Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by forevergreenyon 1213 days ago
but at some point you must think more deeply about what illusions are in a grander sense...

this is a jumping off point into considering your own mind as an illusion. your own self with its sense of personhood: i.e. yourself as the it-element in a I-it interaction.

But if we leave it at that, it's essentially a very nihilistic (deterministically reduced), so either turn back, or keep going:

the fact that your own personhood is itself very much an illusion is OK. such illusion, however illusory, has real and potentially useful effects

when you interact with your computer, do you do it terms of the logical gates you know are there? of course not, we use higher level constructs (essentially "illusory" conceptual constructions) like processes and things provided by the operating system; we use languages, functions, classes: farther and farther away from the 'real' hardware-made logic gates with more and more mathematical-grade illusions in between.

so the illusions have real effects, in MOST contexts, it's better to deal with the illusions than with the underlying implementations. dunno, what if we tried to think of a HTTP search request into some API in terms of the voltage levels in the ethernet wires so that we truly 'spoil the illusion'??

1 comments

I mean, I agree willful suspension of disbelief is a thing, but as someone who actually build APIs and worries about network latency and packing messages to be efficient blocks of data and that the method itself is a useful affordance for the product, I can walk and chew gum at the same time.

Just because people don't actively think all the time in terms of low level contexts doesn't mean that only simulating the high level contexts is a sufficient substitute for the whole process.

I think this whole concept is conflating "illusion" (i.e. allowing oneself to be fooled) and "delusion" (being involuntarily fooled, or unwilling to admit to being fooled.)

I personally don't enjoy magic shows, but people do, and it's not because they think there's real magic there.

>Just because people don't actively think all the time in terms of low level contexts doesn't mean that only simulating the high level contexts is a sufficient substitute for the whole process.

See also Aristole's description of a 'soul' (Lat. anima/Gk. ψυχή), which is embodied above all, unlike the abstract description of the soul that the West would go on to inherit from Neo-Platonism via Christianity.

Even though today we know full well we are indissolubly embodied entities, the tendency to frame identity around an abstraction of that persists, but it seems thinking around this hasn't completely succumb to this historical artifact, see 'Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human'