The case against reality

[flowerthief00]

This is long but goes into really deep fascinating territory. A quick take-away is the finding that evolution does NOT select for the organism who understands reality. It seems to be the case that it could be a survival advantage to be dead wrong in your beliefs.

I am reminded of a study that found that people who have an accurate view of themselves are more likely to suffer from depression. Conversely, the people with unrealistically inflated opinions of themselves are happier in life.

Which leads to an interesting dilemma: Is it better to be happy? Or is it better to be right?
Evolution would suggest that you take the blue pill.



*

[Neo]

It's better to seek the truth. Then a person should be able to act accordingly. To believe in delusion is to live life according to lies, which is a horrible way to live. Self-delusion leads to conceit. Although they may be happy, this type do not conduct themselves according to truth. Who can trust a person who lies to himself about the nature of reality itself?

God created humanity.

[andrewfitzpatrick]

This is long but goes into really deep fascinating territory. A quick take-away is the finding that evolution does NOT select for the organism who understands reality. It seems to be the case that it could be a survival advantage to be dead wrong in your beliefs.

I am reminded of a study that found that people who have an accurate view of themselves are more likely to suffer from depression. Conversely, the people with unrealistically inflated opinions of themselves are happier in life.

Which leads to an interesting dilemma: Is it better to be happy? Or is it better to be right?
Evolution would suggest that you take the blue pill.



*

Thanks for posting. Enjoyable video. I've been watching Tom Campbell on youtube recently since I like his views on consciousness. This is another viewpoint on that same theme.

[Shemp]

https://aeon.co/essays/the-voice-of-sad ... f-its-sane

Rationality is definitely non-fit and strongly selected against. In particular, sacrificing yourself for a grand cause is highly irrational. But back in days of hand to hand combat, armies composed of men who were rational (and thus focused on self interest) would have been crushed by armies of true believers. Rational soldiers would all try to avoid the front lines. Race to the rear would soon turn into a rout. Which implies that people with strong tendency towards rationality probably mostly exist in marginal lands, where they never faced competition with other humans but rather population was held in check by difficulty of eeking out a living. Think hunter gatherers in sparsely populated scrub deserts.

Longer a group has been living in rich lands, where the chief threat is not Mother Nature but rather other humans, greater the tendency towards irrational thinking. In some cases the selection pressure is made extreme by a binary choice every generation: irrational true believers into group A, rational indifferent skeptics into group B. After many generations, group A will have very strong tendency towards batshit craziness. This describes Askenazi Jews, where every generation had the choice to remain a Jew and suffer persecution, or convert to Christianity so as to escape persecution. Converts blend into the surrounding population, whereas true believers become more are more highly selected for tendency to fanaticism.

Above reasoning requires that tendency to rational or irrational thinking is hereditary, either genetic, or programming that can be passed from one generation to the next, or combination of genes and programming. I think it's mostly programming towards irrationality (which opens the possibility that a person raised to be crazy can later learn to be sane), but probably a genetic component with people like Dan Cilley.

I absolutely do NOT believe that rational, reality-based thinking necessarily leads to depression. It only does so in stupid people who actually are not totally rational, but merely more rational than average. Truly rational people are like me, cheerful amoral monsters who don't reproduce much (if at all) and hence are always uncommon.

[Cornfed]

Rationality is definitely non-fit and strongly selected against.

Only if you draw an arbitrary boundary around your physical body. There is no rational reason to do this.

[Shemp]

Rationality is definitely non-fit and strongly selected against.

Only if you draw an arbitrary boundary around your physical body. There is no rational reason to do this.

First you start with goals, then rationality means acting in a way to achieve those goals, irrationality the opposite. If your goal is to expand the Mongol empire and glorify Genghis Khan, then sacrificing yourself in battle is rational. However, such a goal is not reality based.

Reality based goals are based on the physical reality of the body: satisfying fundamental bodily desires for self-preservation and reproduction. The reproductive urge is actually a sexual urge, then mother strongly bonds to her children during childbirth, plus both men and women less strongly bond to other bodies with which they have close physical contact, especially sexual contact. Thus in practice, sexual urge inevitably results in reproduction and child-rearing (absent modern technology like contraception and abortion).

So let me rephrase. Rationality applied to reality based goals is fit and selected for as long as humans are primarily struggling with the rest of Mother Nature for survival. Once humans start primarily competing with other humans (the case in most of the world for past 5000 years at least), rationality applied to reality based goals becomes unfit and is selected against.

[flowerthief00]

Great insights from Shemp. At least someone around here is well-read.

On a related topic, a thing I learned recently that I had not considered before but now seems obvious is that intelligence and rationality are likely to be inversely correlated with physical strength and ability in the context of evolution. When the human species is compared to other life on our planet we are found to be inferior in most ways. Other animal species are faster, stronger, have sharpened senses, have natural body armor, can fly, etc. It is precisely because humans are physically weak that evolution pressured us to develop intelligence in order to compete for survival.

Which is another way of saying that all of the other species we observe did not become as intelligent as humans because they didn't need to. They found enough success without it. There is an implication that intelligence and reason may be a rare thing (both on and off this planet).

[Moretorque]

Great insights from Shemp. At least someone around here is well-read.

On a related topic, a thing I learned recently that I had not considered before but now seems obvious is that intelligence and rationality are likely to be inversely correlated with physical strength and ability in the context of evolution. When the human species is compared to other life on our planet we are found to be inferior in most ways. Other animal species are faster, stronger, have sharpened senses, have natural body armor, can fly, etc. It is precisely because humans are physically weak that evolution pressured us to develop intelligence in order to compete for survival.

Which is another way of saying that all of the other species we observe did not become as intelligent as humans because they didn't need to. They found enough success without it. There is an implication that intelligence and reason may be a rare thing (both on and off this planet).

No other species can match mans physical skill set and we are not talking brains either....

[Zize55]

This is interesting information for me. Thank you for sharing.