Social reality is our way of embracing and making sense of our environment. This reality involves people attributing meaning and labels to the objects we see around us. Alternatively, our social reality can simply make something up and communicate it and its meaning to other people and be treated as a real thing, as Science Focus details:
Brexit is also social reality. Even your own name is social reality. Someone just made it up, and you and other people treat it as real. In fact, most of us spend most of our time in a real world of serious make-believe.
How do human brains create social reality? To answer this, let’s consider it from a brain’s point of view. For your whole life, your brain is trapped inside a dark, silent box called your skull.
Your brain constantly receives data from your eyes, ears, nose, and other sense organs. It also receives a continuous stream of sense data from inside your body as your lungs expand, your heart beats, your temperature changes, and the rest of your insides carry on their symphony of activity.
All this data presents a mystery to your brain-in-a-box. Together, the data represents the end result of some set of causes that are unknown.
When something in the world produces a change in air pressure that you hear as a loud bang, some potential causes could be a door slamming, a gunshot, or a fish tank toppling to the floor. When your stomach unleashes a gurgle, the cause might be hunger, indigestion, nervousness, or love.
To learn more about how our minds shape reality, check the full piece here.
Image via Science Focus
Newest 1 Comment
I mean, there's objective reality and then we (as a subjective experience inside our dark skull) terraform reality. So reality is essentially a Taoistic concept - in order to have the truth you must hold two different concepts in your head at the same time. A rock is a rock, and water is h2o - objectively, deterministically. However, as humans we believe plenty of things that just aren't true. Look no further than modern politics. Right wing people are cancelling and deplatforming and depersoning lefties - and Lefties are doing the same the other way. In reality, are people - on either side, as evil as we say they are? Probably not, yet we are depersoning one another at a rapid pace. And that's just one example how we are shaping reality. For better or worse.
Abusive comment hidden.
(Show it anyway.)