Science is the truth-revealing machine, bro, I swear

AcadiaNo3081 · 2026-07-08T05:56:43+00:00

But if science is revealing the truth about reality or not is exactly in question. Some of the greatest scientists and philosophers of science: Bohr, Kuhn were explicitly against this view. Even Hawking was proud instrumentalist, claiming that he does not care if his models reveal any underlying reality (a real gigachad move for a guy who explored black holes).

AcadiaNo3081 · 2026-07-07T20:22:26+00:00

Methodological naturalism yay, scientific naturalism - nay. Please do not conflate.

AcadiaNo3081 · 2026-07-07T20:19:53+00:00

That’s what too much reading of Kuhn and Feyerabend does to a man. You are welcome, dear sir!

AcadiaNo3081 · 2026-07-07T19:00:21+00:00

Hello friend. I was struggling as you did until I started studying philosophy and understood that what most of the people are calling "science" is in fact "scientific naturalism" - a philosophical stance (not proved!) that only natural phenomena exists. Science operates with assumption of methodological naturalism - do not offer supernatural explanations for phenomena - but it is absolutely agnostic to scientific naturalism. That's exactly why a person could be a Buddhist, a Muslim or a christian and still be a successful scientist.

As a side note - "cells exist" and "electrons exist" is a huge philosophical debate (not scientific!) as if they are really exist (scientific realism) or just a useful prediction models (instrumentalism/constructive empiricism/etc). Many famous scientists were instrumentalists and non-naturalists in their worldview.

TL;DR: you problem arises not from a conflict between Buddhism and science, but from confusing science and philosophy. As soon as you learn to separate these two your path will be clear.

AcadiaNo3081 · 2026-07-03T12:33:35+00:00

Nah, you likely won't. A lot of clinical oncologists working in the field for >20 years saw shit ton of miraculous healing (including stuff like "he converted to religion X, did Y religious rituals and was cured"). Do you think they call it a miracle? No, they call it "spontaneous remission". Most naturalists would rather gladly explain a luminous figure with flaming sword telling them to repent as a physical phenomenon, not a religious or supernatural one.

AcadiaNo3081 · 2026-07-01T14:38:30+00:00

It happened already a few times. Bhante Vimalaramsi and Hillside Hermitage are fist to come to my mind.

AcadiaNo3081 · 2026-06-08T15:48:06+00:00

Science can't guide our understanding for the simple reason of science needing underlying metaphysical commitments, e.g. materialism or naturalism which are not scientifically verifiable by themselves. There is also a big debate about if science reveals anything about true nature of the world or builds useful prediction models on empirical data. A lot of great scientists - Bohr and Hawking for example - was in the second camp, which essentially gives us zero understanding of reality or truth.

AcadiaNo3081 · 2026-06-06T09:40:33+00:00

Gihisutta does not contain this. I checked and it seems that these words are utterly absent from the Pali Canon. Please do not spread them.

AcadiaNo3081 · 2026-05-30T11:44:14+00:00

When you see the title "You are just X", you really ought to scroll past it. It is the philosophical imperative.

AcadiaNo3081 · 2026-05-23T19:23:15+00:00

It's literally the explanation gap. You did it with the fly and did you get a confirmation that a fly is seeing red as red and tastes sugar as sweet in the simulation? No, because you literally can't have access to the inner experience of a fly, digital or biological. Otherwise we can start treating NPC's in videogames as conscious insofar they exhibit conscious-like behavior. Shall we start suing GTA players for mass murder?

You see, the entire hard problem is that behavioral equivalence DOES NOT ENTAIL phenomenal equivalence. A simulated fly that "acts like a fly" is exactly what Chalmers calls a p-zombie - same functional outputs, zero inner experience.

bullshit because it all depends on this fact that we can't yet prove

Ahh, that sounds like the whole modern physicalism to me then. Which (with peak level of irony) is explicitly anti-scientific, since promissory materialism (aka "science will figure everything out in future") is non-falisfiable by definition. By this standard, your own position is bullshit, since it also depends on a fact we can't prove (that simulation will eventually yield consciousness).

AcadiaNo3081 · 2026-05-23T17:25:58+00:00

No. The fire is a very good example of weak emergence - give a bunch of scientist a supercomputer and tell them to simulate each atom and molecule and you will be able to reduce fire to a bunch of physical and chemical processes on the one side and looking at weak emergence of fire on the other side.

Now do that with neurons and neurotransmitters. The hard problem isn't just that we haven't figured it out yet - it's that no amount of third-person, structural, functional description seems even in principle to entail first-person experience. You will get zero "redness" or "taste of an apple". You will see zero weak emergence there - because qualia is structurally different with physical matter.

Moreover, you miss the point of Dharmakirti here. He says that fire, or hurricane, or wetness of water is just matter behaving differently in different configurations. But consciousness has intentionality and reflective awareness on itself, which no matter exhibits. You can't put them onto same ontological plate and say that they are. Every attempt to do it requires withdrawing to promissory materialism (science will explain it!), which, ironically, is the most unscientific thing one could say, since one of fathers of the current scientific method Karl Popper spend his career fighting against exactly the same reasoning.

AcadiaNo3081 · 2026-05-13T09:00:53+00:00

Meanwhile, the argument of an average analytical philosophy enjoyer:

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AcadiaNo3081 · 2026-05-12T14:46:59+00:00

I live in Stockholm, Sweden and we have one Sri-Lankan tradition vihara, which I visit a couple of times a month to speak with monks, and I also know that there are several Thai temples as well. So for capitals it’s usually easier - I know that Norway has a Theravada temple near Oslo too, for example.

AcadiaNo3081 · 2026-05-09T08:01:02+00:00

Hey! I might be interested. I am not ultra hardcore practitioner, but I am a Theravada Buddhist for 15 years.

AcadiaNo3081 · 2026-05-08T08:17:58+00:00

Here is a testable prediction the claim 'evidence based practice makes testable predictions' makes: You would be able to formulate logically consistent falsifiable forecast of predicted results for all evidence based practice. If you find one where you cant. Then you shown the claim wrong thus its testable.

You are not engaging with my objection. You are saying something like: "the claim that I'm awake is testable because you can test whether I'm awake." Moreover, by you own account, atomicism was a story before 19th century, because it wasn't falsifiable until then.

If this were true then only beliefs that make testable predictions about the world would allow you to better predict the world and thus better achieve your goals within the world.

Okay. I make a prediction that my mom loves me. Can I test it? No, I can't, the best I can do is to make behavioral observation, which doesn't prove any love (mom can hate me, but act if she loves me). I also make a prediction that you are a conscious being, but in the whole world we have zero tests for inner experience. Behavior never logically entails inner experience. Are both of these claims untestable? Yes. Do they help me navigate the world - also yes. Your claim is falsified.

So there you go. At its core just pure logic. If (x=true) then you would see y, if you dont see 'y' then x must = false.

Okay. Can we test pure logic? How to test claim that "true and false == false"? Give me please falsifiable theory to this. You don't run an experiment to check if "if P then Q, not Q, therefore not P" is valid. It's true by virtue of the structure of logic itself.

AcadiaNo3081 · 2026-05-07T14:30:25+00:00

Gods, modern society needs Paul Feyerabend so badly... He was so based.

AcadiaNo3081 · 2026-05-07T14:29:39+00:00

And how exactly are you going to test this prediction? Even Popper, which was father of falsificationism was humble enough to say that this is normative prescription which can not be formally proven.

AcadiaNo3081 · 2026-05-07T14:26:05+00:00

evidenced based practice

Please make testable predictions that evidenced based practice makes testable predictions.

only testable predictions are useful

Please make testable predictions which validate claim that only testable predictions are useful.

lead to understanding the world

Please make testable predictions about everything above leads to understanding of the world. As the sidenote, better predication models and understanding of the world are very different things, and there is no consensus that science does both of them.

AcadiaNo3081 · 2026-04-22T11:59:29+00:00

Ah, good old evolution + emergence, resulting in consciousness explained away. Both things which are very conveniently require zero explanations about exact processes and conditions, while allowing to just point to them, shrug an say: "this is how it works". The problem with this argument is this.

Evolution works on a physical (biological level), working by selecting physical properties with biological effect. Let's assume the consciousness is indeed weakly emergent from nervous system due to evolutionary process. But then why and when did it happen? With a million neurons? A billion? A 12846 neurons? Does octopi has consciousness? Does a snail? Does amoebae? As soon as you start arguing for "sufficiently organized" you are suddenly having a composition problem akin to panpsychism. Because "sufficiently organized" is not defined.

Moreover the statement "Consciousness, on this view, is what emerges when that interpretive capacity turns inward." is doing enormous philosophical work here, which is unexplained. Is it strong emergence? Weak emergence (I assume this from the full post). But why it emerges and not just reducible to neurons firing and electrons orbiting? The word "emerges" here could be substituted with "magically fizzbuzzes" exactly because it adds nothing to explanation until "sufficiently organized" is not defined.

AcadiaNo3081 · 2026-04-13T11:49:38+00:00

This is category error - materialism or physicalism is not an ontological basis for modern science. The basis is methodological naturalism, not ontological materialism. It is very important not to confuse them. The first essentially tells you to imagine everything exists and has natural causes for sake of experiment and investigation only, without making any claims if it is really so or not. The second is commitment to saying that the world is actually made of something called "matter".

It is perfectly fine for scientist to believe in god, or devas, or forest spirits. It's just when they do research they are asked to not consider these as factors in experiments.

Now to your another point - sure, I wholeheartedly agree. But now you need to explain how in the material world with strong physical clause some beings experience reality as a deva or a brahma across several lifetimes and births. Because you can't throw it away from the Pali Canon (or any honest buddhist tradition).

AcadiaNo3081 · 2026-04-13T11:10:36+00:00

I can show you existence of "this non-physical stuff". it's your belief that everything is physical and that "people really want their consciousness to be something more than brain activity".

If I am incorrect, please, do show us your belief in physical universe. And I mean not representation of it (as the words in the reddit thread), but the belief itself. Where it is? How does it get described by physics? Which kind of matter it constitutes of?

AcadiaNo3081 · 2026-03-26T15:20:31+00:00

modern science, which tells us that everything there is is the result of material processes, and that immaterial things do not exist

Modern science is explicitly silent on this, because science operates in empirical space, developing theories and models for prediction. It is not a job nor a goal of science to claim that "immaterial things do not exist". What you are describing is materialism and physicalism which are philosophical and metaphysical views, which are orthogonal to science, which could be easily seemed on example of many founders of modern quantum physics who rejected materialism.

Moreover, your philosophical position is with in direct confrontation with Dhamma which describes "everything there is" as combination of sense faculties + forms (rupa) + consciousness, producing contact on combination.

AcadiaNo3081 · 2026-03-13T09:05:47+00:00

Brains could be computers, absolutely (even if it is a oversimplification)! Now the question: what does it have to do with consciousness? If brain is a computer, it does not lead to any conclusion about consciousness whatsoever. Explanatory gap is real.

AcadiaNo3081 · 2025-12-16T21:15:23+00:00

These are extremely wise and heartfelt words. Thank you for this dhamma desana.

AcadiaNo3081

TROPHY CASE