What If Reality Isn’t What We Think It Is?

I’ve been thinking about The Matrix and Interstellar, and I’m starting to wonder how much science fiction is really fiction. Not because I think we’re all plugged into machines or that Matthew McConaughey is going to show up in my bedroom communicating through a bookshelf. Although, at this point, who fucking knows?

What fascinates me is that some of the most outrageous concepts in these movies are rooted in legitimate scientific and philosophical questions. Take time, for example. We experience it as this constant, linear thing. Yesterday, today, tomorrow. Sixty seconds in a minute. Twenty-four hours in a day. Except Einstein established that time isn’t absolute. Gravity and relative motion actually affect how time passes. That’s not some wild idea somebody dreamed up. Relativity is supported by experimental evidence. Think about how absurd that sounds to someone who’s never studied physics. Time moves differently depending on the conditions? What the fuck? And yet, it’s true.

So naturally, that got me thinking about everything else we’re so damn certain about.

Here’s something I find fascinating about the human brain. We don’t simply observe the world. Our brains interpret it. Everything we experience gets filtered through our memories, beliefs, expectations, emotions, and previous experiences. Which means two people can experience the exact same event and walk away with completely different versions of what happened. And both can be absolutely convinced they’re right.

Sound familiar?

We see this in relationships, leadership, politics, families, workplaces. Everywhere. People will defend their interpretation of an event as though they personally witnessed the creation of the universe. But what if you’re wrong? What if the thing you’ve spent years defending isn’t actually reality? What if it’s simply the explanation your brain constructed using the information it had available?

That’s not some spiritual theory I pulled out of my ass. The brain’s role in constructing perception is a legitimate area of neuroscience. And once you start understanding that, you begin questioning how many decisions you’ve made based on assumptions you never bothered to examine.

Which brings me back to The Matrix. Think about how many people spend their lives operating within an invisible set of rules. Who they’re supposed to be. What success looks like. What they’re capable of. What other people think of them. What they’re allowed to question. Most people didn’t consciously create those rules. They inherited them, learned them, or adopted them along the way. Eventually, they stopped questioning them.

I’m not suggesting we can think ourselves into a different physical universe. I’m asking whether we recognize how much our interpretation of the world influences the decisions we make within it. Because those decisions have consequences. And those consequences influence what happens next.

Think about the number of times one decision has completely changed the direction of your life. One conversation. One relationship. One opportunity you pursued. One you walked away from. Now imagine how differently your life might have unfolded if you’d interpreted one of those moments differently. Same circumstances. Different perception. Different decision. Potentially an entirely different life.

That’s a pretty fucking significant thing to consider.

And then there’s consciousness itself. We know an extraordinary amount about the brain compared with what we knew a century ago, but we still don’t have a universally accepted explanation for why physical activity in the brain produces subjective experience. Why does it feel like something to be alive? Why do we have an internal experience at all? Philosophers and neuroscientists have been wrestling with these questions for decades.

Some philosophers even explore whether consciousness could be a fundamental feature of reality rather than something that emerges exclusively from complex biological systems. Is that established science? No. Is it a legitimate philosophical question? Absolutely. And that’s where I think we need to become more comfortable distinguishing what we know from what we’re still trying to understand.

I don’t need an idea to be proven to find it worth exploring. But I also don’t need to pretend something is proven just because I find it fascinating. There’s a difference between curiosity and certainty. Frankly, I think we could use a hell of a lot more of the former.

One of the central ideas in my work is internal authority. The ability to govern yourself, examine your own thinking, recognize patterns, challenge your assumptions, and make deliberate decisions rather than simply reacting to whatever happens around you. And perhaps most importantly, to recognize that being absolutely convinced you’re right doesn’t necessarily mean you are.

I’ve become increasingly fascinated by how our internal understanding of the world influences the lives we create. Not in the sense that we can manifest anything we want simply by thinking positively. I mean through the very real relationship between perception, judgment, decisions, behavior, and consequences. We don’t control everything that happens to us. But we have more opportunity to examine how we interpret and respond to those experiences than we often realize. And the more aware we become of our own thinking, the more deliberately we can participate in shaping what comes next.

That’s where I see the connection between consciousness and internal authority. It’s not about becoming so enlightened that you suddenly know everything. It’s about becoming self-aware enough to recognize how much you don’t know. Including about yourself.

I don’t know whether consciousness is fundamental to the universe. I don’t know whether we’re living in some elaborate simulation. And I certainly don’t think watching a Christopher Nolan movie qualifies me to rewrite the laws of physics. But I do find it remarkable that ideas that challenge our everyday intuitions have sometimes turned out to describe the physical world more accurately than those intuitions.

And I wonder how many assumptions we hold today will eventually look equally incomplete.

Perhaps that’s why I’m experiencing these movies differently now. I’m asking different questions. And that’s the part I find so interesting about growth. You can revisit the exact same thing years later and recognize something you never noticed before. Not because the information changed. Because you did.

Maybe the most important thing we can do isn’t figure out whether we’re living in a simulation. Maybe it’s recognize how much of our lives we’ve spent operating inside a version of reality we never thought to question.

And then have the courage to question it.

What deserves your time?

— Monica Cook