Yeah, I'm talking here about the Engineering Method again. I get inspired by talking to people who argue with me sometimes - read if you like. I put it on my profile so I don't lose it... [snip] That's why I mention my preference for the Engineering Method; there's not a whole lot written up on it - I only discovered it a few weeks ago: It does not mock past methods. (before that, I thought science and engineering were two parts of the same thing, but they're not - not always) Rather, it uses the term ''State of the Art''. Ancient days modeled reality using their State of the Art; it was the best available methods given the resources they had at hand. Bridges were built that stood for thousands of years; even if the theories of the nature of reality at the time involved the things you said above. Even if the engineers of the time believed such theories about the nature of things, nonetheless, they build bridges that worked. Our current state of the art for modelling the physical realm is Physics and its accompanying partner: Mathematics. They tend to work very well together much of the time, although sometimes they are at odds with each other and have allowed us to create some marvelous things and helped to make further predictions and discoveries. But other areas of science are poorly supported by mathematics; and some areas of human life are poorly represented by the sciences and have better models that are more effective. The experience of consciousness is poorly modeled by all of the sciences - every place I researched through journals (that's where I look first as I like to know science's state of the art) - when you get to the area of experience, they always turn to either Buddhism or Meditation or other models that are more highly developed at describing consciousness. That doesn't mean that that is necessarily correct: in fact, I've found it very annoying that the sciences, outside of psychology, has done a generally poor job in that area and I wish someone would pick up the ball already. And psychology... well, it has a lot of good in it but it has a LOT of work to be done there. Oftentimes a middle school coach knows how to destress an athlete better than a psychologist. (Run around the track five times is pretty good advice for destressing)