Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The past is not true

sive.rs

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 362 posts

Re: The past is not true

#51

Post by mmusson »

anbende wrote: post #40

I think the article is sending a pretty problematic overall message. The underlying story is somewhat interesting. The author went through life with a lot of unnecessary guilt and suffering because he was carrying around a false narrative, and it is true that false narratives happen. But the larger conclusion he tries to draw from it seems really problematic: >History is not true. You can change history. The actual f…

I think the point is that interpretation is all we really have. We believe that memories are these absolute things, but rigorous studies show that no human being remembers things perfectly, even when they believe they do.

For many years as a kid, I knew Santa Claus was real because I had seen him come to my house. My faith was unshakable, because I had observed it with my own eyes. Years later, I found out that on Christmas morning. My dad had left the room changed into the Santa outfit, snuck outside and came to the back door to surprise me with my mom. I was too young to realize that my dad had snuck away and wasn’t there at the same time as Santa.

If we could look back in time and see things just as they were I think it would be disconcerting how many little details we remember wrong that our mind fills in, without us realizing it.

Re: The past is not true

#52

Post by narag »

I love HN but, let's be honest, we are often tone-deaf. Very much.

When the author writes "the past is not true", he's not trying to make a Physics or Epistemology point of any kind.

He's just telling that we torture and limit ourselves with things that no longer matter or, in this case, never happened. The anecdote might not be what you wanted to read or what would have fit the "message" best, but real world stories seldom do.

Let me ask you something: do you have something in your past that's holding you back?

Re: The past is not true

#53

Post by bmacho »

thfuran wrote: post #49
sobellian wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could that possibly support the relativity of simultaneity? Different reference frames disagree on what is happening "now."

The people in other reference frames must just be simulations, so their experiences are invalid.

Lol.

Nah, if we allow virtual experiences, than any model naturally becomes the block universe.

I believe, that question of experience is still unsolved. Why do we seem to live in a world made of matter and governed by physics? Is it the same for people that are simulated in a computer? Is it the same for people that are not simulated by a computer (because it is plugged out)? How do they perceive if the data is mangled? Etc. BTW the block universe also needs to solve this problem. But in order to not to be in a block universe, we need the answer that being material based is different than being simulated on a material based simulator, or not even being simulated, just the possibility of it.

@sobellian: relativity doesn't need the block universe. It works perfectly fine if people just get shorter when they speed up. Then the simultaneity of events in a frame is not the same as being in a slice.

Re: The past is not true

#54

Post by pseudocomposer »

sobellian wrote: post #35
bmacho wrote: post #24

Do you know the concept of space-time, block universe, B-theory of time, etc? How physics assumes that the laws of physics don't know the notion of "now"? And how physicists usually start every calculation with "let X denote the set of events", all the past and future events? Isn't that depressing? The future is true, even if we can't know it. (Even in a finite, discrete and deterministic universe, which we can compu…

How could that possibly support the relativity of simultaneity? Different reference frames disagree on what is happening "now."

I mean, relativity already means everything depends on location, so this should just fit right in, right? The contents of your “slice” are from right now at your location, from 20 years ago at locations 20ly from you, 30 years ago at 30ly, etc. We literally can’t know what’s happening at any time other than 20 years ago at locations 20ly from us, after all. So I’d say this jives well with the various “curves” relativity implies exist in spacetime. (Note: I am not a physicist so I’m happy to learn why/if I’m wrong here!)

Re: The past is not true

#55

Post by dmje »

There's certainly a lot of baggage carried by almost everyone almost all the time. We spend a big chunk of our lives worrying that X thing will happen, and another big chunk of our lives worrying that Y thing did happen.

And yet we only ever live in now, so the baggage that we carry can be adapted. For some of this - eg in the case of trauma - it's severe, and difficult, and requires lots of working through with therapy and drugs etc, and sometimes you just can't escape the fear or the past. But sometimes if you spend time examining what the fear or regret or guilt or whatever actually is, what it actually feels like, you can come to understand it much better - and it is possible to make peace with these feelings.

MBSR / meditation / psychedelics / etc are all about providing new forms of perspective to help manage and come to understand these different angles.

Re: The past is not true

#57

Post by thieving_magpie »

keepamovin wrote: post #29
WA wrote: post #2

In an alternate universe: the lady couldn’t walk, got obese and died of a heart attack 10 years ago. So, the past isn’t true until it is and then, maybe, it’s even worse. Not sure what to make of this story.

Reminds me of: https://thedailyzen.org/2015/03/20/zen-story-maybe/ There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically. “Maybe,” the farmer replied. The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaime…

Complete tangent here. My favorite book to read my kids is Zen Shorts by Jon J Muth.

It features a panda named Stillwater who tells this story (among others) in it.

Re: The past is not true

#58

Post by b450 »

Anytime some even vaguely anti-realist claim shows up in a HN headline, such as "the past is not true", a bunch of predictable and dull comments inevitably show up to perform some table thumping about reality being factual and objective, likely paired with some sanctimonious moral panic about the dangers of relativism (normally with a political slant one way or another).

I think these comments are sincere and well-intentioned in their concern for the truth, but I also think that they speak to the impoverished state of anything like public philosophical discourse today. Lest I waste too much time and emotional energy on an internet comment, I'll wrap up by stating my endorsement of the seemingly forgotten, and distinctly American philosophical tradition of pragmatism. It is a picture in which truth and falsity exists, but being products of inquiry, experience, adversarial disagreement, and experiment, remain permanently open to revision. The pragmatist statement of the author's (fine) thesis might be "the past is never finished", since the past exists and is real, but our discoveries, experiences, interests, etc. in the future might demand a revision or reinterpretation of it.

Re: The past is not true

#59

Post by athenot »

This touches on Narrative Therapy. Events happened, yes. Facts are immutable and can't be changed or wished away simply because they are inconvenient.

Rather, how we make sense of them—and internalize them—affects our lives in significant ways, especially if the prevaling narrative we believe about ourselves prevents us from thriving.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapy-types/narrative-t...

Re: The past is not true

#60

Post by mmusson »

foobarbecue wrote: post #45

The conclusion to this article should have been: it's important to study the past, and find out what the truth is. Memory is fallible, and people often misunderstand or lie. But by investigating -- going to more people, consulting more sources, you can get closer to knowing what really happened. Finding and preserving the truth about the past is more important than ever. Truth is under attack from all sides, with pol…

The question is what you really believe to be true. If your car hit me and you truly didn’t remember it that way then you are proving the author’s point.

Maybe you do remember hitting me. There will still be innumerable questions that you couldn’t answer because they were out of your perception in the moment. What if it turns out that in hitting me you stopped me from running over an old lady.

Whether or not you learn of that detail will have a big effect on how you remember the accident.

Post reply on HN