Science is not in the business of explaining the intrinsic nature of the world. Instead, it explains the behavior and interactions of the world purely for the purpose of prediction. This predictive power of science has led us to the modern age where our technology has transformed how we live.
The Galilean Revolution
At the time of Galileo, the naturalistic philosophy of Aristotle dominated thought. These ideas worked with qualities rather than quantities. In 1623, Galileo revolutionized natural philosophy, giving birth to modern science by explicitly ignoring sensory qualities and yielding to an ontology that put mathematics as the language of reality.
Galileo declared that there is a “book to the universe,” and if we hope to see in the dark labyrinth we find ourselves in, we need to learn to speak its language: mathematics. He thought that mathematics could provide insight into the nature of physical reality, leaving the sensory qualities to the domain of the soul.
To achieve this paradigm shift, Galileo discarded the qualities of subjective experience such as smells and colors, considering them as machinations of the soul. In the material world, objects were reduced to just four properties:
- Size
- Shape
- Location
- Motion
This mind-body separation — this naturalistic dualism — is hardwired into us, with children at an early age categorizing “mental things” as distinct from “physical things.”
The Success and Limitations of Science
Science has been so successful at describing the natural world precisely because it limits its scope. By focusing on quantifiable aspects and mathematical relationships, science has achieved unprecedented predictive power and technological progress.
However, even if physics one day gives us a Grand Unified Theory of Everything, it will be a set of mathematical equations. It will tell us nothing of what breathes fire into those equations to create the universe that we all experience.
Experience is the keyword here because science has been so successful precisely because it has ignored the Hard Problem of Consciousness. We can only know our world through our consciousness — through that which we experience. It is this experience that mediates our understanding and perception of the world.
When Galileo declared mathematics to be the language of science, he explicitly put the qualitative outside the domain of the quantitative realm of science. And it is because science transforms the world into a set of pointers — a language that describes the world, but crucially isn’t the world — that it has been so successful.
The Future of Understanding
Science doesn’t have to deal with the what (the intrinsic nature of matter), only the how (the behavior). We shouldn’t confuse the practical utility of predicting behavior that physical science gives us with the ontological aspiration of realizing a complete Theory of Everything.
Science cannot give us that unless it goes beyond physical science, embracing it as an aspect in a larger unified theory. To truly understand the nature of reality, we need to find a way to bridge the gap between the quantitative world of science and the qualitative world of conscious experience.
Source: Galileo’s Error Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness