Thank you for a very enjoyable paper. It was interesting, as you said. However, if I gave you the impression that I was a Machian, this is a mistake. Accordi

Thank you for a very enjoyable paper. It was interesting, as you said. However, if I gave you the impression that I was a Machian, this is a mistake. According to this paper, Mach equated reality with sensory experience (ie. the experiences afforded us through the five senses: seeing, hearing, touch, smell, and taste.. and perhaps some others like proprioception), and that speculation about a world "outside" and independent of such sensations was unwarranted. This is not my position, as I include in "perception", the perception of thoughts, theories, conclusions, intuitions, feeling and everything else considered to be "internal" -- which includes everything Einstein or any other physicist could ever base their own theories on. Also, I don't object to speculation as to an "external", "objective" world, as Mach does. Science can come up with all sorts of interesting and possibly useful things through such speculation. I'm happy to read of such conjectures, and if some people want to engage in it more power to them. However, do I not see any way we could ever verify whether such speculation right or wrong (or, to put it another way, whether such speculation corresponded to the way the world really was), because neither mathematical simplicity or the elegant fitting in to other, larger theories (as Einstein seems to have favored) means that the speculation has anything to do with the "external" world as it is (or even that there is an external world). Since we seem to be limited to our own experience, the belief that an "external" world exists and that we have any (direct or indirect) way to access it seems to be nothing but faith.