I think that you and I may not share the same understanding of what a "scientific proof" is. All I'm saying here is that we learned mathematics empirically--through perceptions of repeatable experiences. Science involves more than empiricism, but it is, broadly speaking, empirical method. Our minds learn by association, abstraction, and analogy. All knowledge is grounded in experience, including knowledge of mathematics and logic.
Which is why your "scientific proof" of math doesn't work. A "2" isn't physical. It's a numerical symbol one already has to understand. A small example of this is that the universe is comprised of about 10^80 fundamental particles (electrons, etc.). However we can formulate numbers far higher than this, making numbers far greater than all physical matter in the universe, and thus these numbers are in no means empirical. Technically in an empirical sense you're not even reading words or numbers. You're looking at pixels on a screen where your eye catches the spectrum of light and filters it through your brain so you can see the image the pixels form.
Now, that we can learn
through empirical means is certainly true. However, that all knowledge is grounded on empirical experience certainly isn't. For one thing "knowledge" is itself in no way physical. You can't smell it. It has no texture to feel or taste. You can't empirically experience knowledge. So the question that must be asked is, how do you know you have knowledge when you never have empirically experienced it? It can't be held by it's own standard, and thus collapses on itself.
But the knowledge that rape is wrong is not a direct experience. It is based upon analogy with other experiences. All I've said is that our chain of experiences is ultimately grounded in the only absolute knowledge we have--direct bodily experiences. This philosophical approach is sometimes called "experientialism", if you would like a name to call it by. Because all knowledge is analogically grounded in bodily experience, we call human and animal minds "embodied minds".
Again, no. See above. That knowledge itself is in no way physical means you can't experience it through empirical means. That it can be accesed by a soulish means is another matter.
That's easy to answer. I know it is my body because I experience my body directly. My senses continually corroborate the existence of my body.
We have empathy to sympathise with someone else's experience. You could be experiencing someone else's body. Or just a body belonging to no one.
...You could say that the fact that you have a concious control over "your" body is evidence of this. But it seems so obvious that evidence is not needed, and that's the point. You must first have self-evident knowledge, or knowledge by intuition, to even begin to know things, through empirical tests or experience.
Your thoughts on these issues appear a bit confused and jumbled to me. You appear to be agreeing with me that bodily experience is direct and that it constitutes "absolute knowledge". All other thoughts and beliefs are derivative of this experience.
Hardly. See any magic trick to know that your senses can be fooled. Or watch
The Matrix. I'm saying there is already self-evident knowledge in place that empiracle experiences can never tell you about. And thus the belief that only those things that can be accessed by empirical experience is false.
Fact: This is also why science primarily developed better in Western civilizations, rather than Eastern one's given that the belief that everything is an illusion and thus we could never really know anything was widely dominate in the East.
I think that this generalization is a vast oversimplification that doesn't really say much. Western civilization did not develop in the complete absence of intellectual commerce with Eastern religions. There were Buddhists and Hindus in the Greek and Roman Empires. Alexander made it all the way to India. If you study Hindu schools of philosophy, you quickly discover a great deal of parallelism between Indian and Greek schools of philosophy (although the Indians seemed to have been quite a bit more advanced than the Greeks in some areas). The Greeks talked about illusion, just as much as the Hindus and Zoroastrians did. There are some basic differences between dharmic and non-dharmic philosophies, but those differences existed in the East as well.
Actually that I attribute science developed
better in the west is largely thanks to Christianity. Yes, the East held scientific knowledge. That they believed the world was an illusion just goes to show the contridiction of that belief. How can you have true information from something that doesn't exsist?
I don't think anyone is claiming that there is no absolute reality, only that we cannot derive knowledge of it independently from our bodily senses. This insight was developed in Greek and Roman times, and Sextus Empiricus even gave his name to the philosophical tradition of empiricism--all that we know derives from bodily senses. Indians also had their own empiricist traditions.
Yet again this goes into those immaterial things we all know but can't experience through empirical means: Happiness, Love, Understanding, Knowledge, etc. And again you face the problem that your senses can be fooled. So you can't really know what your body is experienceing. You think some one on hallucinigenic drugs, or a schizophrenic is hearing and seeing real things?
It is true that science cannot test for immaterial things if they never interact with material things. To the extent that they do interact, then science can study them. So far, we have not reliably detected such interactions.
And thus is why we have people saying those immaterial things don't exsist because science can't test them. Yet a moments reflection indicates that immaterial things do exsist. Morality is a truth that exsists. I would say torturing babies for the fun of it is immoral. All science can speak of is that babies were tortured. It can't give anything to whether this is right or wrong. I can know this without any experience whatsoever. That babies may have been tortured for fun and thus learned through second-hand experience is irrelevant, due to that I can simply hypothysize it's occurance without anyone actually performing the act.
So, I would say that science can't ever interact with immaterial things even when they are interacting with material things. They simply can only study the material end. Remember how I explained to you the correlation of the immaterial mind and soul with the material body? Science can never test the mind or the soul. Yet through the laws of rationality and simple intuition we can reliably know many immaterial things are there.
