Why the Earth 1, Earth 2 Shorthand is Actually Harmful
October 18. Welcome. Grab a coffee and let’s talk about a realistic utopia of a fair society as this is the only kind of society that offers a realistic chance of eliminating violence and war.
I want to pick up something I talked about last night at the end of my TikTok Live session – the references to the existence of an Earth 1 and an Earth 2 when people speak about the widening divide in society. It’s a shorthand, I understand. Something that makes it easier to refer to a complex issue without going into it. But this shorthand is harmful as it enforces and perpetuates the false understanding that we, by nature, all live in the same reality. Thereby it denies the hard work it requires of every last one of us to align our models of the world to the point where cooperation is possible.
The idea that we all experience the same reality in our minds goes back to the narrative that God created the world that unfolds to his plan with humans being some of the playing pieces. Then, of course, there would be one totally immersive movie playing that every creature on earth is watching. And when you don’t experience the same reality, well then you must have broken with God and be in league with the devil. It’s an understanding of life that favors the mighty and rich as their wealth and power must be part of God’s plan the same way everyone else’s misery must be.
While deeply ingrained in the dataset which even the atheists today still use in their individual world generation processes after it was literally preached for millennia, this understanding of life and consciousness is wrong. Our reality is generated by the mushy substance hidden and protected from the environment behind the solid cover of our skulls - our brains. Its only connection to the outside are our senses, which are few, extremely limited, and not very precise. Don’t get me wrong. The whole system works well for the task it developed for as a tool: locating energy patterns in the surroundings, figuring out via hypotheses which of the available patterns are the most promising to get the material things making up our body closer to their lowest energy state while in equilibrium with their surroundings, and creating and executing plans to get our bodies to interact with the chosen patterns. But what energy patters work best for one body will not necessarily work best for another. And thus, the mapping, the model of the world the mind of one person generates will differ, and differ profoundly, from the model the mind of another person generates.
As they differ, these models are not the basis from which cooperation is possible. They don’t allow the shaping of common goals. For that we need to actively align these self-generated models of the world by all integrating the same dataset into our world generation processes and by constantly maintaining and adjusting this dataset while reassuring each other that we are still on the same page. That’s nothing that will happen automatically as the growing divide between how we see the world proves. The more information can be discovered by the individual, the more effort must be made to align the individual models of the world as they are constantly redone with new information being included. We have access to tons of information. To be able to cooperate our effort to align our models must be constant and huge. And our expectations about the seize of groups that can agree on a particular common dataset they want to base their cooperation on might be reduced.
Any thoughts? Tell me. Tell all. That’s the effort it takes.
To watch this post as a video, go here.
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