Own Little World

The idea that we are living in a simulation is actually quite ancient. If you can understand Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” then you’ve encountered that very idea. The difference is that Plato believed you could escape the simulation, whereas the modern notion suggests that we are locked into it. You’ll get echoes of it from The Matrix movie franchise.

For people who find themselves taking the nonconformist faith path, it would actually be more sane to assume that the only way to escape is to die. In other words, each of us is in a simulation, rather like a computer game, with some variation between individuals. There are things that overlap, elements that are in the nature of the simulation itself, but that no two of us get exactly the same settings in our game, and the control panel is missing a lot of options.

I make no pretense to calling this the truth. What I’ll tell you is that it is how I approach things. The very notion that you can never honestly know in this life what’s truly real is very much a part of the Doctrine of the Fall. It suggests that you should expect glitches in your understanding, whether they are ultimately real or not. It boils down to a question of what you experience and perceive. This is why I favor phenomenology. It takes that same approach: There is no reality. There is only your personal experience and perception.

I believe this is critical to taking the nonconformist faith path. If you are going to seize firmly on your convictions as the true anchor or your being, you are going to need the kind of orientation that allows you to reject attempts by other humans to demand you conform to their expectations. You have little choice but to deny that their particular reality applies to you.

Thus, accusations that you are in your own little world are accurate, as far as they go. But we assert that no other world is valid, because all worlds — all realities — are imaginary. Yours is equally valid. Thus, I say that reality is fungible: Yours is as good as mine. This is what enables us to live by our convictions.

This does not require that you adopt a chaotic stance of widely competing variations on reality. If reality is a person, then we can all talk about reality as possessing a lot of similarities for each of us, otherwise we can’t be talking about the same person. In other words, the variations are likely to be small, and sometimes not the kind of thing you mention. It may be too personal, too much like intimacy that justifies privacy.

Still, it does mean that you will qualify by some definitions as insane. It’s because you reject the notion that there is one unified reality. You reject the notion of “objective reality” for which we should all have some unified experience. You should get very comfortable with people regarding you as nuts, even revel in it. It does not damage your testimony if what you testify is true. The default assumptions of a fallen humanity are the big lie.

This is partly an outline of what my proposed book will cover. By the way, this will be echoed in what I post on my other blog tomorrow.