Imagine galileo first looking through a primitive telescope at jupiter's moons, or saturn's fuzzy "horns" that would take some inspiration and telescope improvements to resolve into rings... it's not a simple matter of "believe your eyes." That's utter bullshit.
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What experience at edge of technologically extended being in the universe does to you is drive a sort of shallow derealization of surface sensory being. Telescopes make you see your eyes as just integrated telescopes in your body that are just as trustworthy or not as telescopes
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This was one of Hannah Arendt's best insights, that the invention of the telescope changed the meaning of what it meant to be *human* the boundaries shifted and shrank, the ego got yet more decentered. Instruments de-anthropocentralize the human condition.
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All those glorious space images you see? False color from other parts of the spectrum. Assertions that mantis shrimps see way more colors? Fragile deductions from eye-optics circuitry that is now in doubt.
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Some of this has belatedly leaked through into humanities and social sciences (see for example the "inverted spectrum" argument in philosophy of mind... which required Newton's prism experiments to even construct... or Searle's Chinese room, which requires computers to imagine)
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I bought my first telescope in 8th grade, in 1988, spent years glued to it. Now I own 2 binoculars (haven't lived in good skywatching areas in decades). Every time you use an instrument to connect to reality differently, you become a better human, with a smaller identity.
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But paradoxically, the more your identity shrinks as a result of this process, the greater your confidence in what's left. It will likely last longer than the last layer that was peeled away. It strengthens your solipsism.
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Solipsism is in one sense a sort epistemic confidence graph as you go radially outwards from the void at the heart of being. At your current boundary, the confidence of knowing falls of a cliff. The smaller the boundary of self, the steeper the cliff.
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So growing solipsism, in the context of a ego being shrunk by an instrumental connection with reality is a sign of a *growing* scientific sensibility. (not a necessary result of "doing STEM"... in fact shallow talent can grow the ego in a narrow prowess/procedural identity sense)
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That's true of pretty much all threads. If I add a joke with a nice Futurama gif, that will get more likes :D
