...that's a concept I often deal with here, and my response to Jody's post was an attempt to get someone to engage me on it.

My world view is that there is a reality, its what the physicist studies, a world of quarks and subatomic particles, fields and waves. We are limited in our understanding of it because our means of perceiving and understanding it (our senses and our reason) are inadequate to the task. Our consciousness was designed to allow us to survive in the savanna long enough to transmit our DNA, we were never meant to be able to determine the truth of reality, whatever that means. Still, we are pretty good at dealing with the physical world, we build particle accelerators and orbiting telescopes, and we have developed some very unnatural conceptual tools, like mathematics, to deal with that universe.

But unless you are a physicist doing his work, none of us lives in that world. Our naked ape lives in a totally different reality, whether it be trying to avoid that leopard that's stalking him, or trying to locate shelter, water, food or a mate. Even our physicist lives in the universe of his career, his family problems, his biological, social, cultural, historical, political, economic realities. These all exist simultaneously, and on top of each other, all intimately related, yet not obviously so.

We live in subjective universes that differ for all of us, and differ for each of us over time, sometimes many of them simultaneously. And they mean a great deal to us. This doesn't mean we get to invent our own physics, its just that for most of us, most of the time, physics isn't really all that important. Our personal universe may be centered around the fact that our child is flunking out of school, or our home insurance costs have tripled, or that there's a man at your door delivering a subpoena because you're being sued. These things matter, they are important. They are reality.

If you're in combat, or in prison, or in a burning building, or in an automobile accident, the laws of physics just don't matter.

What reality is isn't always obvious, and it is very easy to get it confused with perception. Regardless of what the real world is, the only world you can see, the one you have to deal with now, is the one that's rolling around in your head.

Maybe that's what the guy who wrote Asimov was really trying to communicate, but didn't have the ability to articulate. Scientific method and training may not be very good or useful for the universe you happen to be dealing with RIGHT NOW. When someone you love is in surgery, and you're in the parking lot chain-smoking cigarettes your own knowledge of medicine may not be very helpful at all.