Yes, really. Last year was filled with news about people who seem to live in another reality altogether, and I often wrote about them; QAnon, Flat Earthers, Anti Vaxxers, you know who I'm talking about. The fact that there's a considerable overlap between these people and conservatives, Republicans and Trumpists is no coincidence.
source: YouTube
I've talked about that overlap on numerous occasions, but if you've missed those, here's the TLDR: conservatives want things to stay the same, or go back to a highly romanticized era in the past. They want to keep intact established hierarchies and therefore consist overwhelmingly of white men of a certain age. Curiosity not only killed the cat, but is an existential threat to be avoided at all costs, which makes them allergic to any new social experiments or developments like the broadening discussions around sex, gender or race. Their anti-science stance is characterized by a strong adherence to religion and traditional values, like the "nuclear family." And when this general loathing of science is combined with a strong urge to conserve established economical hierarchies, we get things like anthropogenic climate change denial, a general distrust of academia and movements to ban Critical Race Theory from schools where this theory isn't even part of the curriculum. This is generalizing a lot, but ultimately what it comes down to, and is the reason why any dumb conspiracy theory that confirms their confirmation bias, like the ones under the QAnon-umbrella, is likely to get a foothold among these conservatives.
I know, that sounds rather harsh when condensed in a single paragraph like that, but it's true nonetheless. But... We're all capable of falling in similar traps. How we perceive reality is another one of my favorite topics, and one I've written about extensively last year. And "confirmation bias," so I've learned, isn't just about our political or ideological opinions. Instead it's everywhere, it's all our perceptions, including our senses. We don't see, hear, smell, taste or feel with our senses, but with our brains. And our brains fill in the gaps left by our sensory organs with what it expects to be in those gaps. Much of our perception of the world is constructed by our brains presenting us with stuff it expects to be there, rather than what's actually there. And it fills those gaps with what it has learned previously. Intuitively we'd expect evolution to have honed us to see reality as accurately as possible; you'd think that seeing reality as it is would increase our chances for survival and reproduction. But that may not be the case. At all.
Modern research seems to indicate that evolution has armed us with some sort of user-interface to interact with reality. The best comparison to make is with a desktop on a computer screen with icons that are sort-cuts to applications. We see an e-mail icon and know that clicking it will start up the email application. But the icon is not the application, it's not the highly complicated process of electrical currents, bits and bytes or thousands of lines of source-code. We experience the icon-equivalent of reality; we all see the same "icons," that's our shared reality, but not really. It's not reality. This is such an interesting topic, one that really makes me think about not only my own experience but all our shared and individual experiences, and how two individuals can indeed experience reality differently, let alone form an opinion about that reality. "Alternative facts" become lit in a completely different light now... The below linked video is about this very topic and shows us how easily our eyes and ears are fooled; it's slightly unnerving even to hear the same sound, but it sounds completely different depending on what words you read while listening to it...
An Argument Against Reality - Why You Can't Trust Your Senses
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