And I’m saying that not questioning your senses is unscientific. Questioning our observations, and retesting them, is the very foundation of scientific thinking.
As for living in a purely material universe, how exactly would you test for something immaterial using material means? Would it look like weird unknown forces we can’t explain or the results of tests looking different depending on if it’s being observed or not?
And also are we going to throw out human experience? Are we not part of the universe? So would not the immaterial things we imagine into existence also exist?
Numbers aren’t material but we treat them as real, and use them to study material things to understand them.
I suppose I should’ve emphasized the “on such a foundational level” -part of that sentence. Questioning and refining observations is obviously of paramount importance, but that’s only valid if we assume that deriving knowledge about the nature of reality is at all possible via our senses and observations.
That’s where the distinction between physics and metaphysics comes in. Metaphysics is philosophy and thus inherently unverifiable.
The things we imagine do exist, as patterns of activity in our brains, emerging from the complexity of a whole bunch of neurons in brains and as part of societies. I said as much in a previous comment about emergent materialism.
And I’m saying that not questioning your senses is unscientific. Questioning our observations, and retesting them, is the very foundation of scientific thinking.
As for living in a purely material universe, how exactly would you test for something immaterial using material means? Would it look like weird unknown forces we can’t explain or the results of tests looking different depending on if it’s being observed or not?
And also are we going to throw out human experience? Are we not part of the universe? So would not the immaterial things we imagine into existence also exist?
Numbers aren’t material but we treat them as real, and use them to study material things to understand them.
I suppose I should’ve emphasized the “on such a foundational level” -part of that sentence. Questioning and refining observations is obviously of paramount importance, but that’s only valid if we assume that deriving knowledge about the nature of reality is at all possible via our senses and observations.
That’s where the distinction between physics and metaphysics comes in. Metaphysics is philosophy and thus inherently unverifiable.
The things we imagine do exist, as patterns of activity in our brains, emerging from the complexity of a whole bunch of neurons in brains and as part of societies. I said as much in a previous comment about emergent materialism.