> I think this gets at the real reason why some people, mostly (but not exclusively!) on the conservative side, are so terrified of other people taking drugs, because it presents a risk to their whole concept of fixed moral and social "truths". If these things aren't eternal verities but merely contingent realities that humans have thought up, that presents a real threat to their worldview.
But is this not yet another a worldview (literally, a "view" upon "the world") itself, but of a somewhat different sort? If you really think about it, how is it, literally, that you (seem to) ~know that "conservatives" "are" "so terrified" of taking drugs...and not just that they are, but also "why" they are?
Yes, I fully realize that you were "just" "making a generalization". But my curiosity is, what is this "making a generalization" thing that people do? Like, what is it really, when you boil it down to its actual implementation?
More generalized, to the broader world, how is it that (as one can observe every day, in extremely large quantities, in forum conversations on any platform):
[Person A] knows(!) what [Person B]/[Group B] [[thinks/believes/likes/hates/wants]/[did/does/will do (in the future)]/etc] (in general, or, specifically regarding: [Topic A]/[Topic B]/[Topic C]/[/etc])?
Again, they're "just" "generalizing". Fair enough- it's literally true, after all. But the interesting thing is, where does the foundational knowledge (facts?) contained within these generalizations come from? How can so many people know enough about the world and how it works such that they are able to accurately predict not only the the thoughts of other people (who are all simultaneously doing this same thing), but also past events and future events (including the massively complex chain of causation for each)?
If one was energetic, you could probably take this thought experiment a little deeper, encompassing the entirety of history and current world realtime events involving all persons and systems on the planet, where multi-dimensional recursion and paradoxes and what not would start to arise, and perhaps other interesting questions, like:
- How frequently (percentage of the day) do each of us engage in this activity?
- Might errors occasionally arise during this process (sometimes resulting in paradoxes, or explaining other paradoxes)?
- Might this activity have effects in the physical world?
- What is reality, really, if you sit down and think about it as hard as you can for a really long time (under a "normal" state, and when on 5 grams of mushrooms)? Is it as it seems? Is it as described on the telly? If it differs, where/how, and to what degree?
- Does any of this matter in the real world? Why or why not?
Humans are surely many orders of magnitude smarter than animals, but how is it (implemented) that they are so much smarter? So smart that they can read minds, predict the future, and even know(!) that which is unknown: what humanity itself (the sum of all peoples on the planet) is or is not capable of in the future (much of which depends on future scientific discoveries of that which is not known in the present)? How is all of this computation implemented?
lol, just kidding, this is all just one of those crazy "woo woo" ideas that came to mind on a mushroom trip one time. It's "just" chemicals, maaaaan (as anyone who has studied logic and epistemology would correctly conclude). Now that I think about it a bit more, conservatives actually are rather uptight folks, aren't they! I'm one of them, so I should know.