Quotes About Reality

Every generation of humans believed it had all the answers it needed, except for a few mysteries they assumed would be solved at any moment. And they all believed their ancestors were simplistic and deluded. What are the odds that you are the first generation of humans who will understand reality?

Clinical psychologists have proven that ordinary people will alter their memories of the past to make them fit their perceptions. It is the way all normal brains function under ordinary circumstances.

Reality is overrated and impossible to understand with any degree of certainty. What you do know for sure is that some ways of looking at the world work better than others. Pick the way that works, even if you don't know why.

Because everything you perceive is a metaphor for something your brain is not equipped to fully understand. God is as real as the clothes you are wearing and the chair you are sitting in. They are all metaphors for something you will never understand.

There is more information in one thimble of reality than can be understood by a galaxy of human brains. It is beyond the human brain to understand the world and its environment, so the brain compensates by creating simplified illusions that act as a replacement for understanding.

the past exists only in your mind," he said. "Likewise, the future exists only in your mind because it has not happened.

I have no reason to believe humans evolved with the capability to understand their reality. That capability was not important to survival. When it comes to evolution, any illusion that keeps us alive long enough to procreate is good enough.

money distorts truth like a hippo in a thong.

I don't read the news to find truth, as that would be a foolish waste of time.

simplicity is not proof of truth. But since we can never understand true reality, if two models both explain the same facts, it is more rational to use the simpler one. It is a matter of convenience.

If, as you say, our minds are delusion generators, then we're all like blind and deaf sea captains shouting orders into the universe and hoping it makes a difference. We have no way of knowing what really works and what merely seems to work. So doesn't it make sense to try all the things that appear to work even if we can't be sure?

Reality has a pulse, a rhythm, for lack of better words.

Humans think they are rational, and they think they understand their reality. But they are wrong on both counts.

The elderly are spooky when they degenerate into reflections of their younger selves. They say things that make sense on some grammatical level, but it's not always connected to reality.

Inaccurate worldviews are the only kind there is.

Confirmation bias isn't an occasional bug in our human operating system. It is the operating system. We are designed by evolution to see new information as supporting our existing opinions, so long as it doesn't stop us from procreating. Evolution doesn't care if you understand your reality. It only cares that you reproduce.

Every generation before us believed, like Snickers, that it had things figured out. We now know that every generation before us was wrong about a lot of it. Is it likely that you were born at the tipping point of history, in which humans know enough about reality to say we understand it? This is another case where humility is your friend.

Our language and our minds are too limited to deal with anything but a fixed reality, regardless of whether such a thing exists. The best we can do is to update our delusions to fit the times. We live in an increasingly rational, science-based society. The religious metaphors of the past are no longer comforting. Science is whittling at them from every side. Humanity needs a metaphor that allows God and science to coexist, at least in our minds, for the next thousand years.

Okay, I can accept the idea that God doesn't have a personality exactly like people. Maybe we just assume God has a personality because it's easier to talk about it that way. But the important point is that something had to create reality. It's too well-designed to be an accident.

How can something that doesn't exist in physical form have influence over the things that do?

about finding evidence of the past) And when you get that confirmation, it would instantly become the past itself. So in effect, you would be using the past, which does not exist, to confirm something else from the past. And if you repeat the process a thousand times, with a thousand different pieces of evidence, together they would still be nothing but impressions of the past supporting other impressions of the past.

The human mind is a delusion generator, not a window to truth. Everyone, including skeptics, will generate delusions that match their views. That is how a normal and healthy brain works. Skeptics are not exempt from self-delusion.

imagine where our current delusions about reality might lead us.

What I saw with Trump's candidacy for president is that the "within reason" part of our understanding about reality was about to change, bigly. I knew that candidate Trump's persuasion skills were about to annihilate the public's ability to understand what they were seeing, because their observations wouldn't fit their mental model of living in a rational world.