The world in here, the world out there

I've been thinking lately about how in life you navigate two worlds.

The World Out There is the world of physical reality. It's made up by true/false facts and the forces of nature. Its laws may merely be discovered and understood, but never changed.

The World In Here is the world of social reality. It's all the stuff going on inside people's heads. It's what we believe, about the world, about ourselves, and about other's beliefs.

Approach

Out There, your tool is reason. You learn how the world works and harness that knowledge to your advantage. There is a right answer, and an underlying truth. If you get it wrong you are punished for it. So this world rewards thoughtfulness and careful epistemics. This is a PvE server.

In Here, your tool is empathy. You learn how people work and use that to navigate your way through the sea of people. In some sense this world is a lot more freeform. This world is susceptible to manifestation. There is no right answer — with enough poise and confidence, you can change this world into whatever you wish it to be. It's the world that emotions inhabit. The world of art and fashion and romance. This world rewards a ready wit.

Rewards

Out There is where we find material abundance. It's where we learned to apply fertilizer to our fields, to eat penicillin when sick, to build factories and mass produce goods, to earn a few basis points of statistical edge on every trade.

In Here is where we find fulfillment. The most important things in life, it turns out, can have nothing to do with material wealth, but in our connections to other people. It is where you can find friendship, community, and love.

In Here is also where we find monstrous wealth. You can reach modest levels of wealth by being good Out There and locally producing material abundance. But truly monstrous levels of wealth is typically only obtained in capitalism by organizing people and taking your (debatably fair) share of the surplus.

Strife

Both worlds lay claim to the other's sovereignty.

After all, what's In Here but the collective experience of brains? What is a society but a collection of individuals? What is a brain but a network of neurons? What is a neuron but proteins and neurotransmitters and axon terminals arranged just so? If we can perfectly understand The World Out There, shouldn't social reality just fall out as a consequence?

And yet plenty of people understand all of this very well without having the faintest idea about people.

On the flipside: why do we care about any of this at all? What significance is the universe to us? Only through experiencing it through our minds. So aren't mind states the whole point? Is the stuff Out There not useful only insofar it helps us achieve lovelier states of mind? Why care to perceive reality more tightly, if it makes you, or those around you, feel more horrible?

Focus

It's rare for an individual to excel in both worlds. Most people I know are far better at one than the other.

(The very way I'm talking about this should make it obvious which one I am.)

I've wondered at times, if rationality is systematized winning, why so many rationalists have trouble in romance — turning either toward the black pill or the red pill. The very act of systematizing can be deleterious to your experience In Here, it seems.

Peace

I subscribe to what I irreverently like to call the two-state solution. Both worlds are important. They both deserve sovereignty, and should peacefully coexist.

I believe something like the following. There is an underlying reality that we inhabit — everything does boil down to physical laws in the end. So The World Out There lays the foundation. But The World In Here — although just a part of The World Out There — is so, so important to our experience of the world, and so, so nuanced and complex and immune to modelling reductively — that it deserves special recognition. Perhaps like how organic chemistry is a subfield of chemistry whose importance is so great it dwarfs the rest of chemistry, mostly due to its utility to us as carbon-based lifeforms, The World In Here is, although a natural consequence of The World Out There, one that defies systematic analysis and must be understood through different lenses.

It's crucial to know what world you're operating in. A lot of conflict comes from folks operating in different worlds. (Heteronormatively — usually the guy operating Out There and the woman In Here.)

Throughout life I have tended to believe that more of the world lies Out There than really exists. So, so much of the world we live in is In Here.