Are there any Pyrrhonian skeptics in the group?

[GliderGuider]

10. As you say,

"You start by making claims about how you attained to a state of Buddhist equanimity and you proceed to make claim after claim about how others think, precluding yourself from having to defend your claims, and concluding with assertions that the question doesn't really matter."

That's an accurate summary of how my thinking evolved over the conversation.

I tend not to "defend my claims" these days, preferring open-ended exploration instead. In this case, my exploration supports the growing realization that the way I think nowadays is probably not conducive to typical on-line discussions, given that such discussions are generally predicated on the defense of claims. I've seen a tendency for conversations to gravitate towards "Mutually Assured Defensiveness" since the days of Usenet in the early 90s. That position is neither productive nor interesting to me any more, and why my participation in discussions like you seem to be asking for may feel unsatisfactory.

Regarding whether my worldview amounts to a philosophy or not, it draws from the schools of skepticism, epistemological solipsism, stoicism and idealism.

Regarding my generalizations about how people think, I plead guilty as charged. I do in fact look for universalities in the way human minds work. My interest in this stems from recent findings in neuroscience about how people hold beliefs, along with a healthy dose of evolutionary psychology.