[Kptlt. Neuerburg]

While I think this belongs in a thread all it's own I applies here as well,

Why Chimpanzees Don’t Hold Elections: The Power of Social Reality



Most of your life takes place in a made-up world. You live in a country whose name and whose borders were made up by people. You allow particular humans to be leaders of that country, such as a president or a member of Congress, by following procedures invented by people long dead, such as elections, and you give them powers that were also made up by people. You acquire food and other goods with something called “money,” which is represented by pieces of paper and metal and even by electromagnetic waves flowing through the air, and which is also completely made up. You actively and willingly participate in this made-up world every day. It is real to you. It’s as real as your own name, which, by the way, was also made up by people.

The accompanying excerpt is adapted from “Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain” by Lisa Feldman Barrett (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 192 pages).



We all live in a world of social reality that exists only inside our collective human brains. Nothing in physics or chemistry determines that you’re leaving the United States and entering Canada, or that an expanse of water has certain fishing rights, or that a specific arc of the Earth’s orbit around the sun is called January. These things are real to us anyway. Socially real.

https://undark.org/2021/01/01/book-e...=pocket-newtab