What Is True?
What, indeed, is “true”? If truth is merely what you can see, hear, touch, smell, or taste—then congratulations, you are nothing more than a sack of meat interpreting electrical impulses and pretending they’re revelations. Yes, I stole that line of thought from The Matrix. It’s pop culture, not scripture—but it’s still closer to reality than most TED Talks.
Ten thousand years ago, in the younger Neolithic, a human could more or less figure out what was true simply by looking around. Reality wasn’t mediated through layers of PR departments, algorithms, and “fact-checkers.” If you touched fire, you got burned. If you ignored the weather, you froze. If you didn’t store enough food, you starved. Cause and effect still spoke in plain language back then, not in PowerPoint slides.
Of course, our ancestors had their superstitions too—we have the archaeological evidence to prove that Homo sapiens have been making up stories to fill the gaps since the beginning. But at least their faiths were honest about being faiths. They worshipped thunderstorms, not press releases.
Today? Observing the world gets you precisely nowhere. The modern environment is a kaleidoscope of curated narratives, synthetic experiences, and third-hand abstractions. Virtually nothing you “know” comes from your senses—it’s all learned through intermediaries. Which means, of course, you have to believe almost everything. You trust the man who trusts the expert who trusts the intern who copied something from a Wikipedia page written by an anonymous zealot.Early humans lived in the real world. We live in a hall of mirrors, nodding sagely at shadows and congratulating ourselves on our enlightenment. They had reality; we have “content.”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/10/04/the-devils-algorithm-unplugging-from-the-climate-matrix/