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.
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.