Everything I’ve described from my surgical experience is grounded in the physical realm and doesn’t require anything beyond that. My intent in offering the example was not to argue against its physical nature, but to show how firsthand experience can foster a deeper, more meaningful understanding. When subjective experience is paired with objective knowledge, it results in a more comprehensive scientific understanding than either alone.
It can be fully explained by physical factors. My point wasn’t to suggest it’s beyond the physical domain, but rather to emphasize that by combining subjective experience with objective knowledge, we achieve a more complete and insightful outcome.
I mentioned a particular nerve only to illustrate the difference between subjective experience and objective knowledge—not to state that this specific nerve was actually involved. Again, you’re interpreting the point too literally.
It may “clarify [your] position” (though I have my doubts). But it most emphatically does not answer my questions.
Firstly your “subjective exploration” appears to be meant to “shed light on these inner experiences” simply by experiencing those experiences. This would appear to be a vacuous claim.
Secondly, this structureless exploration would appear to provide no guardrails whatsoever against the insights that this may provide from being tainted with “preconceptions, biases, etc, etc”.
Finally, there is absolutely no reason to assume that these idiosyncratic and unreliable insights are in way compatible with, and thus capable of being integrated with, science.
I’m afraid @LRT that, like pretty much everything you’ve said about “subjective exploration”, this is nothing but bald, baseless, unsubstantiated assertion. Your narrative does not establish any “critical role” – merely that you had some form of temporary, anesthetic-induced ‘mis-sensation’.
What defines life?
How did it originate?
Does it have a purpose?
Can life arise from non-living matter?
Is life inevitable given the right conditions?
How does consciousness arise from biological process?
etc.
Right. The example was your surgical experience, but the “looking for something more” bit is not.
But is an axiom of a system of reasoning the same as an axiom about the world? I believe the latter is what he’s talking about. Are these axioms truths about the world? What does “equal” even mean in the real world? Is it saying anything to say that an orange is equal to itself? Similarly, what would it mean to say that an orange both is and isn’t an orange? What would that have to do with the real world?
Same with an axiom of faith. If it’s an axiom, there can be no way to know whether it’s true. If there were such a way, it wouldn’t be an axiom. And if there’s no way to know if it’s true, how can it be a reliable foundation for knowledge of the world?
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It makes a few good points. Most importantly, that the label shouldn’t be binary; there’s a continuum, and various journals may have different features associated with the label to various degrees. And some of the comments on peer review are valid, though I disagree with many of them. What would be a better choice than labeling MDPI as “predatory” would be saying that many (most) of its journals publish an inordinate number of crappy papers. While you can’t rely on the quality of many publishers, including Springer Nature, this is again a continuum, and MDPI is on the low end.
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How would understanding consciousness help illuminate any of these questions? I suppose that, for certain values of “understanding”, it would illuminate the last one. But what about the others?
Isn’t the act of observing presupposes these axioms.
How would you abstracted any rule about any different world if the principle of non contradiction didn’t apply to this different world? Indeed, if proposition P and its negation can both be true, it seems to me that you will get utter chaos, not a very different science.
Quite the opposite—I am not overlooking the immense complexity that continues to be revealed, as it is precisely this complexity that makes it so challenging to understand how inert matter could evolve into life. Moreover, why does such complexity exist in the first place, if not to form life? The notion of purposelessness and such intricate complexity seem to me to be at odds with each other. I’m not attacking straw men, merely posing questions.
My point in this case wasn’t to explore consciousness, but to illustrate that combining subjective experience with objective knowledge leads to a deeper understanding. This becomes even more compelling when many individuals share similar experiences.
The big questions, however, remain unanswered.
The fact that a physical anesthetic disrupted my mental map was, indeed, a purely physical process. But that wasn’t the point being made.
The focus was on how subjective experience can help us better understand what’s actually happening.
I would agree that both Springer Nature and MDPI aren’t exactly the gold standard of scientific publishers.
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Understanding life, not consciousness, would illuminate these questions.
So, if I am quote-mining, here is another one from his most recent transformer book which goes against vitalism, but again emphasise that we still do not know:
“The idea that there is a vital force, that life is fundamentally different from inanimate matter, was disproved long ago and is now wheeled out as a straw man to burn - even though it’s understandable illusion for anyone who has shared van Leeuwenhoek’s captivation with busy animalcules. Yet biohemestry - my own discipline, which deals wih the flow of energy and materials through cells - has, with a few notable exceptions, been blithely indifferent to how this unceasing flux might have arisen, or how its elemental imprint could still dictate the lives and deaths of cell today, along with the organisms they compose.”
Also, you should check out the Epilogue of The Transformer book—some fascinating insights on consciousness there.
When combined with objective knowledge, subjective experiences contribute to a deeper understanding, preventing them from becoming mere vacuous claims. This is especially true when the experience aligns with established knowledge, providing a more comprehensive and meaningful perspective that bridges the subjective and the objective.
Structured by objective accumulated knowledge.
If I hadn’t shared my experience, would your understanding of what was happening have been clearer or more muddled? If it was clearer, then subjective experience has indeed contributed to our scientific understanding of the phenomenon.
I don’t really see how the situation you recounted differs in any substantial way from how science has been practiced since human beings started practicing science. Can you elaborate?
Yes, but what @Giltil is saying goes beyond that. His claim was that “Neither rational thought nor science would even be possible if these axioms were not truths.” That logic and the scientific method necessarily involve these axioms does not entail that these axioms are “truths.” At least we cannot say it does until @Giltil clarifies exactly what he means by “truth.”
If the Axiom of Identity isn’t true, then we have big problems. 
This is getting beyond my knowledge of Set theory, but I think there is a sort of ordering, with set of provable propositions growing as more axioms are accepted. When we get down to the axiom of Choice we already have a large set of provable propositions. Adding Choice allows further propositions about infinities, but it is not the case that “nothing else makes sense” without this axiom. Quite a bit makes sense, and this might be why some do not accept Choice as necessary.
An Axiom of Faith is hard to define in term of logic, because it could easily lead to contradictions or paradoxes. In some past discussion the idea that “God does not create paradoxes” came up, thus skirting the theological paradoxes about God and immovable objects. Most people who try to reason about God are not using any formal system of logic, and I would not ask them to. This is where hermeneutics enters the picture, I think.
Despite your assertions, steady progress continues on the big questions.
There’s your straw man again. No one is asserting that we know everything.
I’ll emphasize that advances continue and that every new advance suggests multiple new questions to answer. Again, that is why science is so fun.
You, on the other hand, are asserting that science has stalled at some alleged “limits of objectivity” and needs new, subjective approaches that are allegedly “cohesive” yet you seem unable to articulate. I propose that most of us here aren’t seeing these limits because we focus on evidence, not rhetoric.
You quoted Lane:
Yet biohemestry - my own discipline, which deals wih the flow of energy and materials through cells - has, with a few notable exceptions, been blithely indifferent to how this unceasing flux might have arisen…
You don’t seem interested in those notable (and objective) exceptions. Why?
I’ve suggested that you check out the body of The Vital Question–the objective aspect that goes deeply into the evidence. Why do you appear to be quitting at the introduction?
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