> A problem: you're talking to one right now, and you (your mind's model of reality, technically - you do not have access to the state of the things you claim to) could hardly be more wrong.

A problem: you're talking to someone who used to be religious, so I have as much access to the internal thinking of a religious person as you do.

A second problem: people's self-perceptions of their own internal processes are quite often measurably wrong.

> From large quantities of experience, I am confident I would have no success tackling your disagreements on a careful, strict, point by point basis. Instead, I will simply present two links (I have many others, but let's see what happens with these) and ask: do you believe these have some substantial relevance here, related to the truth value (and appearance of) of our respective claims?

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_and_indirect_realism

Short answer: not in any interesting way.

Long answer:

From large quantities of experience, I would guess that you're about to make a special pleading argument that based on convenience beliefs that you yourself don't believe in any other context, as evidenced by the fact that you don't practice them.

Those pages, particularly the latter, are another example of poor communication being presented as intelligence. If we translate to English instead of philosophy-speak, it boils down to an argument about whether perception is reality or not.

Let's cut to the chase with a relevant parable:

The Buddha and his disciple were walking down the road. Suddenly, the disciple drew his sword and cut the Buddha in half at the waist. The Buddha turned to his disciple and said, "Now you're beginning to understand!"

Would you be willing to reproduce this parable experimentally with you as the Buddha? After all, perception is reality, so if you're the Buddha and you perceive being cut in half with a sword as no big deal, that will be just fine, right?

The thing is, science is perfectly capable of answering this question--it's not unknowable. The experiment of cutting someone in half with a sword has sadly already been performed too many times in history: we don't need to perform it again. The scientific answer, which we already have, is that no amount of changing our perception prevents the person cut in half with a sword from dying in horrible agony. And when you're not speaking philosophese, you already believe the scientific answer just like every philosopher who believes perception is reality until faced with the prospect of being cut in half with a sword. So if you're about to make an argument about direct and indirect realism, I'd have to ask, why do you believe that reality is reality when it comes to swords (and everything else in your day-to-day life), but you suddenly you want me to believe that perception is reality when it comes to your invisible friend?

My only opinion of the unknowable relevant to this conversation is that by definition, neither of us knows it.

More parts of philosophy I think we can discard without losing anything of worth:

1. Arguing that perception=reality when it's convenient and refusing to practice it in any other context.

2. Talking about the unknowable as if we know it.