Alternate Sense Part 1: Science
May 31, 2022•201 words
Something a lot of people don't realize is that science assumes quite a lot of philosophy as well. For one, science assumes a shared, constant reality, i.e. we have to presume that each person are observing the same thing (reality). So if this wasn't true, aliens could and could not exist, just depending on the person and we also have to presume that reality isn't changing as we observe it. There is somewhat of a counter-example in quantum physics and the idea of superposition as the particle is collapsing into a state because of our observation, but there is still underlying explanations. If this wasn't true, rules could change over time. There is also the entire field of the philosophy of science, and the major problem of how we learn about reality, i.e. the problem of induction [1]. Basically this is the problem of why we can generalize an observation from a few observations.
Thus it isn't wholly irrational to reject science based on a rejection of the assumptions above. This is the sense in which this is "alternate sense": we are completely rational yet arrive at completely different conclusions. To me, this feels eerily like a parallel universe.