# Reification bias

> “All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... *fantasies* to make life bearable."
> 
> REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
> 
> "Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
> 
> YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE *LITTLE* LIES.
> 
> "So we can believe the big ones?"
> 
> YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
> 
> "They're not the same at all!"
> 
> YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN *SHOW* ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME *RIGHTNESS* IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
> 
> "Yes, but people have *got* to believe that, or what's the *point*—"
> 
> MY POINT EXACTLY.” 

Terry Pratchett,[ Hogfather](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/583655) 

Humans make up people, objects, things, all the time. We observe a system that we don’t fully control, and then jump to assuming some underlying real thing making it work and function.

Two obvious examples come to mind, one mostly a relic of the past, another very much a part of the present:

*   **Polytheistic religions**, where every phenomenon is literally explained by a hallucinated person: god, nymph, djinn…
*   **Hidden entities theories in science**, where the phenomena are often clarified and explained through the assumption of unobservable entities, like the fields of field theories, the aether in pre-relativity physics, and the strings and branes in string theory.

Yet our predictive hallucinations are far more prevalent than that!

*   When reading a novel or playing a game of D&D, we could directly infer the next event to come from the tropes and the psychology of the author, but we tend to naturally hallucinate a whole coherent world with imagined people as if it existed really, and predict the future of the story based on that.
*   In matters of politics, we could directly model the status games that are being play, like [immoral mazes](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS) and [simulacra levels](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/simulacrum-levels) attempt to, but we tend to naturally hallucinate issues for which we believe we are fighting, like immigration and economy, even though we mostly are playing the status game and often have different opinion about the real world complex systems these words are supposed to point to.
*   In matters of morals, we could directly model the reasons for coordination and the consequences of breaking trust, but we tend to naturally hallucinate moral concepts like Justice, Mercy, Sin, and to act as moral realists even when we have a more sophisticated perspective on morality.

The point is not that we always resort to predictive hallucinations— only that we have a reification bias: predictive hallucinations are our first instinct and our first intuition.

The point is not that predictive hallucinations are bad either. They don’t have a moral value, they’re just tools. They equally give rise to the mess of politics and the progress of science.

Reification bias, like all biases, [is an engine of human cognition](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KKdaaxce5BYtofJC4/biases-are-engines-of-cognition). **For better or worse. It’s both a constraint and a capability, like any affordance**. It is a shortcut that lets us find compressed explanations of almost any phenomenon, and communicate them straightforwardly to each other. When it works, it lets us beat the odds and move faster than we should reasonably expect — most of science's biggest jumps and successes come from here. But like every shortcut, it can lead us astray. Even in science, there have been predictive hallucinations which mostly proved a hindrance, like ether. And it’s so natural for us to believe in them, to ascribe reality to them in the most tangible way, that we often cannot let go.

Like all biases, we can get further not by denying it or fearing it, but by leveraging it, under a watchful eye, to reap its benefits without incurring its costs.