Roger Ramjets
Philosopher
It's more than that though. The real insecurity goes right to the heart of their psyche - of whether their feelings are valid, their thoughts true, and their worldview accurate. The idea that it might all be an illusion is unthinkable, therefore the deep-seated need to refute it."Therefore you're a hypocrite for telling me my woo isn't true." It's that. It's always that. It was that last time. It will be that next time. The same "I'm so intellectually insecure about being wrong about one thing that I'm going to scorch the entire intellectual earth of the entire concept of knowledge" crap it literally always is.
If the mind is just a result of atoms interacting blindly then how can you trust yourself? The answer of course is - you can't. You look at something and 'see' red, but all you are seeing is light bouncing off an object and stimulating nerves in your eye. Then the brain interprets that signal as the color red, even when an instrument might show it isn't. Everybody has seen those optical illusions showing colors that aren't there, and the science behind why we see them is well understood. But the truth is, everything we 'see' is an illusion.
Our visual system doesn't work like a camera, accurately capturing an entire scene exactly as imaged. Instead, we build up a 3 dimensional 'picture' in our minds based on the color and brightness variations around the edges of objects. Then those attributes are referenced to what we know about them from past experience - the curves and angles, textures and patterns, even the materials they are made of. Finally we replace them with our memory of what they represent. You look at a red apple and not only can you 'see' the apple, you can feel, smell, and taste it - all from memory.
That picture we build up in our minds is useful, but it isn't real. In reality the apple might be made of white wax, illuminated with a red light to make it look like a real apple. Without biting into that 'apple' we don't know if it really exists - but we think we do. And the idea that our perceptions are not 'true' is unacceptable. How could we live without it? We can't. But we can use science to show us a truer reality that exists beyond the fantasies in our minds - if we let it.
It's hard to get past the feeling that our perceptions are the reality, and many people just can't do it. But even those of us who can don't most of the time. Even if we know they aren't 'real', we trust our feelings because they help us get through life. That's the way the brain works, so it makes sense to go with it. For most people, most of the time, that is enough. We just need to realize that there are situations where it isn't.
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