The Simulation Holds: On Reality, the Self, and the Fictions That Run Us - Softcover

Allman, Dylan

 
9798181214019: The Simulation Holds: On Reality, the Self, and the Fictions That Run Us

Synopsis

Most people believe they are perceiving reality. They are running a model instead, assembled from sensory data, processed by a nervous system shaped across four hundred million years of evolutionary pressure toward survival, filtered through language they did not choose, interpreted inside a cultural framework they inherited. By the time a perception arrives at consciousness, it has cleared so many processing layers that calling it a direct report on the world would be foolish.

What follows is an attempt to map a circuit of related problems I cannot stop returning to: what reality actually is, what the self is that claims to perceive it, why humans press obsessively toward objective truth, and what all of this means for the age we're living through.

This work is dedicated to the public domain. The complete text and audiobook are also available free at the-simulation-holds.com.

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