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At the end of the day, it most certainly matters if what you believe is really true or not.

That our beliefs affect our thinking and experience is without question. If you believe you cannot do something or that doing it is going to be way too difficult or painful, you won't try. Learned helplessness is terrible.

But this is different than saying that because you believe something is impossible that it is, in fact, impossible... that you are modifying reality through your beliefs. I think the belief in this supernatural power of belief is not just superstitious, it is dangerous and generally deleterious to the quality of life.

I think that people who are trying to convince others that wishes come true if you just wish hard enough or that if you believe in something then you will make it real are encouraging delusion and making people waste energy in life that can be much better spent.

The fact is that the world is not flat. And it should matter whether or not it is flat. "Everyone believes it's flat so it's flat, isn't that ok?" is a question that can be answered "sure, it's ok" by some but "Absolutely not ok." by others. Some people want to know what really is the case. The steak in the Matrix tasted so good to Cypher that he really didn't care. He didn't want to remember his former comrades, the revelation of truth, or any of that. Fantasy was just fine with him. But to others, it did matter. Truth is better than fiction, even if the truth is awful and hard to bear. At least it isn't a lie.

I think that in the case of someone who has been the victim of rape, being absolutely sure about what is real and what is fake is more important than anything. I had a friend who had a knack for getting raped. We had a frank talk about it. I told her that the way I saw it some men are predatory, and they take advantage of perceived weakness. She was pretty mousy. I told her, in a nice way, that nothing anyone did was her fault, but that it was up to her to protect herself, to notice things about these predatory types as much as they notice about her, and to change her non-verbal behavior to project strength and confidence... to notice what she was really communicating to people about herself and to take it by the reigns. So we went about changing her posture and the way she moved to project confidence, strength, and happiness. We talked about the things that happened when she was attacked and located various cues and warning signs. At the end of the conversation, I could see that she was really feeling how moving her body in certain ways could make her feel good or bad and project various messages about herself to other people. We agreed that "I'm strong, you can't screw with me" was a good thing to project.

That sort of thing is a far cry from visualizing that everything is ok when it may not, in fact, be ok. In fact, many women talk themselves out of their instincts that tell them that this or that particular guy is dangerous and bad... and end up in terrible situations where they are at an extreme disadvantage. Their thinking about a situation doesn't match up with what it really turns out to be, no matter how much they might want to believe that a person is not a threat and that everything is ok.

Months later, when I saw this person again, she ran up to be and gave me a big hug. She looked happy and strong. She told me that what we had talked about had helped her a lot. She had obviously worked on her body language.

I am not against someone improving their perceptive capacities. I am all for it. Being aware of how your instincts serve you and knowing when to take that inner voice serious is seriously important. Being aware of how your body language affects you and others is important. It isn't just a belief in something. It's really learning how things are. It's opening to what really is, not creating and projecting a fantasy. My friend really did have strength and confidence, like any human being, she just wasn't connecting with it and projecting it. If she really had no strength and confidence, then my goal would have been to find what she really did have and use that to build some real confidence and strength. If all she had was a fantasy, then we'd use that, and there would really be nothing wrong with it.

GW, your point about functional fantasies is well taken. I've been listening to Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Universe and it strikes me that a lot of what is going on is metaphorical. They are functional fantasies or models that, astoundingly, work and can create amazingly accurate predictions about behavior.

Are these things out there *really* strings, or is the idea of strings just really helpful? How important is it that we realize that strings aren't *really* strings if they really aren't strings at all... especially when what we're doing *works*?

Well, I guess there's a risk assessment that has to be done in each case. Usually painful event occurs as a result of a misconception that makes us re-evaluate it. I think that someone can get a lot of mileage out of the fantasy that they are controlling reality. But I can think of some instances where that fantasy can hurt a person a lot.

Re: uncertainty... it's freaky. The more we know about the velocity, the less we can know about the position, and the other way about. Observing something changes it. Is it awareness that causes this? Does this say something more about us or the behavior of the particle? We don't even really know what awareness is so this makes things even more perplexing, I think. That something that really is in an indeterminate state until observed, not just in an unknown state, but that the cat really is neither alive nor dead or maybe both alive and dead... or even alive and dead and neither alive nor dead or maybe something even crazier than that, and then all of a sudden the probability wave collapses and, boom, it is what it is... totally nuts.

I think all this is so crazy because it is so different than what we know to be true in our everyday lives. Perhaps it is beyond knowing for us? Or maybe, as we grow to understand things better and better, the solution will be found and it'll seem amazingly simple given a new perspective. It won't seem to magical or so crazy. It may even seem mundane, like so many things are to us now.

I think this stuff is so far out of our normal experience of reality that it may just be one of these things that are so strange that we cannot understand it. It may be that our brains are just not physically capable of understanding the universe. Who knows?

I am unfamiliar with the ideal gas law.