> Science is built upon testability. If something can't be tested, we can't extend our scientific understanding of it.

Yes.

> If you can't verify if the hypothesis is accurate or not then the scientific method doesn't work.

No. Science never verifies, science only falsifies. If something were to be verified successfully, that would mean that falsification would be impossible. If something is not falsifiable, it is not testable, and therefore not science, therefore science does not verify.

> You can only verify if something is accurate or not if you can accurately measure it.

What does "accurate(ly)" mean here?

> Measuring something relies on being able to quantify it.

No, unless you mean that in the very abstract sense that any information can be encoded as numbers.

> It's the "at least not yet" that I'm referring to as the misconception. Some things do not lend themselves to measurement, so in some cases it's much more honest to admit we'll probably never be able to accurately measure something.

I'll take the "to accurately measure something" to mean "to explain something scientifically", as I don't understand what you mean by "accurately measure something", see above.

"at least not yet" means "it's not possible now, possibly it will never be possible, possibly it will be possible at some point", right? So, where does that contradict the "admission" that "we'll probably never be able" to make that a misconception? Aren't you saying essentially the same thing with different words?

> Let's also imagine I ask multiple people the same question. What can I infer from this data set? Am I measuring the perception of sadness?

With noise, as all measurements are, but yes, what else would you be measuring?

> What role does the strength of memory play on this? Would I have got a different answer if I asked you 5 minutes later?

All perfectly fine scientific question that one could investigate, no?

> Is a 7/10 from one person comparable to a 7/10 from another person?

Maybe, maybe not, how is the precision of a measurement relevant to the question of whether it is a measurement?

> Note that even though the data set is nonsense, the decision on which number between 1 to 10 was based on something (or rather a group of different things), it's just not something that can be boiled down to a model. Any attempt to do so will require such high levels of abstraction that the end result is too far divorced from reality.

Are you saying that you think the answers you would get would be completely random with no connection to people's actual emotional state? Do you think that if you asked this question to a population of people whose loved ones were murdered the night before you ask them, they would be just as likely to answer 1 as they would be to answer 10 or any number in between, and the distribution of answers would be indistinguishable from when you asked a population of people who just found new love and won a million bucks in the lottery?

Or in other words: Are you saying that you think the model/concept that we commonly refer to using the label "happiness" in the English language does not map to anything in reality?

> To give a more famous example, Douglas Adams' meaning of life being 42, even if you understood the variables used to arrive at this number, what relation does that number have to reality?

Erm ... the relation described by the method that is used to arrive at this number? Is that a trick question?

> In summary, science attempts to describe the order in the chaos, but there are certain aspects of life that do not lend themselves to being reduced in this way.

Such as? Can you justify that position in any way? So far, this seems to be a completely unsupported assertion on your part.

> If you accept that, then you can accept that even if science has merit in some fields, it also has its limitations.

Which is precisely what I said: It is a very important part of science to say "I don't know", that is exactly the recognition that scientific knowledge has limits.