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Comment by nathan_compton | Hacker News Reader

My problem with this attitude is what even are you talking about? Suppose we "abandon our rational mind" for a moment and sojourn into the irrational. How the heck are we supposed to take anything back from that experience and into the world of discourse? Presumably there is much more bullshit in the endless tracks of irrationality than truth and whatever mechanism by which we choose to carry ideas back clearly can't distinguish the two as it has abandoned anything like epistemology. So what is the point of even talking about it?

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First, assuming that the universe is an absolute system doesn't mean we can't build models to interpret its nature through binary interpretations. In the same way that a map is not the territory, a mental model for the universe isn't the universe.

So saying "abandon our rational mind" is just a rhetorical mechanism to establish that perhaps this is the wrong question, and we should reframe what we understand as absolute or relative.

You're incorrectly interpreting my words as a call for irrationality. I'm just saying that our interpretation of the universe and the debates about its origins are often based on ideas that can't be challenged because they are scientific truisms.

The problem is that anything that doesn't comply with our standard interpretation of the universe will be deemed esoteric and unscientific. Therefore, it neuters debates that could yield a valid interpretation of the universe.

I still don't really get it. Not all ideas which disagree with or go beyond the current best scientific models of the universe are considered non-scientific or esoteric (if this were the case scientific progress would be impossible).

How about this: state explicitly what strategies beyond empiricism, model building, ontology refinement, and epistemological reasoning you think can provide genuine verifiable insight about the world?

I'm not stating that any of those strategies are the wrong approach to interpreting the world.

I'm saying that when those strategies are applied axiomatically, there's no room to reinterpret what we know about the world because there's a general feeling that doing so will undo all scientific progress.

Take, for instance, the relativity vs. quantum mechanics debate. I'm not a physicist, but it's pretty evident that the biggest struggle of that debate is that most people want to reconcile both theories by unifying them through some other rational interpretation of the world. Whether or not that's possible remains to be proven, but a theory of everything may emerge from a completely different interpretation of the world. One that is rationally contrarian to what relativity and quantum mechanics tell us.

And this brings me back to my original argument, which is that perhaps we have the proper methods to understand the world, but we are just asking the wrong questions.

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