>>13976401This is a clever analogy to advocate for the materialist take but unfortunately it's not accurate.
We have access to the computer's internals and their function through the scientific mode of inquiry, but unfortunately we do not appear to have access to where the signals go once they leave the box. Whether the program output goes to a screen to be interpreted as an image, or to a speaker to be interpreted as sound encoding we cannot know because we only can look at the internals.
But that's still with your analogy, and it's rough around the edges. A better analogy would be to say we are experiencing the screen of a given game and can understand the game logic through empiricism (if we push a physics object it moves, etc.), but are completely blind as to what is actually computing the game. You cannot infer what the monitor or computer is by testing hypotheses within the game world.
An analogy I've come up with this problem that works well I think uses cellular automata. If a cellular automata were so advanced that it developed something analogous to sentient life, even if this "life" gained a complete understanding of the simulation and the automata rules (Conways 4 rules in the game of life, for example), it would still have to empirical method of inquiry to understand the computer it is running on and certainly not the human who created it.
Even if we were to interrupt the simulation, and feed this info, they would have no empirical way to verify it. Their knowledge is forever confined to the rules of the simulation, because they themselves and the means of their thought and knowing are an emergent property of that simulation.
This is what I'd call epistemic pessimism. If this is analogous to the human condition, then we are truly damned to Lovecraft's placid island of ignorance, and it's frightening.
