The mystery of reality was cleverly illustrated by Roger Penrose as a triad.

In this non-nihilist view, all existence is escapism. Or rather, the only realities we are capable of inhabiting are escaped ones.

The physical world is atoms (A) The mental world is to a surprising extent, the experience of having an ego, relationality and information, bits (B) The Platonic mathematical world is made of qualia. (Q)

An escaped reality is a manipulated environment that achieves a temporary non-equilibrium balance among these three aspects by partially suspending the full richness of one or more aspects.

As technology and understanding progresses, we become less and less escapist: counter-intuitive to reality-primitivist. (these are the people who believe paper is more real than blog posts)

But rather, when we live in more primitive, siloed bubbles, it is easier to forget about “reality”, and inhavit a strongly escaped reality. Civilisational advancement and globalisation tends to break us out of these escaped realities.

A crash is when you stop believing in a virtual reality (thanks to a broken illusion) and stare at the alarming stuff that does not go away.

 What determines the strength of an escaped reality is not the sophistication of the technology enabling it, but the number of other people who believe absolutely in it.

This is another useful metaphor to consider alongside society-is-scripted. A collection of scripts could make up one escaped reality, since a reality is really the response to a stimulus (a behaviour or a script).

And we’re in the middle of a script change, in the same way that we’re in the middle of a reality collapse (multitemporality).