I told my wife I needed thirty minutes to dump some ideas on her. In her infinite benevolence, she said okay. What follows is more or less what I said, cleaned up but not sanitized. She asked good questions. I kept them in. Full transparency, I used claude code to help me take the raw transcript and make it more readable, but I didn’t change any of the content. I just cleaned up the language a little bit. You can listen to the talk and view the raw transcript here if you like.

Reality Space diagram

I’m gonna lay out where we’re headed first so that you don’t get overwhelmed by the math.

We’re headed towards a more complete description of something I’ve been thinking about for a while — a framework for understanding how we move through life. I’ve been calling it reality space. But to get there, I need to bring in some mathematical concepts.

In mathematics, there’s this idea of a space. A space is a set — literally just a collection of elements — combined with some structure that governs/defines the relationships between those elements. Take the real numbers. That’s a set. Inside it you’ve got subsets: rational numbers (ones you can express as a ratio, x over y) and irrational numbers (ones you can’t — pi, the square root of two). When you take that set and add a notion of distance between elements, you get what’s called a metric space. The set plus the rules that govern it — that’s a space.

Now. What I’m pointing at with my theory is that I’m trying to define a space. A reality space.

Within reality space, there are sets. One set is the way things are — just the attributes of your current situation. Your circumstances, your mental state, your relationships, your health, all of it. That’s a set.

Then in some other region of reality space, there’s the set of all the ways that things could be.

“So, possibilities.”

The way things could be. And that’s a set of sets. The way things are is just one set. But the way things could be — that’s many sets, many different configurations of how things could look.

And it’s not that given a way that things are, things could be any way. It’s restricted. It’s path-dependent. Within a given state of things within reality space, you can only get to certain ways that things could possibly be.

So reality space is made up of states with attributes. And the rules that govern it — there are certain probabilities, certain functions or actions that you could take, with certain probabilities of outcomes. The map between the way that things are and one of the ways that things could be — there are particular actions with given probabilities of outcomes that map you from the way that things are to the way that things could be.

When we define these actions, these functions, I think about it like: you have the domain, which is the way things are. The range, which is the ways things could be. And then there are actions that map between the domain and the range in the way a function would. Those actions have certain likelihoods of leading to a particular way that things could be.

Where People Get Stuck

What happens with people is they get stuck in the way that things are. Or they get stuck not being able to imagine another way that things could be. They either hyperfocus on the way that things are, or they lack the imaginative capacity to imagine a new way that things could be.

“So you need people to be creative and think outside the box.”

For sure. This whole thing requires that they think outside the box.

And then there’s another failure state. Even if they can imagine the way that things could be, they either can’t imagine what actions would get them there, or they misassign the likelihood that a particular action will get them there.

Like, somebody’s fat. And they haven’t resigned themselves to that fact — they can imagine being skinny. But because of lack of information or something like that, they’re unable to think of the actions that would lead them to being skinny. And also, all of these actions haven’t been fully explored by everyone. The probabilities might be unique to them based on their circumstances, based on the way that things are.

So really, to move from one region of reality space to another, a lot of things have to align. In order to do this intentionally — to actually get into the region that you’re looking to get into — it requires creativity, imagination, open-mindedness. It requires research. It requires experimentation.

Humans throughout history have come up with all manner of ways of navigating through reality space. You have science. You have storytelling and myth — one of the technologies they used to move from one area of reality space to another, or to preserve their situation in a given region. And then you have magic. You have all sorts of things.

My Mom’s Cancer

“In your life, can you give me examples of places where you’ve been able to do these?”

Yeah, absolutely.

“Like storytelling — can you tell me one that’s been super powerful?”

There was a particular set of attributes that were the way that things were after my mom’s cancer treatment. Anxiety, so on and so forth. And there were actions that I took that led to undesirable new ways that things were. And there were actions I took that led to more desirable ways that things were.

An example of an action I took that led to a less desirable region within reality space: I started smoking a lot of weed and I got addicted to drugs.

And when I looked at it — there was something going on where, for some reason, I assessed the region of reality space characterized by anxiety as being less desirable than the set of attributes where I was a drug addict and constantly catatonic from smoking marijuana. I was stuck in that region. It was pretty tough to get out of.

It took certain actions to lead me away from that less desirable region of reality space and into a new one. Meditation. Psychedelics.

And why did those things lead to a more desirable region? Because of what I said before — it required creative thinking, thinking outside of the box, looking at things in a different way. Guess what meditation and psychedelics do? That. They do that.

Now — this is also a very good framework for thinking about why it’s not always good to do those things. When you’re in a particularly desirable region of reality space and you start introducing things that make you look at it from a different perspective, that might not necessarily lead you to another more desirable region. It might take you to a less desirable one. There’s always that chance.

So really you employ this when you need to get out of a particularly bad region of reality space. Or you need to come to an appreciation that the region you’re currently in is not actually as bad as you think it is — because you see how it could be worse.

The Practice

I like this framework because it says: put the cards on the table. Describe what is, as honestly as you possibly can. It requires reflection on the way that things are. And then it opens you up to the possibility that things could be different.

Concretely, the first step is: sit down and describe the way that things are. What do you think? What do you feel? What do you do? What is your relationship to what you think, feel, and do? How do you see the world? What frames are you seeing the world through? Describe all of those things.

Then you sit down — you might use imaginative aids, you might enter into meditation, you might just wing it — and you start to imagine new ways that things could be. How could it be different?

Sometimes all you need to do is write the opposite. I am unhappy right now with this, this, this. How could things be? I could be happy with those things. It’s not a statement that you believe there is an action that would lead to it. It’s a hypothetical. There is a world that I am capable of imagining where this is the case.

And if you find yourself saying “I can’t imagine it because I’m so stuck in this current reality” — then you stick with that exercise until you can imagine it. You imagine a version of you that is happy, that is not addicted to drugs, that is skinny, that is whatever it is.

Then you brainstorm different actions. Actions that differ from the current actions that are reinforcing the way things are. And you think about the likelihood that they would move you outside of that given region of reality space. But it’s not necessarily that you’re looking for actions that get you to a desirable region. It’s: will this action give me good information about the sensitivity of the region I’m in? How does it respond to different actions? Is it a robust region — not super affected by given actions? Or is it a very fragile one — I change something a tiny bit and the whole thing changes?

You’re doing experimentation and information gathering. And honestly, you’re kind of winging it a little bit.

Karma, God, and Nihilism

You know, I’ve navigated through reality space by taking different courses of action. Moving abroad, living in different places, learning new languages, working in different capacities, taking drugs, doing meditation, investigating religions, living out religions — actually doing the practice. Different diets, different exercises, different sports, dating different people, being with different friends, reading different things.

“So, variety.”

Variety. But it wasn’t variety for variety’s sake.

This is where we come into ideas of karma. Karma says, from this framework, that as you’ve occupied a particular region of reality space and practiced the actions that reinforce it, it becomes easier — the probability of remaining in that reality space increases. It’s only through actions that differ that you can come to experience a different way of being, a different reality. That’s karma. The Buddha said “Whatever we frequently think and dwell upon becomes the inclination of the mind.” If you continuously think and dwell upon things that reinforce your given region of reality space, it becomes more and more likely that you will remain there.

From the perspective of God — I kind of think of the entirety of reality space as God. We are living in constant relationship with God. We are always in this reality space where there are all of these different likelihoods of being, different ways of being. The total, the all — that is God.

To be in good relationship with God is to love reality space. To be in bad relationship with God is to hate it, to resent it, to turn away from it, to deny it. If we acknowledge this is the way that things are, that there are different possibilities, that there are actions, that I have a responsibility to explore, to become wise — that is loving God. And to say this is the only way that things could ever be, and I hate it, and I’m not even going to try — nihilism — that is to hate God. To turn away from God. To deny reality space. To deny the fact that there are ever even possibilities that could possibly be good.

And that in and of itself is a region of reality space that is particularly bleak and particularly hard to break out of. Very heavily self-reinforcing.

Those are my thoughts. Exactly thirty minutes. I think that I am going to make a little app to help me use the framework to map things out.