Suppose that science can never explain consciousness. Can you (or anyone) explain why science can never explain consciousness?
If not, in what sense do you claim to understand the limitations of science? It sounds to me like you're just assuming that these are the limitations.
(We know a lot about the limitations of science. Science can't produce a rocket that goes faster than light, for example. Currently we don't know enough about consciousness to know what the limitations of science are with respect to it.)
The religious person is the one claiming something without and reasoning or evidence. Therefore the onus is on them to prove that God exists, rather than the atheist to prove he doesn't.
There is no evidence to suggest that science will be able to observe an experience, so the onus is on you to prove that its a reasonable suggestion.
We may one day be able to measure experience, but we don't know yet. Until then science is the best tool we have.
This reasoning is nothing at all like being asked to prove there is no god, the history of science shows that we are able to untangle the mechanisms of the natural world, and there are no evidence to the contrary.
Now, in the eyes of science it is not the responsibility of a religious person to prove that god exists or does not exist, it is as much the responsibility of science - it's just very much a non-topic in science since no evidence have been found either way.
(And there are a lot of evidence that science will be able observe an experience - we already can do very basic recognition of patterns in brain waves based on what the subject is experiencing, we are starting to map, understand and simulate a human brain. Eventually that might turn into an engineering problem of hooking up the proper equipment to neurological pathways.)
This is a bold claim. You might as well say that science can't prove electrons exist or that water is wet.
What do you mean by 'proof', and why is that what you choose to mean by it?
What we call measurement is a mental model that we invented to help us think about reality. We don't have a measurement model for consciousness yet, but that doesn't necessarily mean we never will.
Interesting study though.
Technically though, when someone takes an MRI of your brain, that means your consciousness is being observed.
There is, however, a science, which asserts that every human being can understand consciousness and experience it as separate from the matter if he attempts. Read Raja Yoga by Swami Vivekananda if you are really curious.
Science is the discipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment and Bayesian inference. Notice there is no mention of "matter" in that definition.
If an idea has any consequences it can be tested by practicing the discipline of science. If an idea is consequence-free it is boring. Ideas about consciousness that are fully decoupled from material consequences are boring: they entail that no human action is caused by consciousness. For example, my consciousness would have to be unrelated to the contents of this message, because it was generated by making various bits of matter move.
Material consequences are the most studied by science because they are the easiest to get at and they have the widest scope, but we use them to study immaterial and abstract causes all the time.
Here by matter or material includes even ideas and inference because they all stem from mind and mind is built of subtlest matter (as per Samkhya philosophy upon which Raja Yoga is based).
The method to experience of consciousness in Raja Yoga is not consequence free – direct experience of ones own consciousness is the best experience a man can have, and it transforms him thereafter forever. Also read Kundalini by Gopi Krishna.
The process itself is far from boaring and you'll be surprised the changes/experiences you start to observe within few weeks/months of starting the enquiry. (But beware of scammers who sell trademark techniques!)
Btw, I'm not professing any religion here. It's just that there's a method of enquiry which many people throughout the history have attempted and they have experienced something which you also can provided that you dare to. (Samkhya philosophy in fact denies existence of God as we know it but only professes idea of pure consciousness)
Swamij.com is also a good read for curious folks. I have been researching and practicing for some time. I have good number of proofs which modern science has recognized, plus my experiences of last few months. I plan to write an article on this some day. .
Science is the discipline of publicly testing ideas via systematic observation, controlled experiment, and Bayesian inference.
Notice there is no limit on the nature of the ideas. Anyone who says "science only deals with matter" is saying "I don't understand science."
Science is a discipline, a practice, not a method or a specific body of knowledge. The practice of the discipline of science is our only means of producing new knowledge and discarding old knowledge.
So I'm not sure what these inherent limitations you're talking about are. If and idea can't be tested by systematic observation, controlled experiment or Bayesian inference then it must be an idea that has no consequences of any kind, which is to say: an idea that is boring. Otherwise, if it has consequences, it can be tested using the discipline of science, and some Bayesian statement made regarding its plausibility.
It's like someone telling you the Halting Theorem shows there are undecidable computations. This has never dissuaded a single engineer from working on better compiler optimizations, or even limited detection of halting behavior, it just shows the general problem is insoluble.
Perhaps we may never be able to discover exactly how our life came about, or how the universe came about, but there are lots of other related questions narrower in scope that are just as valuable to answer.
I'd say the philosophical justifications are frankly irrelevent. I know this rankles people, I've seen it rankle people debating Lawrence Krauss. They provide a good backwards justification for having logical confidence in our scientific endeavors, but really, science is about making predictions and if you come up with a theory that makes useful predictions, allows you to build things and conduct experiments with agree with the model, in other words, something that "works", the philosophical underpinnings are not going to cause anyone outside Philosophy departments to sweat.
Thus, more useful than "how did OUR life actually evolve" which may be beyond the limits of the historical data or our ability to analyze, other questions are "are other kinds of life possible", and "how can other kinds of life evolve". If there's a useful theory of how other kinds of life can come about, and if we can actually test it with experiments, and actually create this life, then I'd say the "science fiction" of believing that science can answer the really tough questions, and drove physicists to actually solve a sub-problem, was a worthy bit of cultural driving force.
In other words, give me my beliefs in space empires, and warp travel. It inspires me, and others, into science, and useful endeavors, even if the primary goal (FTL) is impossible.
i always curious why we say that when there are right in front of our eyes evidence to the contrary - galaxies moving away with speeds higher than the light speed. FTL is impossible only in SR - ie. in the static continuous space-time - which is only approximation (and not really true) of the real space-time.
Space itself is expanding - so galaxies really far away are being pushed away FTL but they're not actually 'moving' FTL. They couldn't travel that fast towards us, or indeed towards anything.
it is kind like saying that because all stones fall down, one can't fly or jump. Like stone falling down, space expansion (cooling down) is an entropy increasing process. What we know is that any entropy increasing process can be reversed by applying energy (which gets obtained by even more increasing of entropy somewhere else).
Faith in science.
There seems to be a negative connotation to the phrase "faith in science" because faith and science are pitted as opposites here. The only difference is I can see plenty of reasons to have faith in something that has repeatedly given useful feedback, so I'm not even sure the phrase deserves all of the negative connotation it receives.
> We can't see it, touch it or measure it in any way.
Consciousness interacts with the world through its affect on material substances. And so there is a window by which we can study consciousness objectively.
That is, you can never know if you're "done". That's why we keep pressing on with lossless data compression. We can never be sure we're finished.
We don't know when we've "learnt everything" that's possible to know by science and since we don't know what the limits are, why stop asking why?
We could have stopped with Classical Physics, but we kept pressing on and got Quantum Mechanics and General Relatively. We could have stopped with the Bohr model of the atom, but we keep probing deeper into particle physics and now we have the standard model.
Until you know your quest is futile, why stop?
HackerNews is a community oriented around YCombinator startups. The probability that any one startup is successful is vanishingly small. The vast vast majority of new businesses fail. You have to have a little bit of hubris to assume that you're going to strike gold on your particular venture. No one can predict success.
This false belief that your particular crazy idea is destined to make you rich and famous produces useful behavior for society. Since we cannot predict from the top down which ideas in the frontiers of idea-space are going to evolve as a best fit for current demands, the best thing we can do is conduct lots and lots of trial experiments -- startups colonizing all peaks and valleys of the idea-space.
Most will fail to climb to any peaks, left stuck in valleys. A few will climb a mountain that rises taller than others.
But this only happens because people perceive there's mountains to climb, that climbing mountains have rewards, and that it is possible to climb them.
Let people have their dreams.
It's not inconceivable that much of what we consider science fiction today will be a reality in a hundred years time.
Incidentally, why was trhway's comment downvoted? It expresses a perfectly logical objection to the "plant" hypothesis.