Shared understanding is something I have been interested in for a while and have written about in some of my earlier posts – Default in our stars, An IG Story* – among the most recent ones. While the posts were primarily on the individual context, my concern has also been at the societal and species levels because the ability to create and act on a shared understanding is what got us this far. Variety, serendipity, and the opportunity to debate, agree, disagree, identify biases, agree to disagree but hopefully in a civilised manner.
One of my favourite books in 2022 was Peter In Pomerantsev’s “This is not propaganda“, on the sociopolitical information warfare on social media happening daily. Across borders, from Mexico to Manila and London to Kiev, there was a playbook being followed to distort reality. I had discovered it via one of may favourite podcasts – Demetri Kofinas’ Hidden Forces.
Sometime back, the podcast had another fantastic episode on the same subject – ‘What happened to consensus reality?’ with Jon Askonas, based on the latter’s series of essays for the New Atlantis titled “Reality: A Postmortem”. It explores how our own capacity to apprehend reality and come to consensus about the nature of the world around us has been diminishing steadily, and how the modern age shares more in common with the enchanted world of the middle ages than it does the secular age that has defined consensus reality in the Western world for most of the last 500 years. There is also a very interesting perspective on how role-playing games are now being enacted in the new world – people piecing together information and making their own stories as they go, creating versions of reality that makes sense to their group only. e.g. QAnon.
Image management is a focus area of the brain, and in each of heads there is a narrative about ourselves. One that is arguably very different from what others think about us. But it’s what makes us tick. The narrative is also extended to our relationships and the world at large. Our interactions with others informed this narrative. When we moved around, we used to take in the world and its inhabitants, maybe notice what they were dealing with, have a dialogue if necessary, and expand our view of the world, its problems, and possible solutions. But many things have changed in the last few years.
On one hand, there is the quantity and quality of interactions. There has been media fragmentation, and an explosion of screens. At a family table, in public places, in office meetings, our focus shifts to the screen even when there are other humans we can talk to. Our interactions on screen, increasingly with strangers, are more often than not, shorn of contexts, and any understanding of the complex identities that each human holds within him/herself. It is no wonder that skirmishes on social media and WhatsApp are common.
On the other hand, reality is becoming increasingly difficult to navigate. From a place of privilege, everything from income disparity to mental health struggles that I see around me are too painful, and overwhelming. There is an explosion of stimuli that is increasingly becoming too much to handle. And in this scenario, the appeal of confirmation bias versus trying to reason with an alternate worldview is very strong. A sanitised version of reality that is built solely on our narratives and worldview has become easier. We find spaces on social media to connect and solve the need for belonging. Now with generative AI and its hallucinations, having an understanding voice has become all the more easier, and it can give us a version of the world that conforms to our narrative. At least one of the brain’s jobs is beginning to get outsourced. And as our world shrinks, it seems inevitable that our worldview will follow.
Metaphors are one way in which we make sense of the world and navigate it. Our metaphors too are changing – “don’t have the bandwidth”, “here to network”, “still trying to process it”. Where does that take us?
I couldn’t help but think of a different interpretation of aham brahmasmi. This entire universe is a version of reality that we hold in our mind. When we cease to exist, so does that subjective version. Maybe we don’t need consensus when the universe is so self contained. Once we are so used to our custom version of reality, it is accustomed reality.