Are thoughts transcendant?

Damouse, I feel you are misrepresenting the scientific case, and I'm finding myself more and more inclining to agree with Linda Lou.1. Science is not the same as logic. Science is empirical, i.e. it uses observation and experiment to understand the world. If logic contradicts reality (which it sometimes can do), then the logic is at fault. 2. The brain is not a logic machine. It works by association, not by logic. We have logical skills, but they're just a tiny part of what our brain does. For much our interaction with the world, logical thinking is completely inappropriate.3. Science is not a complete world view. It is an analytical method for creating models of the world. Those models can be immensely powerful for making predictions, and for generating technology, but they're still models, not the reality itself.Science is a part of our understanding of the world - we also have our own experience, philosophy, religion (well, some of it anyway), music, poetry, tennis, rock climbing, art, children, love, sex, train spotting, internet forums, sunsets and sea urchins. (And one or two other things).

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

Don't you think it's possible to come to the truth about anything, except via scientific investigation or logic?

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

Logic is very useful and very powerful when we can decompose a problem into binary opposites. If we can simplify like that, then there's nothing to beat it.But there are all kinds of things we have to make judgements about that aren't so simple. Let me give you some examples:1. I'm teaching a creative writing class and my students want advice on improving their poetry. I can advise them on use of rhyme and rhythm, on the use of images, and so forth. I'm imparting knowledge to them, but it isn't knowledge that can be investigated scientifically or analysed logically (and it would be missing the point even if you tried). So how do they judge whether my advice is sound?2. Similarly, how do my children judge whether the moral rules I try to inculcate in them are sound or unsound? It isn't science that helps them decide, or logic (although they are likely to use reasoning of some kind).3. I'm reading a book on Buddhism at the moment. I'm being told that the human condition is one of unease, of dissatisfaction. How do I decide whether that statement is true or not? It's not a scientific hypothesis, so it can't really be tested scientifically, and it's not a logical proposition so I can't evaluate it using propositional logic. And yet there's seems an element of truth there, and it seems a claim worthy of being investigated further.All of these examples have one thing in common, they're about our subjective experience of the world rather than about the world per se. They're squishy, vague, personal things that aren't within the domain of science or logic, but still have value (and for most people have much more value than the things that science and logic deal with).Which is why LindaLou is getting so upset. She's misinterpreting the attacks on her beliefs as attacks on this personal sphere of existence. And it doesn't help when everyone keeps exaggerating, and telling her that nothing has value unless it can be verified by science or logic.

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

When the premises are false. In toy problems, it's always obvious when the premises of a logical argument are false, but in reality it isn't so easy. Logic, unrestrained by observation of reality, has been used to construct monstrous orthodoxies through the ages, and empiricism, and the scientific method, grew out of a reaction against such unrestrained use of logic. The brain isn't a computer. It doesn't work using logic gates. Oh, and it isn't simple or obvious. I quite agree. No, there's much more to being human than logic. I probably use logic more than most people (because I have to write computer programs all day), but even for me it's a skill of minor importance, much less important than my ability to get along with other people, or my ability to remember my wife's birthday, or my ability to read the newspaper. Reasoning (and more specifically, logic) is for problem solving, and not all of our life is problem solving.

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

If science and empiricism were interchangeable terms I might have to concede the argument. But fortunately for me, they're not .Like you, I'm an empiricist. I believe that we can only acquire knowledge through the five senses (and 'through reflection on the ideas we acquire through the senses' to paraphrase Locke).In all three of the examples I provided, knowledge was being acquired empirically, but not through scientific investigation or deductive logic.At the core of the empiricist view of how we make judgements is a lack of certainty. When we make a decision we use our past experience (and maybe some reasoning) to make a best guess, to determine which of many claims is most probably true.Science brings a rigorous methodology to this inductive method of acquiring knowledge, insisting on hypothesis generation and testing, data analysis, replicability, etc. to firm up the probabilities. It's very powerful and very useful, but not necessarily appropriate, or practical, to use in our day-to-day life.Let's go back to my first example.Teaching someone to write better poetryBased on my own experience of writing poetry I suggest changes to my student; she accepts or rejects my suggestions, using her own experience and some poetic experimentation as guidance. That all sounds perfectly empirical to me. Why do you think doing a formal scientific experiment would make it more empirical? Aren't you just fetishizing the formal techniques of science?

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang