htf did this get to the front page? It seems like a dorm room fever dream. Of course, we all had fun discussing this stuff in detail, but then we all got up the next day and said "naw, that was mad. But good fun".
Why Physical Reality Is a Collective Construction
11–20 of 20 posts
Re: Why Physical Reality Is a Collective Construction
#12> Your coffee mug isn't naturally brown and warm: it is a cloud of atoms made of 99.9999% empty space, with no color, no texture, and no intrinsic smell.
A tiger too is "just a cloud of atoms" but nevertheless I wouldn't like to share a room with it. The article sounds a bit like a variant of Solipsism.
Re: Why Physical Reality Is a Collective Construction
#13The billionaires and their bloggers have finally discovered dialectic materialism. Marx had the same view of consciousness: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938... They'll co-opt anything if it raises the IPO price.
Marx ultimately had the same aim, the same MO - encourage people to believe whatever vacuous bullshit you can gin up that helps you gain power. Once you’re in charge, it doesn’t matter if it was all a lie, and you can just get rid of anyone who dissents.
Re: Why Physical Reality Is a Collective Construction
#14I think this article doesn't use a very good definition of "physical reality". Like most writing along these lines, it conflates physical reality, with the human conscious perception of physical reality. This has always been a problem of human psychology, but it seems to be getting worse. Typographical note: Grey text on a black background is really bad for reading.
> This has always been a problem of human psychology, but it seems to be getting worse.
It’s been getting worse since the invention of the TV. Each subsequent advance has pushed us further from base reality into a mediated simulacrum. With the dawn of LLMs, people finally seem to be losing their grip on what it means for something to be “real”.
I can’t even count how many times I’ve seen people deny evidence for something, even evidence that’s right in front of them, just because an AI “said so”.
I can’t totally blame AI, though. People were already losing their grip before Covid. I can’t tell you how many adults I knew who suddenly decided they were witches, or otherkin, or superhero vigilantes.
Re: Why Physical Reality Is a Collective Construction
#15This article is 99.9% empty space.
Re: Why Physical Reality Is a Collective Construction
#16This is bad at least a dozen reasons. The most fundamental one is an unwillingness to accept a material reality. The second one is an unfamiliarity with the best arguments against material reality. Light projects from a light source -> Some of that light bounces off of my fern -> Some of the reflected light reaches my optical nerves -> This triggers a bio-electrical signal in my nervous system -> The patterns of bio-…
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Re: Why Physical Reality Is a Collective Construction
#17> Your coffee mug isn't naturally brown and warm: it is a cloud of atoms made of 99.9999% empty space, with no color, no texture, and no intrinsic smell. A tiger too is "just a cloud of atoms" but nevertheless I wouldn't like to share a room with it. The article sounds a bit like a variant of Solipsism.
Recently re-watched Watchmen:
"A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles."
- Dr. Manhattan
(who almost entirely lost touch with humanity)
Re: Why Physical Reality Is a Collective Construction
#18An obvious issue with reality being a product of our minds is what about the other 99.999% of the universe's existence before we got there?
Re: Why Physical Reality Is a Collective Construction
#19I think this article doesn't use a very good definition of "physical reality". Like most writing along these lines, it conflates physical reality, with the human conscious perception of physical reality. This has always been a problem of human psychology, but it seems to be getting worse. Typographical note: Grey text on a black background is really bad for reading.
> This has always been a problem of human psychology, but it seems to be getting worse. It’s been getting worse since the invention of the TV. Each subsequent advance has pushed us further from base reality into a mediated simulacrum. With the dawn of LLMs, people finally seem to be losing their grip on what it means for something to be “real”. I can’t even count how many times I’ve seen people deny evidence for some…
I'm not sure why this comment is grey'd out 8-/
I totally agree with it, and upvoted it.
One thing I would add: TV was certainly a major contributor to loss of reality for many people, but the internet was far far worse.
Especially with the advent of the mobile, always networked, hand-held computer.
The interactive nature of the internet vs TV, and especially the constant availability of a hand-held mobile computer vs a fixed location TV.
Data also supports your statement that this phenomenon predates the plague (covid), and measurable educational decline started around 2013.
Due to this I've started saying, and this may be a little extreme, but I think still correct:
Apple caused the collapse of US educational outcomes, with the release of the iPhone.
Goggle, seeing what a giant increase this was yielding in the zombie horde of consumers, jumped on board to participate a few years later.
M$, to prevent the only corporate offering that could empower the user's ability to control the means of computation, bought the only well funded linux phone project, and promptly shut it down.
Now, 1 short decade later, we see the consequences of the prescient foresight of these major market monopolies: generations of children, some in their 30s and 40s, suffering constant neurotic mental health disorders, mostly centered around their "phones".
To come back to my first line above, I'm sure this comment will receive even more downvotes because, mostly people don't want to face reality.
Re: Why Physical Reality Is a Collective Construction
#20This is bad at least a dozen reasons. The most fundamental one is an unwillingness to accept a material reality. The second one is an unfamiliarity with the best arguments against material reality. Light projects from a light source -> Some of that light bounces off of my fern -> Some of the reflected light reaches my optical nerves -> This triggers a bio-electrical signal in my nervous system -> The patterns of bio-…
Circling back to add more.
Some people get caught up in wave vs particles as well, and think that this someone disproves a material reality. You should always ask these people what is the medium that the wave propagates through. The ocean wave propagates through water. The sound wave propagates through atmosphere.