So, How Do We Engage with Reality?
By now you should begin to suspect that evolution may have bred out the ability for our senses to regularly and clearly see Reality . For most of our history this less-than-accurate perception suited us just fine. The challenge of our time is going to be the navigation of our large-scale physical challenges, and averting the social, political, economic, and ecological land mines that pull us in wrong directions, or just explode. There is a logical, rational sequence towards effective engagement with reality. The first step is to be aware there is a “box” in your head, which is full of ideas, thoughts, opinions, and fantasies. What is actually physically possible according to the “rules of reality” (RoR) is a small subset of this box. Recognizing this fact is further than 99% of our species ever goes. The next step is to study both our physical reality and the landmines which emanate from our virtual interface with the world: cognitive biases, social traps, heuristics, etc. Following this will be the integration of large -scale systems synthesis into a cohesive description of possible futures. From this foundation, “choices” can be made based on various ethics, or lack thereof. As w e apply these filters to ‘the stuff we can think of’ we narrow down possible paths to a very small number. And finally, we add back in (or subtract) the impact from emergent properties — things we did not know at the time, or new pathways that became possible based on new conditional probabilities from unfolding events.
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