Medical or recreational?
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Your thought experiment is a nice way of illustrating the subjective nature of human perception. I could be a lunatic (or acid head) hallucinating a bus coming down the street, or I could be having a dream in which a bus is coming down the street, or a bus could “actually” be coming down the street. So no, the “bus coming down the street” doesn’t reflect an aspect of reality independent of our perception.
Yeah, you better be careful crossing the street!
You mean discarded when it’s proven not to be true? Come on.
what? Isn’t the point of a theory to see if it’s true putting it to use and repeating it etc to see if it works. So what would you call a theory like flat earth? All false theories are bad theories, they might be eloquent, but they are still false.
So is there in reality a bus coming down the street for this person? Isn’t what is real the reason we help a schizophrenic person that thinks aliens are talking to him through the radio? should we just go alone with it to make that person feel better or help this person see that this isn’t true.
How do you distinguish between a theory that “appears to be true” and one that is “actually true”? You can’t. You can only come up with a theory that better fits observed phenomena. I suggest reading Karl Popper.
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I know. If I get hit by the bus in my dream I may wake up and lose some sleep. 
Now you’re arguing if truth can be known vs if there is truth.
You can distinguish if something is true or false by using a variety of methods through science and philosophy. If something only appears to be true, but isn’t, it’s still false or not true.
Like the hallucinating of a bus, I guess I can quickly distinguish if it only appears to be true or not by the empirical means of not moving and seeing if I get run over by it.
And popper basically said empirical theories can never be proven to be true only be falsified. But if a theory is proven to be falsified, what is the basis of that?
Wouldn’t something have to be true to prove something as false?
Although there is some merit to using falsification to advance science, the burden of his idea in practice is not that great. For example just because I can’t throw a ball up in the air infinite amount of times to prove gravity is true. It would be pure madness for me to scrutinize the fact I can’t using that method.
Dreaming is irrelevant, as are other states of a damaged or impaired brain that can be independently confirmed in themselves. We know about dreaming and that it doesn’t reflect reality and why. If you get hit by an actual bus, bad things will happen to you in reality. I feel like you’re going to strange lengths about this for some reason. I understand that our perception has limits. But we need some basic ground rules for determining what’s real if we’re going to discuss or make determinations about anything in reality, as people do every day. In fact, you implicitly do the same by making statements like ““Reality” and “truth” are just human constructs”. You’re saying the constructs exist, so you seem to believe that things can exist.
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Yeah, I’ve talked about Popper. I am aware of his idea of falsification to advance science and his scrutiny of using empirical means like the scientific method to prove things. I and many people have disagree with this notion as impractical in practice.
Popper also cherry picks with scientific domains this concept of falsification works in. For example the science of evolutionary biology he doesn’t use falsification in. Which scientific domains uses falsification is based on on the impossibility of inspecting an infinite set according to him. There are too many problems with it.
But what if our whole universe was just an atom in some bigger universe! And every atom in our universe might be…a whole universe!
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Medical minty or recreational minty? Or both? 
If you cannot know truth, is the truth meaningful?
I’ve thought science is a language to describe a nature using mathematics.
You can distinguish theories which don’t contradict with observations and which have conflicts with observations. You can say the latter is false, but cannot say the former is truth or there is a contradictory fact that you haven’t known yet.
@Noniway, thanks for this thread, I learned something new on gender.
Indeed. It’s made me realize how completely out of touch I am with young people. I need a sherry and a nap.
I’m surprised about the level of some posts and posters here. Popper nonetheless! I only knew him because of his theory of the emergency (wait, let me look up the English… right, emergence of mind). And I probably never fully understood it, but I remember I agreed on it.
Is this true?
I would also ask what is the purpose of our conversation? Aren’t we trying to come to conclusion of what is true? Isn’t that what we are doing? If not why even have this conversation, pretty pointless and a waste of time wouldn’t you say.
No, we’ve made scientific discoveries before math was even advanced enough to prove it. Like celestial movements. That’s why newton invented calculus. And sometimes the math was advanced enough but physics was behind. Another example of that is Einstein relativity using calculus which is the language of curvatures to prove that actually space curves explaining gravity through that way.
And many other scientific truth can be used without math. If I want to learn more about anatomy I literally can just dissect a person no? It seems you limited science to only fields like physics.
Getting your knowledge of science from Animal House is not generally recommended.
Is there any goal or purpose for this conversation on the truth in science field? I’ve just enjoyed reading it between you and @Dr_Milker and joined.
yes. I thought on biology, but excluded it to make things simple enough for me.
If someone would construct a flat earth theory which has no conflict with any kind of observations/measurements, you cannot deny it no matter how complex it would be.
Dreaming is not irrelevant–your whole life could be a dream! Read your Zhuangzi. And in any case, I would posit that dreams are at least an aspect of “reality.”
I’m not disagreeing with this, but in your scenario there’s no way to determine if there’s actually a bus coming down the road.
I don’t really disagree with this either. Based on the limited information provided by our senses, we humans agree on what is “real” as a shorthand for being able get through our “lives” on a daily basis. But this is just a form of heuristics for getting things done. It could well be a form of collective delusion that in no way reflects any kind of ultimate “truth” or “reality.” Like Einstein said, everything’s relative.