[Blind Eye Jones]

"If, as you suggest, reversion to a pre-scientific notion of 'soul' is the issue, none of this has anything to do with medicine or science at all, and so the fact that it is a medical doctor who is making the claim is irrelevant—he is not making the claim qua physician."

Perhaps science is outside its jurisdiction with certain everyday pre scientific phenomena, like our consciousness or creativity. Science can't determine this yet, if it can at all. I have read somewhere that the id is the creator of everything, including science. That science has to stand on the back of the pre-scientific, like dwarfs standing on each other's backs... but building a human pyramid of knowledge. Every now and then there is a giant that comes along and tries to lift everybody higher to see a new horizon or it tries to violently knock down the whole thing. Copernicus and his Pope where two such giants... but if science does come from the id, do you think that there may be many sciences for different cultures, as there has been a variety of science (Ptolemaic, Newtonian, etc.) for ours?

[snarks_when_bored]

Perhaps science is outside its jurisdiction with certain everyday pre scientific phenomena, like our consciousness or creativity. Science can't determine this yet, if it can at all.

I tend to think not. The scientific method is still a baby. Who knows what it will have deciphered a few centuries hence?

...if science does come from the id, do you think that there may be many sciences for different cultures, as there has been a variety of science (Ptolemaic, Newtonian, etc.) for ours?

It's fashionable in some quarters to argue that, say, electrons are 'social constructions', so if some society chooses not to construct electrons it just means that they have a different kind of science and world-view, no worse than our own.

This is arrant nonsense. It troops together with the view that the world view of radical islam is no worse than the world view of democratic pluralism. The inability to judge claims of truth bleeds over (sometimes literally!) into the inability to judge claims of value.

We should resist this post-modernist pestilence.

(Nice to hear from you Blind Eye. I hope your music-making goes well...)