More thoughts on the Reality Paradigm Shift

Movies and novels are good as far as the characters give us the impression of reality, of knowing them. Or of loving their mystery! It’s same with people, we get the illusion that we know them well from really rather scanty information and impressions. IT excites us, it gets us thinking, we wonder what will happen next, if it breaks the illusion of reality with 4^th wall etc. then it is at least partly ruined.

We cultivate an appearance that we hope will attract the people who attract us. Even if that means we act like slobs, we wish to catch some other slobs or people who like slobs. :D

What about philanthropists and green enthusiasts? Do they actually love the world, or they like to picture themselves as heroes saving the world? Many people act as they do just so they can feel they belong to a larger team.

We project our own sense of personal dynamics onto others when we try to picture their inner lives. We imagine their motivations and feelings are much like our own. We feel sympathetic but it is likely largely just imagined similarities of emotions. Bloggers project our own personal sense of self but usually it is magnified or exaggerated, sometimes for sympathetic responses, sometimes to make people like us, largely in general it is likely just that we want people to like us...but that’s maybe just me.

We all care about what others think of us, about what impression we make on others. When we lose control of our poise, we maybe show more our natural selves, but then again it’s at times of emotional upset and not representative of our ordinary selves really.

Maybe depression or depressive states are exaggerated echo chambers of the negative parts of our thinking, of experiencing disillusion or insecurity about illusions, fear of being found out, fear of people not being what we want them to be or feeling otherwise than how we want them to feel, or fear that we are not who we really want to be, or of general recognition that we are not in control of others or the external world and therefore reality will intrude and break up our sense of belief. Certainly we sometimes tend to project our self doubt and self hatred onto other people and picture them rejecting us and wanting to desert us. We wish to desert our real life selves, and also our ‘negative self image’ reality, and escape to a place where we don’t exist objectively, or we can get back in control of what we perceive and feel.

Maybe atheists, rather than seeking sanctuary from bad feelings in God or prayer, take comfort in the illusion that because they are more ‘rational’ they are therefore more intelligent or better informed than religious folks. Actually just rejecting superstition or religion is not enough to make us better informed; it is only a diminution of their emotional and imaginative boundaries. Being educated or gaining knowledge can give us a broader range of experiences and points of view and all to draw from, but it is not the same as wisdom or intelligence. It is an aid to intelligence, much as a better memory can be. It can lead to a wiser decision because it is more informed by the range of possibilities, of potentials and of precedent that you have been exposed to. This is how a detective becomes better, with experience (and to the mind reading about others’ experiences is itself a form of experience, something to draw from when hypothesizing about what has happened in this situation.)

How is a bookworm different from a scholar? Is it the choice of material, or how it’s experienced/read, or the purpose of the reader? Is a scholar more focused on broadening the range of real world data?

Aporia/____

Maybe religious people and nonreligious people think in similar ways, but the pools of knowledge and mental storage are different pools.

Life before meters...clocks, rulers, weight measurements. Who says? That a certain measurement indicates health and another sickness? Smartness and stupidity? Punctuality? Why are numbers tied to judgment as they are?

Is experience always measured by real world experiences like work experience or travel? What about the amount learned in the library or online, or in the pursuit of hobbies?