+JTB Pred That's why I mention my preference for the Engineering
Method; there's not a whole lot written up on it - I only
discovered it a few weeks ago: It does not mock past methods.
(before that, I thought science and engineering were two parts
of the same thing, but they're not - not always) Rather, it uses
the term "State of the Art". Ancient days modeled reality using
their State of the Art; it was the best available methods given
the resources they had at hand. Bridges were built that stood
for thousands of years; even if the theories of the nature of
reality at the time involved the things you said above. Even if
the engineers of the time believed such theories about the
nature of things, nonetheless, they build bridges that worked.
Our current state of the art for modelling the physical realm is
Physics and its accompanying partner: Mathematics. They tend to
work very well together much of the time, although sometimes
they are at odds with each other and have allowed us to create
some marvelous things and helped to make further predictions and
discoveries. But other areas of science are poorly supported by
mathematics; and some areas of human life are poorly represented
by the sciences and have better models that are more effective.
The experience of consciousness is poorly modeled by all of the
sciences - every place I researched through journals (that's
where I look first as I like to know science's state of the art)
- when you get to the area of experience, they always turn to
either Buddhism or Meditation or other models that are more
highly developed at describing consciousness. That doesn't mean
that they are correct: in fact, I've found it very annoying that
the sciences, outside of psychology, has done a generally poor
job in that area and I wish someone would pick up the ball
already. And psychology... well, it has a lot of good in it but
it has a LOT of work to be done there. "Breath deeply" is about
the best advice it can offer. The average middle school coach
knows how to destress his athletes better than most psychology
(run around the track 5 times and work it off - much better
advice than breath deep :P ) Can you see my thinking processes
here? I'm not trying to get you to agree- I think agreement is
over-rated anyhow although it's nice - but just to explain
myself a little better.
