Send us a text Subjective reality is the mind's best estimation of what the objective world is. "Best estimation" is doing a *lot* of heavy lifting in that sentence. Links https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_character_of_experience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that's creating and interpreting the language of the disinformation age.
I'm Spencer, your host.
And just me today.
A solo episode.
It's a new year.
And sometimes I think about this time of year and I think, what do I want?
What do I want for the new year?
So, I mean, aside from all the regular everyday things, I already thought about it.
And what I want is a world in which politics changes in relation to reality rather than a reality that changes in relation to politics.
I want a world where people I know and meet change how they're going to vote based on what's really happening in the world rather than a world where the people I know and meet choose what to believe based on where they prefer to vote.
I want a world that isn't filled with people who pretend to mistrust the powerful, but are actually doing the things that lead the powerful to becoming even more powerful.
That was a lot of negatives.
I want a world in which the level of conspiratorial thinking is less than the level of rational thinking.
I want to be able to talk to people without them mentioning how the healthcare system is more interested in squeezing them for profits than in healing their sicknesses.
I want to talk to people who don't work backwards from the result to the simplest and most politically biased cause they can imagine.
I want to talk to people who are willing to admit they might be wrong about something, even deeply cherished beliefs.
I want to talk to people who have a standard of evidence high enough that they have some hope in understanding reality.
I want to talk to people I can trust to not freak out when given information that disagrees with their beliefs.
And I want people who feel free enough to give me the information I need to keep me from believing things that aren't true.
I want a world where people don't pretend to serve the greater good by making up facts.
I want a world where people don't pretend to serve the greater good by asserting with confidence something that they should actually be double checking.
I want a world where someone's word can actually be their bond, a world that actually has real trust and that in knowing that real trust exists, people will be careful to not lose it by tossing out feel-good platitudes that might be just as false as the idea they're trying to oppose.
So how do I get all that?
How do I come to understand what it is that people believe?
How can I possibly know what it is that anyone else knows?
Or that anyone else, in fact, knows anything at all?
It's been said that opinions are like assholes.
Everybody's got one.
It's very clever.
But what is an opinion?
Turns out, I know what an opinion is.
An opinion is the portion of a person's subjective reality that they're willing and able to turn into words.
I think this sometimes annoys people about me.
The way I turn everyday conversational things into strict scientific language that they hadn't thought about before and would like to not have to have connected in their minds.
Why don't they want these things to have such strict definitions?
Probably so that they can shift the definitions as needed to avoid having to have their beliefs be confronted by reality.
See, I'm on to you.
And if you let me, I will climb into your mind and shine a light to show what's inside.
Opinions are a small piece of each person's subjective reality.
So what is subjective reality?
Inside your mind is a consciousness that, as part of its self-awareness, has built a model of what the world outside of its cage looks like.
That model is your subjective reality.
We each have a subjective reality.
It doesn't match objective reality exactly.
Attempting to create a subjective reality that exactly match objective reality would take a lot more resources for our brains, much more than our brains have.
So there are budget cuts.
Efficiency.
Our minds have a process that clips, trims, or otherwise edits reality for presentation to our subjective minds.
In addition to this, and maybe even as part of it, our minds make other compromises between subjective and objective reality.
We have preferences and social needs, blind spots.
Perhaps we have a family member or close friend that has a few unsavory or non-ideal properties.
Maybe your spouse is lying to you about something and you notice that something's different.
Perhaps you love them enough that you force yourself to trust them without looking into anything.
They'll tell you about whatever it is when they're ready.
Or maybe it slips past on a more subconscious level because you just have too many things going on and accepting another big one would mean a lot of hassle.
So you reinterpret the new and different parts out of existence.
It's nothing.
Sometimes people change in small ways.
It happens.
People can work themselves to the point where they come to the erroneous conclusion that there is no objective reality.
That the thing that is mistaken for objective reality is just subjective reality in each mind.
It just happens to be very, very similar to the subjective reality in each of the next person's minds and so on.
Perhaps most remarkably is the fact that the people who think this also tend to think that there are no coincidences in any other context, which makes the fact that they come to believe that it's a coincidence that everyone's subjective reality is so amazingly similar really, really strange.
Regardless, it is in this way that they can come to believe that the world itself and all the objectively available things there don't really matter.
The thing that matters is what everyone collectively believes about that world.
And one can come to this feeling very honestly.
The most complicated calculations your brain is doing are related to your social value and to navigating your social relationships.
The most important factor in those calculations is how people see you.
What people see when they think of you.
Do they see someone who is reliable, intelligent, attractive, honest, forthright, trustworthy, honorable?
And when you think about yourself, are you really as much of those things as people seem to think you are?
Is there any sense of imposter's syndrome driving an underlying lack of complete confidence in yourself?
Does this cause you to try to act the part as best you can, at least in some respects, in order to increase your social value to your peers?
And in acting the part or allowing others to see you as greater than you feel inside, do you come to understand that the thing that really matters is how people perceive you?
And once your life is about maintaining a perception of yourself that is perhaps not entirely matching the reality you know to be true inside yourself, do you then fall prey to thoughts about how maintaining a facade for the world is not only possible but likely?
Do you begin to think that everyone would be faking it just the way you are, and that yeah, maybe everything in the world is at least somewhat fake?
If no one has noticed your shortcomings, then maybe the entire world is filled with people who are incompetent and faking it, and everyone is just too busy covering for their own shortcomings to really notice.
Side note, slippery slope arguments don't feel fallacious when you name every stone on the path.
The world can't really be entirely fake.
Every person has a degree of fakeness, but they would have to be agreeing in advance to what parts should be fake in order for this idea to work.
The need for conscious agreement breaks this idea.
How do you think those conversations would go, if anyone actually believes these conversations happen?
Your homework assignment is to write the screenplay showing what words people would use to make them happen.
I want to hear them.
Once a person buys into the idea that a grand conspiracy can be real, they often need to shift a few things around in their subjective reality in order to accommodate it.
One thing that needs to change is objectively real.
Things need to be sorted by whether or not they support the central conspiracy narrative.
It's real, simple.
Everything that supports it is real and everything that doesn't is fake.
And voila, suddenly you're no longer creating a subjective reality that's based on objective reality, but instead attempting to find the objectively real things that support your subjective reality.
The need to undermine confidence in the evidence that other people submit can be powerful.
It leads to arguments like, you can't know that because you weren't there.
This is a line of thinking that can effectively tear apart ideas, but isn't very good at building them.
One then has to ignore this line of thinking when working to build the new idea that will take the place of the idea just torn down by, you can't know that because you weren't there.
Sorting out what is and is not real is a primary objective of this podcast and of everyone's everyday life, more so now that the stakes have been raised and several industries have been created out of a collection of side hustles that all rely on the ability to confuse or deliberately steer potential customers away from objectively real things and toward things like supplements,
alternative medicines and go fund me pages for legal issues resulting from defamation lawsuits.
So what is real?
How do you know it's real?
If it's real to you, then is that enough?
How does anyone know what is real when we know so much about how things could be fake?
I want to talk about Plato's allegory of the cave briefly.
It's been discussed at length in many, many places with very little consensus.
And in case anyone thinks I'm here to sort all that out, I'm not.
I'm here to talk about the nature of subjective reality.
Imagine that you're trapped inside a cave.
The cave has an opening that's the size of a standard door, but the space inside the cave is much larger.
Let's make it about the size of your standard living room and kitchen combined.
There's a bonfire outside the door that casts bright light directly into the cave against the back wall.
As you're trapped in the cave, you can't go outside of it or even directly look out the door.
Your only view is of the light at the back of the cave.
As events happen in the world, it sometimes happens that people walk between the bonfire and the cave entrance, and this casts shadows, contrasting the light against the back wall of your cave.
This is essentially the image given by Plato in his famous allegory.
Many metaphors have been suggested to draw ever larger and more complicated meanings from this image, but today we're just going to try to understand the basic one.
You are unable to directly view the world.
You are at the mercy of the information that happens to make its way to you.
And even then, you are hindered by the need to decipher that world from a limited amount of information.
Now, as the image is formed in your mind about attempting to decipher an entire world in this way, I must remind you that it's not impossible.
You've had years of practice, decades even.
And this has allowed you to develop a lot of shortcuts and methods of understanding and deciphering those shadows on your cave wall in a way that makes sense to you.
And this is where it gets complicated.
Theory of mind is the idea in neuroscience that you, as a conscious and self-aware being, have an understanding that another person, any other person, also has a collection of ideas in their brain that we call their mind.
Without theory of mind, you would be a creature alone in the world, treating everyone you meet with no more consideration than you might give a book, an object that can bring you information and maybe even create an illusory feeling based on the information it brings, but of no more concern than any other inanimate object.
Without having an understanding that other people have minds, you wouldn't be able to understand that they make decisions that might affect you.
You would be completely unable to navigate in a social environment because everyone around you would quickly come to understand that you wouldn't be making decisions with any consideration for their interests, and therefore you could not and would not be trusted.
So you treat other people as though they themselves are conscious and self-aware beings, that they make their own decisions, and that you need those decisions to happen a certain way for your life to continue unimpeded.
But what was all that about Plato's cave then?
Let's tie these two ideas together.
You are a consciousness trapped alone inside of a skull with a limited number of ways for information to make it to you.
And with that limitation in mind, you have developed ways of interpreting and deciphering your sensory information so as to understand your world.
And through your social interactions with people, due to theory of mind, you have come to understand that other people are just individual consciousnesses trapped alone inside of their individual skulls with, again, limited ways for information to make it to them.
And they, in turn, have developed ways of interpreting and deciphering their sensory input so as to understand their world, which is the same as the world that you inhabit.
But now we see the complicated part.
Because in comparing what we each have deciphered about the world with what each other person has deciphered about the world, we find that there are differences.
Each of us has had different experiences so that so that part didn't exactly help.
Also, the words we use are only somewhat reasonable at symbolically representing our thoughts, so that provides an additional barrier to this comparison.
Also, sometimes when you relay your thoughts in great and wonderful detail, other people struggle to understand them, which is undoubtedly happening with at least a few people listening to this right now.
So how, then, do we ever come to trust that another person has deciphered the world in a way that allows any of us to trust that we are being understood by them?
Knowing that everyone else is just a person trapped in a cave watching shadows flicker across a wall and attempting to decipher all of reality from that is very sobering.
When someone tells you something and assures you that it's true, how many mistakes in understanding did they make?
If it was something they were told and assured about by someone else, you now have two minds that must now have understood the thing well enough to pass it on to you.
Each new person in the game of telephone diminishes the likelihood that you're receiving accurate information.
Which is part of how trust is a lot easier to break than it is to build.
In fact, most trust is nearly completely unearned from a rational perspective.
We don't trust people because we have data that tells us what they will or won't do and that these decisions will be good for us.
We trust people because we like them, because they give us a warm and comforting feeling.
We trust people because they're attractive and clean.
We trust people because they appear more confident than nervous.
We trust people because the people are still with us after bad things happen.
All of these are not rational reasons to trust anyone.
But as social creatures, we do it all the time.
And these irrational justifications for trusting others seem to be just part of the way our brains work.
Explains why these are more or less the same reasons, irrespective of ethnicity and culture.
Without trust being irrational, we would never have been able to trust each other enough to have built the societies we have now.
Think about it.
If we had to get the full list of details on each person we trusted and also on all the people they trusted, before we trusted them, we would have to have, we would have been solo creatures from the start.
And without this irrational social lubricant that makes us form groups, we wouldn't have developed the world we live in today.
But knowing this doesn't exactly make our shared reality situation any less tenuous.
The irrational nature of our baseline social trust tends to undermine our confidence and our own opinions of people once we come to realize what is happening.
So now that we have the shaky ground defined, everyone is trapped in their own cave trying to decipher the world through the shadows cast against the back wall.
And everyone knows that everyone else is doing this as well.
And we've convinced ourselves that those people closest to us that we like are more likely to be right about any random thing than anyone else in the world.
So what do we do with that?
Do we throw up our hands and say the problem is too difficult?
Do we agree with each other that the end is inevitable for us and that our time is better spent trying to enjoy what little time there is left?
Or do we stop and think about what to do?
Do we accept defeat before we begin?
Do we declare that every possible solution has already been tried and that we're properly screwed?
Or do we or do we buckle down and try new things?
Do we ignore the fact that this is a planet-killing machine and as the plucky rebels we all imagine ourselves to be, we might be only insects to it, but we're not out of the fight yet.
What do I want for the new year?
I want allies.
People who recognize that the deliberate distortion of information is dangerous and that countering it with a distortion that just happens to lean in the opposite political direction isn't actually helping us to see what's real.
I want allies who can accept when I point out they're wrong and can tell me when I'm wrong.
There are some people out there among this group already, and I'm looking to add people to this list.
So reach out.
The email is truthunrestricted at gmail.com at SpencerG Watson on Twitter at SpencerWatson on Blue Sky.
And if you're close enough to know me on Facebook, then you can reach me there as well.
Tell me what you're doing to fight disinformation this year.