Reality

Be willing to have your most fundamental beliefs challenged.

Better , be eager and question them yourself. For YouTuber Ordinary Things, “The real danger of modern times isn’t that we’ll fail to tell the fake world from the real one, but it’s that we’ll know the world is fake and choose to live in that one anyway because it’s comfortable.” How iron... See more

To be a “realist of a larger reality” is not just to dream of something different than what is, nor to be lost in the spectacle or the world of representations. Instead, it’s to see the scene presented to you as well as what created the scene, to see not just the Instagram picture but the camera by which it was taken, the person holding the camera,... See more

a) I’m sick of pretending that psychic stuff doesn’t exist, and, b) materialism is bullshit. This office-park-version-of-reality charade has gone on long enough.

I’m not saying material life isn’t a thing. I drink H20 and shit entropy like the rest of the species. I’m saying it’s a lot weirder than we’ve dreamt of in any of these peer-reviewed philosophies. Physics is great. I love satellites and semiconductor chips. But we are, um, aware it’s incomplete, and we can’t begin to describe more if we don’t even... See more

“The map is not the territory.” The meaning of this aphorism is straightforward: we may imagine a means of understanding the mundane world, or a part of it; but we should not mistake this story for the truth: we should not believe everything we think.

Any understanding of the mundane world that we develop necessarily involves dimension reduction and simplification: so the story goes. We may end up with a tractable model that predicts reasonably well, but we’ll never get our error term to zero, and we mustn’t confuse our toy conceptions for a high-fidelity reproduction of “reality.”

So what if an alternate reality game really did keep on going, if it had no end point? It would amount to a simulation of the world. All aspects of “reality” that fit into the simulation, including some produced artificially by players for fun and profit, would be incorporated. If the game had no boundary, at some point you could think that the wor... See more

Reality as we understand it is a phenomenon of social structures, language, and shared processes for engaging with the world. Digital media is remaking all of these in such a way that media consumption more and more resembles the act of playing an alternate reality game.

As the media ecosystem produces alternate realities, it also undermines what remains of consensus reality by portraying it as just one problematic but boring option among many.