> The point I'm making which you're overlooking is that those two viewpoints are not equally likely.

I am not overlooking that at all, which is why I said "generally". There can be reasons to think one direction is more likely than another to make progress--that in itself is actually again a question open to scientific inquiry. But the point is that the "we don't know yet" does not imply one way or the other, but some of your points assumed that it did, which is why I wanted to clear this up first.

> If science needs the accumulation of evidence to build an accurate understanding, but some parts of our world are highly resistant to this process, it is not at all likely that we will break that barrier.

Yeah, sure. But how do we know which parts of our world are highly resistant to scientific inquiry?

> Like it or not, "We don't know, at least not yet" implies hope

I'm not so sure I would go so far as to call it hope, but it obviously leaves open the logical possibility of progress at a later date, yes. The actual hope that people have of ever finding the answer to a given question, though, varies widely depending on the question.

> I'm suggesting there are some parts of our experience that are fundamentally hostile to scientific inquiry, and the sooner we accept that science (whilst very useful in some fields) has fundamental limits, the easier it'll be to take a more holistic view of what constitutes wisdom.

But how do we distinguish those parts of our experience that are fundamentally hostile to scientific inquiry from those that we simply didn't have the right idea yet how to approach them?

I don't see any problem with the hypothesis that some parts of our experience might be fundamentally off limits to scientific inquiry. What I don't see is any justification for it actually being true, and in particular I don't see any justification for the hypothesis that a particular part of our experience is hostile to scientific inquiry, which would be required for this knowledge to actually be practically relevant (just knowing that something is off limits doesn't help you anything if you have no clue what it is that you are wasting your time on).

Put yourself in the shoes of an educated person in the 10th century. Suppose you were asked to decide where to draw the line between which parts of our experience are fundamentally hostile to scientific inquiry and which parts it's reasonable to have hope of progress in understanding in. What do you think, which branches of modern day established scientific knowledge would you have cut off? Remember, not even optical microscopes have been invented yet. Germs as causes of diseases are unknown. A prevailing theory of disease is the theory of humors. And prevailing not among quacks, but among what you might call the medical elite of the time. You can not use anything we now know to make the decision, and that includes a whole lot of stuff that everyone just knows to be true, it's actually pretty hard to even figure out what you would have to discard to be in the position of that 10th century person, stuff that you have learned in elementary school and just consider an obvious fact of life was still fundamentally misunderstood and centuries away from discovery.

Now, mind you that leaving open the logical possibility of answers at a later date does not imply that you assign it a high probability, and it in no way prevents you from prioritizing other things for investigation. By contrast, if you actually mean "there is no answer to this question", then that implies that you stop any further investigation forever. If you have concluded with absolute certainty that an answer is impossible, it would be nonsensical to search for an answer, as you would be doing what you are convinced to be a waste of time.

I think you will agree that any decision to actually stop inquiry forever into certain parts of our experience in the 10th century based on the best knowledge available then could very well have ended with some very important and useful field of knowledge of today being erased from history? So, what makes you confident that you can pull it off now without the same risk for our ancestors 1000 years down the line? What makes you so sure that you are not as myopic about our future as they would have been about things that now seem trivial? We are now starting to fix genetic diseases in living organisms. They were still thinking about those diseases in terms of humors and demons. We can now reliably distinguish and treat thousands of diseases, compared to four hilariously inaccurate categories of humors. There is still much that could be better, but the precision we have now would have been just unimaginable to the medical elite of that time.

So, what is your justification that distinguishes your position from someone a thousand years ago claiming that the human body is just too complex and demons are fundamentally hostile to scientific inquiry (well, the spirit of that statement, the conceptualization of the scientific method was still far in the future, obviously), and therefore we should accept that science has fundamental limits?

> To be clear, I have no problem with the scientific process whatsoever, I think it has been a fantastic tool in helping humanity advance. The issue I have is with stretching that tool beyond the point of utility, but giving it a pass because it's science.

Well, what is that point of utility, and how did you determine that?

> As I sense our debate will soon be winding down

Well, I'm happy to continue this, and even getting back to your previous post, as well as your still open question elsewhere in the thread, I'm just trying to avoid confusion by not continuing discussion on too many ideas simultaneously.