If the universe was empty except for a disembodied hand floating in space, it would impossible to know a priori if the hand was a left one or a right one. You might argue that the answer is “neither”: the hand is neither right nor left, because chirality doesn’t meaningfully exist in a universe with only one hand. But suppose a man now magically appears who is missing both hands at the wrist. This supposed “handless” hand would have to fit equally well on either wrist, and that isn’t how hands work. Does the disembodied hand gain chirality at the moment the handless man appears? How can it, if the hand existed unchanged before the man? What other properties exist that we don’t know about because, metaphysically speaking, we only see a single disembodied hand? Truly we suffer more from imagination than reality.
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