You can spin pretty fantasies to while away your incarceration, but even if one such tale happens to closely parallel the external or greater reality...
1. it has no effect on your situation, and...
2. it can never be tested from within the container
And the point here is: If you cannot test a thing, you can't even *claim* to know a thing to be any more valid than any other untestable thing. You and everything you know, even the parameters of knowing itself, are all stuck within your operational reality - whether that reality is "the Really *Real* Reality"[tm] or not.
I'll answer your objections obliquely:
1. Addendum to the Given: Allow some of the ten people to have some "memory" or pre-confinement data set relating to "reality" outside of the container. Some such sets are vague, all are fragmentary, and none agree.
Result: No change in the scenario - they still can't test squat, so they still can't know squat.
2. And what if, my dear, the inside of the shipping container doesn't look like the inside of a shipping container? I remind you of the parameters of the original Given: "...completely opaque, environmentally sealed, seamless, unmarked, soundproofed, motion-stabilized, climate-controlled, indestructable..."
I've been a dockworker, betty. I *know* shipping containers outside and in. If I woke up to find myself inside an environment as stipulated above, I would NOT recognize it as a shipping container.
I tend to use language VERY carefully, betty - it does not serve the reader to dismiss any stipulated detail as trivial.
And so there is no way to know anything until it can be “tested?” And I gather by “test” you mean according to the procedures of the scientific method? And so for all practical purposes, for you anything that cannot be so “tested” remains dubious in terms of having any actual reality?
But lots of real things exist that cannot be so tested. The scientific way of knowing cannot reach to them because they are non-phenomenal, “non-observables.” I gather you think that such things cannot be acknowledged as “true” until they can be tested; but this means they can never be “true” because the scientific method cannot apply to them. You acknowledge as much, King Prout. I take this view to be a view from “inside the shipping container,” so to speak.
And what of “testing?” As Niels Bohr famously remarked, in order to “test” something, you first must interfere with it. To me this means that the very act of observation modifies that which is being observed. So in a certain way, we never see the object of the test as it actually is in itself, but only as it is made to fit our experiment. So, this thing we think we “know” as the result of our test is actually not the same thing that it is in nature; i.e., in its own state prior to our “interference” with it.
Personally, I am fascinated by the “observer problem” — which, it seems to me, is not confined to quantum theory exclusively. It seems to be alive and well WRT relativity theory and also — arguably — WRT classical Newtonian physics. I think you have a pretty weird idea about God, about “divine interference.” You aver that nature itself seems to get along quite well without Him. You wrote:
These Creator entities are supposedly quite capable of doing what they do without necessarily leaving any discernable trace…. It appears that physical reality functions without *need* of a Creator. Barring direct evidence of divine interference, science goes with the *natural* evidence it has.To which I’d say: It appears that physical reality functions according to laws. The laws themselves are not material objects, and it is senseless to speak of a law as a random, fortuitous development. So one just naturally wonders where the universal laws came from.
To put it crudely, the laws are there because God put them there. God does not have to constantly intervene with physical nature because his lawful design — expressed via the Logos — is the very fundament of the world. Alamo-Girl’s term for this (which I love; but then both A-G and I are Platonists as well as Christians) is “the algorithm from inception.” The universe and all things in it evolve according to this algorithm, which is divine, and on which all things depend for their existence.
In short, physical reality “needs a Creator” — otherwise it could not be what it is, or even exist in the first place.
Both the classical Greeks and Judeo-Christianity see this issue in this way. Post-Enlightenment thinkers tend not to; for they have reduced reality to various descriptions according to materialist, positivist, utilitarian perspectives. Which just goes to show that there really is an “observer problem” implicit in science, and also in philosophy.
Personally, I think Greek metaphysics and Christian theology make the “true descriptions” about the ultimate nature of reality, of the universe. Methodological naturalism can give only very partial views of the “all that there is.” And those views may be partially distorted by the need to “interfere” with the object being observed.
Well, for what it’s worth, King Prout! Thank you so much for writing — I’m enjoying our conversation very much.