Modern Science Abandoned the Nature It Claims to Study

August 3, 2023

The word "science" originally meant demonstrative knowledge of any kind, with metaphysics as its highest form. The modern reduction of "science" to empirical natural science represents not a discovery but a philosophical choice one that banished essence and purpose from the study of nature.

"The word 'science' has been commandeered and expropriated by 'modern science' only quite recently; until the end of the 19th century, it was 'natural philosophy' and thus a branch of science still nominally continuous with metaphysics." Hasan Spiker

Hasan Spiker traces a rupture that most people treat as natural progress. Before the 16th-17th century Scientific Revolution, studying nature meant understanding its formal and final causes what things are and what they are for. Francis Bacon and his successors consciously narrowed the scope to "primary qualities" the quantifiable, measurable dimensions of physical reality. This was enormously productive for technology, but it came at a cost: science stopped asking what things are in themselves and started asking only how they can be manipulated.

The consequences are visible everywhere. The best philosophers of science frequently observe that modern science does not study the "nature" of the physical world at all it builds instrumentally effective models. String theory has zero empirical corroboration after decades. Multiverse theory has none even in principle. Yet popular culture treats these mathematical constructs as concrete realities. Schrodinger's Cat was designed to show the absurdity of a particular interpretation of quantum mechanics, yet most people think it demonstrates that a cat can be alive and dead simultaneously almost the precise opposite of its intent.

The deeper problem is that by banishing mind and purpose from the natural world, modern science created the conditions for physicalism the view that consciousness is merely an epiphenomenon of brain states even though this claim has nothing to do with empirical science and is arguably self-refuting.

Takeaway: Science's instrumental success does not validate its metaphysical assumptions confusing effective models with pictures of reality is the defining intellectual error of our age.