Quotes About Reality

This is the essence of the focusing illusion, which can be described in a single sentence: Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

If an event had actually occurred, people exaggerated the probability that they had assigned to it earlier.

Moses illusion.

The sense-making machinery of System 1 makes us see the world as more tidy, simple, predictable, and coherent than it really is. The illusion that one has understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can predict and control the future.

Most of us view the world as more benign than it really

Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be.

El mundo que imaginamos no es una réplica precisa de la realidad;

An individual has been described by a neighbor as follows: "Steve is very shy and withdrawn, invariably helpful but with little interest in people or in the world of reality. A meek and tidy soul, he has a need for order and structure, and a passion for detail." Is Steve more likely to be a librarian or a farmer?

The core of the illusion is that we believe we understand the past, which implies that the future also should be knowable, but in fact we understand the past less than we believe we do.

As you consider the next question, please assume that Steve was selected at random from a representative sample: An individual has been described by a neighbor as follows: "Steve is very shy and withdrawn, invariably helpful but with little interest in people or in the world of reality. A meek and tidy soul, he has a need for order and structure, and a passion for detail." Is Steve more likely to be a librarian or a farmer?

our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in.

The implication is clear: as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt said in another context, "The emotional tail wags the rational dog." The affect heuristic simplifies our lives by creating a world that is much tidier than reality.

we humans constantly fool ourselves by constructing flimsy accounts of the past and believing they are true.

An odd feature of what happened is that your System 1 treated the mere conjunction of two words as representations of reality. Your body acted in an attenuated replica of reaction to the real thing, and the emotional response and physical recoil were part of the interpretation of the event. As cognitive scientists have emphasised in recent years, cognition is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your brain.

Familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.

Ich habe diese Welt nicht anders vorgefunden als gehüllt in mein Bewusstsein; wie also kann ich gehen, ohne sie mitzunehmen? Und gesetzt selbst, dass sie alle, Berge, Häuser, Sonne (und ich bezweifle es) durch und für andere Wesen fortbestehen, - es werden andere sein, nicht diese Berge, diese Häuser, diese Sonne.

Warum er traurig war? [...] Weil die Welt sich so enttäuschend ausnahm, sobald man erkannte, wie dünn ihr Gewebe war, wie grob gestrickt die Illusion, wie laienhaft vernäht ihre Rückseite. Weil nur Geheimnis und Vergessen es erträglich machten. Weil man es ohne den Schlaf, der einen täglich aus der Wirklichkeit riß, nicht aushielt. Nicht Wegsehenkönnen war Traurigkeit. Wachsein war Traurigkeit. Erkennen [...] war Verzweiflung. [...] Weil die Zeit immer verging.

Die Dinge sind, wie sie sind, und wenn wir sie erkennen, sind sie genauso, wie wenn es andere tun oder keiner.

What should he do if word went around that in his throne room hung a magic picture that only the highborn could see, but he couldn't? Of course there was no picture there, it had been one of the fool's jokes, but now that the canvas hung there, it had developed its own power.

The eyes are not windows. There are nerve impulses, but no one reads them, counts them, translates them, and ruminates about them. Hunt for as long as you want, there's nobody home. The world is contained within you, and you're not there.

Erzählen, das bedeutet einen Bogen spannen, wo zunächst keiner ist, den Entwicklungen Struktur und Folgerichtigkeit gerade dort verleihen, wo die Wirklichkeit nichts davon bietet.

Now I understand that one of the important reasons for going to college and getting an education is to learn that the things you've believed in all your life aren't true, and that nothing is what it appears to be.

Materialism: The philosophical position that there is only one thing in the universe: stuff, matter. Anything other than matter is either reducible to matter, as thoughts are reducible to the matter of a brain doing its thing, or doesn't exist, like the Tooth Fairy.

Metaphysics: One of the main topics of philosophy and a bit of a catchall for everything that isn't logic, epistemology, or ethics. Metaphysics looks at the Big Picture: What is "being"? What is the cosmos and what is it made of? Also, incidentally, what is the meaning of life?