The Basic Flaw in the Scientific Method
How too great a belief in the method of science leads to delusion
Science has a long history. What we call “science” today did not coalesce into its present definition until the end of the nineteenth century in which what was previously known as natural philosophy took on the word Scientia, “knowledge” as what we now come to use as a catch all word for a method, discipline, set of institutions and a storehouse of discoveries or conclusions.
We have then largely come to believe that science is the best way by which we can know if things are true. This has some reason behind it, knowing truth is a highly fraught endeavour, and as any naturalist would eagerly point out, evolution has not seemingly equipped us with epistemological apparatus as much as heuristic apparatus.
A naturalist would point to an example such as religion, or even the belief in one’s own free will. These are, to be generous, metaphors, to be cynical, heuristics. In other words, things that aren’t necessarily true but that provide us some benefit by believing them. Indeed one could argue (some do) that the brain is essentially creating reality as much as seeing it, thus making pretty much everything heuristics. Neuroscientist Anil Seth, for example, gave a Ted Talk entitled “Your brain hallucinates your conscious…
