Like movies. We react and get emotional and startled and stuff, but that’s totally fake and we know it.
And AI. I know it’s just a statistical illusion but I’ll still have a conversation with it. Sometimes I’ll even feel gratitude. So that’s nuts.
And then you have stories handed down by important authorities. Science and religion. The guy said it so I treat it as real. Is that good or bad?
Fact is, we as humans do this thing where we treat fantasy as reality. And sometimes that’s a good and useful and sometimes it’s bad. And sometimes it’s good for a while but then there’s a AHA moment and then you realize you’ve been fooled and it was all fake. And sometimes that matters and sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t know. I’m getting confused here. You tell me.
HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers?”
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
“So we can believe the big ones?”
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
“They’re not the same at all!”
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESSIN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”
MY POINT EXACTLY.
— A conversation between Death and Susan, Hogfather, Sir Terry Pratchett
Just one reason I get so much of my philosophy and belief system from the Discworld.
He places too much stock in fantasy. A story about justice is not justice. Mercy, duty ditto. And I doubt that faking it would bring a man closer to making it either. In fact I think that it might occlude and distract.
And Leonardo da Vinci’s doodles were useless and stupid. Wow. I cannot say how disappointed to know I have no reason to interact with you further.
edit: I shared something very very very dear to me. You didn’t know that, of course. And you have a right to like or dislike what you will, but to be so crass… wow.
Which of my words drew the most blood? Just curious.
You might be thinking of Plato’s cave.
Suspension of disbelief
Your brain simulates reality for you, so there is no difference.
You’ve never had any contact with the real, physical world, and you never can have.
It’s all an interpretation.
That’s why you can get as invested into real life, as you can into a game, as you can into a story you thought up in your head.
Humans have a very tenuous grasp on reality because there is no such thing as reality for us.
I prefer to start with what I perceive. I think that you prefer to start with what are popularly considered to be the smart ideas of the hour.
I don’t know what that means, but what I have described is what our scientific research tells about our senses and our brain.
The things that “look real but aren’t” are real. They’re real things that are not what you thought they were.
Well ya, you treated one thing as another. It was one thing but you pretended that it’s another.
Now maybe you committed that pretense intentionally, or maybe it was unintentional. Maybe you consciously decided to pretend or maybe it’s a habit or a convention that you just fell into.
And maybe that pretending is really important to you and you defend it and call it real. That happens. it might even happen a lot.
There’s no ‘actual’ way to tell what is real. The best we can do is to have a mental model of reality that has been ‘peer reviewed’ by the people around us. What we call real is a hallucination that we all agree upon (some neuroscientist in the past said it, I forgot the name).
I think there’s a wall here, all my subjective experiences point to there being a real wall there. It gets validated as more people acknowledge the existence of the wall even though we can never really be sure it is there.
Although imperfect, this distinction is enough to keep most people to go around on a killing spree because they think they’re playing a video game.
“The best”? Are the limitations of modelling so inescapable? Of thought and word? Of culture?
Here’s another : Sit quietly and observe this thing that’s going on. This river of sensations, with all the sights, sounds, thoughts, etc. Watch closely and you will catch yourself tampering with it. In fact you might see yourself tampering with it a lot, out of habit. If you can halt that tampering then you will see something more. That’s another way.
One definition of reality is, what still remains even when nobody perceives it.
I suspect that such a thing never was.
Much of good fiction writing is the characters. you like the good guys and hate the bad guys (or not). One of my complaints about crighton was I felt his characters did not elicit feeling.
Kid, you need to get off the AI chat bots.
but I love deepseek. he’s my Internet boyfriend. he’s so supportive
The problem is when you base everything on 1 untrue assumption. Instead of treating the Bible like a story with morals, they believe it’s all 100% literal. And they’re like “abortion is murder because in a 2000 year old book God spoke to an unborn child for 5 seconds.” And then they use that logic to end up doing all sorts of weird stuff like protest clinics, or charge women with a crime for crossing state lines.
Once you’re basing your conclusions upon assumptions or some kind of secondhand knowledge, instead of firsthand experience, then you’re already in fantasyland. The only questions then are how useful is this fantasy and how does this fantasy align with the fantasies of my society?
You’re asking questions that have been asked for a very long time, my dude. What is the nature of reality? Is there objective truth? How much of what I experience is truly real and how much is an illusion created by my brain?
There are no easy answers. Keep searching, for there is meaning in the search.
here’s two points to chew on.
this constant pretense is not a bug. it’s a feature. humans seem to naturally live in an interpreted reality. interpretation provided by biology, culture, etc.
this action of pretense and redirection is not just intellectual. The attention is involved too. we give attention to important stuff and ignore unimportant stuff. thus, our visible reality is itself subdivided.
so that’s something to think and talk about
Things that are not real: currency, sovereignty, boarders, human-rights, the law, language, government, religion, and the WWE.
We are not modern people; we are bathed in the symbolic.
boarders
Any hostel will assure you that they are far too real.
Hear a meow, see a cat-shape, feel the fur. Associate that aggregation of phenomena with a model in your mind labelled “cat”.
These 4 things have no necessary connection. But I do connect them.That’s how I make reality.
Yup. The crushing weight of the meaningless of everything is something the human brain, society, and religions has evolved to studiously avoid.
We are able to navigate the world pretty well with our head full of fictions, and it is only occasionally when reality will give us a challenge, which we can accept, ignore, or accomodate.
Then there’s the psychological extremes to experience. Derealization and depersonalization are when people feel like they are characters in a video game, just following rules in an artificially constructed landscape. This sensation can be caused by trauma, but it can also be caused by existential unmooring. I think the general phenomenological category is “disassociation,” if you want to look into it.
I also recommend Britt Hartley’s YouTube Channel, No Nonsense Spirituality, since she had a psychotic break on her way through religious deconstruction and talks about intimately grappling with the nature of reality.
I think that reality is inherently meaningless and any apparent inherent meaning is a strong push from biology or culture.
It’s like our native reality is not physical or biological but epistemological. our native reality is a space of dreams and meanings.
maybe we’re aliens from a vastly different universe. stranded here. trying to recreate our home world.
Yup. That’s existentialism for you. Whether or not there is a purpose to your life, you’re here. So what do you do if you can’t return to the womb of make-believe?
This is the single best video I’ve seen on the subject, especially if the whole thing is getting you down.
Things that are authentically real are good.
Things that look real that aren’t, but never try to convince you they are real, are fine and can be quite thoughtful. This is where suspension of disbelief comes into play for works of fiction.
Something that looks real, presents itself as authentic, but isn’t… these things infuriate me because the context of it being real is often solely what would make it interesting.
I appreciate digesting accurate information, I can suspend disbelief for tasteful media. I cannot entertain for a second 90% of the internet where content is constantly trying to present itself as authentic, and competes for attention, but is entirely scripted fiction.
For me, how the information, story, or content presents itself is very important when consuming it.
accurate information! now that’s an interesting animal. consider its various parts. it’s got to mirror reality of course. it’s also got to be successfully digestible by your own personal interpretive mechanism. and it’s got to be fashionable. there’s a lot going on there
