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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
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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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It is not the sort of thing that can be “caused” by behaviors assumed of very strong entities you label “minds” (plural) doing historically situated philosophy. It’s like saying the bottom of a valley (of doubt) “causes” slopes rising up around it. No it’s all one doubt landscape
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“Being” may be the least unstable thread in the being-and-world flux but it is still incredibly shaky ground. Solipsism is best understood as staying attached to it anyway. Other minds are no more than dubious claims of the existence of other valleys that are like “me”.
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Maya is a close cousin of solipsism and generally posited as something to be rejected, in world-negation/being-affirmation (or void-affirmation on the Buddhist side) in the advaita versions. The place I land is what might be called ironic-Maya-acceptance. Blue-pillism.
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I think we diverge on how much we’re willing to accept based on 3 things: a) ‘me’ is not as unstable as ‘not me’ b) ‘not-me’ is weirdly legible to ‘me’ b) there seem to be parts of ‘not-me’ that suspiciously mirror ‘me’ (as evidenced by joint attention — I use a different term)
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What you’re calling moderate realism lands closer to the Buddhist resolution I think. I land closer to a kind of constructionism based on a foundation of not moderate realism (that’s just politeness) but ironic solipsism. I’ll grant you the ‘ironic’ there.
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To bring it back to STEM as a historically specific category of being-and-world, ideas like Donald Hoffman’s recent evolutionary ontology perspective (which is far less radical/novel than he seems to think, but it equips the idea with useful new language) get close to my position
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Overall, I land somewhere close to Hume. I act-as-though a lot more is true than I actually hold to be indubitably true. This is more pragmatism than realism. You don’t have to believe in X to operationally navigate by it. Kinda like how politicians believe in church-going.
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