[lists]

As a software engineer whose original line of work was continental European philosophy, its striking to read things like this because it shows how little we've progressed in philosophical thinking since Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. The radical idea in Kant is that subjective experience has an objective structure: that means we can grant the validity of scientific observation, the key insight being that what you feel and see empirically (what gets called qualia), doesn't exhaust the definition of subjective experience, but is derivative of its essential structure. Once you make these distinctions, talking about why scientific observation is valid is easy.

The fault is that this doesn't completely eliminate a certain nuanced form of solipsism, and this is where Hegel comes in, but does make strong guarantees that gravity won't stop working the same way tomorrow.

[Aqueous]

I'm also a software engineer, and I never turned philosophy into a job - it was just a major for me in college. Nevertheless it's interesting that we are both drawn to Kant, as his seemed to be the only suitable reply to the radical skepticism you're left with near the end of Descartes' Meditations (Even Descartes' disproof of his own skepticism is inadequate compared to Kant.) To this date Kant's response to Cartesian and Humean skepticism is the only one I find remotely compelling. It also lines up with my intuition that the form of subjective experience has properties which make subjective experience itself not entirely discoverable by analyzing first principles - those conditions being space and time, concepts that cannot be derived analytically but must be known prior to experience. And in that sense space and time have objective reality in a sense, as conditions of our perception. Our experience must already conform to the conditions of space and time in order for us to have it at all - which means that some reality exists, even though it has no knowable character independently of our perception.

I don't know why Kant has not experienced a resurgence, as his philosophy seems more and more relevant the more scientific theories like quantum mechanics are developed - theories which intimately tie up experience and objective reality and which, like Kant, both declare the knowledge of things-in-themselves, independent of perception, impossible and at the same time affirm that things-in-themselves exist. This is something no philosophy, with the possible exception of Kant's, has ever been able to conclusively demonstrate.

[whatshisface]

Quantum mechanics doesn't necessarily make any statement about experience. It only seems to after "leaving" an assumption in your explanations about what measurement means for you to find later. (Only one out of the many interpretations involves "the part where the scientist observes the system," and it takes the specialness of measurement as axiomatic for philosphical reasons.