# Fictional Thinking and Real Thinking

### Background Concept: What World Does The Referent Live In?

When we see some symbols representing something, it’s useful to ask “what world does the referent[^2u4mkcrk1yj] live in?”. Some examples:

*   When I’m reading a Harry Potter book, the referents of the words/sentences mostly live in the fictional world of Harry Potter.
*   When I’m going over a spreadsheet of recent crop yields, the referents live in our physical world.
*   When a textbook contains a problem involving a perfect vacuum or an infinite plane, the referents live in a simple hypothetical world (typically chosen to approximately match many little chunks of our physical world).
*   When a news article talks about an expert consensus, the referents live in “social reality”.
*   When I explain how to fix a printer, and you ask “will that actually work?”, and I reply “well that’s how it *should* work”, I am implying that the referents of my explanation live in “should world” (which may or may not match our physical world in any given instance).
*   When someone says “but it doesn’t *feel* like that”, they’re emphasizing that the referent of their emotions lives in “felt reality” (which may or may not match our physical world).

I recommend pausing here, and coming up with an example or two of your own.

### Background Concept: Fictional Worlds vs Physical Reality

All of the worlds in which referents live *except* our physical world are fictional. Usually, fictional worlds which we’re interested in match our physical world to a significant extent:

*   The Harry Potter world includes mostly the same natural geography as our world, the same cities, and very similar humans.
*   The little hypothetical worlds of textbook problems are specifically chosen to approximate many different real-world situations.
*   On most mundane matters, the consensus of social reality matches physical reality. For instance, clear daytime skies are usually blue in both physical and social reality.

Often, people will call a world “fictional” derisively. And this isn’t entirely unfair, but one needs to be careful not to completely dismiss a world as useless-to-reason-about merely because it is fictional. Those little hypothetical worlds from textbook problems are decidedly fictional, but they sure are useful to reason about! And even in places where physical reality and a fictional world don’t *match*, they can *interact*. Sometimes humans intentionally reshape the physical world to better resemble should-world, or social reality, or felt reality, or Harry Potter world.

That said, there’s a reason we have a word for “fiction”. Physical reality is special and different from all the other worlds; it can “push back against us” in a way that other worlds can’t. Physical reality goes on existing, and goes on effecting us, even in places where we don’t have any symbols representing it. Fictional universes, by contrast, can touch us only through the symbols with which we represent them. I cannot go use a thermometer to check the temperature in Harry Potter’s room under the staircase. At best, I could make up a temperature measurement, write it down (or show it in a Harry Potter movie), and convince the author to declare it canon. There’s not really a sense in which that temperature measurement could be “wrong”, other than inconsistency with whatever else has been stated about the Harry Potter universe.

Fictional Thinking
------------------

Here’s the quote with which Joe Carlsmith opened his excellent essay [Fake Thinking and Real Thinking](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GMWtZzpLHpBLKQsYp/fake-thinking-and-real-thinking):

> *“There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall?” *
> 
> *\- C.S. Lewis*

This is the quintessential example of what Joe calls “fake thinking” suddenly turning to “real thinking”. One moment, the children’s minds represent burglars - but the referents, the burglars, live in a fake world, a fictional world, a play world. Fictional burglars. But then, the children hear a sound… and suddenly the burglar-representations in their minds point into the real world. Real burglars.[^61p07sx1xw]

I claim that this example generalizes: insofar as Joe’s “fake thinking” vs “real thinking” points to a single coherent distinction, it points to *thoughts which represent things in other worlds* vs *thoughts which represent things in our physical world*. A better name for the distinction would be “fictional thinking” vs “real thinking”.

Some prototypical examples of “fictional thinking”, using some of the other worlds listed above:

*   Thinking or arguing about what would happen in the world of Harry Potter.
*   Using a mathematical model which has been simplified so much that it no longer approximately matches reality in the places one cares about (or “assuming one’s way out of reality”).
*   Thinking about what the social consensus says, or arguing for the preferred social consensus of one group or another.
*   Thinking about how some system *should* work, making plans based on how it should work, then feeling justified anger at the system’s designers or the world when it doesn’t work as it should.
*   Responding to hangriness by yelling at someone rather than eating, because it feels like they did something egregious to earn my wrath.

Some examples from Joe’s post, reformatted to emphasize the fiction aspect:

*   Thoughts drawn from one’s internal cache. That cache can itself represent a coherent world which is different from the real world.
*   Just repeating things one heard from someone else. These might represent broad social reality, or the more local social reality of one’s own small social circles.
*   Defending a fixed position, rather than updating. Once the position is fixed, one is talking about the world in which it is true, regardless of whether it matches reality.
*   Pattern-matching words without thinking about what they represent at all, or using concepts which “feel hollow”. The referent might live anywhere, if one isn’t even thinking about it.

In contrast, here are some examples of “real thinking” which *use* the same fictional worlds as above, but nonetheless keep their referents in physical reality:

*   Thinking or arguing about how to build a real world flying broomstick or golden snitch.
*   Using a simple mathematical model which does approximately match many things in reality, and keeping those real-world instances in mind along the way.
*   Thinking or arguing about the memetic process which produced some social consensus, and checking whether that process will systematically cause the social consensus to match physical reality.
*   Thinking about how a system *should* work, and then checking each piece of the system to verify that it in fact works that way, and fixing any pieces which don’t work as they should (or changing one’s model of how the pieces should work).
*   Using one’s emotions as evidence of what one wants, or what’s happening around oneself, but checking it against other sources of evidence too rather than taking emotions as ground truth.

The main benefit of tracking which world the referents of one’s thoughts live in is to notice when we’re doing fictional thinking, and (when it makes sense, which is most of the time) replace it with more real thinking, like the examples above.

[^2u4mkcrk1yj]: Jargon: “referent” = thing which a symbol represents 

[^61p07sx1xw]: Note that the children’s mental representations of burglars can point to the real world even if there are not in fact any burglars in the real world; we typically call this “being wrong”. More generally, the referent of some symbol can "live in" the real world even if the thing it's talking about doesn't exist; then the symbols are wrong.