Re:An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyon...
by barrkel on Sunday June 06, 2021 @09:55PM
(#27418167)
My favourite definition of reality is the stuff that doesn't go away when you stop believing in it.
This makes reality a social phenomenon, beyond just physics. For example, institutions are a reality because many people believe in them; the police don't go away when criminals stop believing in the law.
If you get enough people to believe in your dream, it can become real, self-sustaining. Neil Gaiman wrote a nice short story, taking the idea literally - A Dream of a Thousand Cats.
Re:An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyon...
by collyw on Monday June 07, 2021 @09:44AM
(#27422523)
The implication is that your dreams never involve any of these things.
Re:An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyon...
by barrkel on Monday June 07, 2021 @10:01AM
(#27422693)
I don't understand this comment. Is "the implication" from my comment or the parent comment? Is it the dreams I talked about, or the dreams that the parent comment's child interlocutor was talking about? By never involving any of "these things", are you talking about institutions?
To be more verbose, by "institution" I mean stable, recurring patterns of behaviour (much like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institution), which isn't that far off of the continuity point made by the parent.
And often the interactions themselves are the teachers. My mind was blown when a particularly bright child asked me what's the difference between a dream and reality. The best I could come up with is that this 'reality' has a larger continuity and is the one that people in this large continuation agree to call 'real'. I don't know what I could have said if he mentioned a recurring dream with a continuing state. I did say that boils down to a label assignment in case it that should ever come up.