Hey friends! We’re doing something a little different today, if you’ll allow me to wax poetic for a bit. I had some thoughts on consensus reality and wanted to freewrite a piece about it. It’s down in the last segment. I’m also tired and busy, so no Cartoon Daan doodle header today, sorry!

How Am I Doing?

I’m pooped. Had a pretty social week and I’m feeling the results of it. I will now hunker down in my cocoon and focus completely on work for this week.

What Am I Doing?

We’re still slowly chipping away at our Bibidi accessibility & polish update. It’s slow going, but starting to show some progress. We’ve got a system for music now, which is great. I’m starting to feel a bit of time pressure, because we want a demo build by the end of the month (actually earlier probably) and there’s a boatload left to do.

Why Am I Doing? (this)

I’ve been thinking a lot about consensus reality lately. In an age of misinformation, echo chambers, we all believe to be correct. Even if our idea of what is fact or fiction directly contradicts each other. When AI-generated information becomes indistinguishable from material fact, our confirmation biases will help us cement our believes into reality through our actions. More than ever, it seems prudent to find a way to help us define a shared reality: a common understanding that we can agree upon and base our ideals off of. How would we go about that?

First, we have the sensory world. What we see, smell, hear and feel around us registers as reality. But we know this to be unreliable, for many reasons. Our genes and how our brains are wired dictate our senses. Someone who is colorblind will not process the world in the same as someone who is not. Some people taste soap when they eat cilantro. Some people are ticklish. In addition to all that, our brain is very good at imagining senses as well: dreams, hallucinations, pareidolia, et cetera. So we can cross are own perceptions off of the list as a reliable source of reality.

An alternative would be to rely on each others’ senses to form a common understanding. There’s something that you see that I do not, it might not exist. If there’s something we both see, the chance of it being real increases. If you can get enough people to agree on something, it must be true, right? Except that we continuously find that swathes of people will refuse to agree on basic topics. This method also does not account for intentional framing of common understanding, like deception or propaganda. One could call this consensual reality rather than consensus reality: a group of people could believe one thing to be the absolute truth while another might disagree.

Now, the materialists among us would argue there’s one objective, physical reality. I don’t disagree, necessarily. We have the scientific method and various measuring methods that can help us make sense of physical phenomena. The same people who rely on that however, will also concede that we do not yet, and possibly will never, possess the capability to fully observe all there is to observe. So we partially remain in the dark, and let assumptions fill in the gaps. Assumptions that are tainted by our lived experiences and personal biases. So at least in part, we imagine even what we think of as the one objective reality. That part of reality, crucially, is not always agreed upon.

In any case, no matter what your stance on this is, our personal biases will always dictate our actions. That in turn, creates an objective reality. Namely, the reality where you take the actions you’ve thought about. So, in a way that’s not too philosophical or too metaphysical, but as direct causation, what we believe to be true of the world impacts reality.

So, we let our ideology determine what reality is. As we always have done. We’re stuck in a consensual reality, fragmented by our access to information. Is this an insurmountable problem? I don’t really know what my point is, but I guess I just wanted to note down these high school-esque philosophy observations haha.