Writing practice: just write
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Francois couldn’t move forward and he couldn’t go back. He stood motionless on the bridge, bathed in the yellow light of the street lamps and the pink glow of the pre-dawn sky, leaning on the heavy stone railing, staring at the Seine below.
“Let me go through this again,” he thought. “I exist. I exist on this planet. I’m standing here on this bridge in the early morning. I can act. I can move, and think, and speak. Of what else can I be sure? I can identify my surroundings, or at least my perception of my surroundings. This stone feels cold, but that’s just my perception, my awareness based on sensory input conducted to my brain and interpreted based on pleasure/pain and past experiences. There are many others like I – they, too, can move and think and speak. They too can identify their perceptions of their surroundings.
“But what about Paris? Does Paris exist? Or France? Or is that just a construct in our minds? A fiction, and idea. The earth is real – I can touch it, stomp on it, bury my hands in it, pick up its rocks and run my hands through its water.
“I have money in my pocket. No. I have paper in my pocket. The paper in real. Money is a construct, an idea. I can feel the street under my feet, but that’s just my perception of pressure. I can feel the effects of gravity, which itself is a construct, but the effect of the pull that the earth has on me is real – I’m on the ground, not floating away.
“There are certain things I know are real, but it seems so much of my thoughts are focused on mental constructs – thoughts of the past and the future, perceptions of things that are real and mental manipulations of thoughts of those real things to create constructs that aren’t real.
“It’s very interesting. For instance, we assign to real things a value of money which is a mental construct. We then use the mental construct to create other real things. It’s like math and physics – they’re mental constructs used to understand the rolling of a ball in the real world so that we can calculate a force to apply to the ball to change its movement in the real world. But what if the transition we make from the real world to a mental construct is flawed, and we used the flawed mental construct to decide on future action to apply back to the real world? Then we’ll potentially get a movement of the ball that we don’t want. Then we have a choice – recognize there’s an error and work to fix it, or convince ourselves that there is no error my create new, flawed mental constructs (like interpretations we know are false, but refuse to acknowledge are false to ourselves and/or others). Because the real world doesn’t lie – there’s reality and nothing else.”
By the way, Francois doesn’t think in English. The narrator is translating with the greatest of linguistic accuracy for the benefit of what he anticipates is the native English-speaking reader. Onward.
Francois continued with his internal existential/philosophical struggle, suspended as he was several tens of feet over the Seine. By the way, Francois thinks in metric units, as they do in France. But again, with an accuracy appropriate to the precision of measurement, the narrator, for the benefit of Dear English-speaking reader, has, with effortless speed, calculated the distance in units of feet rather than Francois’s [pretty sure i use the ‘s’ at the end here] native meters. Onward. “Humans,” thought Francois, ” get themselves into all sorts of trouble when they use wrong mental constructs or, and perhaps especially, when the choose to disregard the error in the model or in the real-world result.
“But then again sometimes not. Sometimes it actually is beneficial for a person psychologically to disregard certain negative things about himself so that he can focus on the positive things. So where is the balance? At which point does it become too much? And is some willful blindness necessary? What if one simply thought differently about one’s failings, shortcomings, and regrets such that the consciousness of them wasn’t debilitating to the extent that the person couldn’t look forward to a better place and work for a better situation? Even, perhaps, if a person were to say ‘I know there are things in this mental box I don’t want to acknowledge or confront right now, they do exist and won’t go away, but I can’t deal with them right now and I’ll just have to revisit them later’?
Actually, thinking back, perhaps I should have said Francois was suspended several dozens of feet above the Seine, to keep the English units consistent. Anyway.
Let us continue with Francois as he begins to walk along the bridge, and let us set aside these epistemological questions for a bit. F (I’ll refer to as such going forward, for brevity) walked at a lingering pace, enjoying the feel of the real under his feet. He looked at the smooth cobblestones, fitted and mortared in such a way that they’ve served their purpose for decades, if not centuries. “The cobblestones are real,” he thought. “And I’m real, and I’m walking on them. But then again, a cobblestone is just a collection of atoms that we call a cobblestone (language being a mental construct), and my body is nothing more than a collection of atoms that, by some law or power beyond my knowledge, has what we call consciousness – an awareness of existence and of oneself. But I’ll save that for another day. Right now, it’s good enough that my collection of atoms exists and constitutes me, and the collection of atoms that constitutes a cobblestone, or a bridge, or a spired dome exists.”
By the nature of the atoms that constitute the bridge girders, and by the nature of gravitation, the bridge continued to suspend him above the Seine as he walked along it, toward the spired dome in the distance. “We live in a rational universe,” he thought, “where things act consistently. Atoms behave the same day after day. Gravitation too, and stone remain stones and don’t turn into clouds or birds or marshmallows. And it’s because the universe is rational that we are able to learn its rules, or at least formulate understandings of the real properties which we identify by the mental construct called rules.
“So our minds,” he continued as he left the bridge and progressed toward the church in the distance, “give us the capacity to understand at least a subset of the rules by which the universe behaves, and it is by learning these rules and using them to our advantage that we can take actions that continue life along a path that increases pleasure and decreases pain. But the mind gets us into all sorts of trouble because it is highly fallible. It decides what it wants to believe, sometimes in direct contradiction to reality itself, and it distorts the signals it receives, it errs in how it processes the signals, and it errs in its conclusions (often willfully).
“And so many people want to take part in willful blindness in one way or another. And again, while willful blindness can be beneficial at times, too often it harms far out of proportion to the original pain of having faced reality at the beginning. And while reality exists absolutely, we often ‘sign up for’ one way of thinking or another than suits us psychologically, and we become fixated on that way of thinking even more than reality itself. As though, ultimately, our acquired perception of reality is more important to us that reality itself.
“And maybe the most successful ‘salesmen’ in a sense are the ones that can be present a version of reality that others find most helpful, whether or not it adheres closely to reality itself. And perhaps it’s a sort of game, where the people who buy the salesman’s vision do so knowing that it’s not necessarily real, and the salesman knows it too, but they all benefit by believing his story.
“And again, there’s the real and there’s the mental construct. It’s a real mental construct, but it might have nothing to do with reality itself. And to motivate, there must be a sufficient balance of near-term benefits and long-terms benefits, and the total benefit must sufficiently exceed the cost to make it worth it.
“And who pays when the mental constructs are wrong? It would be a just universe when the individual himself was the only one who paid, but too often its others who must, and the individual can continue believing his mental construct is correct while others continue to pay the consequences.
“And we get so tied up with our mental constructs, and the way we form them, that they become part of our identity. And at this point, it’s overwhelmingly psychologically difficult for us to change them. And again, if we lived in a just universe then only those whose mental constructs were wrong would pay the price, but we don’t live in a just universe; we live in a rational universe. But mental constructs are free, and for some/many/most, if we think we can’t change out circumstances, we change our mental constructs so that we think about our circumstances differently. We learn to accept them, first grudgingly or resentfully, then perhaps with resignation, then perhaps even habitually.
“Ultimately, reality exists, but during our lives our mental constructs affect us psychologically in some ways far more than the facts of reality affect us. Perhaps it’s that reality affects us primarily physically, and our mental constructs affect us primarily psychologically, and that in each realm the one is more pronounced than the other. And perhaps, to understand a person, it helps to understand his mental constructs and how he forms them, and whether they are formed consciously and actively or unconsciously and passively.
“So: Reality exists and is that which exists. I exist and have the capacity to form mental constructs. These mental constructs might be, to the best of my ability, based on reality as I perceive it in order to understand and predict it, or they might be deliberate veils over my perception of reality because it’s in my perceived best interest to veil my understanding or acceptance of reality (usually my acceptance). Itt can be quite comforting to know that reality exists, that for our purposes the entirety of reality exists within the confines of this universe, and that the universe is rational. That means, to the extent we can and/or are willing, by understanding the workings of the universe we can observe reality as it is.
“And by adjusting people’s mental constructs, we can affect how they perceive reality, and thus in some way manipulate them (not necessarily in a nefarious and underhanded way). But it is a bit like the tail wagging the dog. We are the dog, and our mental constructs are the tail and should be controlled by the dog, but if we wag the tail in certain ways we can manipulate the dog. It’s all backwards, but that’s part of how we self-manipulate or how we manipulate others.
[ok, 2 hours]