Hi Aurino,

***However, when I see dogmatic physicists saying "reality is like this and like that" I can't help getting annoyed. I feel they are abusing the powers they were given, they were not supposed to say anything about reality, they were assigned the job of making sense of our sense impressions. They are quite good at the latter, but the former has always been and always will be outside their domain. But I think you agree with that.***

It's always good for a laugh.

***Now the interesting thing, and what you may not agree but I can tell you it's true, is that while we cannot prove that the universe is how it appears to our senses, we can use logic to prove that it can't possibly be so. For instance, a while ago I I offered the argument that space doesn't exist the way we think of it, that it is little more than a creation of our minds. My argument was based on the scientific fact that all the images we ever see are located "inside" ourselves but we think they are "outside". It's a classic case of an illusion, and I quoted "inside" and "outside" because my argument makes it clear that those concepts only have from the context of the illusion itself.***

I would agree that any concept we have of something is a direct product of our minds and inner working of our minds. For example, space is conceived of inside our heads. Where I differ is that I believe that evolutionary development was such that we had to have a pretty close match (or isomorphism) between the way we perceive of concepts and the way those concepts actually are. If there were extensive differences (e.g., we estimated distances incorrectly), then the actual effect would be extinction of any species that didn't have a good perception of their surroundings. That is why I contend that we survived, our minds are very good at matching the way the world actually is.

***I only have a problem with people who are irrational, make unjustified assumptions, live with paradoxes, all the while claiming not to be doing it and lambasting everyone else who disagrees with them.***

You have to give me examples. I am not against those lambasting those who are irrational (e.g., those who reject an external world that is 'out there'). It all depends on what you mean.

***If you paid attention to our dialogue, you must have realized that we don't think much differently. I see you are as strongly opposed to scientific dogmatism as I am. The only problem I see with you sometimes is that you seem to support the very position you criticize. For instance, as I tried to show here, you criticized Dick for defining reality as a set of numbers without realizing your acceptance of physics implied that you agreed with his definition. Try to imagine how people feel when they perceive that kind of contradiction.***

I think there's a great deal of difference between Dick's position and the position of most of science. Dick's position is an attempt to formalize our observations and then use mathematics as a means to come to some conclusions about the nature of those observations. The position of most of science is to accept general commonsense intuitions such as sense impressions, inductive reasoning, etc, and then through an accumulated process of evidence gathering, induction, and mathematical reasoning, to make certain general conclusions (or theories) about the world. It validates those conclusions by testing predictions of what evidence one should expect to find if this conclusion is correct. If this evidence is not found, then this generally downgrades the explanation and some change might be needed.

The problem I have with Dick's approach is that he is using analyti