We visualize concepts, and then we falsely associate the made-up visualization with the concept (usually with the help of movies and TV).If a believer met Jesus, and he looked like Jeff Goldblum rather than the normal bearded beatific type, they'd just keep walking. Because they know what Jesus looks like...even though they obviously totally don't (and even though Jeff Goldblum almost surely bears more resemblance than the gentile hippies we've senselessly come to expect).
For instance, aliens travel in saucer-shaped ships, right? If you ever spot a saucer flying around at night in the desert, you'd certainly know how to explain it. That's an alien! We "know" this from movies and TV. Some random visualization caught on, creating a false consensus that's utterly non-meaningful.
Alien visitors may or may not be real, but the flying saucer trope almost certainly isn't. We couldn't begin to imagine alien tech, yet most people feel they could identify an alien spaceship because they've been conditioned by some random visualization. It's a form of tail-wagging.
If you walk around an old, dark house at night and encounter a hovering gauzy white presence, your brain will likely tell you - based on movies and TV - that this may be a ghost. Yet, for all you or I know, disembodied spirits look like manicotti, and are delicious, and we've been eating them for years.
When abstract concepts (or concrete concepts with no observable examples) become visualized, we easily become tied to that visualization.
The article ignited as I wrote it, which happens sometimes, transforming into something very different and infinitely more interesting: a fresh explanation of the underlying nature of reality, offering a completely original (and persuasive!) cosmology. It was a fluke win that baffles and chills me to this day.
But returning to the humble fallacy that gave rise to all that, I just connected it to a long-standing mystery of mine.
I have a gift for self-healing. And I've previously noted that my hacks are always crazily simple and juvenile. As I wrote in the latest of a series of installments detailing my discoveries,
The answer is never "Travel to Indonesia and hear the mating call of the Javanese lapwing at sunrise while sipping kumquat juice". It's always vanishingly small. If I were selling these fixes, I'd probably add extra steps just to persuade people it's serious. No one wants to fix health problems with solutions seemingly thought up by a seven year-old.My fix for itches (at that same URL) is juvenile. Same for my cure for tendinitis. And for grief. And for muscle cramps. And for panic attacks. And for hiccups. Etc.
You'd think people would try them, since none are risky, involved, or expensive. There's nothing to lose, yet no one ever wants to give them a go, because....well, I never understood why not. Until now.
They don't seem like the sort of measures people are expecting. Imagining. Visualizing.
There's some vague mental image of what a fix will amount to, even though, obviously, no one has the slightest idea. But we feel that we've got some handle on it. Hey, we've all seen aspirin and acupuncture needles and hyperbaric chambers and neck braces and MRI machines. We have some high level handle on what's involved in addressing health maladies!
But no, we don’t. Any normal-seeming solutions would have been discovered long ago. With millions desperately scrambling for relief from these incurable conditions, likely fixes have all been exhaustively tried (e.g. you can't fix the carpal tunnel in your wrist by stretching it because millions of sufferers have tried every imaginable stretch ad infinitum - and ice, and heat, and acupuncture, etc.). A fix that really fixes must, inescapably, be surprising.
But surprising cures don’t jibe with the innate sense of what a cure would be like.
The Visualization Fallacy!
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