Fire and Water

Reality is life distilled down to its least common denominator where water is wet and fire burns.

I’m going to admit that I saw something early this morning that freaked me out more than a little bit.

On the heels of learning that young people are dating (and marrying) AI generated “people”, AND there is an AI “actress” named Tilly Norwood, I saw an advertisement for something called “Friend”, a wearable, necklace style, AI driven, internet connected device designed to act as a personal companion, listening to conversations and providing feedback through an app – and the person in the advertisement was talking to the “Friend” appliance as if it was a real person.

Holy alternate reality, Batman!

Conservatives talk a lot about “reality”, but what is “reality”? Is it a fixed concept or does it depend on how individuals perceive the world? Is there such a thing as “my reality” or “your reality”?

The basic definition of reality is the state of things as they exist, encompassing the physical world, objective facts, and observable phenomena, independent of subjective perceptions or beliefs. Philosophically, it is often debated whether reality is purely material (as in physicalism) or includes non-physical aspects like consciousness or abstract concepts. For example, science grounds reality in measurable, empirical data, while some philosophies argue for a mind-dependent reality shaped by perception.

Practically, reality is what you can consistently observe, measure, or interact with - like the ground beneath your feet or the laws of physics. I tend to define it according to the basic dichotomic idea in logic that something either is or is not. Reality to me is life distilled down to its least common denominator possible.

Rudyard Kipling addressed this process and consistent endpoint in his epic poem, “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”, writing:

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man

There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.

That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,

And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins

When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

One resource I turn to in matters of the mind is Jonathan Haidt. I found his Moral Foundations Theory extremely interesting. As I read Haidt (combined with all the other science and philosophy I have consumed) it seems humans have defined a process where there is reality and there is “almost reality”. “Almost reality” is a branching off from the human mind’s cognitive journey to discovering the is/is not of our existence, an abbreviated process where people don’t learn that reality means that fire always burns and water is always wet because they are never subjected to real fire or real water.

It strikes me that the process of overprotecting/underprotecting doesn’t create a separate reality, it merely prevents kids (and the adults they become) from distilling their experiences down to that least common denominator, down to things like natural laws and the product of eons of human nature, and how those two things combine to create the basis for communities, societies, cultures and civilizations.

I think, talk and write a lot about politics, but as Andrew Breitbart said, politics is downstream from culture. I would add that culture is downstream from reality. If one assumes that premise is valid, then we must talk about both culture and reality consequently. If how we define reality defines our culture and our politics, it logically follows that an abbreviated or paused search for reality results in a jaundiced definition of it that inevitably results in a jaundiced culture, and a twisted form of politics surely must also follow.

I have been reading Jonathan Haidt’s last book called “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness” in which he makes a compelling case that the rise of mental illness in our younger generations is more than a willingness to talk about mental challenges, it is real, it is driven by kids spending to much time living in a virtual world rather than being socialized with other human children in the real world and as parents, people have spent too much time “overprotecting” kids in the real world while grossly underprotecting them in the virtual world.

Haidt recommends five steps to begin to turn the aircraft carrier:

• Give children far more time playing with other children. This play should ideally be outdoors, in mixed age groups, with little or no adult supervision (which is the way most parents grew up, at least until the 1980s).

• Look for more ways to embed children in stable real-world communities. Online networks are not nearly as binding or satisfying.

• Don’t give a smartphone as the first phone. Give a phone or watch that is specialized for communication, not for internet-based apps.

• Don’t give a smartphone until high school. This is easy to do, if many of your child’s friends’ parents are doing the same thing.

• Delay the opening of accounts on nearly all social media platforms until the beginning of high school (at least). This will become easier to do if we can support legislators who are trying to raise the age of “internet adulthood” from today’s 13 (with no verification) to 16 (with mandatory age verification).

We are living in a world where one major US political party, their members, and a substantial cultural fringe, live in the form of abbreviated reality, where they claim Trump is mentally compromised but Joe Biden wasn’t. I make no secret of hating progressivism, American liberalism, Utopianism, and all forms of coerced collectivism because all of them can only exist in a world where fire doesn’t burn and water is not wet.

The only way to change actions that are driven by a false reality is to give the youngest in our society a dose of real fire and water.

There is nothing brave about this new world. It is actually kind of stupid.