Transcription
Reality doesn't make any sense. And I don't mean that as an exaggeration. We know more about the surface of a distant planet dozens of light years away than we know about our own existence. We understand more about the forces that govern black holes than we do about why we have a sense of self.
The thing we call reality collapses under even the slightest scrutiny. Yet, it's something that every single person who has ever existed has experienced. That is the paradox of reality. It is simultaneously the most familiar and the most mysterious thing we will ever encounter.
So mysterious, in fact, that for most of our history, reality was taken at face value. The world is here because it is. Rocks are hard because they are. The sun rises because it does. Asking why was considered a bit of a fool's errand and like asking why water's wet.
But eventually those cracks started to appear. Philosophers, mystics, scientists, and ordinary people in strange states of consciousness all came to the same uncomfortable conclusion. Reality isn't as straightforward as it looks. If reality is so obvious, why do your senses contradict themselves? Why do entire traditions describe the world as an illusion? And why do physicists, the very people who claim to be the keepers of certainty, tell us that matter is mostly empty space, time isn't absolute, and nothing is as stable as it seems.
The rabbit hole of reality goes deep, way deeper than you think. From personal accounts of altered states to sprawling systems of philosophy to cutting edge science, we find the same impossible situation. What we think of as reality comes in levels, and the deeper you go, the stranger it gets.
So, let's dive in.
Level one, the consensus reality. Level one is the surface. The one we all start on. The one we all more or less can agree on. Call it consensus reality. This is the world that you wake up in every morning. You brush your teeth, grab your keys, head out the door, and everything seems straightforward. Tables are solid, water's wet, and if you stub your toe on the way out, it's going to hurt. Things remain where you left them. Objects have boundaries. Everything else seems to be navigating the world the exact same way that you are.
Consensus reality feels self-evident. The ground feels like ground. The air feels like air. But if you push just a little harder on these everyday assumptions, everything starts to wobble.
Now take your senses for example. They're the only reason you believe that the world is out there. And yet your senses are notoriously untrustworthy. Optical illusions trick your eyes. Miragees bend light into landscapes that don't exist. Phantom limb syndrome convinces amputees that a leg that has been cut off is still there. And this mirror trick literally convinces your brain that a fake arm that you put there by yourself is yours. Hallucinations create voices and visions out of nothing. Even something as simple as colorblindness shows that two people standing side by side can be experiencing the world in completely different ways.
Consensus reality is far less solid than it seems. Rather than objective truth, it's a stitched together agreement, a kind of unspoken contract between nervous systems that says, "Yes, this is the world. Let's all pretend we're seeing the same thing." But at this stage, reality is just the stage set, the furniture of existence. And yet, as with any stage set, you can't help but wonder what's behind it.
The rise of social media was meant to lead to greater human connections, to create a virtual amphitheater where we can spread our ideas and learn from one another. Unfortunately, it has instead become just rooms full of echo chambers. And even worse, it has become the death of our privacy. Our opinions, wants, and desires are all being tracked, categorized, and sold on the black market. Data brokers collect these fragments of your life and package them into lists that are then being sold to the highest bidder. There are real data broker lists with insane labels like tough start, young family, and rural and barely making it that prey on the most vulnerable in our society. We are all sorted into categories for these predatory companies and bad actors to use to identify and harm us. This is the unfortunate reality that we are currently living in. But protecting your privacy is protecting your ability to think for yourself instead of being constantly bombarded with advertisements from the highest biders. Incogn was built to fight back. Incogn automatically erases all of your personal information from the places that you can't see. data brokers, people search sites, predatory directories, all the dark corners of the internet that are quietly trading your identity for profit. On your own, it could take weeks or even months to get all of these data brokers to erase your data. But Incogn does it automatically and continuously to keep your information out of the hands of these bad actors. And now with their new custom removals feature, you can go even further. Just Google yourself, find a site exposing your information, copy the link, and Incogn's private experts will work to have it removed, even from sites outside of their automated network. Your data shouldn't be their currency. It should be yours. Take it back. Go to incogn.com/apperted and use my code, Aperture Deal, to get 60% off an annual plan to keep your information out of the hands of the people who want to harm you. because they can't harm you if they can't find you.
The realm of perception. At level two, we start to peel away the curtain. Here, reality isn't just out there. It's in here inside your brain. Your senses don't deliver reality directly. They deliver fragments, chaos. The world doesn't come prepackaged in neat shapes and colors. It comes as wavelengths of light, vibrations of air molecules, chemical signatures drifting through space, and your brain has to do the heavy lifting of turning that chaos into something usable.
Vision is the easiest example. Light enters your eye, hits the retina, flips the image upside down, and sends an electrical signal down to the optic nerve. What your brain actually gets is a scrambled two-dimensional pattern of electricity. Your brain then has to flip it back, stitch the blind spots together, and fill in those missing details. What you think of as seeing isn't the raw feed from the world. It's a best guess reconstruction.
And it's not just vision. Time itself gets stitched together. Your brain takes discrete moments like still frames in a movie reel and smooths them into what feels like a continuous flow. That's why you don't perceive the gaps when you blink. That's why a magician can palm a card without you noticing. Your brain edits reality like a film editor, cutting and splicing, hoping that you don't catch the seams.
Smell, taste, touch, all of them are selective, biased, and tuned more for survival than for revealing or expressing truth. Dogs hear frequencies we don't. Bees see colors that we can't. Birds navigate magnetic fields that we can't even perceive. Your reality is not the reality. It's a narrow slice, a customized interface your species evolved to handle. The philosopher Donald Hoffman calls it the user interface theory of perception. Just like a computer desktop isn't the computer itself, your senses are not the world. There are icons on the desktop, convenient and useful, but never the real machinery.
At level two, the unsettling realization is this. You don't see reality. You see your brain's version of reality. And that means the real reality, whatever it is, will always be hidden from you.
Level three, the realm of belief. Level three is where things start to get really slippery because here reality isn't just perception, it's interpretation. Take money. Physically, it's just paper, ink, or numbers flickering on a server somewhere. But socially, it's a force that can dictate where you live, who you marry, and how long you survive. Money has no inherent reality. Its reality comes from collective agreement. belief reinforced billions of times a day until it feels as solid as granite.
Or take borders. Look at the Earth from space and you won't see any lines dividing countries. But down here, those invisible lines decide whether you're free or imprisoned, safe or endangered, wealthy or impoverished. They're abstractions, concepts, but they shape lives as powerfully as mountains and rivers.
Even morality itself, our sense of right and wrong, is built on cultural frameworks. Cannibalism might be a taboo in one society and a sacred ritual in another. Marriage, gender roles, honor, justice, all of them realities that we live inside, but realities that are made of man-made ideas. Ideas that can bend and change over time, stretching and collapsing to fit the needs of the group. This is what the anthropologist Clifford Gears called webs of significance. We are suspended in them. We spin them. We get tangled in them. We pass them down from generation to generation.
Level three reality is not physical at all. But it is no less real for it. Ideas, beliefs, and shared symbols create worlds we inhabit as fully as any physical landscape. But here's the kicker. Because this level is built on interpretation, it can fracture. Competing realities can clash. One group's sacred truth is another's absurd fiction. And when those realities collide, wars are fought, nations fall, and entire ways of being vanish. At level three, reality is no longer something you just see. It's something you participate in, construct, and maintain.
But if reality can be constructed, what does that mean about the layers that are deeper?
Level four, the realm of science. At this level, reality really stops playing nice. Up until now, things felt at least somewhat stable. Shared objects, sensory reconstructions, cultural agreements. But when science digs deeper, oh, that entire foundation cracks open.
Take matter for instance. Everything around you feels solid. The table beneath your hands, the floor underneath your feet. But zoom in far enough and you'll find that what you're touching is mostly empty space. Atoms aren't little billiard balls all clumped together. They're ghostly probability clouds surrounding a nucleus that is itself almost entirely nothing. If you scaled an atom up to the size of a football stadium, the nucleus would be a grain of rice on the 50ard line and the electrons would be like gnats buzzing somewhere in the nosebleleed seats. Everything else is just empty. And yet you feel solidity because of the electromagnetic forces between the atoms that are resisting each other. You never actually touch that table. Your atoms are simply repelling its atoms.
Or consider time. To your everyday mind, time flows smoothly forward, a river carrying you from past to future. But Einstein's relativity shattered that illusion. Time can stretch, bend, and warp depending on how fast you move or how much gravity you're sitting in. An astronaut orbiting Earth for 6 months will return slightly younger than their twin on the ground. And that isn't science fiction. It is experimental fact.
And then there's quantum mechanics. If relativity bent reality, quantum mechanics completely blew it up. At the atomic scale, particles don't exist in neat positions. They exist as probability waves, mathematical smears of possibility. Only when you measure them do they collapse into something definite. It's as if reality refuses to pick a shape until you're looking at it. as if it's saying to you, "Well, I'll only be there when you're there to notice me." Like how the toys in toy stories only act as toys when humans are around.
What's even stranger is that particles can be entangled, linked in such a way that changing one instantly changes the other, even if they're separated by light years. At this level, reality is no longer intuitive. It's not the stage set that you walk around on. It's a bizarre, counterintuitive, almost dreamlike structure of equations and paradoxes. The philosopher J. A. Wheeler put it bluntly. No phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon. In other words, observation doesn't just reveal reality. In some sense, it creates it.
Level four leaves us with a deep unease. The very tools that we use to prove reality end up undermining it. The microscope and telescope don't just show us more reality. They show us that reality itself may be slippery, provisional, and stranger than we can imagine.
Level five, the simulation layer. If level four dismantles reality, level five reimagines it all together. This is the level where philosophers, futurists, and scientists start asking, "What if there isn't a base reality at all? What if all of this is just a simulation?"
The idea is simple, almost too simple, admittedly. If it's possible for civilizations to create highly realistic simulations, worlds as vivid as our own, then statistically it's far more likely that we're in one than not. After all, our base reality could spawn thousands, millions, even billions of simulations. And if so, the odds that you are in the real one are vanishingly small.
This argument popularized by philosopher Nick Bostonramm forces a radical reconsideration. Imagine that your senses, your body, your memories, even your deepest emotions are just data being rendered in real time. Imagine that the laws of physics are simply the engine of this universe and that gravity, time, electromagnetism, and all of that are just the underlying code. And here's the unnerving part. From inside the system, you would never know. Just like a character in a video game doesn't realize they're in a game, we may be unable to perceive anything beyond the walls of this simulation. Every glitch could be dismissed as coincidence. every anomaly could be patched.
Of course, not everyone takes this literally. Some see the simulation hypothesis as a metaphor. Maybe we're not in a computer, but reality does behave like a coded system. Emergent rules generating complexity. Layers stacked upon layers. Illusions stacked upon illusions. Whether literal or figurative, the simulation question makes one thing clear. Reality may not be ultimate. It might be nested. a copy of a copy. And if that's true, then what we call real is just the interface, just the rendered software of a program running somewhere else.
Level six, mystical reality. At this level, science and philosophy gives way to something older, mysticism. Because for thousands of years, entire cultures have been saying what physicists are now only starting to whisper. The world you see is not the real world. It's a veil, an illusion. Hinduism calls it Maya. Buddhism calls it samsara. Gnostics call it a false world or a trap. Across traditions, the message is strikingly consistent. The everyday world is less real than it appears. And behind it lies a deeper ground of meaning.
Mystics, meditators, and psychonauts often report dissolving into this deeper layer. They describe reality as melting, as boundaries between self and the world collapsing. The chair, the floor, the breath, the body, all of it revealed as one continuous field, more vivid than vivid, more real than real. The writer Aldis Huxley called it the mind at large. Neuroscientists studying psychedelics speak of the default mode network dissolving the brain's internal storyteller shutting down, allowing raw experience to flood in. Whatever the mechanism, the effect is the same. The world you thought was solid becomes transparent and something infinite shines through.
Here, reality is not something that you live in. Reality is something you are and everything else too. The line between subject and object, self and other, collapses. What's left is unity, one vast, undivided whole. Level six raises profound questions. If this state feels more real than everyday life, which one should we call reality? And if mystical traditions across the world have pointed to this for millennia, does that mean science has been peering at shadows while ignoring the light?
Level seven, the unknowable realm. Finally, we reach the last level. The place where all descriptions fail. Where every model, every belief, every theory collapses. Call it the unknowable, the ineffable, the groundless ground. This is where philosophy runs out of language, where science admits ignorance, where spirituality falls back on metaphor.
Because whatever reality ultimately is, it's beyond concepts. The Taote Té Ching begins with a line, "The Toao that can be spoken is not the eternal tow." In other words, the moment you try to define ultimate reality, you've already missed it. The map is not the territory. The word water is not wet.
At this level, reality is less something to be solved and more something to be experienced. It's the silence behind thought, the mystery behind measurement, the abyss behind existence itself. Maybe it's the source of consciousness. Maybe it's the hidden laws that generate universes. Maybe it's something forever inaccessible to us. But perhaps that's the truest insight. Reality is not a riddle to be cracked. It's the very medium in which riddles, questions, and answers arise. It's not something you stand outside of and analyze. It's something you are inescapably at every moment.
From consensus reality to perception to belief to physics to simulation to mysticism all the way to the unknowable. The journey through the seven levels of reality doesn't just reveal how strange the world is. It reveals how strange it is to even be here at all. Maybe reality isn't one thing or seven things. Maybe it's the act of layering itself. The way each level hides the next. the way the obvious conceals the incomprehensible. And maybe the deepest truth of reality isn't that it's an illusion or a simulation or an ineffable mystery. Maybe the deepest truth is that it's all of those at once.
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