“The ‘apparent’ world is the only one: the ‘real world’ has only been lyingly added…” — Friedrich Nietzsche¹
Philosophy questions itself, wrote German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) at a young age, “In contrast to researchers in other fields of science, it appears to be a particular quality of the philosopher that he always first and foremost questions his science. What is philosophy?”² The natural sciences, on the other hand, capitulate by virtue of famous physicist Stephen Hawking, who says, “There is no picture- or theory-independent concept of reality.”³ Science does not know what reality is and must invent its own models for it. Hawking has based his theories of the origin of our universe on what he calls “model-independent realism”, but if by definition the natural sciences cannot know what the reality she claims to be researching is, then what is science?