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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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That's the most valuable thing about having ~36k followers... not the tweet that gets 500 likes (meh), but the 10 tweet esoteric thread that at least 1-2 people actually read to the end, grok in their own way, and appreciate. Large n twitter is basically rare fish fishing.
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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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What happens when the instrumentation is integrated with human biology? Example: data from a prosthetic limb. More interesting example: data from a radio telescope array. Does the scale of the human mind present limits re some types of knowledge? A Bohr-ing analogy:
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What a funny way to end it. Your essay skills distilled into short-form are just as lit. I appreciate that you have an astrophysics background. I'm often considered esoteric for mashing up humanities and STEM ideas.