You can't get to this via Descartes, unless you use his scepticism as a sort of koan.
To reach it with clarity requires understanding how real relations (that is, signs) function to found experience, and thus form the frame for quantifying confidence in a belief.
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So... no, philosophy gave rise to STEM and is still required to best understand the nature of scientific knowledge.
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One reason I'm an unrepentant STEM supremacist is that I think it's *necessary* pre-work before you can meaningfully tackle humanities and social sciences with any sort of depth in 2020. The primary value of STEM is not knowledge but establishing a connection with instruments
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This beautifully humbling and strengthening experience cannot be the result of Cartesian scepticism, which is absolute and extreme. It's actually premodern moderate realism in concrete form:
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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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This isn't growing *solipsism*, it's increasing the perfection of one's understanding of another object.
twitter.com/vgr/status/127
The humbling of the ego is antithetical to solipsism, which is by definition closed off to things outside the mind.
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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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I love science deeply *because* of its ability to transcend solipsistic and self-oriented, egotistical perspectives.
But this creates the opposite response to "hail science" - twitter.com/vgr/status/127 - it makes science the vicegerent of being. It's "hail being!"
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There's a beautiful ethical corrollary to this:
twitter.com/vgr/status/127
Doing science is like "joint attention," the process by which humans become aware of other people's perspectives *by* focusing on the same object. By it, we are led out of solipsism into other-awareness.
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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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In joint attention, we gain awareness of another person's perspective through focus on an object. In science, we gain awareness of another object by focusing on the signs by which we experience the object.
Both lead us out of solipsism by checking experience against a mediator.
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As joint attention is the servant of other-awareness, science is the servant of being-awareness.
Both humble and strengthen us. Both keep us from self-worship (that is, unless we get confused and start worshipping science or joint attention!)
Worship the deity, not the priest.
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I love how so often we have to pursue a question down to the farthest depths before finding real value.
Reality doesn't come with a how-to. It's almost like it's set up to favour worshippers and true lovers. No one else has the will to go deep enough.
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This particular example is particularly powerful for me. Spent my PhD years working on interferometric space telescopes for exosolar terrestrial planet detection. The stack of assumptions underlying the instrumentation is *incredibly* deep.
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Interesting counter but no. I would not describe my position as moderate realism. I’m merely moderately polite towards prevailing conventions of consensus realism. My definition of solipsism is a more robust one: I cannot be sure of the nature of anything outside my in mind.
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“Hail being” is where *you* land pursuing this line of development, but it’s not the only place to land. What you’re calling other awareness and joint attention are still bracketed for me with not-my-mind doubt and subject to something closer to solipsism and Cartesian skepticism
Solipsism isn’t “driving” things. It’s the least unstable core at the core of flux. Your attempt to locate a “cause” for scientific sensibility in a particular place in the western tradition (second scholasticism over cartesianism) suggests we are not talking about the same thing
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To me “STEM” is merely a historically specific chapter in the evolution of being-and-world that relates the least-unstable core (provisionally but not absolutely labeled me-being in time) to the most-unstable.
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