The individual will need some way to record their observations to do science, some sort of a database. This probably involves something with characteristics of a language even if it’s just to communicate their observations accurately to themself in the future, or just organise their observations so that they’re amenable to analysis and testing new hypotheses.
I guess you could do some rudimentary science with non-language/non-abstract recording, like marking a single subjects height height on a wall, or putting sticks in the ground to mark sunrise and sunsets across the year or collecting stuffed animals. But eventually you’ll want to record more complex data and do more complex analysis, or get so many specimens that you’d need an abstraction like labels and a card index or something.
Don’t wanna start an argument or otherwise intervene with your convo with the OP but I wanna highlight a possible confusion: note that Presoak gave a definition of what they mean by “science” in this context - a way of studying reality.
You said “The individual will need some way to record their observations to do science, some sort of a database.”
In the context of Zen meditation, no. Very much the opposite actually. You are right that to do science, you’d need all that. But for the study of reality, as per Zen thinking, you don’t.
I think for an individual, the closest equivalent to what science is for society is science…
The individual doesn’t need language tho. He can use subtler stuff. A society needs language to do science. That’s a huge difference.
The individual will need some way to record their observations to do science, some sort of a database. This probably involves something with characteristics of a language even if it’s just to communicate their observations accurately to themself in the future, or just organise their observations so that they’re amenable to analysis and testing new hypotheses.
I guess you could do some rudimentary science with non-language/non-abstract recording, like marking a single subjects height height on a wall, or putting sticks in the ground to mark sunrise and sunsets across the year or collecting stuffed animals. But eventually you’ll want to record more complex data and do more complex analysis, or get so many specimens that you’d need an abstraction like labels and a card index or something.
Don’t wanna start an argument or otherwise intervene with your convo with the OP but I wanna highlight a possible confusion: note that Presoak gave a definition of what they mean by “science” in this context - a way of studying reality.
You said “The individual will need some way to record their observations to do science, some sort of a database.”
In the context of Zen meditation, no. Very much the opposite actually. You are right that to do science, you’d need all that. But for the study of reality, as per Zen thinking, you don’t.
Society uses maths to do science wherever possible; “the language with which god has written the universe”.