Alternate Realities - Donald Trump and Ted Cruz

Ted Cruz and Donald Trump

 Donald Trump and Ted Cruz do not live in the same world as as many of us do; They have a completely different reality in their heads, literally.  As they wander through this thing we call time and space their brains seek information to be used for understanding what is happening and for reassurance that what they think is 'correct' among other things. The important things, things that they consider useful for interpreting the world and for making predictions, they store into memory. Brains do not store everything into memory. It is selective in what it keeps and what it discards. Memories are what form our reality, nothing else. Memories *are* our reality, our personal realities. What Ted Cruz and Donald Trump have stored in their memory banks is not the same as many others.

It is not clear to me that either Donald Trump or Ted Cruz are even aware that other 'realities' exist. Both of these people are behaving as though theirs is only  possible take on 'reality' and that they have been, for whatever reason, privilege to see it. The rest of us are idiots and/or useful tools to be used in accomplishing what they would like to accomplish. The only 'real people' to them are those that see/remember approximately the same things that they do. Donald Trump or Ted Cruz understand and respect these other 'real people' for their ability to see things as they 'really are'. At least, this is the way that they speak and behave. They are both clever at manipulating their physical and social environment; they are very smart people.  But they seem to believe that they alone are privileged to see reality 'as it really is'. They do not seem capable of stepping outside of their own personal realities, or even to realize that what they perceive is *not* necessarily 'real'.

Donald Trump and Ted Cruz do not live in the same world as as many of us do; here is how. People gather information to confirm what they 'believe' or that they find useful. These are things that the brain likes and seeks out for future reference. The brain is interested in prediction and when it fails the exceptions are noted and are presented to the conscious mind for 'consideration'. Consideration refers to a conscious effort to rationalize unexpected observations. The conscious mind looks for ways to integrate the unexpected observations into the brains preexisting Individual Reality Models (Belief System). If the conscious mind cannot do this, it then seeks reasons (rationalizes) to reject the information; the conscious mind finds the "extenuating conditions" which will nullify the negative effects of a problem and leave the Reality Model intact if possible, or it will modify the Model to the minimum degree possible. This is how the brain works, as far as I can tell, with everyone, myself included.

There is a wonderful psychology experiment where people are asked to keep track of something complex and give their answer at the end which, they do. At the end of the experiment during debriefing they are asked about the naked lady  (OK, it was a gorilla) that walked through the middle of the court and the middle of ones focal point.  Only about half of the people even see the gorilla. It is not part of Individual Reality, at all. The memory is not accessible to the conscious mind. Even just one second after an event, all one has is what the brain decided to retain. Individual Reality *is* memory and memories are chosen by each individual brain according to its own individual Reality Model and according to what it considers important or is searching for at the time.

This may be a bit easier to swallow by washing it down with the following analogy. The brain seeks out information to build a functioning intellectual structure that can interpret and predict 'reality'. Useful observations are collected and broken down into the material which is used to build and maintain an intellectual structure or interpretation of the world, which I call 'Individual Reality'. Information is sought out and digested and used 'intellectually' in the same manner that that an individual seeks out food for the the body and stores it in the stomach as it is broken down into its fundamental building blocks (i.e. protein), which are then incorporated into the physical body.

Some people, however, have one other process going on. Some are fully conscious that their brain makes mistakes and what it presents to the conscious mind is often wrong. This is the whole point of 'scientific' thought process and the null hypothesis. Many people actually believe the things that their brains come up with. Many people don't. Ones 'reality', the world in which they live is constructed of the things that the brain has decided to store, nothing else. People store different things into memory.

Ted Cruz and Donald Trump really are living in a different reality. I mean the literally. They do not "see" the same things that you do. They do not "hear" the same things that you do. All they have is their own individual memory of the event, nothing else. What I am saying, less delicately put, is that it is not clear to me that either of these people are endowed with the property of a brain that is taken to be 'uniquely human', the ability to recognize and step out of their own Individual Realities.