The acid-head who thought he could fly

Let’s assume someone, perhaps under the influence of LSD, believes he can fly — or perhaps (he believes) God has told him he can fly — and so he jumps off a building intending to fly away. But instead he falls to the ground and dies. The reason is that his belief was incorrect; it was counter-factual. It did not conform to reality, or at least to a certain subset of known physical reality.

Now I’m well aware that the notion of “fact” is a slippery thing and there are many kind of beliefs and worldviews and mindsets that do not fall as cleanly onto the spectrum of fact vs. fiction as the belief that you can fly. However, one can stipulate that not all propositions in the world are necessarily characterizable as provable facts without abandoning the claim that some facts, physical or otherwise, do in fact hold.

Like the acidhead falling tragically to his death, behaving in ways based on beliefs that are contrary to facts, no matter how strongly those beliefs might be held, is counterproductive and destructive. Such behavior is highly likely to reduce whatever metric you care to choose for quality of life in the broad sense. Of course, one can always adopt contorted positions such as claiming that some kind of satisfaction derived from the very fact of holding a possibly counter-factual belief — perhaps social approval from a group of like-minded believers — offsets the detrimental effect from counterproductive behaviors based on that belief. However, when taken to its extreme, this kind of logic would lead to bizarre…