Almost everything is pretend though, unless we’re talking about the basic laws of science (and even those change with context).
Language is “pretend”. Words don’t mean anything unless we all agree they mean something.
Valuing family is “pretend”. We all agree to give family importance, but plenty of animals don’t.
All laws are pretend. Country borders are pretend. Gender roles are pretend. Social position is pretend. Even my job is only my job because everyone agrees to give me responsibility in this role. Pretty much everything in society only works because of tacit agreement.
Not everything is “pretend” but what you have identified is that all societal rules are participatory algorithms, and that includes money and laws. Money, or really wealth and value, are effectively resource allocation and prioritization algorithms. It’s why the very idea of individuals, or even organizational entities largely decouple from societal benefit, having comparable allocative power to actual societal management structures is batshit absurd.
I disagree with this statement. My kid, age five, has not asked this about money; but they have asked about, for example, characters on a screen. If you’re asserting that they wouldn’t ask because it’s something they’ve physically touched, I see your point, but my kid has (when much younger) asked similar things about, for example, figurines they’ve held.
I will say, for my kid in particular, that it’s more likely they would ask questions like “what does a dollar mean” or “does someone make decisions about the money” or even “what is money,” but the “real or pretend” question is plausible IMHO.
You should check out the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Humans have this amazing ability to make up all sorts of crazy shit, but it has huge advantages in our ability to organize.
One on one, a chimp would easily be at up a human. Ten on ten, the chimps still have an advantage. But 200 on 200, humans would win no contest. Our ability to make shit up allows us to coordinate with huge numbers people that we don’t even know, which is extraordinarily rare.
What differentiates humans from all animals including apes is our ability to cooperate & coordinate. Cooperation is what has allowed humans to dominate the world. I’m quite optimistic about the future simply because our innate sense of cooperation is all the good we have ever needed to conquer any and all evil the world has managed to create at any point in history all the way to now, and will continue to hold true forever.
Yeah, tying back to the original post about whether money is real or made up - that ability to come up with abstract concepts out of asses is what allows us to cooperate on such grand levels.
You might only personally know 100 people that you reasonably trust. But you don’t need to personally know and trust someone in order to sell something to them. We all sort of magically agree that money has value and it allows us to transact with almost anyone.
Same thing with governments. A government isn’t a real thing that you find in nature, but by believing in the concept of it, we’re able to (somewhat) unify millions or billions of people to get shit done.
I guess what I’m saying is, don’t discount the power of something just because it’s not “real”. Making up imaginary shit has got our species pretty damn far!
We sorta do see “government” at times in nature. There are animal groups in which different individuals have different jobs, though it’s much less nuanced and hard-set as a proper government, though(unless we’re talking about ants, I suppose). And that cooperation definitely helps them do a lot more than they ever could alone.
We’re also surprisingly resilient compared to many other species. We can recover from wounds that would be lethal for other animals in weeks or months - such as broken or even lost limbs. We grow scar tissue at a pretty rapid pace as well, allowing us to heal wounds quickly. And our pain tolerance is high enough that other animals would drop dead of shock from some of these things. We invented surgery at least 200 years before painkillers, and things that we consider minor surgery would outright kill other animals. Hell, we were punching holes in our skulls to “let the bad light out” in the Neolithic era. Our mouths grow too many teeth, so we rip them out and graft metal onto the rest to force them to grow in alignment.
Our endurance is so high that the only other species that can keep up with us is dogs, and even then, they can only sort of keep up. We used to have a hunting strategy where we’d follow an animal at a walking pace for hours on end, never letting them rest, until they eventually couldn’t run anymore or simply dropped dead from exhaustion. We have a pretty wide range of temperatures and climates that we can survive in thanks to our ability to sweat off heat and shiver to burn extra calories for warmth. We can go 3 days without any food or water, and a full week with only water to sustain us.
There was a great sci-fi short story somebody wrote once about how humans were some of the most beloved crew members for spaceships because while we may not be the strongest, fastest, or most intelligent species out there, our ability to pack-bond with literally anything - including inanimate objects - and crazy endurance meant that we were the most dependable and capable species in a crisis. A human would jump into Hell itself in order to save a crewmate and simply walk it off like it was nothing afterward.
When I broke my ankle, I thoroughly shattered it then tried to set it myself and stand - twice - before realizing it was broken. Point being, it was in bad shape. After realizing what had happened, I called my wife who came out to help me while waiting for the EMT’s.
I remember her at one point, in a very comforting manner, saying “It’s hard to believe you can even recover from this kind of injury.”
(To be fair, I guess she was the best kind of correct. It still plagues me to this day.)
You keep saying that word… I don’t think it means what you think it does.
Pretend, something that isn’t what it is being represented to be. E.g. imaginary.
Just because people collectively agree on things doesn’t make it pretend.
Money doesn’t have value because we pretend it does, but rather because we believe it does. Because we trust that it does.
And yes, there is a difference.
On a more real note, it also has value because everyone else trusts that it does. All those other countries. And no, they are not countries because we pretend that they are. They’re countries because we recognize their authority over their territory, and their citizens recognize the authority of their government.
So why do we recognize authority? Because of means to enforce it.
There’s no pretend going on. The consequences will be very real.
See the problem with this though, is that if everything’s just pretend and made up, then I can’t get mad about Elon Musk’s “Nazi Salute”. And yet, there are abundant red flags showing a rise in fascism, that if ignored, may very well permanently alter the world order and our standard of living. In the past 48 hours there was a significant chance the supply of coffee that drives most of my economic output could be disrupted or tariffed.
And, that’s because a lot of this comes back to the connotation of the word, “pretend”. Replace it with the word, “Idea”, and you get sort of the same concept, but suddenly the non-existent thing sounds much more powerful.
Agree with the sentiment, but things being pretend or made up doesn’t mean that you have to ignore them or that they are trivial. It’s probably good to recognize that Nazism doesn’t exist in the vacuum of the cold universe, but is a uniquely human endeavor that does not need to exist because we are the ones that spoke it into existence. We have the power to shape reality for the best
Almost everything is pretend though, unless we’re talking about the basic laws of science (and even those change with context).
Language is “pretend”. Words don’t mean anything unless we all agree they mean something.
Valuing family is “pretend”. We all agree to give family importance, but plenty of animals don’t.
All laws are pretend. Country borders are pretend. Gender roles are pretend. Social position is pretend. Even my job is only my job because everyone agrees to give me responsibility in this role. Pretty much everything in society only works because of tacit agreement.
Not everything is “pretend” but what you have identified is that all societal rules are participatory algorithms, and that includes money and laws. Money, or really wealth and value, are effectively resource allocation and prioritization algorithms. It’s why the very idea of individuals, or even organizational entities largely decouple from societal benefit, having comparable allocative power to actual societal management structures is batshit absurd.
Also why would a child ever ask if money is pretend? It’s not something they’ve only heard about in a storybook and never laid eyes on themselves.
Whole post is bullshit, lol.
I disagree with this statement. My kid, age five, has not asked this about money; but they have asked about, for example, characters on a screen. If you’re asserting that they wouldn’t ask because it’s something they’ve physically touched, I see your point, but my kid has (when much younger) asked similar things about, for example, figurines they’ve held.
I will say, for my kid in particular, that it’s more likely they would ask questions like “what does a dollar mean” or “does someone make decisions about the money” or even “what is money,” but the “real or pretend” question is plausible IMHO.
You should check out the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Humans have this amazing ability to make up all sorts of crazy shit, but it has huge advantages in our ability to organize.
One on one, a chimp would easily be at up a human. Ten on ten, the chimps still have an advantage. But 200 on 200, humans would win no contest. Our ability to make shit up allows us to coordinate with huge numbers people that we don’t even know, which is extraordinarily rare.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
What differentiates humans from all animals including apes is our ability to cooperate & coordinate. Cooperation is what has allowed humans to dominate the world. I’m quite optimistic about the future simply because our innate sense of cooperation is all the good we have ever needed to conquer any and all evil the world has managed to create at any point in history all the way to now, and will continue to hold true forever.
Yeah, tying back to the original post about whether money is real or made up - that ability to come up with abstract concepts out of asses is what allows us to cooperate on such grand levels.
You might only personally know 100 people that you reasonably trust. But you don’t need to personally know and trust someone in order to sell something to them. We all sort of magically agree that money has value and it allows us to transact with almost anyone.
Same thing with governments. A government isn’t a real thing that you find in nature, but by believing in the concept of it, we’re able to (somewhat) unify millions or billions of people to get shit done.
I guess what I’m saying is, don’t discount the power of something just because it’s not “real”. Making up imaginary shit has got our species pretty damn far!
We sorta do see “government” at times in nature. There are animal groups in which different individuals have different jobs, though it’s much less nuanced and hard-set as a proper government, though(unless we’re talking about ants, I suppose). And that cooperation definitely helps them do a lot more than they ever could alone.
Apes together, strong haha
We’re also surprisingly resilient compared to many other species. We can recover from wounds that would be lethal for other animals in weeks or months - such as broken or even lost limbs. We grow scar tissue at a pretty rapid pace as well, allowing us to heal wounds quickly. And our pain tolerance is high enough that other animals would drop dead of shock from some of these things. We invented surgery at least 200 years before painkillers, and things that we consider minor surgery would outright kill other animals. Hell, we were punching holes in our skulls to “let the bad light out” in the Neolithic era. Our mouths grow too many teeth, so we rip them out and graft metal onto the rest to force them to grow in alignment.
Our endurance is so high that the only other species that can keep up with us is dogs, and even then, they can only sort of keep up. We used to have a hunting strategy where we’d follow an animal at a walking pace for hours on end, never letting them rest, until they eventually couldn’t run anymore or simply dropped dead from exhaustion. We have a pretty wide range of temperatures and climates that we can survive in thanks to our ability to sweat off heat and shiver to burn extra calories for warmth. We can go 3 days without any food or water, and a full week with only water to sustain us.
There was a great sci-fi short story somebody wrote once about how humans were some of the most beloved crew members for spaceships because while we may not be the strongest, fastest, or most intelligent species out there, our ability to pack-bond with literally anything - including inanimate objects - and crazy endurance meant that we were the most dependable and capable species in a crisis. A human would jump into Hell itself in order to save a crewmate and simply walk it off like it was nothing afterward.
When I broke my ankle, I thoroughly shattered it then tried to set it myself and stand - twice - before realizing it was broken. Point being, it was in bad shape. After realizing what had happened, I called my wife who came out to help me while waiting for the EMT’s.
I remember her at one point, in a very comforting manner, saying “It’s hard to believe you can even recover from this kind of injury.”
(To be fair, I guess she was the best kind of correct. It still plagues me to this day.)
You keep saying that word… I don’t think it means what you think it does.
Pretend, something that isn’t what it is being represented to be. E.g. imaginary.
Just because people collectively agree on things doesn’t make it pretend.
Money doesn’t have value because we pretend it does, but rather because we believe it does. Because we trust that it does.
And yes, there is a difference.
On a more real note, it also has value because everyone else trusts that it does. All those other countries. And no, they are not countries because we pretend that they are. They’re countries because we recognize their authority over their territory, and their citizens recognize the authority of their government.
So why do we recognize authority? Because of means to enforce it.
There’s no pretend going on. The consequences will be very real.
See the problem with this though, is that if everything’s just pretend and made up, then I can’t get mad about Elon Musk’s “Nazi Salute”. And yet, there are abundant red flags showing a rise in fascism, that if ignored, may very well permanently alter the world order and our standard of living. In the past 48 hours there was a significant chance the supply of coffee that drives most of my economic output could be disrupted or tariffed.
And, that’s because a lot of this comes back to the connotation of the word, “pretend”. Replace it with the word, “Idea”, and you get sort of the same concept, but suddenly the non-existent thing sounds much more powerful.
Why can’t you get mad? I can get mad at characters in books and video games. Those are certainly not real.
I can even get mad at a strawman that I debate against while I shower. And that is literally pretend.
Agree with the sentiment, but things being pretend or made up doesn’t mean that you have to ignore them or that they are trivial. It’s probably good to recognize that Nazism doesn’t exist in the vacuum of the cold universe, but is a uniquely human endeavor that does not need to exist because we are the ones that spoke it into existence. We have the power to shape reality for the best
One could argue that since we are but merely very complicated, slow burning chemical reactions, that the very concept of “pretend” is pretend.
*tokes* duuuuuuuuude
Come with me, and you’ll be, in a wooooorld of pure imagination!
Living there you’ll be free, if you truly wish to be.
Yo, the amazing digital circus, it goes hard (the first episode was rather brutal💀)
Yeah it’s pretty good ngl. I’m a fan. Idk exactly who it’s supposed to be for age wise but I like it.
First I’ve heard of this - bookmarking.
The seven year itch just reared its ugly head. Soon to have free time in spades.
It’s on Netflix. The Australian crocodile actually has a really good character arc!