The beginning of my journey of thought...

By day I am a lowly, very early career scientist. My days are spent running experiments in cognition for well-respected professors. Each day I walk the halls of academic progress, cutting edge science, evolving frontiers of knowledge. I share my time with colleagues who firmly trust that this knowledge pertains to truth about the nature of the world around and within us. However, by night, dare I utter it, I find myself increasingly nibbled by metaphorical worms of doubt. I am restless with the discomfort I imagine descended upon the first Christian to suspect that perhaps there is no heaven awaiting us after all.

My primary problem is this: is the ‘objective reality’ presented by the scientific method the true reality? Or is it merely a version of reality, a version whose depiction is constrained by the methods used to achieve it?

This quickly leads me to further questions on the nature of our understandings of reality; is the scientific method just another form of knowledge acquisition? For example, are the findings from scientific studies any truer than the quiet personal insights achieved by the Buddhist deep in meditation, or the relativist’s investigations into an individualised snapshot in time? And if so, can knowledge derived from the scientific method be superior to any other method? And furthermore, how do we place intrinsic merit values on knowledge derived from different modes of thought within the world?

Now I am not a philosopher, and I am sure that a philosopher would address these questions with ease. However, I do urgently feel that our inherent assumptions in scientific knowledge acquisition need to be considered, if not investigated. So I’m going to do my best. Those who have leapt further than these early tentative steps of mine, please be patient with me.

My increasing disquiet tells me this is what I should do. The investigation of thought in the thirteenth hour is born.

Philosophers may find my musings grossly un-informed; scientists may shake their heads and throw me to the irrational basket. However, I am lucky that there are many centuries of thinkers who have come before me from whom I can gleam some sort of knowledge base. Some well respected, some not, all with something interesting to say.

Lets investigate with an open mind into the knowable, and maybe the unknowable too.

THANKS TO http://www.nataliedee.com/archives/2005/Sep/ FOR THE COMIC IMAGE