Peirce’s visceral reaction highlights how deeply realism is tied to meaning-making for some, without universals, the world can seem empty or arbitrary. But from the nominalist camp, that same insistence on universals can look like projection or even imperialism of the mind over experience.

Critics of nominalism like Dugin and Benoist do often connect it to the unraveling of traditional identities, but as you point out, that assumes the legitimacy of those categories in the first place. From a nominalist view, those identities are constructed and contingent, not essential truths. So if realism can support oppressive structures by making them seem eternal or “natural,” then yes, it has its own dangers.

For a strong case against realism, Richard Rorty comes to mind, he didn’t see truth as correspondence to universals but as what works in conversation. His pragmatism was deeply nominalist. You might also check out Nelson Goodman, especially in Ways of Worldmaking, where he questions whether there even is a singular “world” apart from the symbols we use to carve it up

People often conflate epistemic uncertainty with ontological possibility. The semantics of modal logic distinguishes between what’s true in at least one possible world (possibility) and what’s necessarily false in all (like contradictions). The “impossible worlds” idea can be fun for thought experiments, but it doesn’t change the logical status of statements like “it rains and doesn’t rain.”

For me, cannabis didn’t just help with stress or sleep, it kind of reshaped how I relate to downtime. Like instead of pushing through mental noise, it let things soften a bit, made space for more perspective. Not every strain hits the same though, like some make me spiral, others mellow things out in a clean, manageable way.

If anyone here is curious about specific effects or what helps with what (like clarity vs couchlock), https://strains.uk/ is where I usually look. It breaks down what different strains are used for, especially in a medical context

Your point about there being no “now” without a conscious observer ties into what’s sometimes called the “specious present” in philosophy. And yes, relativity further complicates things, since simultaneity isn’t absolute, the sequence of events can vary between observers.

So even the “succession” of object-object time isn’t as fixed as it seems. It raises fascinating questions about whether time is a fundamental feature of the universe or a mental construct tied to consciousness

One approach says reality is what’s consistent, testable, and persists independently of perception (empiricism). Another argues everything we know is filtered through perception and cognition (constructivism or idealism), so “real” might just mean “coherently experienced.”

At the end of the day, we trust our senses and reasoning not because they’re perfect, but because they’re the best tools we’ve got, until they aren’t

It happens

There are times, though, when an intuition feels so internally consistent and repeatedly validated by experience that it gains a kind of personal certainty. Whether that ever rises to the level of the reliability we give to empirical or logical knowledge is debatable, but I think there’s room for intuitions to have intersubjective influence when enough people independently arrive at similar conclusions

I really like your approach of looking at how “faith” operates in real discourse instead of locking it into a rigid definition. Words like “faith” are notoriously slippery and context-dependent, and reducing them to a single formula (like “faith is trust in authority”) oversimplifies the richness of how people actually use them

The infinite regress argument about subjective time requiring itself to change is intriguing, though it leans heavily on a metaphysical notion of the mind as a primary mover. I’d challenge the assumption that time must be a substance at all. Many physicists and philosophers argue that time might emerge from relationships between events rather than existing as an independent entity.

Your thought experiment is clever for illustrating our inability to perceive subjective time directly. I think this would be a fascinating topic to expand with perspectives from process philosophy or modern physics