Everything is science, and just because humans, who are no where near all powerful and all know knowing, can't discover how ever little detail of existence and how the universe works scientifically doesn't mean it is something other than science. Just look at how science has advanced since the beginning of human history. Everything that we once believed has changed to conform with bigger and stronger understandings that we could never have imagined. Just because we can't see how something works doesn't mean it's work is something other than science.
Yeah I put just as much faith in believing in the unexplained as religions but at least my belief continues to grow and strengthen as actual proof piles on the table.
Although I basically agree with the above sentiments, I'd not compare science to religion as two
things one may have faith in, one with growing evidence and one without. Rather, science and faith are two
methods that one may use to acquire evidence and thus make testable meaningful predictions, both of the methods flawed, but one of them clearly a lot more flawed than the other.
Science isn't a monolith of beliefs with mounting evidence for their absolute truth; rather it is a process by which people make and test beliefs. Neither is faith a monolith of beliefs (religions are, faith isn't), rather a process by which people make and test beliefs.
The success of faith, in its own terms (it finds evidence that supports its predictions), can be explained by scientific method (confirmation bias will do for a start) as not depending on the truth value of its predictions. I guess the fidelic method could do the same for science: faith is, after all, quite capable of coming up with pretty much any explanation and then finding evidence for it (one of its most glaring flaws; and one flaw which the scientific method explicitly guards against).
Since both science and faith are evidence-based,
in their own respective terms, I guess maybe the only way to persuade someone of faith that the scientific method is consistently more effective than faith at arriving at or close to accurate descriptions of and predictions of reality (in the long run), is by appeal to logic and common sense (two ways of thinking that should surely be orthogonal to the faith/science divide).
Science depends on the subjective experiences of animals (humans, specifically, in the case of humans conducting science) using their imperfect motor apparatus to manipulate the world, and their imperfect sensory apparatus to apprehend the consequences of their manipulations (or sometimes just to apprehend the world, without manipulation), and their imperfect cognitive apparatus to interpret those consequences and make, based on them, propositions about reality.
So does faith, clearly, although often faith does without the 'apprehending the world' bit, sticking instead to apprehending one's own internal states. Then again, so does science sometimes (psychophysics essentially omits the 'apprehending the world' from the equation, rather apprehending one's own apprehension of the world).
But faith stops there. It doesn't take care to check whether the experience is replicable, whether there could be any other things that could have caused the experience other than the one that it initially interpreted to be the cause, it doesn't take care to minimize the effects of the human's limitations by rigorously gathering evidence from multiple sources, explicitly seeking justified contradictions of its interpretation.
It seems clear that science is just making a hell of a lot more of an effort to deal with the fact that we are not infinitely perfect devices of sense, action and cognition.
Anyway, I'm not disagreeing with you fundamentally..., just was interested to think further on ideas you raised.
What you experience is up to you to interpret, but it is just our brains going crazy inducing a wild perception that runs in set of biological guidelines and parameters. It has as much meaning as everything else in this world, basically it is nothing special.
While I agree that the 'meaning' of experiences is an empirical psychological question, different - and equally unrelated to truth or falsity outwith itself - for different people, entirely amenable to science in that sense (psychology), and that meaning is just how people relate to any stuff, psychedelic experiences being nothing special in that sense; I wouldn't want so strongly to say that McKenna can't be right... It seems not impossible (though not evidenced by any means) that in the psychedelic state our neurons (or at least those neurons accessible by the talky bit, since that's the bit of the brain that talks about this shit) may be more amenable to influences outwith the normally perceived three dimensions of space (given that the true dimensionality of space is somewhat of an open question in physics at the moment, right?). But it's an empirical question, of course.
