Let's try it. You know one fact. Some birds have red plumage and some birds have blue plumage. Therefore, we can logically assume that the difference is purely a matter of pigmentation, yes? However, birds cannot produce a blue pigment and the colour is due to reflections from a particular arrangement of proteins in the feathers.Terrapin Station wrote: ↑February 17th, 2020, 4:59 pmNothing about realism is suggesting that anyone is claiming to know "everything there is to know" about the real (extramental) world, or to know every fact of the real world. It's just saying that we propositionally and/or by-acquaintance know the real world. You could know just one fact and that would qualify.Greta wrote: ↑February 17th, 2020, 4:56 pm
Alas, such labels are nonsensical because each presumes to know what they don't.
We do not know yet if everything is scientifically interrogable. Researchers tend to suspect not because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, physical constraints (eg. how large an atom smasher one can build) and the fact that the universe appears to be a closed system. However, we are obviously far from coming up against limits of possible knowledge.
However, it is perfectly possible that we do not notice certain perspective effects of reality, just as a microbe lacks the capacity to comprehend many aspects of its existence (darn good at finding food and avoiding toxins, though). It is still possible that any attempt to understand the absolutes of reality beyond relativity are hopeless. But we don't know that one way or another either.
So, sure, we can attend the real world, but we cannot know how deeply the dynamic layers that create this reality go, or the extent to which they overlap and interact. All we can do is explore and see how far we can go. You will still run into the limits defined by Heisenberg and Gödel.
With this particular topic, there are a different angles. One question is how much subjective life is left in the objective three to six minutes of brain oxygen. Some might think this doesn't matter because it doesn't affect the real world. I would argue that, when your real world consists only of your ruined body getting cold on a slab, one's subjective existence is everything. If there is significant compression of thought processes leading to significant progressive time dilation, one might subjectively experience something akin to an eternal afterlife.
The objectively larger issue is that no one knows why qualia exists, why animals experience their lives. Highly complex and flexible behaviours are possible without any qualia at all (check out robotics), yet it's clear that even simple animals like insects experience their lives. The range of insect behaviours can readily be replicated with robotics without the entity feeling any sense of being. Ditto mice and other small mammals. They too very obviously experience their lives.
So we don't know whether qualia is an emergent property of matter in certain configurations, or if qualia is a basic property of matter that is amplified (exponentially) and then shaped by nervous systems. For many years, this question was not even permitted in much the same way as one was not allowed to ask what came before the big bang.
Consider the notion of logical positivists like Dan Dennett that subjective existence doesn't matter, that it's an irrelevance, just an accidental effect that so happens to emerge in certain configurations of matter. It is almost as childishly naive as the Sky Daddy and his coterie of angels. In terms of living a life, dismissing as irrelevant the things that are hardest to understand, makes sense. Black box it and move on. In terms of philosophy, it's a cop out.