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In your fervor to dismiss the human experience it appears that you have played a bit loose with the logical formation of your argument and thereby missed an imp
by Brain_Thief 7y ago
In your fervor to dismiss the human experience it appears that you have played a bit loose with the logical formation of your argument and thereby missed an important point. Your premise is that the veracity of previously-achieved scientific results holds independent of human opinion or emotion. You then use this basis to conclude that "...feelings are irrelevant to both the scientific process and the results found from using it." But here you are 1) confusing the product of the scientific process (a distinctly human endeavor with obvious limitations) with the actual nature of reality that said process is attempting to probe, and 2) conflating the achieved results of the process with the process itself. In fact, nearly every novel scientific result achieved is the product of a human mind's creative efforts (and sometimes fortunate accidents). The enthusiasm, open-mindedness, and feelings of a scientist absolutely impact his or her line of thought and level of creativity and therefore directly influence the set of scientific results that are generated by the scientific process. Our ability to probe reality is correlated with our ability to imagine and intuit relationships (and to construct experiments that may illuminate them); our imagination and intuition are correlated with our current and past emotional states. Ergo, human feelings directly impact the output of the scientific process and our understanding of the natural laws underpinning reality.
You may consider the case of pure mathematics, where intensely creative and open-minded individuals manipulate exotic structures atop towering ladders of abstraction; such exploration is the source of much of our most powerful technology and insights into reality. If you listen to explanations of the working methods employed by mathematicians many of them will claim that among the tools they rely upon most heavily are intuition and "feeling".
Once you move beyond the unfortunate anti-human perspective of what I'll half-jokingly call "extreme scientific materialism" and accept the fundamental role of the human experience in the unfolding of the cosmos you might come to see that a mind bent on pure rationality (to the exclusion of all else) is like a beautiful, fueled-up airplane idling on the runway with no pilot in it.
- RobertRoberts 7y agoI won't pretend feelings don't exist, science can't even measure them. I am simply arguing that we need a real solution, and how we feel about that solution doesn't change whether it will work or not. A non-functioning solution that feels good won't fix the climate. Arguing that feelings are relevant isn't a fix. The great leaders down through history did not rely on making people feel good, they did the opposite. They inspired people to take on real difficulties. To face _not_ feeling good. That is the problem right now, hypocritical leadership has no ability to inspire or motivate and will not make any changes to the climate.