My friend Divia has coined this intense-but-great phrase "So “materialist epistemology industrial complex” is my own mental handle, and it might be silly but I like it for now.
I claim that there’s some memeset that launders legitimacy from “everything is made out of stuff in a refuctionistic way, seems like the laws of physics"
And today I was noticing how the Buddhist doctrine of 'no-self' contributes to this whole way of thinking—
by denying that there's a self (claiming instead what we call a "self" are five aggregrates/skandas that interact in a way that seems selfy but doesn't actually constitute a real thing) this thinking can fall trap to leaving the so-called objective/external world pre-existent, out-there, reducing it to just physics.
—at least as its imported into the USA. And probably not how it is interpreted by deep Mahayana practitioners, for example, or people who have actually reached the nondual nirvana state advertised by the practice and that gave rise to the doctrine, who would experience this as a false duality and notice that whatever we normally think of a subject would need to be included/accounted for in/as the object.