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bogus comments on The two insights of materialism - Less Wrong
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Comments (132)
It depends. To those wise enough to take joy in the merely real, the materialistic explanation could be a challenge to actually become more empathetic and communicative towards their lovers. An alief of communion and transcendence can also enhance trustworthiness and cooperation, which are generally sought in any love relationship.
By contrast, if the 'spritual' explanation were real, it would probably lose its charm and even be resented by some as a loss in autonomy, just as fire-breathing dragons and lightning spells might become boring and unexciting in a world where magic actually worked.
Voted down for preemptive use of Let Me Google That For You. I would actually like to vote this down first for signaling that you are providing a resource explaining a technical term you used by providing a link, but instead providing a much less helpful Google search, where the reader is not sure which, if any, of the search results will be helpful, and vote it down again for using LMGTFY instead of Google directly, which includes obnoxious animations and requires javascript.
I would have left it alone if you had just used the word "alief" without any link at all.
Sure, one can always look at the positive aspects of reality, and many materialists have even tried to put a positive spin on the inevitability of death without an afterlife. But it should not be surprising that what is real is not always what is most beautiful. There are a panoply of reasons not to believe things that are not true, but greater aesthetic value does not seem to be one of them. There is an aesthetic value in the idea of 'The Truth,' but I would not say that this outweighs all of the ways in which fantasy can be appealing for most people. And the 'fantasies' of which I am speaking are not completely random untruths, like "Hey, I'm gonna believe in Hobbits, because that would be cool!', but rather ideas that spring from the natural emotional experiences of humanity. They feel correct. Even if they are not.