Put another way, rather than perceiving reality, we perceive the output of a long chain of noisy translations.

Let’s walk up this chain layer by layer, starting from the bottom (fundamental physics) and ending at the stories we tell. 

Layer 1: We only make measurements

On one common reading of quantum mechanics (part of the deepest description of reality that physicists have a reasonably high degree of confidence in), a fundamental object is the wave function. 

We don’t observe the wave function directly. We make measurements, and those represent properties, such as the position or “spin” of a particle. We can think of this as observing just one realization (or taking one branch) of the deeper thing. The wave function, in a sense, captures all of the realizations we might have observed but didn’t.

That means that at the most basic level, before biology or psychology even enter the picture, there’s already a chasm between us and the fundamental nature of things. 

Rather than reading reality, we sample a thin projection of it. We’re stuck accessing reality only through measurements. But that’s just the first layer of translation.

Layer 2: Measurements turn into signals

Measurements are not something you can directly experience. Your sense organs make the measurements. When light hits your eye, first a chemical reaction occurs, then this chemical reaction kicks off electrical signals – representations of the light (not light itself).

Your brain processes those electrical signals, and out of that, an experience is produced in your mind. Put another way, your brain creates a simulation, and that’s what you experience. For instance, in your brain’s simulation, you experience the vivid sensation of red. But there’s no such thing as red out there in the world – red exists ONLY in the simulations produced by our minds.

Out there in the world, light of certain frequency bands is hitting our eyes. Inside our minds, the experience of red is happening.

The same is true of sound, smell, warmth, and every other quality of experience: they are our brain’s rendering of the measurements made by our sense organs. They are not the measurements themselves, and certainly not the underlying reality.

Three distinct sorts of failures can occur at this layer.

First, the signal itself can be distorted, such as might happen if the optic nerve is damaged or if cataracts tint the light entering our eyes.

Second, the simulation that your brain creates can be unfaithful to reality, misrepresenting what’s there. We see this most clearly with optical illusions. 

The reason we find them interesting is that they lay bare ways our brain’s rendering of reality comes apart from reality itself. 

We can only tell this is happening because we can check our internal rendering against something indisputable to prove a mismatch (e.g., by using a ruler or checking the color of different pixels).

The unsettling implication is that the renderings we can’t easily check are sometimes misleading, too. But we lack the awareness or the right ruler to catch them.

The third distortion at this layer is that our simulations of reality always leave out information. For example, our eyes can’t see ultraviolet or infrared light, so those wavelengths simply never make it into our experience, no matter how carefully we look. Intriguingly, we don’t perceive a gap in the color spectrum. Presumably, that wouldn’t have been useful for our ancient ancestors, so evolution didn’t bother with it. We aren’t even naturally aware that other “colors” (well, really, frequencies) of light are possible. We feel as though we’re seeing the full spectrum (while bees and butterflies enjoy ultraviolet patterns on flowers that are hidden to us).

Every sense is like this. Each provides us with a window of information, which we use to simulate aspects of reality. A lot of information is silently dropped because it lies beyond the window frame. We remain convinced that these narrow portals into reality show the whole thing.

Layer 3: We bucket the simulation

A raw field of colors and sounds may be a partial approximation to how an infant sees the world, as its brain learns furiously how to structure things. But that isn’t yet a world you can act in. To use your experience effectively, your mind has to carve up experience. It has to decide that this region is a table, that one a person, and that other one, the floor.

This chunking happens automatically and below conscious awareness. It’s enormously useful. But it’s another layer of interpretation laid on top of an already-imperfect simulation, and it can distort things in its own ways.

For one thing, the boundaries we draw can simply be mistaken – we can mistake a coat on a chair for a person the moment we enter a room. Or, if you’re me, you can briefly think you see cats in the dark when on vacation because you see cats in the dark when you’re at home.

Our categories take genuinely complex things and force them into a bucket. You may, when walking in a park, stumble on a rare bird – the last of its species, on the brink of extinction. Your brain just says “bird”. 

Moreover, we sometimes get our chunks wrong. You walk by a fresh-faced man with long hair and incorrectly think “woman”. Or, in my case, you see a symbol tattooed on a classmate’s arm and think Swastika. It turned out to be the manji – a sacred Buddhist symbol representing good fortune.

Tremendous variation can hide inside even simple-seeming categories, let alone complex categories like “tree”, consisting of tens of thousands of species.

Buckets produce compression, and compression is what makes the world manageable, but sometimes a lot is lost in the process.

Importantly, the more you pay attention to a type of thing and the more you understand about it, the more refined and subtle your buckets are likely to become. That’s not just a tree. It’s a Sycamore tree. And it’s not just a Sycamore tree; it’s Platanus wrightii – an Arizona Sycamore. 

Layer 4: We ignore almost everything

Even with the compression achieved by this chunking up of reality, there’s far too much information for us to process, so our brain uses another heuristic: if something doesn’t draw our attention, it’s ignored.

When we’re told to carefully count how many times people pass a basketball, we can, with remarkable ease, miss the person in a gorilla suit that’s walking between them.

Or, if you’re having a conversation with me, and you ask me to close my eyes, then you ask me to recall what you were wearing, I’ll be clueless, despite having been looking at you moments ago. Heck, with my eyes closed, I may not even be able to tell you what I’M wearing. 

On the other hand, if you try the same thing with a person who works in fashion, they’ll not only be able to describe what you are wearing, but also make a guess about the brand.

We notice what we find interesting, important, or surprising, as well as what we’ve trained ourselves or been trained to notice. And we are unaware of most of the rest. This (in part) explains why eyewitness testimony has proven to be much more fallible than a lot of people assume. 

You didn’t know that person was about to rob the store you’re in, so even though they walked right in front of you, you have no recollection of what they look like. 

Even when you realized that they were robbing the store, your attention was drawn to the knife in their hand or the exit door, rather than the contour of their brow, lips, and nose.

Our limited attention acts as yet another filter on what makes it into our experience. But one layer remains.

Layer 5: We turn noticed chunks into meaningful ones

Even once you’ve chunked the world into objects and categories, and we’re actually paying attention to some of them, the process of perceiving isn’t complete. Your brain still has to decide what it all means. 

A Sycamore tree to Bob has no special significance, whereas to Sally it’s where she had her first kiss, and to Elio, it’s what his grandfather died under. To me, it was a phrase served to me in an ad when I was looking for a type of tree to use in this example.

Once we’ve chunked a scene, it gets woven into a story. Our reflective minds run on such stories.

The stories tell us what’s important, what’s threatening, and what’s good. But this final layer of interpretation is steered heavily by things that have nothing to do with the scene itself: our identities, our motivations, our worldviews, our past experiences, our anticipations, and our social groups.

This is why two people can look at an identical event – even identical data represented in a chart – and walk away with opposite understandings. They are running the same visual input through different meaning-making machinery constructed within different lives.

Of course, that’s not how this all feels. The meaning we make feels like it’s obviously the way things are – the one true story – or, not even a story – just reality itself.

We, of course, don’t think of the wave function that we collapsed (or took a branch of) with our measurements. Or the electrical signals that flow through the retina. Or even the bucketing we did to compress the information. We don’t, of course, pay attention to what we failed to pay attention to. And we rarely consider alternative stories our brains could have told us (but didn’t) about what we did pay attention to.

This may sound grim, but it’s not a complete epistemic disaster. Despite all this, we know a lot about how to get reality to do things for us. Science often works to discover new truths. Bridges rarely fall. Some stories are accurate, even if they aren’t complete.

The practical upshot of it all is epistemic humility. 

It helps to remember, from time to time, that what we’re experiencing is a model, a series of translations removed from whatever is actually out there. And to aim to make our estimates and opinions at least somewhat more uncertain as a result.

Doing so has a happy effect: it makes it easier to consider alternative perspectives that contradict our own. That’s useful societally, where there’s an overabundance of perspectives that are rigidly held. But it’s also helpful in relationships, friendships, and our work.

We can’t see reality directly – it’s not actually the sort of thing that’s capable of being seen. But we can, at least, stop mistaking the top of the stack for the bottom.

This piece was first written on June 30, 2026, and first appeared on my website on July 23, 2026.

It’s easy for us to believe that our side is fully right, and therefore that the other side is completely wrong. That’s typically what both our own side and the other is convinced of, and usually, we’re all mistaken!

Since most of us discuss these controversial issues with people who share our perspective, and most of us read sources that seem trustworthy according to our existing world view, we rarely hear the arguments of the other side portrayed by someone we view as credible. This makes it easier to believe that the other side’s beliefs are a consequence of stupidity, ignorance, or evil; as opposed to being caused by differing base values, a different view on the importance of good and bad aspects of a subject, or a different interpretation of the evidence.

Once our brains decide something is beneficial, we find it harder to remember the drawbacks. We may even deny they exist or view anyone who mentions these drawbacks as a rival. Likewise, if we’ve decided something is not beneficial, there may be intense psychological pressure to forget or deny the beneficial aspects. But reality rarely divides good and bad into such neat packages (at least, when it comes to big, controversial policy issues).

Consider some examples of how benefits and drawbacks can exist concurrently:

(1) Nuclear power plants are good in that they can provide large amounts of clean energy. Nuclear power plants are also bad because they are expensive, they sometimes have nuclear meltdowns, and they produce radioactive waste products that have to be safely stored for a very long time. How valuable nuclear power plants are, depends on how important clean energy is to you, relative to how probable and serious you think nuclear meltdowns are, and also how bad you think their radioactive waste is, all in comparison to other options for producing energy.

(2) Restricting gun purchasing is beneficial because people with guns sometimes use them to kill others or themselves, which they might not have achieved without a gun. Restricting gun purchasing is not beneficial because people (in the U.S. anyway) enjoy owning, practicing with, and collecting guns and because people believe (sometimes correctly) that guns provide protection. Also, individual gun ownership could be considered a constitutional right, so not allowing it may weaken other constitutional protections.

(3) Raising the minimum wage is beneficial because it increases the income of the disadvantaged, improving their lives and helping them provide for their families. Raising minimum wage could be bad because, in some cases, it probably increases unemployment (e.g., by preventing certain types of businesses from coming into existence or by triggering downsizing). It likely causes some companies to fail that would have otherwise succeeded.

(4) Legalizing marijuana is beneficial because it reduces arrests for victimless crimes and because marijuana may be helpful in certain medical contexts (e.g., when dealing with chronic pain). Also, many people enjoy using it. But legalizing marijuana is bad because some people develop marijuana dependence (e.g., 9% of users by one estimate: http://bit.ly/1Rwn6FN), use of it may temporarily reduce motivation as well as motor control and working memory (http://bit.ly/2Dr3bxc) especially in new users, it causes paranoid symptoms for some people, and for some small percentage of users, it may trigger psychotic episodes and perhaps (though the causality is very tough to untangle) even increase the chance of schizophrenia (http://n.pr/2DASWWv).

(5) Legalizing prostitution is good because it can make prostitutes safer (e.g., by making it easier for them to report being attacked) and because it can reduce the spread of disease (e.g., by mandating condom use and regular HIV screening). But legalizing prostitution is bad because it may increase the amount of marital infidelity in society, may increase people viewing sexuality in a transactional manner or increase objectification, and may cause more people to enter a field that causes various risks they did not fully anticipate (e.g., violence, psychological effects, health effects).

As exemplified above, controversial issues are bundles of good and bad, and saying you support something should mean that you think on the net the good outweighs the bad.

“Good” things should be thought of as only good on balance, meaning more good than bad once both the good and bad have been fully taken into account. Being good on balance is not the same as uniformly being “good,” despite our brains often forgetting the difference.

You can fully support a policy while still acknowledging that the opposing side is right that it (like most such things) has downsides too. And if someone tells you, they think a policy will have some negative consequences, that doesn’t mean they support the “other” side.

It feels, to nearly everyone, on a gut level, that I am ‘me’ and you are ‘you’, and consciousnesses are distinct from each other and easy to separate. Moreover, the vast majority of people accept that you 1 minute from now is still the same “YOU” in a meaningful sense as YOU right now; that it makes sense for you right now to try to prevent harm to you one minute from now (even if acting purely selfishly – not altruistically trying to prevent harm coming to any being).

But imagine the following hypothetical scenario taking place far, far in the future, when our understanding of the brain, our ability to perform brain surgery, and our technology, in general, is drastically more advanced than today.

You’ve voluntarily elected to undergo an operation (for science!) where your brain will be slowly but completely replaced with a replica brain.
The steps of the surgery are as follows:

(1) you are temporarily put into a deep slumber (e.g., using something like general anesthesia) for a few hours.

(2) surgeons very carefully remove some tiny portion of your brain and then analyze that portion of the brain (e.g., using some sort of scanning device)

(3) based on this analysis, they then construct a replica brain piece (whether robotic or made of organic material, it doesn’t really matter) that will behave essentially just like the piece they just removed (e.g., maybe using some kind of 3d cell printer)

(4) they then insert this replica piece in the place where the original brain piece used to be and affix all of its connections to the surrounding brain tissue just as the original brain piece was affixed so that it will operate within the greater brain essentially just like that missing brain piece used to

(5) the original piece removed from the brain is then carefully preserved elsewhere, and its original position in the brain is carefully recorded

(6) finally, you are woken up, and you get to spend the day doing whatever you like before returning the next morning for further surgery

Now, after each time that steps 1-6 occur, you should feel almost exactly the same (minus any nuisances of having undergone brain surgery, but with this future technology, those are minor). After all, only a very small portion of your brain was removed each time, and that piece was replaced with a piece that was designed to be functionally identical. If the portion removed was small enough, and the replacement piece was a sufficiently accurate replica, you shouldn’t even be able to tell that you’ve changed at all.
What’s more, you remember your life before surgery, you remember being put to sleep on the lab table, and you remember waking up. You have no more gap in your life than you would after a sleep where you don’t remember your dreams.

So it seems that after steps 1-6, you are still “you” in any meaningful sense (or if not EXACTLY you, you are still really, really close to you).

Okay, but suppose now that steps 1-6 are repeated many times (replacing one tiny brain region each morning and then spending the rest of each day living your normal life).

At some point, 50% of your brain has been replaced (whether measured by mass, volume, or “functionality,” it doesn’t matter). Are you still “you” in a meaningful sense?

In my experience, at this point in the thought experiment, most people will say that it’s definitely still you. With each tiny replacement, you couldn’t tell the difference, and as long as those replacements were each accurate enough, you shouldn’t even be able to tell the difference with 50% of your brain replaced. What’s more, there was never even any large gap in your consciousness.

But here’s the twist: as you realized a few months into the experiment (well before 50% of your brain was swapped), the surgeons had actually lied to you originally. You thought that they had been analyzing each piece of your brain bit by bit as they removed it in order to make replicas of each piece.
What they had ACTUALLY done (while you were asleep that very first time on the operating table) is scan your entire brain right away, building a nearly perfect, functioning, living replica, which they keep in a vat. This functioning replica is able to think just like you, has all your memories, and even BELIEVES that it is you. The replica is so accurate that, if the replica was hooked up to a machine that lets it talk, a person who knows you really well wouldn’t be able to tell which of you it was talking to (other than due to the fact that the replica is disembodied – which of course would change its behavior, but your own behavior would change in an equivalent way if you were disembodied).

So when the surgeons were removing tiny portions of your brain, they were also removing the closest possible corresponding tiny portion of the replica brain (after putting it to sleep in the same manner that they put you to sleep) and simply swapping it with yours. So the replica got your tiny portion, and you got the replica’s corresponding (and incredibly close to equivalent) tiny portion.

This lie from the surgeons doesn’t much change what happened to your brain FUNCTIONALLY since, in either case, each tiny portion of your brain is replaced with a very similar tiny replica portion. However, since the replica brain and your brain are having different experiences each day, there are genuinely irreconcilable differences between the tiny parts of the two brains (e.g., your brain may have some new connections in that tiny region that the replica doesn’t). The surgeons simply do their best to always swap the tiny part from your brain with the closest, most identical portion of the replica brain, even though the match isn’t 100% perfect. By making the tiny portions sufficiently tiny, you should still notice very little difference upon waking after each surgery.

Now, most people agree that when the replica of your brain is first created (before any swapping occurs), it is just like you, but it is not actually YOU. One way to think about this is that you still control your original body, and you still experience the thoughts of your original brain, whereas the replica separately experiences its own thoughts. In fact, you didn’t at first even know that a replica was ever created, you just went on having your normal experiences, so it seems that the replica being created had no effect (initially) on your identity.

But now that we’re at the halfway point, with half of the portions of your brain swapped out into the replica and half of the replica brain swapped into yours, personal identity becomes genuinely confusing. Both copies are now half original and half replica. In fact, both brains have a consistent series of memories, with no weird gaps (beyond the sort that one has from sleeping at night). The replica remembers going to sleep that first time on the surgery table just like you do; the only difference (as far as it is concerned) is that when it woke up, it didn’t have a body. Each day you and the replica both underwent surgery, and after each surgery, you both woke up being very close to identical to what you were prior to surgery.
While I think at this point most people still think that the original brain that slowly had 50% swapped out is more YOU than the replica that slowly had 50% swapped in, it’s gotten a lot harder to explain WHY. Both brains now have an equal amount of original material, and both feel equal, like they are the original you.

The thing is, the surgeons aren’t done at 50%. They decide to go all the way, continuing steps 1-6 until 100% of your brain has been swapped with the replica brain.

The really weird thing now is that the body walking around that you used to identify as YOU now has the replica brain in its head! And the vat where the surgeons keep the other brain has your original brain in it! In other words, the two brains are now just back to what they started at, with the only difference being that during the interim period, they were temporarily mixed up (continuing to gain experiences while mixed up), and “your” brain happened to end up in the vat whereas the replica ended up in your body.

Compare this whole thought experiment to the surgeons just (all in day one) removing your brain and putting it into the vat, then making a replica that they put into your body. The actual thought experiment is very similar to this, except that with the slow process of swapping a tiny portion each time, your two identities get more mingled (since those brain regions are all slightly changing each day as the two brains have experienced, one in a body, one in a vat).

At this point, people tend to be much more confused, but I think most would say that the brain in the vat is now the real YOU. After all, it is essentially entirely your original brain.

If this all sounds very abstract asking “which one is really YOU?”, then how about asking this more concrete question: now that you know the full details of the experiment, if one of the two brains (either the one in your body or the one in the vat) is going to be tortured in the future (after all the surgeries are fully complete) and you get to pick which of the two brains it happens to (you pick prior to the experiment beginning, of course), which one do you choose to be tortured (assuming here that you’re a selfish person that doesn’t want to experience torture)? You can also ask the same question (again, choosing before the experiment begins), assuming that the torture occurs after 50% of your brain is swapped with the replica (instead of 100%). In the 50% case, which brain would you choose to be tortured (the one in your body, or the one in the vat)?

Another way to think about what we mean by “YOU” in this thought experiment: suppose the brain that ends up in the vat and the brain that end up in the body both are properly hooked up to working eyes at the end of the experiment so that they can both see, and furthermore that when the experiment has totally finished the brain in the vat will get to see a picture of Tom Hanks, whereas the brain in the body will get to see a picture of Bob Saget if you (before the experiment has started) are asked “Later when the experiment is over will you see a picture of Tom Hanks or a picture of Bob Saget?” what would you answer? If you say “Tom Hanks,” then you expect to have the experiences of the brain that ends up in the vat, whereas if you say “Bob Saget,” then you expect to have the experiences of the brain that ends up in the body. Note that if, for someone reason, this question lacks meaning for you, then note that outside of weird philosophy of mind thought experiments, this sort of question is not only meaningful but has an obvious answer. For instance, if you knew someone was going to show me a picture of Bob Saget tomorrow and show you a picture of Tom Hanks tomorrow and someone asked which picture you expected to see tomorrow, you would say “Tom Hanks” – duh!

How can this scenario be interpreted?

(A) We could say that the brain in the body started out as YOU, and at some discrete point, things flipped so that YOU end up in the vat. But what seems to make no sense about that is where to draw the line on that flip. The only way this could happen is if there was exactly one surgery (which, remember, only after swaps out a tiny, functionally nearly identical brain region) which caused the brain in the body to flip to no longer being you and the brain in the vat to being fully you. If there was some special “soul” molecule in your brain which determined what was you, then this would make sense (since the moment that soul molecule was transferred, the brain in the vat would become you), but nobody seems to believe in such a soul molecule (neither scientists nor believers in souls).

(B) We could say that in the end, neither of the two brains are YOU in a meaningful sense. This seems pretty weird since, after the first small surgery, it seems nearly certain that the brain in your body is YOU in a meaningful sense (or very, very nearly you), so what operation prevents the being in the vat (which has all your original brain matter essentially, and has all your memories, and has the daily experience of being you daily) from being you? What exactly about this whole procedure fully eroded your identity?

(C) We could say that both brains are about equally much you (say, each close to 50% you). This seems weird because at which point did you split into two? It also seems weird because the brain in the vat is actually made of essentially all of your original brain material, so how did this slow process of taking piece by piece somehow make the replica brain have equal claim to being you? After all, if all the surgeons had done is take your brain out and move it to the vat immediately, we’d all agree that the vat brain was you, not the replica.

(D) We could say that BOTH brains end up as fully you. This seems even weirder because it’s not like what one of those brains thinks will causally change the behavior of the other. And the brain in the vat definitely doesn’t control your original body. So they can’t both be you in the sense of both being one indistinguishable consciousness. But maybe they could both be you in the sense of having equally strong claims to being you?

(E) We could say that this thought experiment is physically impossible. In order to work (as a thought experiment), it doesn’t actually matter how incredibly hard or unlikely this scenario is (the point is simply asking how we should interpret it if it WERE to occur). But if something about the thought experiment actually violates the laws of physics, then we can dismiss it, saying that it couldn’t take place in our universe, so the question being asked is not actually a question about our universe. But what aspect of the thought experiment violates the laws of physics?

(F) We could argue that although it doesn’t violate the laws of physics, the only way to do it without violating those laws would be to have the tiny swapped brain regions be a lot more different from each other than I imply. In other words, doing swaps of tiny brain regions is not impossible, but it’s impossible to make them extremely similar (e.g., because the brain is changing too fast each day, or because of error in such a procedure that is impossible – it’s directly implied by physical laws). This conclusion might push us a bit towards (B), thinking that neither brain is really you (they get too messed up in the process, so both drift from you in a meaningful sense).

(G) You’re still [the brain in] the body. You “stay in the body (fully and determinately) with every small exchange, so you stay in the body after the full exchange process is completed.” (David Chalmers takes this view, as he indicated in a comment on my original post of this essay)

(H) We are so deeply confused about identity that when we say it is or isn’t YOU, we don’t realize that we aren’t actually saying anything sensible/meaningful; we only think we are.

(I) We could say that YOU started out in the body, then for a while you were mingled with this other being merging your YOUNESS, but, by the end, you have separated again with YOU ending up in the vat (for much the same reason that we would say you are in the vat if your brain had originally just been cut out immediately and put in the vat – only in this case it was done bit by bit instead of all at once causing a temporary period of being merged).

Thinking along these lines, each of us can divide all things that exist or seem to exist into a few categories:

1. Those things that exist in physical reality that also have a representation in my simulation. An example of this would be some particular car that I see on the street. There are atoms (or quantum wave functions at least) in the universe that correspond to this car, and there is a visual experience in my simulation that represents this car. After I look at this car and walk away, my simulation continues to have the concept of this car, at least until I have forgotten about it. So the car exists in my simulation, but it also exists in physical reality as a bunch of atoms (though there is no dividing line in physical reality between where the car atoms end and not-car atoms begin, that dividing line too is a property of the simulation). Color is another thing in our simulation that corresponds to physical reality, but is of course only a representation of it. There is no “redness” in space, redness is something that we experience. What there is in space is electromagnetic radiation, some of which produces an experience of redness in our simulations after it hits the simulation/reality interface that we call our eyes.
2. Those things that exist in physical reality but have no representation in my simulation. This would include a particular planet in another galaxy that I’ve never heard of. Although I have the concept of planets existing, this particular planet has no representation in my simulation of reality.
3. Those things that exist in our simulation but are not representations of specific things in physical reality. An example of this would be a hallucination (sure, there are bunnies in physical reality, but that particular bunny that you think is laughing at you now and doing head stands doesn’t actually correspond to any set of atoms). Perhaps a more interesting example from this category though would be impurity. A dish is unclean, Jewish custom says, if it has touched both milk and meat. This contamination property continues to hold even after the plate is scrubbed completely clean, even if every atom of milk and meat are removed. Suppose that a man who lives by this system of thought is given a plate, and then he is told that it was recently used to eat both meat and milk. Regardless of whether that claim is true, so long as he believes it the plate will suddenly gain the property of uncleanness in his simulation. He may experience the sense of this uncleanness quite strongly, and the thought of eating from that plate may even cause him to feel disgust.

One thing that is odd about living inside a simulation (as we each are), is that aspects of the simulation that don’t correspond to anything in physical reality can feel just as real as those that do correspond. For instance, someone I know once had a schizophrenic period where they became convinced that certain objects in their kitchen were, in fact, quite evil. This evilness was completely convincing and quite overwhelming. But what does it mean for an object to be evil? Evilness surely is not a property of atoms, quantum wave functions, or physical objects, but a property of representations of things inside our simulations. Normally we only associate this property with intelligent beings, but when the simulation goes haywire it can get associated with inanimate things. Just as we think some particular clown nose is red (i.e. our simulation contains the experience of redness which our brain links to its concept of that clown nose), we could end up thinking that some particular bar of soap is evil (i.e. our simulation contains the experience of evilness which our brain links to its concept of that soap).

Influences: Michael Vassar