Learning how to pretend
-We are meatsuits. Things will happen despite how we feel about them.
-We have a conscious choice to identify with said belief of reaction to stimuli. (Or at the very least perceive a choice)
-Perception becomes important. Things begin to feel less “auto”, and more manual thinking can manifest.
-Example being the placebo effect. Expectation, context, conditioning, and belief can directly influence symptoms and bodily processes.
So in theory, if one can “convince”, or”fake” thoughts and can further identify, they wont be able to tell the difference if something is true or not.
-This also applies to the nocebo effect. Anxiety -> state of worry -> panic -> body follows -> brain operates accordingly.
-A thought is a neurological event tied to prediction, attention, memory, emotion, body state, and behavioral perception.
The brain evolved less to “see truth” and more to anticipate survival-relevant outcomes fast enough to not get eaten by something with teeth. (Hence why things like spears were invented)
-Going back to the “auto” thinking idea…Essentially: if a thought becomes convincing enough, repeated enough, emotionally reinforced enough, or physiologically paired enough, the brain begins treating it as reality-adjacent.
-A really simple example of this is anxiety. The anxious brain overestimates: probability of danger, severity of consequences, inability to cope, and importance of uncertainty.
Therefore, if someone thinks something bad is going to happen, the brain starts to scan the environment for proof to reassure.
-If you see reality negatively, optimism could sound delusional because your nervous system has stopped assigning credibility to positive prediction. (This works both ways.)
-If you want to experience the other side, you must convince. Conviction is built through repetition + emotion + embodiment + reinforcement.
-It is NEVER about being correct. You become convinced of something because it is: useful/protective/identity-consistent/repeated/emotionally satisfying/fear-reducing.
-One can easily cling to either side, the positive or the negative. Predictability, even miserable predictably, can feel safer than ambiguity. A known hell can feel psychologically safer than an unknown future.
(An anxious intelligent mind is especially dangerous or incredibly useful because it can produce convincing evidence for almost anything.
A lot of suffering doesn’t come from “being wrong”, it comes from perceiving things other people successfully ignore.)
TLDR;
The body reacts to perceived reality almost as strongly as objective reality.
Repeated perception shapes nervous system conditioning.
Nervous system conditioning shapes future perception.
Identity stabilizes repeated perception into “truth-feeling”.
“Truth-feeling” is not the same as truth.