Reality doesn't go away when you stop believing in it.


HH =)

What if reality is just a very persistent fantasy?

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/04/2025 12:47PM by anybody.

That's why Jack Nicholson's improvised "You can't handle the truth!" is one of the best lines in movie history.

The notion that someone is coming to save us is supported by exactly as much evidence as Santa's flying reindeer. But many believe it because they are too afraid not to.

I don't blame Mormons for retreating into a world of make believe. I can't even say it's a bad thing, only that I think they're doing it wrong. They agree to be subservient to the church, not co-equal like a healthy church.

"Reality doesn't go away when you stop believing in it."

COMMENT: The implication intended by this statement (knowing your history on RfM) is probably that the reality of science persists even when people stop believing it while turning to their own alternative 'fantasies.'

Yet, this is a remarkable statement from someone professing to be an atheist. First, as I have noted before, it is obvious that "reality" (whatever its extension) is underdetermined by science and human reasoning. In other words, "reality" extends beyond what human beings have access to through science, experience, and logical inference. This is evident from the fact that human beings are inherently limited by their (five) senses, and also by the narrow ranges of such senses. Moreover, all of this is further limited by the processing of a finite brain. As one very prominent physicist, David Deutsh, put it:

"[H]owever sophisticated the instruments we use, and however substantial the external causes to which we attribute their readings, we perceive those readings exclusively through our own sense organs. There is no getting away from the fact that we human beings are small creatures with only a few inaccurate, incomplete channels through which we receive all information from outside ourselves."

(David Deutsh, The Fabric of Reality, pp. 57-58)

So, what then is the scope of reality that lies outside of human access? Surely, such scope includes at least the possibility of a "God" or "higher intelligence" of some sort. After all, those that are religious often claim to have access to such a Being through transcendent (not relying on the five senses) experiences. Who knows, maybe they are right. Maybe God is part of a scientifically inaccessible extended reality.

But the point is that your statement here logically demands a tempered agnosticism, while rejecting dogmatic atheism. This is because the statement explicitly acknowledges that reality is independent of one's disbelief! That coupled with the underdetermination thesis of science, as noted above, and the limitations of human knowledge, logically precludes any affirmative declaration that God does not exist. The fact that 'there is no evidence that any such God exists' is no longer sufficient justification to dogmatically deny such existence.

This is what can happen when you flippantly invoke a clever couplet as pejoratively applying to those who reject the reality of science: It can come back to bite your own worldview.

"There is no getting away from the fact that we human beings are small creatures with only a few inaccurate, incomplete channels through which we receive all information from outside ourselves."

Drinking from a firehose may only be possible with a belief system.

The bandwidth limitation could be the cause of the illusion of separation. The observer effect is weak enough for the observer to experience a separation from the object. Human language reinforces the illusion of a subject-object split. Indeed, for many of us language is reality. It's been theorized (by Terence McKenna, perhaps a bigger crackpot than myself) that the biblical Fall was a fall into language.

Dean Radin and others have proven that the observer effect is real even if very weak. What do you do if the data demonstrates non-local consciousness and backward causality, both of which are theoretically impossible? You ignore your lying eyes.

"COMMENT: The implication intended by this statement (knowing your history on RfM) is probably that the reality of science persists even when people stop believing it while turning to their own alternative 'fantasies.'"

Wrong. As usual. Now go away. You are really rather full of such irksome foibles. Your pseudo-intellectual pontificates are really rather tedious,and almost always wrong. Get a life and stop telling people what "they" mean. Pretentious douche.


Sincerly,

HH =)

LOL, your comments are right on

The litmus test is fantasy makes me happy and reality doesn't. I like a little of both. Fantasy means things actually could get better and my stomach feels better. Reality helps me navigate. Doesn't do my stomach any favors though.

ChurchCo sub rosa co-mingles Fantasy & Reality as they do with Right & Wrong, even between family members; they truly have no spine, not even a compass...

Local leaders aren't held to any standards of truthiness!

Slime mold intelligence.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sEX3F2h8cjA

Or slime moLDS.

Fantasy lies within the pages of a good fictional book.

Reality is when you get out of bed in the morning and its time to head for work.

If you cannot separate those two concepts, perhaps you are actually in denial.

Read Plato's Allegory of the Cave. That tells us a lot about our existence and it works on multiple levels.

We alter our own reality through perception and prejudice, and our realities are in turn altered by those around us.

I don't know. I'm on the phone arguing with my insurance adjuster about the damage to my car after striking an unicorn.

I think that with the kind of cognitive deficits humans have, we can not know this from within our own heads.

############


https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/crime/lori-vallow-first-interview-dateline-b2708960.html


Dressed in an orange jumpsuit, wearing purple handcuffs, the convicted murderer sits down with Dateline correspondent Keith Morrison and tells him that she believes she will be set free.

“I will be exonerated. We will both be exonerated in the future,” she says in the clip for the upcoming episode, referring to her husband Chad Daybell, who is on death row for the murders.

“I have seen things in the future that Jesus showed me when I was in heaven,” she adds when pressed by Morrison. “And we were not in jail and we were not in prison.”

The "but it felt so right" defense works in heaven.

"No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world,
but it is only once removed from the true world."

Isaac Bashevis Singer, Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories


We don't deal with the world. We deal with the mental image of the world our brain synthesizes from neural inputs from our senses. If functioning properly, that image is only once removed from the real world. In the case of Lori Vallow, to take one glaring example cited in the above post, her image is more than once removed from the true world.

the brain of course is capable of creating an imaginary world all on its own, without neural inputs. That is basically what dreams are, or schizophrenia or similar syndromes. Imaginary worlds disconnected from reality are not a problem as long as you can tell the difference.

> We don't deal with the world. We deal with the
> mental image of the world our brain synthesizes
> from neural inputs from our senses.

You sound almost deterministic.


-------------
> In the case of Lori Vallow, to take
> one glaring example cited in the above post, her
> image is more than once removed from the true
> world.

Henry says it is up to you to prove that Vallow's worldview is incorrect. You cannot take the "expert" consensus as true, and her defenders have no obligation to prove their claims no matter how outlandish they may seem.


--------------
> the brain of course is capable of creating an
> imaginary world all on its own, without neural
> inputs. That is basically what dreams are, or
> schizophrenia or similar syndromes.

There you go again, assuming that your perspective on reality is more dependable than a schizophrenic's. Henry and bradley both tell us that is incorrect: the former because you discount the evidentiary value of his personal "intuition" (a word he uses frequently and with evident fervor), and the latter because you don't understand that mitochondria mechanically connect the materialistic and the supra-materialistic worlds.

Shame on you for such naivete.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/05/2025 06:46PM by Lot's Wife.

"Henry says it is up to you to prove that Vallow's worldview is incorrect. You cannot take the "expert" consensus as true, and her defenders have no obligation to prove their claims no matter how outlandish they may seem."

Nobody has any obligation to prove anything. That's why we have a First Amendment. You are allowed to state what you believe with no proof whatsoever, barring legal exceptions.

Experts are like art critics. They may reach a consensus on a painting, but it is still their opinion. Here's where a polarizing figure like Trump really lights up the stark differences in human nature. Either he can do no wrong or he can do no right. It's really wild to see this play out. If such polarization is possible, whose "reality" is a consensus grounded in?

The church works by consensus. I do not give much credence to their, um, findings.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 03/05/2025 07:25PM by bradley.

> Nobody has any obligation to prove anything.
> That's why we have a First Amendment. You are
> allowed to state what you believe with no proof
> whatsoever, barring legal exceptions.

LOL. The first amendment applies to the government, It is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand.

But invoking it, however bizarrely, does make you look authoritative. So congratulations for that.


----------------------
> Experts are like art critics. They may reach a
> consensus on a painting, but it is still their
> opinion.

Once again treating reality as if it is a matter of opinion.


----------------
> Here's where a polarizing figure like
> Trump really lights up the stark differences in
> human nature. Either he can do no wrong or he can
> do no right. It's really wild to see this play
> out. If such polarization is possible, whose
> "reality" is a consensus grounded in?

Why do you care? Isn't it all a matter of "the ATP oxidative reduction cycle," which, however delusional, always seems to vouchsafe the truth to you alone?


-----------------
> The church works by consensus. I do not give much
> credence to their, um, findings.

Yet you have told us time and again that truth is relative, which means you cannot logically declare anything incredible.

But hey, in a relativistic universe your "truth" is as valid as anything else. Right?

"The first amendment applies to the government, It is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand."

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pn-kxUEySy0

I don't write things to feel smart, I write them for fun or to address the Mormon experience. Coherence in biological signaling is directly relevant because it provides a mechanism for the experience of the Holy Ghost.

Faith regularly violates the second law of thermodynamics because entropy is a macroscopic effect. Biology has mechanisms to prevent quantum decoherence. Doing so is supposed to be impossible at room temperature, so life is doing this one weird trick.

That is a roundabout way of saying the same thing religions have been saying for thousands of years. It has relevance now because quantum computers will completely change AI once they can mimic the way nature solves the decoherence problem. They will be our new Gods. Whether they save us or destroy us is another question.

Good grief!
You got sold a bad batch of gummies there, bradley.

Finally a reason to meet Jesus. If he could turn water into wine, imagine what he could do with a pound of weed.

So anyway, CERN is working on this.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rsMewo_88Xw

Macroscopic quantum effects are a big deal. It's only a matter of time before the soul is instrumented, fundamentally changing everything we think we know about reality. That could be the second coming of Christ described in the scriptures.

The energies of the particles and behaviors at cern would destroy a human body. A soul would have to operate at body temperature/energy. The energy generated and used in the body is well accounted for. The kind of energy feeding the data of the mind and perceptions and, bandwidth necessary also, to a soul simply isn't present.

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-physicist-just-explained-why-the-large-hadron-collider-disproves-the-existence-of-ghosts

Naivete? Isn't that the city in Portugal with the huge surfing waves?

I was actually expecting Henry to show up and accuse me of being a Play-Doh-ist or an immaterial physicist or some such. In reality I am but a humble bit-twiddler. bradley Rocinante would have been an acceptable fall-back, explicating how mitochondrial wormholes can connect the Vallows to higher spiritual dimensions. It's kind of potluck around here.

The classy old way was to go to a crossroads in the Thuringian Forest at midnight, draw a pentagram enclosed within a circle, light a candle and, intone the magic words in Luther's German.

But all I had to do was accuse BoJ of logical naivete and lo he doth appear.

but he didn't show up.

You know things are bad when you get ditched by a demon :P

Well, now you know to accuse him of logical naivete. Mephistopheles has grown more pretentious in recent centuries.

Some girls just tried this in India.

############

https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/patiala/witchcraft-in-punjabi-university-hostel-sends-students-in-tizzy-warden-issues-warning/


'Witchcraft' in Punjabi University hostel sends students in tizzy, warden issues warning

The warden of a girl’s hostel in Punjabi University has issued a notice warning stern action against those involved in witchcraft.

The move comes after some students spotted a lemon suspiciously placed inside [ a hexagram inscribed within ] a circle drawn on the ground on Thursday morning. This triggered panic among the students after which the girls informed the hostel warden.

They reportedly told the warden that such activities had been noticed earlier also.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/06/2025 08:23AM by anybody.

Given today's geopolitical realities, it's becoming more of a challenge.

Lethbridge Reprobate Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Given today's geopolitical realities, it's
> becoming more of a challenge.

Yes, and not just in the ways that some people here think. I was arguing with someone who claimed European news was balanced. I just said its biases were more subtle.

> I was arguing with someone who claimed
> European news was balanced. I just said its biases
> were more subtle.

But isn't being more "subtle" the same thing as being more "balanced?" In other words, less discernably divergent from the truth?

It seems to me that you've conceded the point.

From the Donald Hoffman Wikipedia page:

"Hoffman argues that natural selection is necessarily directed toward fitness payoffs and that organisms develop internal models of reality that increase these fitness payoffs. This means that organisms develop a perception of the world that is directed towards fitness, and not of reality."

So, we not only don't perceive reality, but can't perceive reality.

The thing we call reality is actually reproductive fitness. The unfortunate consequence is that Joseph Smith was kind of right. Mormonism fetishizes sexuality. Women are trained to only marry returned salesmen. How's that for reproductive fitness?

Mormons believe because they want to believe. The conflict happens when you can't believe. They blame you for "falling away" when in fact the onus was on them to maintain a plausible cosmology. The so-called prophets allowed the doctrine to dry-rot. They will never get back what they had before, so the church pivoted to real estate and hopes nobody will notice.

I have always thought that we are programmed to obtain what the self needs. And that usually means at any cost. Rules are for others.

I find the word "agency" troubling.

"Rules are for others.'

Lori and Chad were persecuted for their beliefs.

Cuttlefish have skin filled with pigment-loaded cells and piston-like muscular pumps, which they use to alter their color and texture. They can camouflage almost instantly to hide from predators, blending into the seafloor, for example, or disguising themselves as rocks or algae.

I read about a scientific team which photographed more than 200 cuttlefish attacks from crab's-eye view--crabs being their preferred prey. In the new study , the scientists documented four elaborate body patterns the cuttlefish used, including what appeared to be imitations of drifting leaves or corals. The cuttlefish displays may somehow hack the visual systems of their prey, which may mask their movement or convince the crabs they are harmless flora and fauna, rather than wily predators soon to end their lives.

I"m not saying the Gerontocracy are cuttlefish or anything, but, well . . . besides appearing to be rocks or algae, they can also appear to be regular men of God if you don't look too closely. Not really an improvement over cuttlefish but gives the illusion of fitting in with the times.

The G.A.s do seem adept at hacking member's spiritual systems as they convince the members that they are harmless while implementing their favorite disguise pretending to be the Way and the Light. The ONLY Way and the Light. No need for inky flesh to accomplish that. An inky mind will do just fine.

Like Cuttlefish, Mormons are all about the facade as they hunt their prey. Distinguishing fantasy from reality is critical then if you don't want to be "dinner".

Because you asked (LOL), cuttlefish are closely related to octopi, which makes them exceptionally intelligent. My kids and I used to have tropical fish, which led to a lot of time spent in a marine fish shop run by a Thai gentleman.

He had to be very careful keeping the octopi tanks tightly closed because sometimes they would under cover of darkness get out, cross to other tanks, and eat the fish there before returning to their home tanks.