The world we live in is obvious at a glance. The rules are simple. Reality is defined by what we see.
Imagine sitting in the very spot where this picture was taken. It is real. You are there. The cool breeze off of the water is scented with pine. The ripples of the water are occasionally disturbed by a trout swimming beneath the surface. Your voice echoes across it. It is real. You are there.
You tell your friend about your experience. You explain the breeze, the fish, the pine scent. You show the picture you took. To your friend, this place seems real too now.
Your photo and your experience are shared a hundred times. A thousand. The picture and the experience reverberate throughout the world. It is now part of the network of reality that we live in. It is a morsel of shared experience for all people.
Years go by and your picture is shared back to you. You have forgotten the experience. The lake and the mountains do not look familiar to you. Were you really there? Is there a lake? Are there mountains? Were you ever even a young person once?
The nature of these questions is the nature of Reality Machina. When experience is had in first person, there is no questioning that it is real. The only question is that of perception. Provided that your perception is accurate, the things you are seeing with your eyes are real and truly are as you see them.
When experience is second hand, it is real also in so far as you trust the individual and their perception who are sharing them with you. And yet….it is different. You don’t know the smell, the sight, the feeling of being there. You can only relate to it through your own experience. Like cutting out pictures of a magazine to make a picture like the one described.
As an experience or a piece of knowledge spreads away from its origin, even if it remains unchanged completely, it becomes less and less real. The pieces of ourselves that we apply to build an internal representation of this novel thought become more generic and less granular, especially as we accumulate fewer real experiences on our own.
At the extreme, we gain experience only from those experiences shared by others. We become trapped in a house looking out a window, wondering if those things we see are truly real, or if they are just pictures hung outside our home. What difference does it make? They have no ability to affect us. They are just images, pictures. They are just stories told to us by strangers. How can we know what they really are? If we live only within this experience, how can we even know that we are real, have a past or a future?
We stand alone, together. Detached from the real and plugged helplessly into the unknowable. This is the Reality Machina. The Machine that makes our reality. What is its nature? What does it want? What are its intentions, this Machine?
Welcome to the meta of the meta.