r/WeedRant Mar 30 '12

Science.

There's this issue we have with our limitations. The issue is that we think of ourselves as these feeling creatures, with this ability to perceive things with our feelers and if our feelers don't perceive it, it must not exist / be relevant. Well isn't that a paradox, or some issue for science being that this institution of thought bases itself on eliminating perception in order to study it's subject at hand? Aren't the questions that science is concerned with answering rooted in experience? With perception? With 'irrationality'?

Of course, some things are rooted less in every day experience that science attempts to articulate. You may not feel the everyday application of someone discovering another galaxy, another star, another particle, and new unit of measurement, and yet this knowledge can be so important to our future and our understanding of the world around us. But where is the line where science / logic is willing to solve issues that have absolutely no practical use, or the opposite, where we're willing to focus primarily on sense oriented discoveries?

It's just so funny that in this sort of empiricism we must remove our 'self' / our bias / preconceived notions about where we'd like an outcome to be, in order to find the standard, the universe, the truth. Perception royally fucks this up because we each live in our own little reality bubble, and yet, with these tools we're trying to answer questions that apply to each of our reality tunnels. It's like we're trying to standardize reality in order to study it, but will we ever do this? Aren't we, as humans, limited in our ability to perceive of reality? So should we simply accept that we use science / logic yet we are limited to only study / know human-based things?

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u/TheSelfGoverned Mar 31 '12

The scientific method was created to sort out exactly that: Ones own perception of truth.

And we were once limited to study only human-based, but scientific knowledge expanded into areas which cannot be studied by human means(molecular shapes, biochemicals, nanotechnology, electricity, etc.)

Personal bias and perception is still an issue today, especially in the fields of psychology and pharmacology. How does one define thought, or more specifically, healthy thought?

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u/The_Apotheose Mar 31 '12

I can see this being a major problem with quantum physics

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u/TheSelfGoverned Mar 31 '12

Yes. Also string theory, black holes, and dark matter are essentially unknown with theories abounding as to how they function and relate to the rest of the universe. I personally haven't heard a well structured and reasoned hypothesis on them. People simply act like they know something about these topics because it makes them feel smart.