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by stagas·3y ago·view on hn ↗
It is actionable because once you come to terms with the fact that most of your knowledge is based on (flawed) assumptions, you are a) less inclined to try to impose your views onto others (because no single view has greater weight than another), and b) any new information that comes your way can be treated as something to explore no matter how contradicting it may seem to you initially, because it can help you reduce or refine those assumptions. There is no fixed world out there we can have access to, it's composed and filtered by the meaning we give to it. This view produces a totally different set of actions than a view that, e.g posits that "there is a world out there, it has meaning independent of my perception" because you might be thinking that whatever you think you know is actually the world and therefore anyone that is not acting according to that, is either malicious or ignorant and must be reformed because they pose a threat.
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I disagree, that just leads to extreme subjectivity in which you can argue for anything. I can justify killing all children I come across as they are not real, or if they are real nobody can argue that killing them is a bad thing. Or simply becoming catatonic since nothing outside of the mind matters.
Subjectivity is all you have, there's no extreme version of it. And ethics is also something we define. In any case, you have to make a jump and make a metaphysical claim that you can't prove.

There are two possible claims:

1) The belief that the world is out there and is intelligible and I have the means to know about it. Which means whatever I think I know, must be based on some absolute truth that was there before me knowing about it.

2) The belief that whatever I think about the world, defines the world and whatever I think about the world is something I am making up right now.

If you adhere to 1, then all of your actions are justifiable for you, because the only place to lookup for confirmation is still just your own mind, and you believe that the mind reflects "a world that is out there and is intelligible" then whatever you do or think must be based on some truth, including harming others. Wars are a perfect example of that. In the minds of the people conducting it, it is justifiable because that's their version of reality and they believe that reality as something concrete and unchanging. Nations, ethnic categories etc. are all things that people made up and hold strong beliefs about them.

If you adhere to 2, then you are more humble in how you approach matters. Whatever you might imagine, you know that is just a product of the mind, and is malleable, since the world isn't intelligible and therefore can't be known. The lack of concreteness creates doubt, and in doubt you (usually) don't take actions. You allow the space for others experiencing their own version of reality however they feel like, as you do yours, without an inclination to indoctrinate them into your own version, since the metaphysical claim is that anyone has their own, and that's how things are. You could say this makes you catatonic, but i claim that it better directs your attention to the things you find interesting, rather than others telling you what you need to pay attention to. You are free to create your own ethics, based on your own experiences of what's good or not according to you, for your own space.

When you adhere to 1, the ethical framework is already given to you and imposed on you by other people hallucinating their reality, and if they say "lets go to war" you go to war, because that's what you believe must be true. There is no doubt, since there's no subjectivity, it must objectively be the case that you need to go to war. That's the only possible outcome of a belief that the world is out there and is intelligible.