Proving What We Already "Know"

[bennyboy]

You can use world if you like, all I did was copy paste a definition.  Just like you could sub out "anything that interacts" for natural and physical so that we could at least entertain the possibility of many worlds.  That said, the things you offered as murky examples aren't really murky.  A table, as the solid object we perceive..or as mostly empty space, is physical and natural in both cases, just as our perceptions that don't accurately portray the world (or ourselves) are.  

See, the physical and natural world I have in mind encompasses all the things you might care to include...empty tables and full heads...so there's really no reason to bicker about it as though it excludes something - which..I'm pretty sure, is whats ruffling your feathers.  Maybe you should just cut to the moneyshot?  There's something of value to you, either science or just words..somehow..exclude it, or you fear as much.  What?  If you could have an unguarded conversation about it, there's an extremely good chance that your fear in that regard is misplaced.  Introspection, for example, is neither ruled out, nor unapproachable. There's a whole branch of science about it, after all.

The repeated projection of chicken-farmer psychological analogies aside, the metacommentary about what you think my motivations are is making it a bit hard to follow the thread, and therefore to respond to your comments.  Let's take it as given that I'm trembling in my booties, pissing my pants, and generally fearful of any idea or definition you might come up with about anything at all-- and then get back to the job of discussing the nature of reality and approaches to discerning it.

My response to solid-and-empty tables is to establish a context, and to accept a truth-in-context.  In the context of modern physics, it's true that a table is mostly empty.  In the context of placing my breakfast on it it's true that it's solid.  The problem is that in establishing a context, a local truth cannot be generalized to Truth™, unless you have some mechanism or method of bridging two (or all) contexts. I do not currently know of a way to bridge a modern scientific understanding of the world with my actual daily experience of it.

Re: your definition of terms. My problem with too broad a definition of physicality or of science isn't that it offends me or scares me-- it's that terms no longer really mean anything.  Imagine a Venn diagram, with two non-intersecting circles named (let's say) "Shakespeare's poems" and "penguins." Now imagine that someone walks into the room, draws a big circle around them both and says, "See? Same thing." Sure, if you want it to be, but it doesn't tell me anything useful. Specifically, it doesn't make it clear how to bridge contexts.