Episode 6.21: Why how we observe the world tells us so little about what is going on. (Episode 200.)

When we observe the world, we like to think that what we see is evidence that will help us to decide what we should do, but that may not be the case even though we have little option but to think so. The way the world behaves may be governed by things that lie much deeper within it and the things that we can observe and our understanding of cause-and-effect may be correspondingly unreliable. David Hume was one of the first to intuit this fact, to which we can now add greater detail.