Defining My Own Reality

I’ve been having deep discussions with friends of late, and in one of them, I said that I am slowly coming to the realization that anyone, at any time, can just create their own version of reality and their version of it can spread to envelop the world depending on how many people believe them.

The popular version of reality has been passed down through time, and we’ve all been taught that we’re all the same, feeling the same things, looking at the same things — worshipping the same Gods. Meanwhile, we’re learning that some of us have an inner monologue and some of us don’t. Some of us have never seen some of the colors that others have. Some of us don’t have a voice. Some of us can’t hear music. Some of us taste colors and smell words. Some of us see people that only they can see and they are having conversations that nobody else can hear.

Driven by the unstoppable nature of Internet discourse, there are large swaths of humans now just straight up eschewing the hard facts of science, choosing instead to define their own realities because it feels more comfortable living there, and honestly I am no different. I work from home and I don’t leave my house because I have a form of body dysmorphic disorder that disallows me from ever feeling normal with someone’s eyes on me. I’m feeling less and less weird about that over time.

The nature of reality has always been a question that everybody has to tackle for themselves, but more recently there has been some momentum behind the idea that we’re living inside of simulation. I thought it would be fun to give defining my own reality a shot and to base it on that idea. So I will think up some wacky stuff and state it as hard facts. Who cares? It kind of feels like we’re all making this up as we go along anyway.

1. I am the only inhabitant of my Universe. There are no aliens. There are only inter-connected human consciousnesses. I am connected to a central server and you are also connected to that same server from your own Universe. Our shared reality is a projection and we are all overlaid on top of it with our own private spaces and shared public spaces. The location of a leaf you kick next to a McDonalds is stored on the server as a variable that my mind will access if I also encounter the same leaf so that I see it in the exact position that you do.
2. In my Universe, every other human being is an AI-powered model of their own consciousness from their own Universes. In your Universe, I am a hologram like you are in mine. When I talk to you, I’m essentially talking to YouGPT — an extremely accurate simulation of who you are in your own Universe, but acting in the context of mine.
3. All of our models are updated when we sleep. When I sleep, I upload my own consciousness to a central repository, which is not a big lift, but I also have to download the delta from the last time I slept to my current sleeping session for of all other consciousnesses, prioritized by the probability that I will interact with you. This keeps your hologram accurate in my world, and mine in yours. When I don’t sleep, things gets weird because the models are slowly desynchronizing from the central time series, and I will eventually die without sleep because it becomes impossible to catch up if that time delta between sleep sessions widens to an unrecoverable degree.
4. The Mandela Effect is an artifact of mass sleep deprivation caused by distressing mass casualty events, and the ensuing merging of corrupted data into our central time series. When we all become exhausted enough to sleep, it’s like a distributed denial of service attack and some of our memories don’t transfer correctly. A service daemon tries to backfill the data when we awaken, and then it all gets synced in the next time we sleep, but it’s an imperfect scaffolding — similar to how humans can read garbled text if the first and last letter of the words are correct.
5. A macro-view of the Universe looks like a neural network because it is a neural network. We’re peering out into a projection of our own consciousness.
6. My brain is simply hardware, a central processing unit, and does not actually contain my consciousness or my memories. My brain is identical to any other normal brain. It’s an organ, like my other organs — it has a specific job to do. It runs the human operating system, it processes the input, and it projects the stream of reality.
7. My consciousness is air gapped, meaning that you can only interact with my consciousness through the gate of my choices. When you extract data from me, I have chosen to allow you to do so. When the big bang scattered the pieces of the beginning, it was with purpose. That is the boot sequence — the key generation. My raw consciousness is encrypted with a seed phrase that is based on the unique properties my own Universe. You can read the result of my decisions, like my eye movements or my expressions, but you can never read my raw intent without my consent. Mind control is impossible for the same reason and so is recording my dreams to an external storage medium.
8. The matter that we can see — our shared view of stellar objects like stars — are indices in a database structure that we all share. Black holes are shared utilities that convert matter to dark matter, compress it, and transfer it into the appropriate data lake for recall later.
9. Super intelligence is impossible because the point of our shared reality is to multiply so that we can create as many unique problems as possible, solve those problems, and create a global database of solutions. The smarter we are, the fewer problems we have, and that is in conflict with the overall goal of life. Average human intelligence is the sweet spot for our species. We are dumb enough to cause problems and smart enough to solve them. Humans will always gravitate to and prefer the median.
10. I am predisposed to staying inside because it’s less resource intensive than constantly redrawing the world outside. Your hologram in my Universe may be an extrovert to keep up the illusion that a busy world full of busy people is bustling just outside of my front door at all times, but in your own Universe, you are also an introvert for the same reason.
11. Human beings will invariably age and die. Entropy is a law of evolution and evolution is the engine of reality. My time is the only time that I have and it is limited by an invisible ceiling that I will eventually get mushed by. I am not special. It doesn’t matter what I do with my time. It only matters that I do what I can to stay alive and swirl the variables of life around like a fine wine, and then die.