There are fake people everywhere. When you scroll through social media, most feeds you see are highlights of people's life. Some people can make a beautiful post on their social media while simultaneously saying terrible things to the people closest to them like their close family or friends. This dissonance of realities can be really stark. I have a few close examples of this in my life and I find it difficult to understand. I know that people have a strong desire to be accepted by other people but why not focus on the people physically next to you as opposed to focusing so much on upholding a virtual appearance, where most of those people may not really care about you. I had a student last semester that had a very disrespectful attitude towards me and her fellow classmates but would take pictures posing in class, presumably to post on social media. I would think to myself, what is the point of upholding some virtual appearance when the people around you, due to being disrespectful, think poorly of you because of that. It makes no sense to me that people place more value on their virtual identity than how people physically and in real time, perceive them. As a father, I hope to teach this to my daughter, I hope that she can value in-person relationships and physical interactions over upholding a fake virtual identity.
As a social constructivist, I believe that most knowledge is socially constructed. However, I have concluded that there are three forms of knowledge: 1) Empirical Knowledge, 2) Social Knowledge, 3) Self-actualized knowledge. Below I will briefly summarize them: 1) Empirical knowledge can be thoughts (or symbols) based on experiments or observations of nature that can describe and predict some phenomena. In principle, this type of knowledge should be generally accepted by all people, due to clear cut evidence needed to support any claims based on empirical knowledge. However there are many people that reject empirical knowledge due to having other beliefs (Self-actualized knowledge) that they feel are more “true” to them, even if there is no empirical evidence for them. By definition we are all ignorant until knowing truth, so for many people, a lack of empirical knowledge comes from the lack of interest in science or understanding the true nature of our universe. 2) Social Knowled...
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