Yes, and “observing external reality” only leads into observing more qualia in your head rather than perceiving external reality as such, from which you make more or less indirect inferences about external reality. Some of these observations feel relatively direct, like observation of macro-level objects like tables and whatever, but even then you always only observe the them in some limited way, from some specific angle and what you see is something like your brain’s representation of the object rather than what it “objectively looks like” (there probably isn’t such a thing), these observations also never equal to the objective existence of the object which could always conceivably be a hallucination etc.
And then something like atoms or quantum fields isn’t perceived even this way at all, but rather postulated and inferred from complicated experiments to explain a wide range of comparatively more direct observations. Consciousness of other people is a bit like this—I would argue still more direct than the “observation” of atoms as pretty much all people can figure out other people probably have subjective experiences without doing any formal science. It’s just basic extrapolation from one’s own subjective experience, similarity to other humans and observing their behavior and postulating consciousness etc.
Yes, and “observing external reality” only leads into observing more qualia in your head rather than perceiving external reality as such, from which you make more or less indirect inferences about external reality. Some of these observations feel relatively direct, like observation of macro-level objects like tables and whatever, but even then you always only observe the them in some limited way, from some specific angle and what you see is something like your brain’s representation of the object rather than what it “objectively looks like” (there probably isn’t such a thing), these observations also never equal to the objective existence of the object which could always conceivably be a hallucination etc.
And then something like atoms or quantum fields isn’t perceived even this way at all, but rather postulated and inferred from complicated experiments to explain a wide range of comparatively more direct observations. Consciousness of other people is a bit like this—I would argue still more direct than the “observation” of atoms as pretty much all people can figure out other people probably have subjective experiences without doing any formal science. It’s just basic extrapolation from one’s own subjective experience, similarity to other humans and observing their behavior and postulating consciousness etc.