With the above criticism in mind I'd like to commend you for having the courage to systematize your thoughts. Everyone has a personal ontology and making that plain is unusually useful for communication.

I wonder what happens if all references to "creator" are substituted with "knowledge"?

Yeah, norms change which is why surveys may be repeated. Ideally maybe like once a year. Until then I'm afraid the concept of "morality" is likely to remain an intransitive, incommensurable spectre.

Of course. Science is about discovering what is the case, not what should be the case. Obviously it's not perfect. But it's at least empirical. To my mind law is about as certain as ethics can get, so maybe you'll accept a legal parallel in the notion of common law, where standards are slightly more malleable and descriptive in pursuit of what I'll tentatively call "the least unusual and most popular".* The hypothetical scientific survey I proposed, which gives everyone on the planet some input, would follow a similar intention in order to establish a normative notion of universal morality, or as I would prefer to call it, kindness. Science doesn't do prescriptive knowledge; that's chiefly the job of philosophy.

*This is a very simplified version which omits judges and contrasts slightly with civil law.

Interesting topic. I notice the issue of practicality has been raised. I wonder how people feel about a hypothetical global human survey which somehow qualifies what the majority of humans take to be moral? Could this data form a legitimate basis for our opinions? If so, this would be a scientific basis.

This seems tautologous because it can't be falsified so I suspect it may be a proof without meaning.

In my view the so-called "theory of everything" is slightly hyperbolic. I think the interdisciplinary problem you've identified is a major one. I understand biology has been trying to rid itself of teleology for quite some time since it has a whiff of the supernatural, but life, whatever life is supposed to be, apparently has plans which can't be entirely apprehended by our current understanding of physical processes. This is to say nothing of the cognitive sciences, whose problems are even more abstract, ie. realizability.

I expect it's possible to reduce everything to a collection of physical things in principle, but a metaphysical perspective makes things even trickier than a biological one since there would still be unexplained phenomena requiring physical import, such as causation and the logical imperative of causal closure, which doesn't seem to be the kind of thing observation and measurement can positively verify despite being a crucial aspect of physicalism. Events, facts, states, kinds and properties also seem to present problems of a similar flavor, and unfortunately they're both necessary and invisible.

While I'm confident our species will find a way around these explanatory gaps and generate a decent "theory of everything" with the assistance of computers, that theory in my opinion will likely feature at least one clunky appeal to practicality, where one variable must be substituted manually as required, rather than being the smooth mathematical description we would prefer. However, this is obviously highly conjectural and there are others I'm sure may like to offer a more robust take on the situation.

I avoid ethics while recognizing ethics exist. Hope that's not a problem.

It's fairer to say this is an issue about individual people doing science, not scientists as a species.

There are already a number of ethical codes in place for scientific research, certainly in psychology, and applied ethics is a relevant field of philosophy with scientific implications. Particularly in medicine.

I generally avoid ethical discussions since they can't be properly falsified. Sorry.

I don't know. But I can offer a psychological perspective.

I maintain a lot of things boil down to personality, but that area of research is currently a mess because there are such a huge number of variables, many of which are unaccounted for. An anarchistic society would need to (somehow) account for these variables to maintain a bare minimum of social function in figuring out who is most vulnerable to patterns of destructive behavior, assuming such a thing exists.

As a second-best, a belief system can be a persuasive motivator. It's like a cultural hack which can prevent the kind of alienation you're talking about, where people feel like they're valued and crime is less enticing. Crime wouldn't stop, and people would still push their luck, but the "overseer" would be internal instead of external. People need structure. Specifically, they need a shared ontology and vocabulary.

I doubt people are naturally bad, but if the rules of the game allow for cheating, it becomes a strategy.

Hi, thanks for the post. Do you have any thoughts on the notion of different types of logic?

Sorry for the interruption but how do you know what other people don't know?

If you're okay with a semi-serious answer, I'd venture our collective human ignorance will always present the appearance of genuine choice, which I'm okay with. I can't say how that relates to consciousness.

I can't help but feel that quote is in desperate need of context..

Hi. Excuse me if this is somewhat obvious but it may be worth remembering "science" isn’t a single entity to be analyzed using identical systems following identical rules. There may only be one "true" reality of everything, but our current scientific understanding necessitates the deployment of different paradigms for different areas of research. It’s possible this may have something to do with the potentially irreconcilable disagreement I’m seeing here. Apologies in advance if I'm saying nothing new or interesting.

Postpositivism, which prioritizes predictive power, is a typically physicalist approach marrying the formal and physical sciences. Constructivism-interpretivism is a more lenient approach suiting the cognitive and social sciences. To a postpositivist, most hypothetical links from φυσις to modern science would be implausible because we can’t conduct a survey collecting testimonials of dead people, and that’s just too bad. (Lol.) To a constructivist-interprivist, however, it’s possible to sufficiently ground a hypothesis by extracting common themes and standpoints in the literature. For φυσις, this may invoke the "natural elements" of Indo-European mythology as an effort to properly bookend an account and thereby make it robust enough to be considered scientific. But even if it’s given that mythology is early evidence of proto-science as I contend, the notion is still, clearly, highly tentative. I mention this because, judging from post histories, paradigms haven't been given much mention, though I personally think they bring a lot of clarifying power to any discussion. Hopefully that can be appreciated here to at least some degree.

As for the question of φυσις being some kind of weird non-divine driving force of science, it may actually be a question of what one thinks science is supposed to do. If science tells us how, then φυσις is probably an antiquated and superstitious container of convenience which is probably no longer relevant. If science tells us why, though, then I’m afraid the spectre of φυσις is transformed into what are mysteriously now known as the "Laws of Nature" (not "Natural Laws"), which appear to serve as a kind of “known-unknown” foundation for coherent scientific explanation despite being.. somewhat ad hoc.