Reality

The thing to remember is, nothing you've ever experienced actually tells you how life, the world, or any other generalized construct is. What you have are bits of evidence, chunks of experience which may only be understood by comparing them with, and fitting them into, known theories. The thing we end up calling(inevitably in arrogance) "reality" is that theory which accounts for the greatest number of our experiences.

It is an important place in the human psyche, the concept of reality, and not one I think we are likely to do without any time soon. It's one of those fundamental assumptions, like the self or right/wrong, which underlies many truly beneficial cognitive processes, like society and decision-making. Reality is our cognitive context, and even if it might seem implausible that our limited, socially-specialized species should have any insight into the basic systems of the natural world, it is nevertheless important that we assume *some* coherence to our experiences in order to function in the same. This is what is meant by sanity, distinct from accuracy or correctness(which none of us actually has).

Taken this way, as the union of our experiences with the creative products of others, we have some control over our concept of reality. We can pick and choose, find an explanation that accounts for everything we've seen So Far, and then shop around for others as we encounter new experiences. This control is reduced, however, when the theories we adopt purport to explain *everything* within a given context, as when a person's behavior is summed-up as having an exclusively psychological, genetic, or physical explanation. This tendency of our theories to have lines around them is related, I think, to the tendency of our stories to have beginnings and endings, artifacts not to be found in the natural world; it might also be related to the selective advantage of memes to exclude the possibility of other memes taking hold.

What is *not* accounted for in any "complete" theory of reality, and what I find gives away the lie in any such notion, is the number of times every one of us has been forced to change our minds in our lives. No supposedly objective belief accounts for the fallibility of the believer, just as no depth of knowledge about human bias relieves one of a biased perspective. This is the strength of humility, for it amounts to characterizing our worldviews as subject to revision.

The irony, and indeed the crux of the problem in my view, is that humility, however powerful in processing the development of our cognitive contexts, is very definitely a weakness in social settings. Our identities, our stories, and everything that derives from their characteristics, all depend on presenting them with confidence. We assert to gain mastery of groups and of ourselves, and indeed this is the only way we may do either; but the world beyond humanity does not notice the assertions or beliefs of humans, is unaffected by our confidence or posturing, and so we are faced again with the problem of using abilities formed for social settings to explain non-social phenomena.