding of science. If science would ignore consciousness then what are all the branches of science studying it for?
When a person is utterly vegetarian he can easily remember his past lives. His clarity is such that he can look into his past lives.
More like when person is insane. There is no medical or physical possibility of that simply pseudo-scientific mysticism. Our brains record memories. Storing as much data as thousands of past lives should be visible in the way the brains work. (also such vast amount of content is evolutionarily useless and would not propably have been created and I am not stepping into begging the question: evolution has a lot of proof.)
He is not gross, his energy is not blocked, his energy moves easily. His river of consciousness can penetrate to the ancient most times; he can go backwards as much as he wants. The consciousness of a non-vegetarian is blocked -- in many ways. He has been accumulating gross matter in himself. That gross matter functions as a barrier. That's why all the three religions that were born outside India, and have remained non-vegetarian, could not come to the idea of reincarnation. They could not experience it.
Oh but you underestimate religions. There are estimately three religions born every day and vegetarian CULTURES have existed everywhere on earth. Actually cavemen used to be vegetarian and didn't actually live in caves. There are surprisingly accurate estimates about when early humans started eating meat.
AND I have no idea how being a vegetarian could influence the capacity of your brains and funtionality of your memory system neither do I know a reason WHY it would affect it. Pure rubbish if you ask me.
Pythagoras lived in India, lived the life of a vegetarian, meditated deeply, became aware of the past lives, could see himself moving backwards. He could understand what Buddha means when he says, "Once I was an elephant, once I was a fish, once I was a tree."
Sure a lot of people talk to pink elephants too. The pink elephants also told them you are wrong. See how easy it is to bring in the supernatural argument. Not very plausible but still.
Oh great. The scientific community just doesn't know about it yet. This is pure pseudoscience.
OR if you are certain that they are right prove yourself and earn a couple of millions in the process. No one has been able to do so yet but you seem certain.
http://www.skepdic.com/randi.html
Since you won't bother reading it I will copypaste it here (You shouldn't have a problem with copypasting)
James Randi, a.k.a. The Amazing Randi, magician and author of numerous works skeptical of paranormal, supernatural, and pseudoscientific claims has for about ten years offered "a one-million-dollar prize to anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power."