As a therapist, I am absolutely horrified by this video.

I can't even begin to tell you how wrong this all is.

But let me tell you: your brain can totally differentiate between drawings of people and actual real breathing human beings https://twitter.com/chandralialove/status/1298115577563807745

A quick 5 min research in google scholar gave me this article http://www.anna-abraham.com/uploads/2/1/1/2/21121736/2008_abraham_jocn_realityvsfiction.pdf

Which not only shows how your brain will react differently to different scenarios involving either real people or fictional characters, but also say this in the intro :

AND THIS IS JUST A QUICK SEARCH because I'm currently busy with work matters.

But please please please DO SOME RESEARCHES and stop manipulating teens into believing your pseudo-science that is based on your beliefs and not facts.

I'm realizing I forgot to provide a caption for the picture.
It's a screencap of the article reading "What is therefore remarkable is how easily we can, nonetheless, tell fiction apart from
reality, and how rarely, if ever, healthy individuals confuse
fiction with reality."

and the rest of the text: "Indeed, this ability emerges early during development (Woolley & Wellman, 1990), and by the
age of 5, children can not only differentiate reality from
fiction but can also distinguish between different fictional
worlds (Skolnick & Bloom, 2006). "

Quick update: the reason I said I'm "horrified" (that might have sounded too grave for some people) is because this video is constructed in a way to make people believe the guy without question. It's manipulative.

First he starts with some "philosophic" question +

(which has already been discussed long and large by philosophers, and while it would be presomptuous to pretend we answered the question of "what it means to be alive", there's A LOT of litterature about it, just in the philosophical sense, and I invite you to read it.)

But the very confident way he says it + stating his opinions as facts, it's not meant to push people to actually think about the question, and to make their own opinion.

It's made to "blow the viewer's mind" (especially younger, more naive viewers), to destabilize them.

Then, instead of saying things like "you can't differentiate between fiction and reality", he'll use sentences like "your brain can't differentiate between 2d pictures and 3d pictures", which makes it *sounds* more scientific.

It's not.

And the invitation to ask more questions because "it's more complex" after those blatantly wrong assertions is another way to make his speech looks more serious.

someone so confident surely knows what he's talking about, right ? 

Not at all.

He has no source to back him up.

But that's not the only thing that makes the video "horrifying" for me.

it's the context in which it's being published, and the platform it's being posted on.

If you're not familiar with current fandom culture, know that there's a growing trend of people (mostly teenagers, but not only) going after content creators and other fans because of the fiction they create and/or consume, because said fiction is "problematic".

they will equate what the people draw, write, or read about to be a reflection of what they want in real life.

The idea that the brain can't differentiate between fiction and reality ? they already claimed it high and loud and used it as a justification for their actions.

And when I say "going after" and "their actions", I mean targeted harassment, dogpiling, doxxing, death threats, suicide baiting, and the list goes on and on.
In the JoJo fandom this year, already 3 artists ended up in the hospital after harassment due to drawing the wrong thing

And when I talk about the platform, I talk about tiktok, which is widely used by teens, who are more likely to believe that speech (especially since fellow teens use it in fandoms) and to replicate those harmful behaviors.

I know some people think it's just a weird dude being blatantly wrong in his room, but I already saw this argument being used, and it was in justification of violently harassing people to protect the rights of fictional characters.

This is why this video is "horrifying" to me

On this point, I'm going to mute this thread. Thanks for reading it and spreading this.