Quote Originally Posted by rett2 View Post
I have the greatest respect for both science and for introspective practices. As far as I'm concerned they are equally valid ways of approaching an ultimately unfathomable reality, but they have different purposes. Science does not erode, damage or take away anything from introspective practice. What science can do is take away social capital from religious or philosophical figures who base their power or status on dogmas about how the world is constructed.

Determining structures by X-ray crystallography involves processes where electromagnatic radation is viewed as quantized particles (the generation of x-rays) and as waves (diffraction). Both are useful approximations, but the underlying reality is unfathomable to use. We can't picture the wave function (unsquared), as it is inamenable to our intuition. By analogy, I suggest that experience as we perceive it, and the models of experimental science are also equally valid ways of viewing reality that do not contradict one another. However that goes both ways. Meditators can't tell scientists what physical reality is composed of and how it works, and scientists cannot tell meditators what life means. (Not just meditators, but any thinking person in the arts and humanities or anyone just engaged with the quandries of life.)

Even if science measures the brain waves of meditators, or learns to model a human being down to tiniest level, it will never touch meaning and experience.
#truthfacts

Is the question to the meditator "What life means?" or should we start from something more immediately practical? The structure, composition, type and duration of thoughts. Science can't observe my mind, but I can. It just so happens that these observations are useless and cannot be aggregated into a meaningful model. This is irrelevant to the practitioner because the purpose initially is the physio-neurological adaptation that results from rigorous disciplining of the attention.

Quote Originally Posted by rett2 View Post
As Schrödinger observed, physical models exclude experience at the outset.
Schrodinger made quite a few startling observations about the very topics at hand. What is Life mentions aperiodic crystals + genetics, consciousness, and free will vs determinism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F
...living matter, while not eluding the "laws of physics" as established up to date, is likely to involve "other laws of physics" hitherto unknown, which however, once they have been revealed, will form just as integral a part of science as the former.

The only possible alternative is simply to keep to the immediate experience that consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown; that there is only one thing and that what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing...