A blind and deaf camcorder engineer

1. I'm going to revisit a pet issue of mine. I'm a realist about the external world. There's an extramental world, independent of observers. So I'm not a metaphysical idealist.

But in two respects I'm an antirealist. The uniformity of nature is an axiom of scientific realism. The physical world operates according to a continuous chain of physical cause and effect. It's like a machine. 

And I agree that the closed system view of nature is the default setting. But it has a manual override. There are personal agents with powers of mental causation who can  manipulate nature to produce outcomes that bypass natural processes. Take miraculous healing. That's discontinuous with antecedent conditions. It circumvents the chain of causes. It interjects a new cause, a new starting-point, that's not traceable to the causes leading up to that outcome. 

So that places limits on our ability to extrapolate from the present to the past or future. All things being equal, uniformity is the norm, but all things considered, we must always be open to the possibility of events that circumvent the default mode. 

2. The other is the issue of sensory perception. We don't perceive the physical world as is. Rather, that's mediated through the sensory processing system. 

It's like we have a camcorder in our minds/heads that records sights and sounds. What we see or hear is a mental copy of the external stimulus.

Recording is a representational process, where the copy is supposed to resemble the original. Now imagine a blind and deaf camcorder engineer. Because he can't see and hear, he can't compare the copy with the original. So he can't tell if they matchup. 

Consider naturalistic evolution producing a biological camcorder through dumb luck. And this would have to develop independently on countless occasions. The process can't compare the copy to the original to distinguish a match from a mismatch. It requires an outside observer to make that comparison. An observer who's not part of the circle.  

However, even if the designer can see and hear, there's another complication, because there are different ways to sample the same physical object. Two observers may see the same object: one has color-vision while the other is color-blind. They see the same thing but they don't perceive the same thing. Likewise, one observer may have the acuity to detect a camouflaged animal that's invisible to another observer. 

Some animals have different senses, like infrared perception, polarized light, scent trails, echolocation, and electromagnetic signals. So their inner camera takes different kinds of pictures. 

Science fiction posits superheroes with X-ray vision. Sensory relays can sample the same object at different scales of magnitude. It can peel back the layers to see the inside as well as the outside. So there's no one true viewpoint.  

Or take a music score. That's encoded music. An abstract record to reconstruct a musical performance. The score doesn't sound like anything. It's just a set of symbolic markings. 

Then there's the ineluctable circularity in the fact that we must use our senses to analyze our senses. We can never get behind our senses. My own description of the process is deceptively objective in that regard. 

Ultimately we're dependent on God to design a sensory perceptual system where the mental representation is an approximately accurate and adequate sample of the external stimulus.

Only God can break into the circle to provide an external check. It's like communication. If what you hear on the receiving end is gibberish, then the signal was garbled in transmission. But if an intelligible message comes through, that means there's a match between the input and the readout.  

So we depend on God to design a system in which the copy is an approximately accurate and adequate sample of the original. Even then, appearances may be several steps removed from reality. Mountains seem smaller and closer at a distance. So the mind must interpret what it perceives to make necessary corrections or adjustments. 

Science can never falsify revelation because science requires revelation to provide the intersubjectival benchmark. Only the Creator can stand back of the process to make perception correspond to reality.