Pulling a special science out of a rabbit hole

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You’ve heard this before: the practitioner of some special science tells you “The world you see with your senses is not real. It is an illusion generated in your brain. The real world is the one exhibited by [FILL IN SPECIAL SCIENCE HERE].”

So, a physicist may tell you that the real world is what physics shows us. But how do we know what the laws and entities of physics are? Well, we know them by looking at a read out on a scale, or watching a dial, or peering through a telescope or electron microscope. In other words, this supposedly reliable world of physics is completely built upon the supposedly illusory world of our senses! If we can’t trust our senses when we look at a tree or another person, why can we suddenly trust them when we look at a meter or a scale?

It is obvious nonsense. At the very best, if the world of our senses is actually an illusion, then the laws of physics are the laws of how this illusion behaves.


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