No...? Science is just a tool to resolve disagreements in conclusions about observations. It is a pretty effective tool if your personal philosophy believes reality is objective (externally defined) and shared.

It's not the only tool available though. You could also use other tools like coercion, intimidation, violence, negotiation, etc. to also arrive at a single conclusion. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

To be fair, I understand why they're skeptical. A brain's perception of itself is imperfect, and sometimes completely made-up. (Actually, one could make the argument that all perception is completely made-up, but I digress.)

Since we're talking about things that happened inside my own head, how can I know whether I actually experienced a certain period of time, or only created a memory of having experienced that time? My own recollection of it may be flawed, so it logically follows that in order to know for sure, I have to find some way to objectively quantify it. I don't know how I'd objectively quantify the number of thoughts I'm having, though, lol.

They're skeptical because it stands against convention. The rest is mere justification. Not very serious.

It's funny. You distrust your eyes but trust your thoughts.

> First-hand observation

Well no, it is not. If you spot an UFO, chances are your "first-hand observation" is lying to you.

Or you might say that your seeing is good but your interpretation is bad. Or vice versa even. It ain't so clearly cut.

The problem with drug users is that they don't seem to be alarmed that others can't confirm the "profoundness" of their experiences from outside. They tend to discard the obvious explanation of their fascination: their own stupidity induced by drugs makes trivial things seem profound. E.g. the fact that the interpretation is broken.

Actually no. The plural of anecdote is not data. This is a single anecdote, not a set of data from a properly blinded or designed study.

Humans are TERRIBLE at knowing reality. That's like the whole point of the scientific process. People's self reports are literally the worst evidence ever used in science, and you have to actively work against your subjects and their brains to tease any actual signal out of that noise.

Consider for example, many airplane accidents have people reporting the plane was hit by a missile, even though we can have independent evidence that they weren't even looking in the direction until after the event.

We KNOW the brain lies to you as a matter of course, and makes up pretty much everything it can for the purpose of being lazy. Your entire consciousness is a fiction, vulnerable to all the normal human biases. We KNOW it is incredibly easy to mangle, twist, modify, and combine memories, and that pretty much everyone has memories that don't match reality.

You offer that we cannot trust our observations - except that we can trust our observations in the case of a method for validating our observations.

You see how that is rather inconsistent.

How about this instead.

We can offer, in addition to our observation, the method by which we arrived at the observation. The method of our "experiment".

We might also compare our observation with that of our "peers".

(And we might also cultivate ourselves, to make better observations. If you think such a thing is possible)

But however you slice it, the validity of the observation stands upon the authority of the observer. There's no getting around that.