The scientific materialist worldview robs reality of its colour, temperature, smell, leaving us with a picture of reality that is radically at odds with our common sense understanding of the world. Helen Yetter-Chappell proposes an alternative: Reality is made of experiences, woven together into an experiential tapestry, that persists even when we aren’t looking.

Snow is white. Fire is hot. What could be more obvious? Yet a surprising number of philosophers do not think these things are true in the way that we ordinarily presume.

What is it for something to be hot? You know this. You’ve felt heat before. It’s warm, then it’s unpleasant, then it burns. It feels … hot. But when scientists look around, they don’t find the hot feel. What they find is molecules bouncing around rapidly. So scientists (re)define heat as molecular kinetic energy.