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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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One of the fun things about playng twitter with a decently large following is that you can get as esoteric as you like and trust that at least a few people will be able to follow the whole line of argument (whether they agree or not) simply by virtue of the law of large numbers.
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Replying to
Btw, rare fish in a statistical sense not necessarily "beautiful mind" sense which would just be self-congratulation in disguise. More like the kid in Slumdog Millionaire who just happens to know a bunch of game show answers through law of large numbers random experiences.
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Replying to
You've been on twitter since 2011 looks like and less than 1500 tweets... that's 0.45 tweets a day. I've been on since 2011 and tweeted 105k times... that's 22 tweets/day. Gotta earn it with high volume shitposting my friend
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