Re: dhw--Epistemological Framework (Order of Rank?) (Humans)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Monday, March 07, 2011, 13:43 (5009 days ago) @ dhw

dhw, -This needs a little more discussion:- The claim that "the only way to understand what you're studying is to understand it as a unity of cause and effect" would rob us of virtually every technological, medical, and scientific advance we humans have ever made. Of course our understanding will only be partial ... as you say, the network is infinite ... but without that clear distinction we will be confined to the present state of things: the car will never start again, the disease will never be cured, I shall never know the cause of thunder.-You went down the wrong rabbit hole here...
This goes back to my distinction on what it means to know something. Not to just hear it. Not just repeat what someone told you, but to know. Knowing is a marriage of all the causes and all the effects that make up that object. It's a deep understanding, NOT a superficial one. Science's job is to give us workable knowledge--NOT truth. You're describing workable knowledge. -Truth was perhaps a misleading word for me here. Science gives us workable knowledge. Actionable. Just enough to transform our environment. But you seemed to me to be mistaking "what works" for "what's true" and by extension "what's reality." Reality can never be fully understood this way, to the extent that any individual is capable of understanding reality. Science is understanding reality by creating a chain of causes and effects and comparing them to what we see. We build a model from language and see if observations make sense. But even going back to my pool cue description, it only captures a small shade of what's going on--only that portion that can be described by language. -As a sidenote, diving back into these old teachings after having abandoned them for so many years has demonstrated to me more directly exactly what it is that scientism endangers. There's a sharper distinction to me in the mind that I didn't catch on the first pass.

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"