Scientists are considering the idea that our perception of reality is shaped not only by our senses but by our brains creating an internal map or model of the world around us.
This means our perception of what’s true or real is malleable, and we are at risk of losing our grasp on it. The result can be tragedies like the Jonestown mass suicide and Nazi Germany.
Some philosophers think that evolution cares more about how to survive than about any accurate version of reality, which can lead to “useful fictions” about the world.
That headline is cringe to it’s core, but that aside, who would possibly be an opponent of this concept? I thought it was just universally understood that our individual senses can lie to us and that collective reality with repeatable experimentation is our only source for basis in fact.
FFS as a species we’ve been recording this same conversation towards this same conclusion for thousands of years.
Nobody discovered fuck all with this assertion.
EDIT: I shouldn’t have come on this strong, my apologies, it’s perfectly fine to study and reiterate this work and it’s good that they’re tying it to modern historic examples.
Headline is so wrong that i have to downvote. Reality is NOT a shared hallucination. Reality is what it is regardless of our thoughts about it.
True, but the caveat is that we have no way of knowing what that reality looks like other than through our interpretation of it. We can’t do anything about “true reality” because we have no way of proving anything about it without relying on said thoughts. Like for example, we really like the scientific method for “proving” reality, but it only works assuming that the “true reality” follows the same logical principles we adhere to. Is there really a cause-effect sense in “true reality” or is it just our biased interpretation that the universe follows natural logic rules?
That’s like saying that there are facts and alternative facts.
No. It’s like saying there is visible light and invisible light. Which is true, there’s ultra violet and infra red, but you don’t know that because you’ve seen it. Your can’t see infra red, that is the point, your model of the world is based on words, not on ‘reality’.
I can understand most of your point, but that last part is just weird. My model of the world is not based on words. It’s based on observation amd perception.
Isn’t this kind of what Kant said? For example that time is just how our mind is “ordering” everything.
We have thousands of years of works of philosophy discussing these exact ideas, but I would guess that some scientists don’t focus too much on the humanities in their education.