What is it? Where did it come from? How does it work? We have many theories and stories for this. Is this a simulation? Is the Universe a computation engine? What does eternal recurrence mean? How do we find salvation? Is it a multiverse?

Every culture has explored this and come up with various answers for these questions. As you explore these questions, you will find that every theory has a counter theory and peer theories. There is many layers of reality in a way, the biological layer, the physical layer, the mathematical layer. Historically, the religious books have provided a unified theory of sorts for all of these questions. More recently, we have science exploring and providing newer theories. The scientific theories have benefited from being the most accurate in terms of computing the future and being useful in terms of creating technology to build tools, drugs, etc to scale life and have garnered the most attention and investment. They have also benefited with having a culture of trying new things, accepting failures and incremental improvements. There is also the philosophical angle for questions which are more difficult to define. The public debate is usually around aligning on definitions of words and trying to arrive at a common understanding of the meanings of words like God, happiness, love, life, death, zero, infinity, etc. For example, the word God is overloaded to mean infinity, zero, unknown, a multi-dimensional eternal being, a parent like figure, an invisible force in the universe, etc. The conflict and debate ends up being about who gets to own/define the meaning of the symbols and which theory needs to be chosen to inform public policy around governance and economy. Trying to get the collective to get to consensus is an eternal exercise. Every Observer is a unique experiment of reality, like a snowflake that has a unique experience of reality. Biological life has a beginning and an end, every life form is like an ecosystem that is consuming other life forms and fighting off other life forms, the big ones or the small viruses, parasites, bacteria, etc and once it perishes, is recycled back into the ecosystem. The genes, information, ideas, thoughts or memes that are born or mutated in the life form endure. The definitions of symbols like ego, consciousness, self awareness, etc are always evolving and being redefined and refined constantly. The physical layer is easier to get a consensus on, we are still exploring the quantum level of physical reality and find the right symbols to compute that reality to get an incrementally more accurate model of physical reality. The mathematical symbols are the likely the best symbols we have to compute and then communicate to other Observers to arrive at a common understanding of reality, so we can explore it collectively.

So, what is my reality? While the concepts of infinity, zero is something that I wonder about, they are comforting to some extent to set some boundaries/anchors to explore reality. I am fascinated by and grateful for all of those who came before me and how they have explored these questions and arrived at their own answers and shared them with the world. I will also continue exploring these questions and hopefully contribute to the collective understanding of reality. I prefer to think that this is a side effect of just living and exploring life with everyone and everything. A combination of embracing the chaos and isolating from it seems like a good method to explore reality individually and as part of a collective.