To use literary terminology, in a Doylean sense reality blindness is a humorous exaggeration of people’s tendency to ignore or deny upsetting realities and facts, plus a riff on the magical “veil of unknowing” in “Buffy” type realities which keeps people from realizing their town is full of vampires or demons or whatever. As such it needs no justification save being funny.
In a Watsonian in-universe sense, however, reality blindness is hard to justify, since it seems to be both dangerous and and contradictory to the way actual “normal” people behave and interact with the world: the analogy with real-world “reality blindness” breaks down when people come face to face with unbelievable but terrible things: a person who doesn’t know what a bear is when seeing a grizzly moving in their direction doesn’t think “ooh, big puppy”: a person who doesn’t know what a volcano is who sees the whole side of a mountain blow out doesn’t think “huh, that’s a big flock of geese.” And real-world people believe all sort of incredible things: they imagine they see stuff like UFOs and sea monsters and members of the trilateral commission all the time.
So, in-universe: it makes sense that at some time in the past reality blindness was actually _useful_ for survival, to the extent it became a hereditary trait in much of the human race. So, theory: the Great Old Ones ruled the world for a long time. Humanity wasn’t wiped out, for they were no more important than insects in the eyes of the Great Old Ones. But many perished all the same, for those who looked upon the Great Old Ones died of fear or went hopelessly mad.
Evolution happened: two new breeds of man emerged. One was descended from those most able to close their minds to what they were actually seeing: rather than a Great Old One, they imagined they were seeing a storm, a swarm of insects, a moving pillar of smoke, a waterspout or a tornado full of sharks. This increased over time, since the greater your ability to ignore what you saw, the more likely to survive and have descendants.
More rarely, certain types would go all the way through madness into a glorious new “sanity,” with occasionally useful side effects such as the stretched-vine powered bamboo and coconut robot: over time, they would evolve in the ancestors of the Mad Scientists, although less successful than the reality blind due to their loss of anything resembling “common sense”.
The Great Old Ones departed when the Stars were no longer Right: enough “baseline”, non reality-blind survived through luck and knowing when to bury their heads under a bush to eventually become numerous again (not being in denial about the existence of, say, giant bears or mountains spitting flame helped).
(My headcanon, for now. I may come up with a better one at any moment, so don’t reference me. 🙂 )
Although my take on reality blindness (the Gaspode Theory) is that it’s not enough to not know something exists, it has to contradict things you do know, like “dogs don’t talk” or “you can’t make a teleporter of bicycle parts”. So it wouldn’t cut in if you saw a large carnivorous animal heading towards you and had never heard of grizzlies, but it might if you had been convinced they were mythical creatures.
Since reality blindness attempts to explain it away the incomprehensible as something believable, this may explain conspiracy theories.
If the Great Old One hypothesis holds, it’s likely that their departure was in some way connected with the Mad Scientists’ ancestors. It’s unlikely that it involved an aeolipile-powered star-realigner, but who knows?
You’re forgetting Douglas Adams’ take on this with his explanation of the Somebody Else’s Problem field: they can see it, they can’t rationalize it or find a way to deal with it, so they ignore it and work with what they can affect at the time. A crowd fleeing from an exploding volcano will not notice or comment on the Italian restaurant painted pink and standing on one edge in their path.
True, but they won’t run face first into it because they can’t see it. That guy bringing stuff to the big nonhuman get together just saw an empty field.
Would that we could all be more like Bugs Bunny: “THIS is a job for The Masked Avenger! Eh, but since he ain’t around, I guess I’ll just have to see what I can do.”
“The only difference is that sanity has made him into a liberal arts major!”. 🙂
Good one!^
Again, can you really call reality blindness “sanity”?
And again, it’s only “sanity” in the sense that they’re not Mad. That doesn’t mean they can’t still be crazy.
To use literary terminology, in a Doylean sense reality blindness is a humorous exaggeration of people’s tendency to ignore or deny upsetting realities and facts, plus a riff on the magical “veil of unknowing” in “Buffy” type realities which keeps people from realizing their town is full of vampires or demons or whatever. As such it needs no justification save being funny.
In a Watsonian in-universe sense, however, reality blindness is hard to justify, since it seems to be both dangerous and and contradictory to the way actual “normal” people behave and interact with the world: the analogy with real-world “reality blindness” breaks down when people come face to face with unbelievable but terrible things: a person who doesn’t know what a bear is when seeing a grizzly moving in their direction doesn’t think “ooh, big puppy”: a person who doesn’t know what a volcano is who sees the whole side of a mountain blow out doesn’t think “huh, that’s a big flock of geese.” And real-world people believe all sort of incredible things: they imagine they see stuff like UFOs and sea monsters and members of the trilateral commission all the time.
So, in-universe: it makes sense that at some time in the past reality blindness was actually _useful_ for survival, to the extent it became a hereditary trait in much of the human race. So, theory: the Great Old Ones ruled the world for a long time. Humanity wasn’t wiped out, for they were no more important than insects in the eyes of the Great Old Ones. But many perished all the same, for those who looked upon the Great Old Ones died of fear or went hopelessly mad.
Evolution happened: two new breeds of man emerged. One was descended from those most able to close their minds to what they were actually seeing: rather than a Great Old One, they imagined they were seeing a storm, a swarm of insects, a moving pillar of smoke, a waterspout or a tornado full of sharks. This increased over time, since the greater your ability to ignore what you saw, the more likely to survive and have descendants.
More rarely, certain types would go all the way through madness into a glorious new “sanity,” with occasionally useful side effects such as the stretched-vine powered bamboo and coconut robot: over time, they would evolve in the ancestors of the Mad Scientists, although less successful than the reality blind due to their loss of anything resembling “common sense”.
The Great Old Ones departed when the Stars were no longer Right: enough “baseline”, non reality-blind survived through luck and knowing when to bury their heads under a bush to eventually become numerous again (not being in denial about the existence of, say, giant bears or mountains spitting flame helped).
(My headcanon, for now. I may come up with a better one at any moment, so don’t reference me. 🙂 )
I like it.
Although my take on reality blindness (the Gaspode Theory) is that it’s not enough to not know something exists, it has to contradict things you do know, like “dogs don’t talk” or “you can’t make a teleporter of bicycle parts”. So it wouldn’t cut in if you saw a large carnivorous animal heading towards you and had never heard of grizzlies, but it might if you had been convinced they were mythical creatures.
Since reality blindness attempts to explain it away the incomprehensible as something believable, this may explain conspiracy theories.
If the Great Old One hypothesis holds, it’s likely that their departure was in some way connected with the Mad Scientists’ ancestors. It’s unlikely that it involved an aeolipile-powered star-realigner, but who knows?
^(;,;)^
You’re forgetting Douglas Adams’ take on this with his explanation of the Somebody Else’s Problem field: they can see it, they can’t rationalize it or find a way to deal with it, so they ignore it and work with what they can affect at the time. A crowd fleeing from an exploding volcano will not notice or comment on the Italian restaurant painted pink and standing on one edge in their path.
True, but they won’t run face first into it because they can’t see it. That guy bringing stuff to the big nonhuman get together just saw an empty field.
Would that we could all be more like Bugs Bunny: “THIS is a job for The Masked Avenger! Eh, but since he ain’t around, I guess I’ll just have to see what I can do.”
I figured they’d be on their way to Kansas.
I’m surprised his bikes aren’t rust-resistant! Definitely something to address in the next model.
They’re out of the frying pan, They’ve got this escape-pod plan. But sane Captain Kinlin is fussin’ and fiddlin’. His bicycle’s not on land.