In Defense of the Scientific and the Spiritual - Part 1 : What is Science, Really?

The Universe does not exist in a binary, there are not only shades of grey between black and white, but an uncountable infinity of various wavelengths extending from the planck length to as long as the observable universe.

This is especially amazing considering that the entirety of our visual perception is limited to an extremely narrow band of around 300nm.

Everything you have ever seen can fit in a space of less than 1/3rd of a mm.

Nevertheless we must have limits in all things, lest we get too bogged down with the infinite weight of uncountable infinities.

Thus when I speak of science, I mean a narrow subset of natural philosophy called Logical Positivism and for our purposes we are going to limit ourselves specifically to it's most rigid subset Falsificationism

This helps us ensure that our Science explores the "how" of things and posits that the universe is best explained by things which are quantifiable, measurable, but also "falsifiable". Meaning that some experiment can be proposed which would allow for the hypothesis to be refuted.

This is the most powerful tool we have for inquiry into objective reality. It means that if something cannot be "quantified", it is not scientific, even if a respected scientist is telling it to you.

Under this definition here is what makes science, scientific.

#1 It relies on observation
#2 The observation can be described with a theory
#3 The theory makes a prediction
#4 That prediction can be tested
#5 That test results in an observation

If those 5 things are not present, you do not have science. If the results of the experiment cannot be repeated, then you also don't have science. You may have some or another branch of philosophy, but not actual science. You need the rigor of the scientific method in order to make a scientific claim. Because science is a tool to describe our shared objective reality.

Science is just a tool for describing our shared objective reality!
And beyond this point of, shared objective reality, is also where science breaks down and is no longer the best tool to use.

There's a lot of stuff passing for science, that is in no way scientific. It is spiritualism or religion or general philosophy, pretending to be science.

Being unscientific doesn't make it "bad" per se; it just means that the tools of science won't help you beyond this point and you need to look for new tools, before you break your tools by banging them upon the rocks of either absolutism or the infinite.

Our science requires a thing to be measurable, but the limits of our perception are such that we need instrumentation and tools to give us the "enhanced extra senses", that we need in order to probe the depths beyond what we are endowed with. As such, our tools really don't "tell us anything". The tool gives us a measurement, in units that are within the physicality of our understanding.

Yet it is up to each of us to interpret what those measurements actually mean, regarding the subject matter under study.

This is a fancy way of saying that...

We cannot make the mystery go away by "explaining" how it works. We just tell you how it works. In telling you how it works, we will have told you about the basic peculiarities.
The game we play is a very interesting one. It's imagination, in a straightjacket.
Richard Feynman