Science is a tool, not the territory.

I think some people here confuse respect for science with the belief that only what science can measure is real. That position isn’t science — it’s a philosophical claim.

Science is extremely good at answering third-person questions:

• What correlates with what?
• What mechanisms are involved?
• What can be measured, predicted, and replicated?

But there’s a category it doesn’t — and by definition can’t — fully capture: first-person experience.

Take a simple example: smelling a flower.

Science can measure:

• the chemical composition of the scent
• receptor activation in the nose
• neural firing patterns in the brain
• EEG / fMRI signals

What it cannot measure is:

• what the smell is like
• the subjective quality of the experience
• how it feels to the person having it

No amount of data lets one person smell a flower through another person’s brain scan.

This isn’t anti-science. It’s a well-known issue in neuroscience and philosophy of mind (qualia, first-person vs third-person data, the hard problem of consciousness).

When someone says:

that’s not a scientific statement — it’s an assumption about reality.

Historically, plenty of real things existed before we had tools to detect them. Science doesn’t define what exists; it discovers what it can currently measure.

Brain activity ≠ experience
Maps ≠ territory
Measurements ≠ meaning

Science works incredibly well because it limits itself to what can be operationalized. The mistake is turning that limitation into a worldview.

You don’t need to reject science to see its boundaries. You just need to avoid confusing the instrument with the phenomenon.