Factual Relativism

• Work in Progress*

Factual relativism is the denial of a single objective reality, and more generally a rejection of the ability of objective episteology like science and deductive logic to discover/create knowledge or a rejection of knowledge (as justified true belief) generally.

Factual relativism is both unfalsifiable and internally contradictory, because the claim that truth or knowledge doesn't exist is itself a claim to truth/knowledge. The contradiction can be avoided by framing the claim like "The only truth is that there is no truth (except this one)", but it remains an unfalsifiable assertion.

Argument from Quantum Physics

In science, particularly at the level of quantum mechanics, there are often competing models used to describe phenomena.

These are not strictly meant to be different accounts of how reality is, but are different mathematical models and ways of explaining things. Provided they are equally simple and predictive, it is typical acceptable without too much controversy to choose whichever helps you do the math better and nobody is going to complain as long as you get the right answer in the end (unless it's tripping up them trying to follow your work, which IS a reason to use the same system other people are).

We could talk about gravity as an attractive force between matter, or as a repelling force from the void; as long as the outcome is the same it really doesn't matter (which is why you should do it the same as other people do it so you can more easily read each other's work, which does matter). Mathematically identical is mathematically identical for primal forces, the only issues are pragmatic.

Why this is, is either because we don't know which model is "really" correct, it may be impossible to test or access that information, or in some cases the actual fact may be very different from anything we can easily visualize, or for primitive and quantum forces there may in fact be none (something that doesn't scale up to the macro world).

The facts of relevance are manifest in the behavior of the force in question (gravity, or anything else on that level), which is not up to reasonable differences in interpretation. Whether it's a pulling from below or a pushing from above is not material to those facts. Something important to understand is that ANYTHING emergent from those forces doesn't leave any question of the truth of their possessing underlying realities because they are contingent only on that uncontroversial fact (of general behavior), not on the underlying quantum mechanics themselves.

E.g the functioning of a grandfather clock doesn't matter which theory of quantum gravity you use, it only relies on the uncontroversial fact of the force of gravity on its mechanisms, so ambiguity at the quantum level of the underlying fact of gravity doesn't scale up to ambiguity of how a clock works.

Imagining we had no actual evidence of its mechanics, if you wanted to make a model of mind in which pain didn't exist and what we perceive as pain was just an extreme deprivation of pleasure, or say there was no pleasure and only the state of being more or less free of pain, then such differences of models could be excused by ignorance, BUT that doesn't mean they're both true just because they both work. In no sense does the legitimate question of reality on a quantum level bleed into the emergent macroscopic world; it stops at the very non-controversial manifestation of those forces.

And even if it did bleed through, and the pleasure only vs. pain only models were equally true, it still wouldn't matter because however you model it the unambiguous behavior comes through that indicates sentient beings have preferences for one state over another and express those clearly by changing their behavior through learning. I.e. sentience is true in the same way the basic mechanics of a clock are true, regardless of the way you interpret the underlying forces.

There's not a reasonable alternative "narrative" to sentience. Any such "alternative" would have to disregard all of the evidence and the simplest models explaining it/accurately predicting behavior in favor of a convoluted theistic explanation which does absolutely nothing to further our state of knowledge and only adds more unsubstantiated assumptions which drastically reduce the probability of it being correct.

Truth of empirical reality may be provisional and probabilistic, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist within the domain of moral certainty, and the very limited potential ambiguities with respect to the underlying truth of quantum mechanical forces don't scale up to emergent properties of the natural world.