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Replying to and
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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Replying to and
“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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Replying to and
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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Replying to and
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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Replying to and
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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Replying to and
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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Replying to and
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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Replying to and
For practical, everyday use, the valley of doubt of which “I” occupy the bottom point is very gently sloping near “me” (in the “familiar” zone) and rises steeply beyond. But in non-everyday use, the “I” might be at the bottom of a narrow, deep Cartesian well of doubt-minimum.
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Replying to and
So I “believe” in cars enough to not step in front of speeding ones. I “believe” in other minds enough to talk to people as though they were unproblematically ontologically similar to “me” on an everyday basis. But on a less pragmatic basis... no. Dubito ergo cogito ergo sum ftw.
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Replying to and
Basically we might say that I take the indexicality sub-problem of the hard problem of consciousness a lot more seriously than you appear to. Haven’t revisited the topic since 2007, but it’s still as serious for me 13 years later.
Replying to
Great response! Re. solipsism and other terms, I see that you're defining terms in an epistemologically-driven way, while I was using them metaphysically (twitter.com/arlynculwick/s). Happy to run with your usage.
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Replying to @arlynculwick and @vgr
Solipsism is disbelief in the existence of other *minds*. Neither is Cartesian scepticism the tool to clarify the experience. Its reliance on certainty, and its foundationalist approach, is foreign to the probabilistic and coherentist nature of scientific knowledge.
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