Most of my theories I’ve arrived at alone, laying prostrate on my bed in my parent’s home, during summer in high school, in between bouts of biotech classes at Fullerton college or other extracurricular academic nonsense (not sure how much they improved my chances of getting into UCLA).

The LA valley heat is nothing short of oppressive: once my mother and I biked to the nearest orange line bus station and back only to sustain third degree burns head to toe due to the lack of any form of shade and the heat being amplified by the concrete island effect that plagues basically all of San Fernando valley. I digress.

Multiple people in my life who are or have been close to me (best friends, lovers, other companions) have at one point or another ended up in a conversation with me about “the meaning of life” or something of that ilk and time and time again I end up exposing my real beliefs about things like that and it’s usually met with ghastly expressions and “that’s so depressing”s and “but then why do anything”s and etc etc.

I would like to preface this by assuring you that I am not depressed, I have quite literally zero thoughts of self harm, I don’t believe I’m in dire need of a therapist, etc. Personally I think that if you react to what I am about to say with thinking that I need a therapist, perhaps it is you who needs a therapist, although I would hesitate to recommend one because I wouldn’t know one who could reliable heal the scars of the realizations I’m about to tell you.

Let’s jump into it:

It is impossible to prove that anything that you experience is real.

Not now, nor ever. It is a fundamental impossibility that stems from being an agent who only perceives their world through senses.

We (or rather I can only say, I) have five (known) senses and through these senses we perceive what we call our reality. We buy in to this reality because its extremely, extremely inconvenient not to. This is because of social conditioning (internal forces) and external forces like weirding other people out or making decisions that would harm you (physically, mentally, socially…) in a world that is all that we know.

I hate to play the “if you were a game developer, then you would know” card, but… if you were a game developer then you would know.

Consider how most AI (aka “bots”) is created for games.

Most of the time the bot is given full access to the world’s internals: the position of the player, the positions of many items and areas of interest in the world, the statuses of things, etc.

The player may not notice this because AI players “knowing” the locations and statuses of things isn’t that suspicious most of the time since the player might also know these things through their own perception. For instance, the player might have played de_nuke so many times that they know pretty much all of the locations of interest, and if they are playing with other human players who can call out positions over voice chat, they can hear a position and know where it is in space and navigate to it basically as efficiently as a bot who just uses A* or dijstra’s to get there.

But think about what this means:

There is a “world” where there are basically two kinds of agents: human-controlled agents that perceive the world purely through their visual and auditory senses, and ai-controlled agents that have no perception whatsoever, they just fundamentally “know” where everything is, what everything is, etc. by virtue of their “mind” having direct access to the “essence” of all of the things that they “care” about.

If you are developing a game like this, eventually it will hit you that you just created a world where there are extremely fundamental differences between the “minds” of the agents that inhabit it, yet they are subject to the exact same world restraints: physics, what their capabilities are, etc.

This experience will help decouple in your mind the difference between an agent (i.e. you 🫵🫵🫵) perceiving the world and then believing it is real, from an agent that somehow omnisciently knows that the world is real.

If you know that, then you know that you simply can’t assume that these are the same thing, that they are the same experience.

i.e. experiencing the world through perception is fundamentally different from experiencing it through omniscience, which is different from other modalities of experiencing the world, etc etc.

So then what really makes us so adamant about believing that the world that we engage with is actually real?

Either the visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile data is being streamed to your consciousness…

Or the world is real but the decisions that people make are not of their own volition: aka agents besides the self possess no will and their actions are “scripted” by some other agent that possesses will, or perhaps are somehow fundamental to the universe you occupy, perhaps tied to your existence in said universe, or perhaps not: perhaps people would do everything they were destined to do whether you were there or not.

The point is “I” don’t know: i.e. the self can’t know. If you 🫵 are the self, you 🫵 can’t know. If others are selves, they ☝️👉👇👈 can’t know within their frame of reference, i.e. within their respective frames of consciousness.

It’s impossible. We are “perceivers”, like human players of the game of life. We are not “bots” of the game of life.

If this makes you sad, read on:

Why none of this is “sad”

Lots of people I’ve told this too don’t want to accept it not for its merits as a sound theory, but mostly because it makes them “sad”. “What’s the point of doing anything then??” they ask. Well, I’ll tell you.

Let’s take an extreme example. Let’s posit that you believe all this, and it makes you sad, and makes you feel like there’s no point to doing anything anymore, and at the end of this rabbit hole is suicide: “If there’s no point to doing anything anymore, what’s the point of being alive? It doesn’t make sense to live”.

Let me stop you right there. Rewind that: what did you just say?

What’s the “point”? What is “point”? It’s not “worth” it to do anything? What is “worth”?

If you truly, understand the ramifications of this theory, you will grasp the infinite possibilities of the kinds of realities that you as a conscious being can truly occupy.

The current perceived world that we occupy is one where there is perceived volition, i.e. we all at least feel like we have will: we make decisions and then act on those decisions and then perceive the subsequent consequences.

That’s not at all the only “world” that you could occupy if you don’t buy in to it. There exists a world where “you” could exist but have no agency. Kinda like a tree just sorta grows, it doesn’t really appear to have volition on where or how it grows but we can definitely agree that it is “alive” and that it exists in our world. If that tree somehow was conscious, it would be a consciousness that could perceive but have no will. You could “be” that tree if all that you accept defines “you” is your consciousness.

So now that we established that, let’s reexamine these words “point”, “worth”, etc.

What does it mean for something to be “worth”? It means that it has “worthiness”. Ok but to whom? Well, an agent right? An agent is defined as a being of agency, something that can “do” stuff. For something to have “worth” as an action (such as eating a sandwich, riding a bike, living, etc), it really only possesses that “worth” to a being with the agency to decide either to do it, or not to do it, i.e. an agent.

So does it really make sense to say something like “Life is not ‘worth’ it”? In order for you to remain being an agent who possesses the ability to perceive worth, you have to be ALIVE lmao. If you end your life, you forfeit any and all agency within the perceived world that we occupy, and then whether something is “worth” or not means nothing because its not like you have the fucking ability to do anything anymore. It’s not like you’re like eh I don’t really enjoy living anymore, it’s not “worth” it because I would rather do this other thing, well you can’t really do that other thing can you? In other for “worthiness” of anything to even make sense as a concept, you have to remain existing in a world where you are a being of agency, i.e. you literally have to actively be living in order for “a point” of anything to even be defined.

If you truly believe that it’s impossible to prove that anything is real, then you know that it’s impossible to prove that what is real is that you are really an agent. All you know is that the only world you have ever known is one where you possess that quality, but if you kill yourself you have literally zero idea of what kind of agency (or lack thereof) awaits you in the moments afterwards. You are basically rejecting the only place, perceived or otherwise, where you possess any amount of (perceived or otherwise) willpower to choose to do something or another based on their relative “worth”.

So no, this theory is not “sad” because if what gives you the energy to keep going in life is whether or not there is a “point” to things, then you fundamentally could never really believe in this theory anyways: those two modes of thought are completely mutually exclusive.

If you really grasped the full magnitude and ramifications of the complete unprovability of your senses equating to reality, then you would immediately know, that applying any kind of worldly decision weighting (i.e. is it “worth it”, whats the “point”, etc) to the complete unworldlyness of the existence of literally anything since you understand you’re limited to only what you can perceive, is absolutely impossible.

I.e. the world we (or “I”, or “you”) perceive we occupy is such a small collapsed form of all of the different worlds that we really could occupy that it doesn’t make sense to reason about whether or not it makes sense to keep living given that we aren’t sure what truly is real, because that “sense” only exists in this world: you aren’t a being with the same capabilities in a world without volition (read: death, or etc), “sense” means nothing when you cannot do anything.

So I would really challenge you to think a bit harder about all this before coming to an emotional conclusion. I’ve written about this before but even if I completely buy in to the world we currently exist in, I still don’t think there is any fundamental “point” to life and I have literally never based my lifeforce around any beliefs of that ilk.

If we are getting emotional here, I confess that emotionally that kind of modality of thought reeks of throwing away the grandiosity of consciousness that we were so generously awarded with by however we came to be. It’s such a gift that in our perceived world we have the volition that we do, the senses that we do (again game dev moment: players only have 2 senses but we have 5, how splendid!), etc.

For us to throw all of that away and equate life to a game of maximizing one thing, one “point” is so emotionally detestable beyond the mere inability of theories like that to exist in the frame I believe in to interpret life.

If we are allowing ourselves to get emotional here, may I confess that this understanding of the unprovability of our perceived reality has made me incredibly, incredibly happy in a fundamental sort of way where it extends through every atom of my being.

In our perceived world (I feel like I need to use this preface constantly throughout this article), we are so, so inundated with things demanding our full attention, demanding our haste, our immediacy, our full emotional beings being beladen with the worries of the world.

Oh make sure you do that by EOD, oh make sure you respond to so and so like not too late!~~ or else!~~, oh make sure you get this done and this done and this done and it’s very very important by the way, take me very seriously by the way, did I mention how your actions with respect to these very important things will reflect on your character that we will all scrutinize with our upmost scrutinous scrutiny and scrutiniaty by the way

like ugh shut upp, everyone shut up

The urge to just drop: “you can’t be sure any of this is real, or that I’m real, or that these deadlines are real, or that importance is even a concept considering it only exists in a world where priority exists which implies that it’s populated by being with agency which you can’t ever know if anyone else but you have (and I can’t know that anyone else but myself has)”.

Really, if we are thinking emotionally here, we (now more than ever) need defensive options to fight back against the tyranny of “it’s so important, you have to care about it”. It feels like everything these days is trying to be important: work, interpersonal relations, the interpretability of your life by others (aka social explainability), even games. Even fucking games where I’m trying to goof off in a world created abjectly different from the one we occupy for the sake of escapism are fucking somehow important now: what rank are you? esea or faceit? trying to go pro? trying to be a streamer? trying to be an influencer? gotta have consistency in your brand image~~ gotta have consistent uploads~~ feed the hive~~❤️❤️❤️.

Let me ask you, dear reader, are you not tired? Are you not exhausted from the “importances” of this world? If you are, then how could any of what I just told you be sad? Did you realize that it basically is the only true liberation from this madness? Sure everything is important, everything can be very, very important if you buy in to all of it.

There’s a progressiveness to the buy-in: You can buy in to the existence of our world, then you can buy-in to the importance of what people think about you, then you can buy-in to the minutia of every single thing you do, etc etc ad nauseam.

You can just keep buying in deeper and deeper until even if someone says your shoes are untied your entire fucking universe just breaks down and the self image you had of being the infallible, “real” being that you are explodes into a million pieces of shrapnel and wounds the walls of your soul.

You can do that or you can go the opposite route and accept the unprovability of everything you perceive and have that at least as an emotional buffer you can rely on when people pressure you, as they always, always will.

“Sure boss I’m sure it’s verryyy important I’ll have it done by EOD”, you say. It becomes so much easier to engage with the manic reality we occupy when we know that none of it is undeniably true. “sure”, “yes”, “I won’t forget”, “yeah why not”, just say it. Just fucking say it. Do you believe it? Do you believe this whatever is really that important, or that whatever, or any of this fucking nonsense. Of course not, but not because you’re just some mean, cynical person.

Because fundamentally, you can’t really believe anything anymore.

Once you have seen this light, you cannot unsee it. Once it has hit you, you will forever be changed. It’s not like you want to not really be emotionally invested in how fucking important whatever the fuck is to your measly, little life; it’s that you literally can’t, because believing that it is so important isn’t possible if you can’t even truly, really believe that the fundamental world that any of this occupies is really there, because it’s only told to you through the story of sights, smells, sounds, tastes, and touches.

You are a program with five input streams, the data constantly being fed to you by the fundamental rules of this place we call home. And honestly I’m perfectly fine with that because I will really take absolutely anything and everything that I have at my disposal to defeat the fucking invasion of my own personal priorities by the stressors of the outside world.

If tomorrow, I wake up and a bunch of bespectacled scientists pull a heavy visor off of my “true” face, and say good job standing up for yourself in front of your boss there, we the board have determined your soul worthy of ascending into the overworld; the test is complete, you may step out of the chamber; then there is nothing in this world I’m in right now that could have alluded to any of that since until this point I had only my perception to rely on.

And that’s fucking ok. Bring it on docs, throw the din of life at me:

I will show you what I’m made of.

Originally published on Substack. View the source version ↗