To clarify, there is nothing wrong with wanting a better way, or hoping that a personal worldview might become a practical worldview - that is not the criticism. A more constructive suggestion, is that people should strive to understand the strengths and weaknesses of whatever worldview they happen to have. We have a science tool which does a really good job at science, but is inappropriate for philosophical or spiritual questions. A worldview that want there to be something more than just science doesn’t make a very good science tool, pretty much by definition. That doesn’t mean there are no other uses for that worldview.
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What makes it inappropriate?
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If you are aspiring to true objectivity, why is your approach entirely rhetorical instead of evidentiary?
And why are you completely omitting the most objective aspect of science, hypothesis testing, in favor of the IDcreationist pseudoscientific pretense that science is merely arguing about retrospective interpretations of evidence?
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Fair point. Science IS appropriate where we can define a hypothesis, of course, but there are plenty of example of philosophical questions where that is not possible.
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One might ask what is appropriate in such cases. Will anything allow us to answer such a question reliably if science can’t?
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If we don’t have empirical data to go on, all we can do is give arguments based on premises we have simply assumed, and no way of showing that one premise is better than another.
At best we can evaluate arguments on their parsimony and/or modesty. The greater the number of unproven premises we base an argument on, the greater the probability that we’ve got at least one of them wrong and therefore the argument would be unsound. That seems intuitive to me at least. But that doesn’t at all mean the simplest argument with the fewest premises is the most likely to be true. You can have an argument based on two unproved premises that are completely bonkers and simply beg the question of course.
To make matters worse, different camps will have different intuitions about whether something is reasonable to assume or not. Since this is always going to be the case and we have no way to test these assumptions, ultimately we actually can’t demonstrate truth to our interlocutors through logical arguments and philosophical debate in the same way we could collect evidence for or against a scientific hypothesis.
I don’t agree that hypothesis testing is a sine qua non of science. Consider a group of researchers who are tagging animals. They then use these tags to determine migration patterns, population trends, etc. But all they are doing is collecting data. This data can of course, be used to generate and test hypotheses. But even if these researchers never do that, are they not still scientists? I can’t see why not.
I believe any philosophical question can be approached from a scientific perspective. By that, I mean from the premise that all that exists is the physical world and the laws describing its behaviour, as revealed to us thru science. In considering philosophical questions, any scenarios involving supernatural beings not beholden to physical laws and so forth can be disregarded on the basis that we have no good reason to believe such things exist. That is what I would consider to be using science to answer philosophical questions. And, sure, that is not to say that every philosophical question can be so answered. But, like John, I don’t see any other approach that will answer those questions.
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The word “merely” is important when we think about how our understanding of consciousness has changed over time. In the past, consciousness was seen as something divine or mystical—a life force that went beyond the physical. Today, it’s largely understood as a product of brain activity, a result of synaptic firing. In this view, consciousness is just that—an outcome of the brain’s physical processes, with no deeper essence or connection to something beyond the material world. Yes, it is now “merely” that.
The universe, after all, came from nothing. Evolution is a random, blind process driven by genetic mutations and natural selection with no purpose other than survival. Life, at its core, is just molecules interacting randomly, and our sense of self is an illusion shaped by chemical reactions in the brain. So, while we may “create meaning” in our lives, it’s a mental construct. To think that this kind of purpose could be as meaningful as something given by a purposeful universe seems questionable—perhaps even nonsensical.
This purposelessness is reflected in the very processes that brought us here. Evolution, the development of our neural networks, and the rise of consciousness are all blind, purposeless processes that don’t have a greater meaning beyond survival. Meaning, therefore, must be something we invent or impose on our lives.
The screwdriver analogy helps clarify this. We assign meaning to a screwdriver—not the universe. The tool’s purpose is a human construct, just as the meaning we give to our lives is. If meaning were inherent in the universe, we would discover it rather than create it. The universe would have a purpose, and we’d be uncovering that purpose, which would be far more profound than inventing one ourselves.
If there were a soul—a non-material essence beyond the body—it could imply that life has a deeper, more lasting meaning independent of our personal experience. This belief would change how we see life, death, and our connections with others.
In short, meaning is something humans create, rooted in our consciousness and the physical world. It doesn’t come from the universe itself. Even though we can create meaning, it remains a product of our minds, shaped by our need to find purpose in a world that seems indifferent to us. The tension between a universe with inherent meaning and one where we must create purpose ourselves reveals a deeper struggle in our understanding of life’s significance.
Please refer to my previous response to Rumraket for my answers to your first two questions. Regarding the third, I believe we play a passive role, rather than an active one, in shaping our own destiny. Our sense of self, in this view, is not an inherent or independent entity but a construct of the mind. We are not truly shaping our own destiny; instead, our brains create the illusion that we are.At least, that is the version that we get from neuroscience.
Ask an evolutionary theorist about intent and purpose in evolutionary theory!
We are not!
For reference, that worldview was:
Being truly objective means having a worldview that is open to evidence and being willing to adjust your understanding based on that evidence, rather than attempting to reinterpret or cherry-pick the evidence to fit your existing beliefs.
OK, I understand that is your opinion, but I can point to hard evidence - working results from science - to support my case that we already have a reasonably objective worldview*. If this worldview is flawed then science doesn’t work, and we don’t get good results.
I do not think you can support your position in the same way, and that is OK. You should not have to defend a personal philosophy in that way, and I won’t ask you to. BUT if you are questioning the objectivity of science, then it is fair to ask for a demonstration of whatever it is that you think is better then the science we already have.
Note that these views are not incompatible. There is nothing wrong with accepting the results of science AND still believing there is something more.
* I should note that a lot of scientific ideas fail and are rejected. Putting ideas to the test and rejecting the ones that fail is the heart of the scientific method. That is what I intend by “reasonably objective”; not perfect, but continually refining itself to remove flawed ideas.
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What I meant is that consciousness would not be a by-product of the brain, but rather a separate entity in its own right. In this analogy, consciousness would be like gravity—something that affects matter but exists independently of it. Just as gravity operates on physical objects without being a product of them, consciousness would interact with the brain and body but not be solely reducible to them.
Science must remain open to the possibility that there may be aspects of reality beyond the material world, and that exploring these dimensions may require more than just scientific methods. Given its inherently subjective nature, such phenomena may not be fully accessible through empirical observation alone, and a broader, more interdisciplinary approach might be needed to study them.
You mentioned in your post that epigenetic inheritance is not an evolutionary factor, but I pointed out that in plants, epigenetic inheritance is indeed recognized as an important evolutionary factor.
Correct; evidence would be needed for us to begin accepting it as plausible. While the majority of neuroscientists still focus on the brain as the source of consciousness, a few are beginning to explore alternative explanations beyond just brain activity to understand where consciousness truly comes from.
Science may just be reaching a point where it’s beginning to question why fundamental questions like the nature of life and consciousness aren’t advancing more rapidly. But even so, science is still far from fully exploring new avenues that could potentially provide answers.
Hypothesis testing is a cornerstone of the scientific method, but it’s interesting how scientists sometimes interpret evidence in ways that strongly align with their own theories or biases.
It would? Why?
I don’t believe you have actually explained what “inherent meaning” is. I’m not convinced that the concept is even coherent.
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You pick a good place to ask that question - we have some people here well qualified to answer. 
You sort of get around to answering what I asked in another response. I’ll get to that.
Thanks for defining that. I think that might be a useful place to start.
Do you realize the contradiction here? You are asking that science become something other than science. You are hardly the first person to bump into this problem.
I confess to asking for an AI summary of this, and near-death experiences were one of the topics mentioned. This is a topic that has come up before, and you might be interested in those previous discussions.
Yes, of course. It would be highly unusual for a scientist to put effort into theories or ideas they don’t think have a chance of being correct, unless it involves eliminating other possibilities. Sometimes those interpretations and biases turn out to be correct, but often not. Testing those ideas are how progress is made.
Sure, they are doing science too, and if there is any justice they will be co-authors. For that matter, the near-entirety of my own career is being a co-author, so how could I object? 
(@John_Harshman too)
My counter example (which you surely know already) is a concept. Concepts are not material, but some have the power to influence thinking and behavior in the material world. They can be useful. We can test certain hypotheses about concepts, collecting material data to test the hypothesis. That does not make a concept a material thing, unless we count ideas as being material (and I think they are not).
Just to be contrary, I will note that @LRT’s ideas do not actually require that a supernatural consciousness exists, only that such a concept might be useful. I would allow this is possible, but I still want a material demonstration of that usefulness.