Perception Scientist Says Reality Is ‘What Proved Useful in the Past’
Later in his explanation, he cites language as a clear example of something that’s part of our reality but only exists in our collective imagination. “It doesn’t exist without us,” he writes. “But it is very much part of our reality, because it was useful for it to be so.” Scientists have theorized that the human capacity for language is what allowed us to form the social bonds we needed to survive as a species. In Sapiens, the historian Yuval Noah Harari expands on this concept of “shared fictions,” explaining that things like money, laws, and religions are likewise very much a part of our reality because they’re useful to us but also don’t exist, in any concrete and objective way, anywhere outside of our minds. If we collectively stop believing in any of these things, they stop existing — and therefore are no longer part of reality. Perception, he concludes, is all in the brain. And because we’re now learning how to manipulate perception in the brain, it’s entirely possible that we can thereby alter our experience of reality.
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I remember an Episode of the Rachel Maddow Show in which she showed how the two major Political Ideologies in the US were working with two different sets of facts.
I come down thoroughly on the side of empirical facts —not preferred belief.