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Perplexed comments on The Dilemma: Science or Bayes? - Less Wrong
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But what is it that makes you think that your experience has privileged ontological significance? Is it that you think that instantiation from your viewpoint is isomorphic to instantiation from everyone else's viewpoint? Why would you believe that with any confidence?
my experience is the only thing I can assume as real. Everything else is derived from my experience. It is thus the only thing that needs to be explained.
Indeed I find it reasonable to assume that everyone else can claim the same for him/herself.
Ah! "Reasonable to assume". One of my favorite phrases. There are many things which it might be reasonable to assume. Unfortunately for you, the particular thing you have chosen to assume is not one of them. Because you will probably agree that I am a member of the set of people you mean by "everyone else". But I assert that I do not and can not claim that my experience has a subjectively privileged ontological status.
I did not claim that my experience has a subjectively priviledged ontological status. This is your interpretation. I meant it has a subjectively priviledged epistemological status.
In the great grandparent, you wrote
Perhaps you use the word "real" differently than I do, but it sounded to me as though an ontological assumption was being made. And that you were then extending that private ontology-of-experience to everyone else by a further assumption.
I'm happy to let you be an empiricist who is epistemologically cautious about what you can know beyond personal experience. I'm less happy to allow you to limit what can exist to that which you can know. As Eliezer argues out in the posting, Occam's razor, properly understood, does not provide you a justification for this.
I do not believe your assertion contradicts quen_tin's specific claim either as intended or as worded..