TL;DR: reality is bad and communism is good. Some communists think reality is part of communism. I think that’s wrong and I was confused why they thought that. I’ve arrived at the conclusion that they just like reality and need an explanation of communism that fits into reality.
Five friends pile into a station wagon on their way to LA. An hour into the journey, the person in middle back yells at the driver for being gay, because they heard gays are slow drivers. Right back and passenger seat are very concerned that this might slow down the journey, so they tell the driver to pull over and debate the issue. Six hours later, the group comes to a consensus: gay people probably aren’t slow drivers, but the gay person is going to have to swap with left back just to assuage middle back’s fears.
Left back (now the driver) is a vegan. Two hours later, middle back says vegans are slow drivers.
There is no evolutionary niche better served by perceiving truth than fitness, except perhaps for the niche that humanity has created for itself by inventing technology that is capable of destroying the Earth’s habitability to human life. And a situation like that has never existed on earth before now, so there is no way any organism can have adapted to it.
Also, realists (be they Abrahamic or atheist) aren’t really capable of accepting foreign religions to the fullest extent. Before the Romans came and fucked everything up, polytheists generally believed in the gods of foreign cultures as well as their own. The Romans used religion as a tool of conquest and said “actually there’s only one pantheon, y’all have been worshipping Jupiter the whole time, surprise, now please don’t revolt against us”. Then they converted to Christianity and said “wait, there’s only one god. Polytheism is fake and bad, every other god doesn’t exist”. Then atheism became popular starting in the Enlightenment, but in a post Rome world atheism existed primarily as a reaction to monotheism from people who didn’t understand polytheism or history.
As an unrealist, I believe in all gods. What do I care if they’re real, I’ll believe in them anyway because it’s a nice thing to do. And that’s how most people felt about foreign gods before the Romans. But in the post Roman world, you have genocide from Christians who think it’s a crime against the lord to be a dirty foreign pagan, and you have dismissiveness from atheists who don’t really know the value of a religion because they’re stuck in this realist mindset where they can’t adopt the beliefs of foreign cultures. And I don’t think the Stolen Generations in Australia were primarily religiously motivated, they were realist motivated. Capitalist realists wanted the aboriginal children to be taught about the “real” world, instead of aboriginal communist dreamtime “nonsense”. And I don’t think atheists are capable of fully understanding the value that’s lost when 60,000 years of oral religious history is genocided away. That’s a whole world, extinct. That’s a whole world extinct for every single tribe that doesn’t have anyone to tell its stories anymore. If you only believe in one world, you can’t believe in the value lost there.
So I think realism has an important racial component that’s often neglected.
I am an anarchist, but I’m further left than most of them for simple reasons like radical gender inclusion and neurodivergent advocacy. And for complex reasons like unrealism, magic use, and pagan revolutionary attitudes.
Anarchy is simply impossible if you come into the whole situation thinking there’s no way for the human mind to conquer reality. That’s a defeatist mindset that leads to weak praxis. I use magic to help trans and otherkin people escape the mental shackles placed on them by realist society. Realist “anarchists” tend to reinforce those shackles by saying things like “You can’t become a dragon in real life, that’s impossible.” I say things like “Your draconic identity clearly leads you to a different experience of sexuality and body than a human. You’re obviously nonbinary and you deserve to explore your dragonkin identity to the fullest, here’s some magic to help with that.”
Left and right are relative, not absolute. Americans think that Joe Biden is a leftist because they’re all the way on the right. Norwegians think that social democrats are on the left because they’re on the moderate right. Hardcore communists think that demsocs are on the right, and some neo Nazis would think Reagan was a leftist if they met him.
I’m further left than the average Hexbear user, so from my point of view the MLs and anarchists who don’t understand far left theory are centrists. They’re further right than me, but I’m willing to compromise and accept those people as being “in the middle”.
Yeah, I am acting in good faith. And I do appreciate the open mindedness and support from mods. I’ve seen people come to understand my gender and neurotype and that’s awesome. So I would characterise a lot of the people who initially reacted with hostility as well meaning liberals. Whereas the leftists who already had an education on xenogenders accepted me instantly, like that one angelgender person.
But I have a whole lot experience of denialism of my gender identity, and since I don’t expect anyone here to have been in the same subreddits or discord servers or local orgs as I have and seen this for themselves, talking about through-lines that I’ve seen here is the best way to make my claims verifiable for others and prove I know what I’m talking about and I’m talking about it in good faith. So I talk about the realist bigotry here as a case study to help others understand the rest of my life. And the bottom line is: people who put reality above feelings are cruel to trans people. Trans “allies” who have been convinced reality is compatible with binary trans people are usually still enbyphobic. It’s only the nonrealists who act with true acceptance. Because I will always have to justify my existence to realists, and even if science and kindness are on my side, it’ll still be a struggle to get them to open their minds for the next marginalised experience
I wish that was true. If liberals weren’t such huge realists they’d be less transphobic. I mean, I’ve even taken transphobia from liberals on Hexbear who had a problem with my gender for being incompatible with reality. Realists always act like that. If mainstream liberals were idealists, it wouldn’t have taken until last week for me to be open about my gender on a public site. I wouldn’t be scared of them doing hate crimes at me for being unreal.
Hoffman explored these questions as an answer to the hard problem of consciousness: how can neurons give rise to consciousness. Hoffman says they don’t. It’s the other way around.
I find unrealism valuable because it makes my chaos magic stronger and lets me do more to help trans people. I also think the revolution must be unreal in order to effect lasting change. Realism was used to justify cultural genocide of indigenous ways of thinking. That’s crap and we should stop doing that.
We know there are such things as conscious entities because we’re conscious entities. We have no evidence that there exist such things as non-conscious entities, and Occam’s razor says we shouldn’t take their existence on faith.
Conscious realism is the subject of one single chapter out of a whole book of proofs that realism is false. Hoffman states in the book that he put the section on conscious realism at the end because he doesn’t want people to over-focus on it. This is just a proposed model and he hasn’t put a lot of study into fleshing it out and testing it, in comparison with his work disproving realism. He suggests conscious realism only because he knew that some people aren’t going to buy a single thing he says if he can’t present an alternative theory. His primary goal was to refute the existing theory. He’s a cognitive scientist, not a philosopher. He just wanted to prove that brains don’t represent truth, because that’s cognitive science. He’s not in the business of inventing worldviews, he’s just in the business of one narrow corner of science.
The skyscrapers, dams, and bridges are representations of what may be some unknown part of some unknown conscious entity, according to Hoffman. Hoffman does not believe consciousness is exclusive to human beings.
Why not a simple relativist answer to the problem?
“I want to have a revolution because capitalism causes me to perceive myself and others as suffering. I have a subjective distaste for suffering and choose to impose my personal views upon the world by supporting communism. I will use the scientific method to determine which actions of mine reduce perceived suffering, and then I will do those actions.”
There has to be some existence in which evolution selected for things for it to work
Some, yes. But not one that carries the cultural baggage with which you associate the term “existence”. It does not imply that there exists matter, or nonconscious entities.
If we cannot know reality, then there is no reason to believe this aspect of reality is true either, and therefore no reason to believe that we cannot know reality etc etc
If we are to propose that reality exists, then we must have some consistent theory of reality that does not invalidate itself. Hoffman proves that mainstream realism invalidates itself. In the absence of a coherent model, the null hypothesis of solipsism is supported by Occam’s razor. You seem to think realism is the null hypothesis, which is as strange as it is to say that a teapot orbiting mars is the null hypothesis.
I think you read my comment the wrong way around. I said Donald Hoffman proposes the answer is “yes”, as in “yes, the last human would see the works of humanity”.
Hoffman’s theory of conscious realism is summarised on Wikipedia like this:
Conscious Realism is described as a non-physicalist monism which holds that consciousness is the primary reality and the physical world emerges from that. The objective world consists of conscious agents and their experiences. “What exists in the objective world, independent of my perceptions, is a world of conscious agents, not a world of unconscious particles and fields. Those particles and fields are icons in the MUIs of conscious agents but are not themselves fundamental denizens of the objective world. Consciousness is fundamental.”[8][3]
Or in other words how can you possibly hope to change anything when you can only ever know nothing.
There’s an old saying from chaos magic, and maybe you’ve heard it in Assassin’s Creed as the philosophy of the Assassins too: “nothing is true. everything is permitted.”
If I believe in nothing, then I can choose to believe in anything. I find unrealism to be revolutionary.
I think the answer to that question is unknowable at our current level of scientific development. There is an argument to be made from Occam’s razor that the answer is “no”, because that’s the simplest explanation for the available data. Likewise, the “no” answer does afford us the greatest revolutionary potential. Believing it is beneficial to human welfare. On the other hand, Donalf Hoffman proposes a theory I find intriguing, called conscious realism, which says the answer is “yes”. I would be willing to entertain the idea that the answer is “yes” for purposes of smoother communication with people who aren’t quite ready for the level of revolutionary potential I propose.
TL;DR: reality is bad and communism is good. Some communists think reality is part of communism. I think that’s wrong and I was confused why they thought that. I’ve arrived at the conclusion that they just like reality and need an explanation of communism that fits into reality.