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Comment by totetsu | Hacker News Reader

It’s a nice quote. But what about the notion that we’re always believing in something, and sometimes those beliefs tune closer to something objective but if we keep tuning past that into something else, then that reality becomes hard to conceive of and really does seem like it’s gone away.

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No matter how much you don't believe there is a tiger behind the bush. The tiger really believes you are going to be tasty.

So you build a machine that kills all tigers and now you don't have to worry about belief.

The problem with objective reality is 1. it changes. 2. it can be different for different people in different places.

If I live in rural India, there is probably not a tiger behind the bush. If I live in downtown Chicago there is almost certainly not a tiger behind the bush. This leads to the hard problem of probabilistic thinking which requires a lot more energy than black and white thinking.

Lastly, humans are real, and even incorrect belief systems create a reality you have to live in. God, for example, is almost certainly not real. Saying that in a forum will have some percentage of people downvote you and try to reply with a relatively poor argument. Saying it in the wrong place and time outside of the internet can most certainly get you killed. So just because something isn't real doesn't mean you should open your mouth at an inopportune time and learn the reality it created.

This leads to the hard problem of probabilistic thinking which requires a lot more energy than black and white thinking.

You are overthinking this. Reality exists in a point in time and space, same point where you are. That is the only problem you face.

Conscious probabilistic thinking is perhaps more demanding of energy. But all animals engage in subconscious probabilistic thinking. That gut feeling you have for example is your inner bayesian logic refined from millions of years of natural selection. The child being afraid of the dark is demonstrating deeply ingrained probabilistic thinking and assessing survival risk in real time. The higher order abstractions modern language and modern structured society saddles upon us often get in the way of how our mind actually works, as they are far younger than the mind. Poke a bug with a stick: it runs away. Poke a lizard with a stick: it runs away. Poke a human with a stick: it runs away. This example is an ancient survival mechanism all shared by the common ancestor of the human, the lizard, and the bug, which is probably half a billion years old or more. And we won't necessarily get any better with the demands of modern language and society either, as these are under far weaker selection pressures (if any) than these other highly conserved behaviors.

When you break a leg you can’t start believing it is all good. It doesn’t go away.

As much as you would have aspirations to be a pro soccer player, badly enough broken leg can prevent you from ever being good enough.

Your imagination of being pro player does go away when in reality you’re not fit for the purpose.

You can't become a pro footballer just by wishing your leg wasn't broken, but you can pay close attention to the difference between pain and suffering, and acknowledge the pain without accepting any unnecessary suffering.

Pain is part of reality. Suffering comes from wishing reality was different to how it is.

There will always be a point where you simply snap under stress, no matter how well you rationally understand the difference between pain and suffering while being at rest, and you will undeniably suffer from the pain when that happens. It's why torture works so well.

Not to say that knowing this difference has no merit, just saying that it has limits to how much it can do. After all, reality can also hit the brain, when it gets flooded by hormones and neurotransmitters that take away your rational thinking.

Agreed

Maybe that's the kind of reality that the posted article is about, but I would say that, soccer is already just a made up game that has no inherent claim to reality, and pro-soccer doubly so.

There isn't an exact quote from Douglas Adams, you have to read it all, but he put the point marvelously: reality is scary, unlimited and lovecraftesque, and we have filters to avoid that. Only when you master those filters you can consider yourself conscious.

I think we might about have the technology to build the bad thing blocking sunglasses now.

Common philosophical answer is that people only can know the approximation of reality, never the reality itself.

Better approximations usually score you more points, which is why our perception usually evolves closer to reality.

Bad scoring systems exist.

For example, let's say if an extremely privileged person – a favorite son|daughter of a billionaire – takes random chances and people around him|her always agree and accommodate for them to win (because they want a favor from a parent), than this person will most likely have a very warped sense of reality through no fault of their own. Basically their only approximation could only be "Do whatever, just don't touch fire with bare hands and don't make daddy angry"

On the other hand, the suffering child from "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" would also have warped sense of reality, because they lose no matter what action they take. The only reality approximation they can know is "everything feels bad"

Sidenote: in my philosophy, the continuous warping of reality happens mostly to people in overprivileged and underprivileged positions. Which is why I believe that a good equality index makes for a healthier society. But thats my pov, I'm not trying to sell it or anything :)

Note that I wrote "continuous warping". While sometimes bad approximations got rewarded more than good ones, reality is probabilistic. Since it can't be comprehended by people, we basically define reality as "something that is more likely".

And that's the answer to your question. If you tune past the reality, you start scoring worse again, and turn back. It's a distance thing, and the goal is to get as close to zero as you can, doesn't matter from which direction.

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