Science Needs to Stop Talking as Though What it Investigates Actually Exists

Science, in its best form, does not care if what it discusses actually exists, physically.

This is because what matters are the properties that we discover/rediscover in the subject of interest.

Just as a fiction book can teach the greatest lessons without its characters and scenarios being true, science does not depend on its theories embodying some true definite form of that which it explains.

It is the properties, found to be invariant, using whatever lens the current paradigm happens to adopt, that speaks to universal truths; truths about systems, dynamics, structures, processes, patterns, mechanisms, constraints and life writ large.

These truths persist, even if the naive ways we find them do not.

The same can be said for religion. Any religion’s greatest contribution does not depend on its stories being true. The value is in its utility, and revelations related to the workings of life and meaning. Their stories may be true, they may not be; hence faith. But to focus on their historical accuracies is to miss the point.

This does not negate the fact that believing something actually is often provides the greatest motivation to pursue truth in the first place.

But the point stands; the quest for knowledge does not depend on the reality of the placeholder objects we use to determine what is true.

Letting go of our need to believe in the specific physical form of what we theorize in more logical and scientific than the alternative. Scientific theories are epistemic tools that must be wrong. There is no such thing as a direct measurement, nor proof in science. It is a theory’s capacity to collapse that makes it worthwhile.

We can only infer the informational properties of that which we study. What physical substrate enacts those properties is both irrelevant and unknowable. Information is ultimately agnostic to physical reality, and thus finds its presence universally untethered to any specific physical instance. It persists, because it does not emanate from a specific thing.

Science needs to stop talking as though what it investigates actually exists if it is to truly embrace rational and scientific truth.