Thanks for poking at the formicary of philosophy -- the concepts of reality, existence, justification, truth, and belief.

My primary tool for dissolving questions is to ask "From what perspective?". From what perspective do the claims hold? From what perspective are the claims made?

The descriptions of both direct and indirect realism identify the concepts of an external reality and its interpretation by human senses and mind. Manfred in his comment provides some models from this perspective.

When I ask the question "From what perspective?", I see that these descriptions are from a third person perspective, a human perspective, and so these descriptions are from substantially the same context that that our first person experience of reality comes from. My answer to this question also came from a human perspective, and so is also from substantially the same context... and so forth in a seemingly pointless regression of justification.

From this it seems reasonable to claim that we have an anthropocentric perspective of reality, and every evaluation of our perspective on reality is also substantially anthropocentric.

(But you might say "We can build tools of math and science that provide perspectives that are independent of the human mind." To which I would respond that these tools were designed by humans, relate to reality as described from a human perspective, and produce results that are translated into the terms of human experience and understanding so that we can comprehend them.)

From this perspective neither direct nor indirect realism describe a universally objective situation, they are actually subjective anthropocentric descriptions. As such we should be able to identify contexts where these descriptions of realism are valid, are invalid, or are even meaningless.

What remains is a question of pragmatics, not of truth; is one of these perspectives on realism more useful than competing perspectives, for the context of current concern?

Compare http://lesswrong.com/lw/ds4/article_about_lw_faith_hope_and_singularity/73m3?context=3 with http://web.archive.org/web/20120802190229/http://lesswrong.com/lw/ds4/article_about_lw_faith_hope_and_singularity/73m3?context=3

How ironic.

Found on Wikipedia:

There is an ongoing controversy in metaphysics about whether or not there are, in addition to actual, existing things, non-actual or nonexistent things. [...] Note that "actual" may not mean the same as "existing". Perhaps there exist things that are merely possible, but not actual. (Maybe they exist in other universes, and these universes are other "possible worlds"--possible alternatives to the actual world.) Perhaps some actual things are nonexistent. (Sherlock Holmes seems to be an actual example of a fictional character; one might think there are many other characters Arthur Conan Doyle might have invented, though he actually invented Holmes.)

I'm exploring some elements of the philosophy of existence (ontology) and while reading about ontological arguments I was reminded again about the description of God as the "unmoved mover".

It occurred to me that although we can't say anything meaningful about the ultimate origin of motion, we can describe the mover that is not changed by the motion from a mathematical perspective, it is called relativity -- a static description of dynamic systems.

Everything that exists does so in some definite quantity. Existence is that property of conceptual referents such that they necessarily exist in some definite quantity.

I'm confused by this mix of referring to things that exist and referring to existence as a property of conceptual referents. Are you saying that conceptual referents are the things that exist in finite and definite quantity? Or are you saying something else?

definite quantity

I see that you are claiming that existing things are bounded in some quantifiable way, but you do not seem to account for the inherent uncertainty of determining quantities.

The identification of a definite quantity requires a quantifier. Some uncertainty comes from the implementation of this quantifier; if it is incorrect then the identified quantity would be wrong. You could handle this by verifying the implementation of the quantifier, but that only pushes the uncertainty into the context of verification. To use the quantifier you must choose to halt the regression of verification and accept the remaining uncertainty.

Additional uncertainty comes from the choice of the quantifier. The quantifier used is one choice from a large and possibly infinite set of possible quantifiers. Not all of these quantifiers would provide the same answer--or even provide a "reasonable" answer, for example by replying with "hat" instead of a number like "2".

For example: I scoop up a handful of gravel from a beach. I want to count the stones in my hand. But my hand contains all kinds of stuff; rocks and dirt from the size of dust to a couple inches across, bits of wood, shell, and other organic debris. Out of this mess which bits of the stuff are stones? It depends on how I quantify stones; is it by volume, apparent area, mass, composition, color, texture... there are many possible measurements, and combination of measurements. I choose one way of counting stones and get a quantity of 5, but it could have been 1 or 1000 or "blue hat" if I had made other choices.

Given this uncertainty, how can I know that only a "definite quantity" of stones exist in my hand?

I might go to this.

It irritates me to no end that the original study is so much better known than the utter failure to replicate. I have to suspect that this has something to do with how conveniently it fits many programmers' notion that programmers are a special sort of person, possessed of some power beyond merely a lot of practice at programming and related skills.

Great, thanks!

Do you have links to sources that describe these types of cycles, or are you willing to describe the cycles you are referring to--in the process establishing the relationship between these terms?

Let's say that ontology is the study of that which exists, epistemology the study of knowledge, phenomenology the study of appearances, and methodology the study of technique. There's naturally an interplay between these disciplines. Each discipline has methods, the methods might be employed before you're clear on how they work, so you might perform a phenomenological study of the methods in order to establish what it is that you're doing. Reflection is supposed to be a source of knowledge about consciousness, so it's an epistemological methodology for constructing a phenomenological ontology... I don't have a formula for how it all fits together (but if you do an image search on "hermeneutic circle" you can find various crude flowcharts). If I did, I would be much more advanced.

For example an antennae interacting with a photon creates a context of evaluation that generates meaning in terms of the described system.

I wouldn't call that meaning, unless you're going to explicitly say that there are meaning-qualia in your antenna-photon system. Otherwise it's just cause and effect. True meaning is an aspect of consciousness. Functionalist "meaning" is based on an analogy with meaning-driven behavior in a conscious being.

it stops privileging human consciousness as the only context of evaluation that can generate meaning. It is this core idea that separates my epistemology from most of the related work

Does your philosophy have a name? Like "functionalist perspectivism"?