> “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
Funny thing is that it seems to apply to intersubjective phenomena too. For example, a "limited liability corporation" is made entirely out of shared delusions of people, but is a real thing under this quote, in the sense that it remains even if you or I stop believing in it. However, if sufficiently many people stop believing at once, it will go away.
(And so will things like money, rule of law, or civilization.)
Even if all humans suddenly vanished, many artifacts for those "beliefs" will remain: coins and bills will still be there, and the documents, books, and computer data with laws and LLC documentation will still be there too. So I don't see how you can call them a "shared delusion"; they're real things that people invented, though ultimately they're just shared agreements backed up by some kind of documentation rather than word-of-mouth communication.
The ideas that "homosexuality is perfectly ok" (in some societies) or "homosexuality is horrible and those who practice it must be punished or even murdered" (in some other societies) are shared "delusions" (aka "ideas" or "opinions"), though these ideas usually also result in actual laws (written in books). So I guess you could say that peoples' shared "delusions" (ideas) about how a society should operate are then codified and written down in the form of laws to be used to enforce those ideas on others.
Funny thing is that it seems to apply to intersubjective phenomena too. For example, a "limited liability corporation" is made entirely out of shared delusions of people, but is a real thing under this quote, in the sense that it remains even if you or I stop believing in it. However, if sufficiently many people stop believing at once, it will go away.
(And so will things like money, rule of law, or civilization.)