Does Science Truly Represent Reality?

I would imagine that in most cases the individual is beyond that.

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Everybody is entitled to my opinion.

I'll buy that, however I would add that what we can't know might very well have an impact on what we think we can know.

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Everybody is entitled to my opinion.

I understand your point, GDR, and I suppose if we were a cat or a snake or a bat, 'reality' would be completely different.As crash points out, we have a remarkable talent for finding out more of reality than our senses allow for. We have heat seeking devices, and devices which allow us to hear otherwise inaudible frequencies. We can go to the bottom of the ocean, we have microscopes and telescopes and infrared cameras. There are probably more 'realities' out there, but chances are we can find 'em.

Well, but clearly anybody who's ever looked through an infrared imager has found a new way of perceiving the universe - via technology. I disagree. The key feature of the human brain is its plasticity in nearly every stage of the human life cycle. Did you read the article I linked to? The feelSpace researcher actually developed a magnetic sense. It wasn't just that he felt the buzzing around his waist and consciously interpreted that as "north." Within only a few days it was literally just that his brain knew where north was, and he only felt the buzzing indicators if he specifically concentrated on doing so.Another researcher was able to see objects and doors in a room by means of an imaging device attached to his tongue. He was literally seeing by the sensation of electric shocks on his tongue. At the end of the experiment, he had no memory of the feeling of the room on his tongue; what he remembered is what the room looked like.So the brain's capability to develop new senses is clearly considerable. Even if we did not have vision - if we only had touch or hearing - a technology that turned visible light patterns into acoustic or tactile patterns could train our brains to interpret those patterns, seamlessly, as visual information. Oh, for God's sake. Oscar the Cat is a ridiculous hoax perpetrated on people who don't know how to think things through. Look, think it through:1) The Steere Nursing Unit where Oscar lives treats only individuals in the end-stage of various fatal illnesses - so regardless of whether Oscar sleeps on them or not, most residents there are going to die fairly soon. They're already dying.2) Cats like to sleep on quiet, warm spots where they won't be disturbed. People who are dying of Parkinson's or Alzheimer's are listless, generally unaware of their surroundings, unresponsive and uncommunicative, and may already be suffering from fevers or blood issues that make their skin warmer than the surroundings.3) People who are dying experience metabolic shutdowns that release certain distinct odors. Cats have an incredible sense of smell, and Oscar is invariably rewarded for his attention to a dying person, so doubtless he's been behaviorally trained to pay attention to those odors.There's nothing spooky or magic about it. It certainly doesn't prove that cats can see into the future, or read energy flows, or do any of the other ridiculous superstitious bullshit that people have attributed to Oscar the cat.Is there stuff going on that we don't know about? Sure. But the problem here isn't that we don't know what we don't know. The problem here is that you don't know what we know.

I'm not so sure but obviously that is pure conjecture.Edited by GDR, : No reason given.

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Everybody is entitled to my opinion.

The article you posted the link to was fascinating. Thanks.It seems to me that with technology we can develop ways of expanding the existing senses. The body even adapts on its own. My understanding is that people who are blind have their other senses enhanced.Radar is another way of seeing something that we wouldn't be able to otherwise but it just uses technology to convert what it detects into a something that we can visualize. Well it fooled the publishers of "The New England Journal of Medicine" so I figure I'm in pretty good company. Read the articles. He is able to discern which deaths are really imminent and disregard the others. Do you really think that the cat should on this basis be able to tell the difference between somebody 2 hrs from death to someone who is 24 hrs from death. Think it through. He started doing this on his own so he couldn't have been trained using a reward system. As for him being able to detect imminent death because of odours being given off, I'll accept that as a possible answer and that it would not be an additional sense that we don't understand. However that is just speculation like anything else. I don't imagine that anyone has suggested that it proves anything but it is a curiosity about which we can speculate. You seem to approach all subjects with the certain knowledge that there is nothing that given enough time the human mind can't discern. I happen to think that you're wrong.Neither of us can prove our views, we don't know what we don't know, regardless of how much greater knowledge you have than I do.

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Everybody is entitled to my opinion.

No, it is not.What we perceive through our senses is the very definition of empirical knowledge.That's the realm of science. Science studies 'reality' only to the extent that any reality out there intersects with, and manifests itself as, empirical knowledge. Beyond this science can have no contact with reality.Perception of reality beyond this subset would necessarily entail the use of methodologies other than science. It is true that Plato was making a philosophical argument, not a scientific proposition.Your dismissal of his image as 'masturbation' on this basis alone, though, reflects a subjective reality on your part. You have not demonstrated through empirical means that a metaphor people have found meaningful for centuries is--in any factual, objective sense--without meaning at all.Is your dismissal real, even though it is not science?___Edited by Archer Opterix, : clarity.Edited by Archer Opterix, : html.Edited by Archer Opterix, : title.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

Science doesn't 'have faith' in the usual sense of the word. What it does is operate on a practical basis.Our perception of things often seems to reflect reality. There appears to be a cause-and-effect relationship between many things we perceive and many other things we perceive, between certain things we (seem to) do and the things that (seem to) happen afterwards.Philosophy questions the accuracy of this impression. It asks how we can be sure where, if at all, our perceptions of reality and reality itself connect.This is a wise question. But it is not a scientific one.Science accepts the impression as it stands and provides a method whereby we can measure what we encounter (or so it seems) and collect the quantifiable data. From there we can share what we learn with others (or so it seems) and nurture a growing body of collective knowledge.Science can't prove to you why proceeding on this basis works. It can't prove any ultimate connection, if any, between our perceptions and absolute reality. The method just seems to bring benefits in the reality we perceive, so we keep doing it.It's a practical thing.____Edited by Archer Opterix, : typo repair.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

Thanks for the post. I agree with all of it except I think that you are only partially right on it not being a scientific question. However, I agree that it is primarily philosphical.Time is something that interests me a great deal. As was pointed out there is no universal standard of time. As a result we measure both time and distance using a standard of time that we perceive on Earth. If we were on another planet in another galaxy that is moving through space and time at a different rate than we are I assume we would come to a different conclusion as to the age of the universe. Which would be correct? Isn't that a scientific question?

Huh?Which is correct, metric or English measurements?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

It might not have fooled them. Maybe they just thought it was an interesting story that people would like to read. Like Harry Potter - few people think that real. Harry can cast spells with his wand. Hearsay and anecdotes, not reality. You'd be suprised. This story will turn up on psychic's websites for decades to come.

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My minimal understanding of time is that it is basically how we perceive change and we perceive it at a rate that is dependent on velocity and the gravitaional we are in.Another planet in another galaxy is moving a what could be a very different velocity giving its inhabitants should they exist a very different perception of time.

That fact that people might use two different scales or references does not change the reality. In the case involved, the age of the Universe, all you are doing is referencing two different scales, two referents. The age of the Universe is still the same and if the correlation between the two measuring systems was known, a conversion between the two could be accomplished with ease.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Fooled them how? Not even the editors of the NEJM attributed Oscar's behavior to magic, like you just did. No, you're still not hearing me. Are you paying attention to what I'm writing?It isn't just that our existing senses are expanded. The guy with the feelSpace belt - and I wonder if you really did read the article, because they made every effort to stress this - didn't just read a compass by feeling it. He didn't just "extend" his sense of touch into magnetic sense.What he extended was his brain. Sure, the interface was tactile - but it was also transparent to him. From his perspective, he wasn't at all wearing a belt that indicated north via touch - he was wearing a belt that indicated north in his brain.That's what you're still not getting, it seems like. That it's not that we're just extending our current senses in new directions. We have the technology to create entirely new senses that the brain registers as something else beyond sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, temperature, or proprioception. These technologies use our current senses as transparent channels. It's not simply a matter of converting information into something our senses can detect. It's about using our senses to connect our minds to sensors. Everybody's death is imminent if you're at the Steere Nursing Unit. That's the point of the unit; it houses the dying. The nurses are all busy tending to people so naturally the cat doesn't sit on any of them. Obviously. We have no idea how often the cat just gets lucky, incidentally. You've never heard of "confirmation bias"? You have no idea how many times the nurses are forgetting that they saw Oscar sitting on the lap of Old Man Perkins, who's been there for weeks. You have no idea how many times they've seen the cat curled up in a sunbeam or on the lap of a little girl (who presumably is not near to death.) It's real easy to invent the legend of a death-predicting cat when you forget every single time the cat has been wrong.Christ haven't you ever seen John Edward on TV? (The "medium", not the politician.) Don't you know how those scams work? He guesses things out loud until he gets something right, and then everybody forgets how often he was wrong, because they're all committed to believing that he has supernatural powers.You know, like you and this fucking stupid cat. Wrong again. He's rewarded every time he does it. So the first few times he did it by random, or because they were the warmer laps of people dying of fevers; once he was rewarded for doing so, obviously he continued doing it. Clearly you're as ignorant about behavioral conditioning as you seem to be about everything else. No wonder you fall for bullshit like this. I haven't been, yet. Since there's no possible way to distinguish between the things we don't know because we'll never know, and the things we don't know because we simply don't know them yet, it's as reasonable an assumption as anything else. And, as yet, I've never been proven wrong.But look, you're really getting way ahead of yourself worrying about the stuff mankind may or may not ever know. There's a whole world of information that rest of us know that you don't. You should be trying to catch up a little bit before you go worrying about the limits of human cognition. You're not exactly at a place where you're pushing those limits yet.

Well, I don't see anyone pushing the limits of human cognition around here, myself included. On the whole I'd say GDR has opened some big questions rather ably. Some people never ask them.GDR asks if there is, or could be, more to reality than science can discern by its methods.His cat, intended as an example, is fast becoming a tar baby. The validity of the question does not depend on the necrophilia of a cat.The cat is just one those charming oddball stories people tell. It's like crashfrog's own charming oddball story, which he tells elsewhere, of American journalists who go to work 'systematically hostile' to the very political ideas they are most likely to hold. Such a notion hardly represents a reasoned analysis of comprehensive data. It's just a tale that, like the necrophiliac feline, gets indulged for its story appeal over its logic.Let's see where we are with the big question.I notice GDR and crashfrog, among others, agreeing that reality is larger than science in at least one respect: science doesn't know everything. Our body of empirical knowledge has to be revised and updated to accommodate something larger: the empirically knowable.Is this larger thing, the empirically knowable, synonymous with reality itself? Or is reality larger even than this?Most individuals admit the question remains open. We don't know.For the two things to be synonymous, reality would have to be empirically comprehensible in every detail. We don't know that it is.Even if it is, science by itself is not the mechanism for demonstrating the equivalence. Science is limited to empiricism by definition. It can only take account of data it can admit. Confirmation bias, as crash notes.___Edited by Archer Opterix, : clarity.Edited by Archer Opterix, : html.Edited by Archer Opterix, : html.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.