He's not here, but I was reading the LessWrong sequences at lunch, and something caught my eye. It made me think of LHX's thread "The Origin of the Lie" (which might have been started at the Sandbox, or RWHN's haven). It also ties into BIP theory.
Essentially, the case was made that reality is single level; that is, we keep reducing "reality", or the experiential universe, to fundamentals -- so far as of this writing, that would read as, "The Universe is a vast amount of quarks and probability fields."
However, our conciousness is multilevel -- the brain that we evolved cannot see a field of quark probabilities and say, "that is a hammer." Instead, we start a long way way up, where those quark fields have produced a mass that reflects light into a shape that we have learned to call "hammer".
The point being, we have always been telling lies. Our maps have always been way removed from the territory, and it has only been recently that we have found ways to align our beliefs to correspond closer to what's actually going on.
So it's incredibly easy to move from the lie that what we're seeing is "what's really going on" to imagining something that is cohesively, conceptually, even logically possible and yet has no basis in that vast quark field.
So, you could say that the origin of the lie was when we could percieve, but not at the level of the fundamental universe.
Origin of the lie was kicking around in my head late last week and I felt sure it had some significance to metaphysical materialism and consciousness, but I never followed the thread far enough.
Good one, though. This is something to think about today.
Bump for LHX's glorious return.
the maybes:
does this necessarily mean that we have always been 'telling lies' or does this suggest that we have are simply developing a more refined idea of what the 'territory' is?
also:
does this have any relation to the idea of knowing / believing a fact and then reporting a different / fake 'fact' instead of your real understanding?