Ways of Seeing
- Exploring Modern Metaphysics -

---

METAPHYSICS - Or, MetaSCIENCE

Metaphysics, like science, is the search for truth. Unlike science, metaphysics does not require verification by anyone, anywhere, anytime. For metaphysics, theories are proposed and tested but it is to the satisfaction of the individual instead of to the satisfaction of the community as it is for science. The advantage of this "weaker" burden of proof is that areas of truth are reached by metaphysics that can not currently be reached by science.

Areas of interest to metaphysics center around the question of human existence, such as "what is consciousness" and "what is the meaning of existence". Within the last couple decades the methods of science are finally starting to explain the origins of consciousness, for example, but science is nowhere near explaining the experience of consciousness. You and I, however, are conscious and know it. Just because science can not explain this experience does not mean it does not exist. Metaphysics does attempt to explain it.

Note that metaphysics is different from religion. Almost all religions, by contrast, are not searching for truth about existence because each of them claims to already know the truth about it. The reason metaphysics is worth looking into is that most religions are different from the others and exclude the others as not being true, yet each claims to be true itself.

We will now progress to several topics of vital interest to metaphysics: human freedom and interpretation. Another section of this Exploration, "Ways of Seeing" located at the end of the Meditations Topic, provides a number of perspectives from which reality may be viewed, where various ways of interpreting experience can be tested by the reader for truth and relevance.


Return to WOS Home Page