The world in here, the world out there

In life you inhabit two worlds, which I like to call the world out there and the world in here.

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The world out there is the world of physical reality. It is a world made up of forces of nature, whose behavior cannot be changed but where the laws that govern them may merely be discovered.

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, others ourselves, and about other's beliefs. It's the world that emotions inhabit -- the world in which we feel joy or despair or pride or envy.

To navigate the world out there, you learn the rules and to figure out how to best make use of them. There is a right answer, and if you get it wrong the universe will punish you for it. Your tool is reason.

The world in here works differently. In some sense, it is a lot more freeform than the world out there, since you yourself create it. It is susceptible to manifestation. Done deftly, you can change reality into whatever you wish it to be.

The world out there is where we find abundance. It's where we learned to apply fertilizer to increase crop yields, to eat penicillin to cure pneumonia, to build factories and mass produce goods, to earn a few basis points of statistical edge in millions of financial transactions.

The world in here is where you can find happiness. The most important things in life, it turns out, can have nothing to do with material wealth, but in our connections to other people, and the laws that govern these connections barely even exist to be discovered. It is where you can find friendship, community, and love. It's where , or when you realize three fundamental truths at the exact same time and alter the course of history.

The tricky part is that both worlds lay claim to the other's sovereignty.

After all, what is social reality but the collective experience of brains? What is a brain but a network of neurons? What is a neuron but proteins and neurotransmitters arranged just so? If we can perfectly understand the world out there, shouldn't social reality just fall out as a consequence?

And yet one can easily understand brains without at all understanding people.

On the flipside: why do we care about any of this at all? What significance is the universe to us? Only through experiencing the world through our minds. Those very mind states are arguably, the only thing that really matters. So is the world out there useful only insofar it helps us achieve more pleasurable states of mind? Is there really a meaningful difference to the observer between a happy reality truthfully believed, or an earnestly held delusion?

In reality both worlds are important. They both deserve sovereignty.

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

I've wondered at times, if rationality is systematized winning, why so many rationalists have trouble in romance.

My personal view is 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 for the world. But the world in here -- although a subfield 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 -- that it deserves special recognition. Perhaps like how organic chemistry is a subfield of chemistry whose importance is so great it is almost its own separate field of study, dwarfs the rest of the field, the world in here is a natural consequence of the world out there that defies systematic analysis and must be understood through the lenses of psychology and empathy.

It's crucial to know what world you're operating in. A lot of conflict comes from folks operating in different worlds.

Throughout life I have tended to believe that more of the world falls under the jurisdiction of the world out there than really exists. The more I've seen, the more I've come to question institutions like (TODO: examples).