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The wax "trick" is a reference to Descartes Wax Argument, in which he argued that even simple objects can't be known from only their empirical content, because that content can easily change in almost all regards without the object essentially changing. Further on in Meditations, he argues that the entire world could theoretically be an illusion, and there would be no way to discover this empirically, because our sense can be deceived.

The wax "trick" is a reference to Descartes Wax Argument, in which he argued that even simple objects can't be known from only their empirical content, because that content can easily change in almost all regards without the object essentially changing. Further on in Meditations, he argues that the entire world could theoretically be an illusion, and there would be no way to discover this empirically, because our sense can be deceived.