Hard Problem of Reality

The terrifying gap between the world as it appears to our senses/consciousness and the world as it might be "in itself." Our entire reality is a user-interface generated by our brains—a simplified, species-specific model optimized for survival, not truth. The hard problem is that we are forever locked inside this simulation, with no way to peek at the source code. Even our most objective instruments (telescopes, particle colliders) just feed data back into our perceptual and cognitive interface. We can never know if we're describing the "real" reality or just the next layer of a nested simulation. The map is all we have; the territory is permanently off-limits.

*Example: You see a "solid" wooden table. Physics tells you it's 99.9999999% empty space, a quantum cloud of vibrating fields. Which is the real table? The useful, evolved illusion of solidity, or the counter-intuitive mathematical description? Both are models in your mind. The hard problem: We can swap out one model for a better one (Newtonian for Quantum), but we can never discard modeling altogether to see the "thing itself." Reality is the one guest at the party who can never be directly perceived, only inferred from the reactions of others.* Hard Problem of Reality.

by Enkigal January 24, 2026

No we do not ✌️✊️✌️✊️create✌️✊️✌️✊️ reality you delusional fuck

And do the extent that we do it's heavily localized and uses the physical components that already exist and the theories we generate regarding how those components interact.

Hym "No we do not ✌️✊️✌️✊️create✌️✊️✌️✊️ reality you delusional fuck. We affect reality and YOU make up stories that aren't real to distort reality but that isn't what you are insinuating when you say we create reality. What you insinuating is that we somehow generate the broader non-localized reality through some nonsense. And that's fucking stupid."

by Hym Iam January 27, 2026

Reality Harnessing

The act of treating the local set of physical laws and constants not as a fixed stage, but as a system of levers, dials, and raw materials to be utilized. It's a step beyond harnessing individual forces (like gravity) to instead manipulate the foundational parameters that define how those forces interact. This could involve locally altering the speed of light to enable communications, tweaking the fine-structure constant to change how atoms bond, or creating bubbles of spacetime with different dimensional topology. It's the ultimate form of environmental control—adjusting the very fabric of existence you're operating within.

Example: "The alien probe wasn't armored; it practiced reality harnessing. It simply increased the Planck length in its immediate vicinity, making quantum tunneling so probable that any attack would harmlessly dissipate into a fog of probability before reaching its hull."

by Dumuabzu January 29, 2026

Reality Engineering

The proactive, creative counterpart to Reality Harnessing. If harnessing is using existing levers, engineering is building new levers—designing and instantiating entirely new physical laws or constants within a confined volume. This could mean crafting a pocket universe with different thermodynamics for perfect computation, engineering a region of spacetime where entropy flows backward, or creating a "physics bubble" where electrons have a different charge, enabling impossible chemistry. It's the pinnacle of technological capability, moving from understanding nature's rules to writing your own subsidiary bylaws for localized reality.

Example: "The archive wasn't a hard drive; it was a bubble of reality engineering. Inside, information was stored as stable knots in the weak nuclear force, with a local arrow of time set to zero. Data lasted forever because 'forever' had no meaning in its engineered physics."

by Dumuabzu January 29, 2026