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There are many, many people who would happily put you and your family in a gulag or concentration camp for your political beliefs if you have any, whatever they

There are many, many people who would happily put you and your family in a gulag or concentration camp for your political beliefs if you have any, whatever they are. There are lots of people who believe that achieving their utopia is worth a lot of dead men, women and children. This is true whether you would pick the fascists or the communists given a forced choice between the two.

mistermann 6y ago
I'm not saying it isn't plausible, and history contains many examples of such behavior, but my point is that the mind has this ability to imagine various scenarios of what could be true, but we speak of these neurologically generated virtual scenarios as if they are actually true. In this example, you even literally use the word "true" when referring to these ideas, demonstrating how real these simulated scenarios seem - to the mind, they are often indistinguishable from actual knowledge and first person experiences. This phenomenon is ever present in human behavior, in everything we do. In science, engineering, manufacturing, and "most" activities that humans engage in within the economic sphere, we typically apply fairly rigorous scrutiny to competing theories (consciously controlled imaginations) about the current and potential future states of reality, and as a result we tend to produce high quality and sometimes even amazing results (splitting the atom, landing robots on Mars, antibiotics & vaccines, the internet, etc)...but when it comes to normal day to day activities (our "actual lives", the underlying reason most people do all these other things at our place of employment), we seem to not only not apply similar levels of scrutiny to our thinking, but most people seem to consider the very idea to be outrageous, often passionately so. I think it's an interesting way to think about the world. Perhaps there is even some future value in thinking about the world in different ways, as there has been in the past.

mistermann 6y ago

I'm not saying it isn't plausible, and history contains many examples of such behavior, but my point is that the mind has this ability to imagine various scenarios of what could be true, but we speak of these neurologically generated virtual scenarios as if they are actually true. In this example, you even literally use the word "true" when referring to these ideas, demonstrating how real these simulated scenarios seem - to the mind, they are often indistinguishable from actual knowledge and first person experiences. This phenomenon is ever present in human behavior, in everything we do. In science, engineering, manufacturing, and "most" activities that humans engage in within the economic sphere, we typically apply fairly rigorous scrutiny to competing theories (consciously controlled imaginations) about the current and potential future states of reality, and as a result we tend to produce high quality and sometimes even amazing results (splitting the atom, landing robots on Mars, antibiotics & vaccines, the internet, etc)...but when it comes to normal day to day activities (our "actual lives", the underlying reason most people do all these other things at our place of employment), we seem to not only not apply similar levels of scrutiny to our thinking, but most people seem to consider the very idea to be outrageous, often passionately so. I think it's an interesting way to think about the world. Perhaps there is even some future value in thinking about the world in different ways, as there has been in the past.