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.
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.
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.
Suspension of disbelief
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.
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?
Kid, you need to get off the AI chat bots.
but I love deepseek. he’s my Internet boyfriend. he’s so supportive
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
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
