Anonymous #3 9h

That’s actually not falsifiable, it’s a metaphysical claim. We know brain activity correlates with consciousness but we don’t have any way to prove whether it’s causing consciousness. Emergentism is just a theory. Consciousness is beyond physics. That’s why it’s called the “hard problem of consciousness”

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Anonymous #5 9h

I mean I think the fact that physical damage to the brain and artificial inputs of certain chemicals can actively modify emotions, personalities, and memory indicates that consciousness is most likely directly emergent from the physical

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Anonymous #4 9h

Brain damage changing the mind proves the two are linked, not which one is fundamental. If brain activity is just what experience looks like from the outside (Kastrup's idealism), you'd expect the exact same correlations. “Emergence” names the gap, it doesn't explain it.

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Anonymous #4 9h

Physicalism and idealism predict identical observations, so no experiment can decide between them. Physics tells us how matter behaves, not what it is. That makes this a metaphysical question, and physicalism is a metaphysical position too, not 'the science.' So we should judge them on consistency and simplicity: one posits unobserved matter plus an unexplained jump to feeling; the other starts with experience, the only thing we know directly.

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Anonymous #4 9h

Which brings me back to the original post. The problem isn't believing love involves chemicals. Of course it does. The problem is the word “just.” Explaining how something works isn't explaining it away. A song is pressure waves in air, and that's a true and useful description, but nobody thinks it's the whole story of the song. Same with love, the neurochemistry is real, and so is the experience and the meaning. Those are answers to different questions.

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Anonymous #4 9h

Science tells us how things behave. It's the best tool we have for that and it should never be dismissed. But questions about what reality fundamentally is, what experience is, and what matters are metaphysical and spiritual questions. When either side tries to swallow the other, it goes wrong. Spirituality that denies evidence turns into superstition. Science that declares meaning an illusion turns into scientism, which is a philosophy pretending to be a finding.

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Anonymous #4 9h

They work best together: rigor keeps spirituality honest, and spirituality keeps rigor from deleting the very experience it depends on. Every observation science has ever made happened inside someone's consciousness.

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Anonymous #5 8h

I think that our conscious is solely chemicals and electrical signals, just as a song is solely sound waves. But the solely physical nature of these phenomena does not take away their meaning. Consciousness exists, it being a product of physical reality does not take away its meaning. A song being meaningful doesn’t mean it isn’t still made out of sound waves. I take issue with people saying “love is just chemicals” because that implies that the value of consciousness is based on its medium.

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Anonymous #5 8h

I don’t think that methods of understanding the world that are not evidence-based are particularly valuable in understanding the true nature of reality. Philosophy itself has value, but that is primarily when it is within an evidence-based framework. I think the big problem with treating spirituality as a method of understanding the universe on par with science is that it isn’t evidence-based.

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Anonymous #4 8h

Genuinely glad we agree on meaning. But 'only evidence-based methods reveal reality' isn't evidence-based. No experiment could ever prove it. It's a philosophical position, the very thing it rules out. Science itself runs on assumptions it can't test: that nature behaves consistently, that induction works, that our reasoning is trustworthy. Those come from philosophy, not from data.

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Anonymous #4 8h

History tells the same story. Newton wrote more on theology and alchemy than on physics, and saw his laws as uncovering a divine order. Kepler went looking for God's geometry in the planets. And when Tycho's data didn't fit his perfect circles, he followed the evidence to ellipses. That's my whole point: spiritual vision gave him the question, evidence disciplined the answer.

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Anonymous #4 8h

Descartes, who helped build the scientific method, grounded all knowledge in one non-empirical certainty: 'I think, therefore I am.' Consciousness first. The idea that science and spirituality are natural enemies is mostly a 19th-century story. The people who founded modern science didn't believe it. Evidence is the best tool we have for how things work. It just can't be the tool that proves it's the only tool.

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Anonymous #4 8h

I would highly recommend reading John Keynes’ essay Newton, The Man

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Anonymous #5 8h

But there is no metric to determine the reliability of spirituality. In science you have evidence, you have repeatability, you can assess the methods of a study. In spirituality there is no way to compare the validity of different claims. Christianity claims you go to heaven or hell after you die, Hinduism claims you reincarnate. Jainism believes harming living beings weighs down the soul, while Aztecs and Vikings believed violence was how you got into a certain afterlife.

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Anonymous #4 8h

Spirituality is inherently based on emotions, without a scientific process to assess truth, there’s no way to determine whether the belief that the soul is annihilated after death, or the belief it is reincarnated, or the belief it goes to heaven are more valid. These are all fundamentally contradictory concepts.

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Anonymous #4 8h

Some religions profess belief in a single higher creator, and think that only that creator, angels/demons, and humanity are ensouled. Others believe that spiritual beings are commonplace in everyday physical phenomena and creatures. But with no method to assess the validity of a truth claim, you are left with equally placed contradictions. Who is to say that Scientology, or Mormonism, or Heaven’s Gate are any less valid than Catholicism or Buddhism.

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Anonymous #4 8m

I think we're talking about two different things, so let me separate them. Spiritual practice, like meditation, contemplation, or finding meaning, makes claims about experience, not about the external world. It doesn't compete with empiricism because it isn't doing empiricism's job. Comparing them is like asking which is more accurate, a thermometer or a poem.

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Anonymous #4 7m

Doctrinal claims about reality, like heaven, hell, or reincarnation, are a different matter. I'm not defending every religion's metaphysics, and I agree those claims need testing. But 'no metric' isn't right. For questions experiments can't reach, the metric is philosophy: internal consistency, simplicity, explanatory power, fit with what we do know. That's how you can even say Heaven's Gate is weaker than, say, Buddhist philosophy of mind without running an experiment.

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Anonymous #4 5m

And lots of conflicting answers doesn't mean there's no answer. Science had phlogiston and oxygen, geocentrism and heliocentrism. Disagreement means the question is hard, not that it's meaningless. Scientific practice demarcates science from nonscience. It doesn't demarcate sense from nonsense. That's philosophy's job.

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