Tyee: Are We Cancelling the Enlightenment? Musings on the challenges of maintaining a single shared reality.

[Fiendish Thingy]

If we’re bored of reason and a single shared reality, we’ll need something to take their place.

https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2024/11/19/Are-We-Cancelling-Enlightenment/

(The Tyee is a progressive Canadian news site)

T The Enlightenment had a good run. Over 400 years ago, an audacious idea emerged among scientists and philosophers that a single shared reality existed that could be measured and predicted using fundamental laws of nature. All the trappings of modern life, every technological convenience and scientific breakthrough flowed from the radical realization that truth exists — not in the proclamations of the powerful, but in underlying nature itself.

The re-election of Donald Trump is a harbinger that the Enlightenment may now be on its last legs. Bored and weary of having to accommodate facts we don’t agree with, many are retreating into bespoke realities served up by social media algorithms. Our ubiquitous devices and online platforms — themselves a product of Enlightenment thought — are ironically becoming its undoing.

Embracing a shared evidence-based reality is hard work. It requires dialogue and compromise among people who disagree and respecting the rights of those we might not respect. Many people seem sick of it. Popular cyber-platforms paired with artificial intelligence provide a convenient off-ramp from a confusing and frightening world that increasingly requires our attention and agency.

Historian and author Yuval Noah Harari notes that “most information is not truth.” Our social media feeds are a firehose of addictive and largely useless images and videos, curated by online algorithms designed not to inform but to keep us engaged.

These information streams are also increasingly polluted with AI-assisted disinformation in an effective effort to weaponize ignorance and undermine the very concept of truth. Why? Because disinformation works. In the words of Holocaust historian Timothy Snyder, “post-truth is pre-fascism.... To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.”.

(Italics and bolding mine)

Much more at link.

The struggle to maintain a shared, evidence-based reality affects all people from all walks of life, not just the MAGA-afflicted. Manipulating our perceptions of reality via misinformation, disinformation and outright Conspiracy Theories is what keeps us fighting each other, rather than organizing to fight the powers who benefit from our disparate realities and our refusal to accept uncomfortable truths.

[DBoon]

1. As described by Orwell

“You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Paty, which is collective and immortal.”

― George Orwell, 1984

[Arne]

2. This author, Mitch Anderson is incredible. Thank you.

Found his AI robot blog.
Eye opening and thought provoking.

[Trust_Reality]

3. a very useful term

"weaponize ignorance" - More than any other this seems to characterize the Republican/Trump/Russian/Fascist approach to recent US politics.

[jfz9580m]

4. The United Conservative Party of Alberta Sounds bright

Exxon or Shell tried this in 2004..even they stopped that..a little girl with a flower or some such thing..connecting co2 to life

Many governing political parties are now embracing the lazy groupthink demanded by their supporters. Avoiding climate catastrophe means drastically reducing carbon emissions, but people enjoy cheap abundant energy and the economic prosperity it provides. What to do?

Instead of facing those hard choices, the United Conservative Party of Alberta recently passed a resolution at its annual meeting proclaiming that “the Earth needs more CO2 to support life and to increase plant yields, both of which contribute to the Health and Prosperity of all Albertans.” Decades of robust climate science were indulgently dismissed in a show of hands by 6,000 UCP faithful gathered in Red Deer. Problem solved.