Fact is a nominalization and as such NLP considers facts as a distortion of reality.
Freedom of will and isolation of facts. – Our usual imprecise mode of observation takes a group of phenomena as one and calls it a fact: between this fact and another fact it imagines in addition an empty space, it isolates every fact. In reality, however, all our doing and knowing is not a succession of facts and empty spaces but a continuous flux. Now, belief in freedom of will is incompatible precisely with the idea of a continuous, homogeneous, undivided, indivisible flowing: it presupposes that every individual action is isolate and indivisible; it is an atomism in the domain of willing and knowing. – Just as we understand characters only imprecisely, so do we also facts: we speak of identical characters, identical facts: neither exists. Now, we praise and censure, however, only under this false presupposition that there are identical facts, that there exists a graduated order of classes of facts which corresponds to a graduated world-order: thus we isolate, not only the individual fact, but also again groups of supposedly identical facts (good, evil, sympathetic, envious actions, etc.) – in both cases erroneously. – The word and the concept are the most manifest ground for our belief in this isolation of groups of actions: we do not only designate things with them, we think originally that through them we grasp the true in things. Through words and concepts we are still continually misled into imagining things as being simpler than they are, separate from one another, indivisible, each existing in and for itself. A philosophical mythology lies concealed in language which breaks out again every moment, however careful one may be otherwise. Belief in freedom of will – that is to say in identical facts and in isolated facts – has in language its constant evangelist and advocate.
Human, All Too Human, book 3, paragraph 11
One of the more useful metaprograms is the one that is called “sameness/difference” Our brain works by making things the same. Evolutionary this has a great advantage because once your learn that a specific tiger is dangerous you don’t have to learn that again for the next tiger you meet. Sameness makes life saver. So the brain filters out differences. Nevertheless in some people the brain filters out less differences and in others more. That distinction can be described within NLP with the metaprogram “sameness/difference”.
Judgement: this is the belief that ‘such and such is the case’. Thus, judgement involves admitting having encountered an identical case: it thus presupposes comparison, with the help of memory. Judgement does not create the appearance of an identical case. Instead, it believes it perceives one; it works on the supposition that identical cases even exist. But what is that function, which must be much older and have been at work much earlier, that levels out and assimilates cases in themselves dissimilar? What is that second function which, on the basis of the first, etc. ‘What arouses the same sensations is the same’: but what is it that makes sensations the same, ‘takes’ them as the same? – There could be no judgments at all if a kind of leveling had not first been carried out within the sensations: memory is only possible with a constant underscoring of what has been experienced, has become habit – – Before a judgement can be made, the process of assimilation must already have been completed: thus, here too there is an intellectual activity which does not enter consciousness, as in the case of pain caused by an injury. Probably, all organic functions have their correspondence in inner events, in assimilation, elimination, growth, etc. Essential to start from the body and use it as a guiding thread. It is the far richer phenomenon, and can be observed more distinctly. Belief in the body is better established than belief in the mind. ‘However strongly something is believed, that is not a criterion of truth.’ But what is truth? Perhaps a kind of belief which has become a condition of life? In that case, its strength would indeed be a criterion. E.g., regarding causality.
Notebook 40, August – September 1885 paragraph 15
A number is a nominalization and as such a distortion of reality.
Number. – The invention of the laws of numbers was made on the basis of the error, dominant even from the earliest times, that there are identical things (but in fact nothing is identical with anything else); at least that there are things (but there is no ‘thing’). The assumption of plurality always presupposes the existence of something that occurs more than once: but precisely here error already holds sway, here already we are fabricating beings, unities which do not exist. – Our sensations of space and time are false, for tested consistently they lead to logical contradictions. The establishment of conclusions in science always unavoidably involves us in calculating with certain false magnitudes: but because these magnitudes are at least constant, as for example are our sensations of time and space, the conclusions of science acquire a complete rigorousness and certainty in their coherence with one another; one can build on them – up to that final stage at which our erroneous basic assumptions, those constant errors, come to be incompatible with our conclusions, for example in the theory of atoms. Here we continue to feel ourselves compelled to assume the existence of a ‘thing’ or material ‘substratum’ which is moved, while the whole procedure of science has pursued the task of resolving everything thing-like (material) in motions: here too our sensations divide that which moves from that which is moved, and we cannot get out of this circle because our belief in the existence of things has been tied up with our being from time immemorial. – When Kant says ‘the understanding does not draw its laws from nature, it prescribes them to nature’, this is wholly true with regard to the concept of nature which we are obliged to attach to nature (nature = world as idea, that is as error), but which is the summation of a host of errors of the understanding. – To a world which is not our idea the laws of numbers are wholly inapplicable: these are valid only in the human world.
Human, All Too Human, book 1, paragraph 19