dad said:
Misuse of the word reality does not help your empty posts.
And since the next thing I said was that you would "tell me that I'm not allowed to use the word reality, or that reality is your thing, or something like that" means that I was right.
Interestingly, whenever we see someone, ('KTS' in this instance), invoking a notion of "reality" in the process of doing scientific thinking, they can be observed to be using the notion in a way that demonstrably depends on their mind and this would also be done very differently by a very different mind (ie: 'dad').
Science only demonstrably deals in a version of reality that is
mind dependent, and it only needs that
concept of reality, to perform its function.
Interestingly, the notion that science accesses some kind of
mind-independent type of reality, can actually be a barrier to scientific progress. (This has happened many times in the history of science). The widespread idea that science uses a notion of mind-independent reality is actually not so, because the notion actually has no objective basis. (Otherwise, please cite the objective test, conducted totally independently from the influence of any mind, whose outcome conclusively demonstrates a mind independent reality).
Note that the clarifying point needed to be made here, is that there is no claim that reality is
"only in the mind", or that mind-dependent reality
"is what reality actually is", instead, the point is that the word
"reality" means different things in different contexts, and in science, it only means how our minds make sense of objective perceptions.
KTS said:
Tell you what, let's play a game.
Let's pretend that the Bible doesn't exist. Let's say that somehow all copies of it were lost hundreds of years ago, and there's no one alive today who even knows about it.
What do you have that would convince you of a different state past if you didn't have the Bible?
Thought experiments are fine in science when the constraints already have an established objective basis. However, when they rely on there being a reality independent from minds, (I think you refer to it as 'Physical Reality'?), in the absence of any objective test for it, implies that one has stepped beyond the scientific method.
Of course having said all that, substituting
a book written by other minds, and somehow claiming that as being
'the true mind independent reality', when minds clearly authored it in the first place, is nonsensical. If it is claimed that something independent from the authors' minds motivated it, then this only represents the different way the claimant's mind has invoked their own reality, (albeit in the same mind dependent way, however).