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Transcript

How Real is Real Enough? · Headcrumbs

• 0:04
  Dan: I really love the first season of the robot centered HBO show Westworld. Just the first season though, the writing after that is highly questionable and you can email me if you wanna get my 10,000 word rant on that subject. But there's this scene in the first season where this character played by Jimmy Simpson is being dressed for his trip into the Wild West styled robot filled morally questionable theme park. And with him, a possibly non human woman played by Tallulah Riley helps this male character get dressed and then begins to seduce him pretty openly. And the man, who isn't super comfortable with the situation, asks the apparent robot woman if she's real, whether she's human or not.
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: You want to ask, so ask.
• 0:57
  Speaker 3: Are you real?
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: Well, if you can't tell, does it matter?
• 1:03
  Speaker 3: That question, that idea, that if
• 1:06
  Dan: you can't tell the difference between real and not, does it matter? That is the kind of question that fits the nature of Headcrumbs very nicely. As the lines between what is real and what is not get blurrier by the day with artificial intelligence overrunning pretty much everything in the entire world. I'm curious, does real really matter to human beings? And what does it mean to be equipped the way we are as humans in a world that is getting better and better at blurring the lines of reality?
• 1:45
  This is Headcrumbs, where every idea leaves a trail worth following. I'm Dan. Thanks for letting me your ears and your attention for a little while here once again. When starting up a podcast after many years away from the game and this creative process, one of the many struggles that I think a
• 2:01
  Speaker 3: lot of creative people have had,
• 2:02
  Dan: but that I experienced as well, was this inescapable feeling of, like, what's the point? You know? Things have changed a lot in the past few years specifically, and a podcast script can now be generated in a second. Even a voice can be synthesized and distilled and tweaked into a full ready to go episode in the fraction of the time that it would take for me to make anything at all. So why bother?
• 2:29
  And sure people are rebelling against the slop that's out there, but you know, honestly, there may or may not be as much rebellion as it seems like there is, at least at this moment. But I feel like in the everyday, the less eternally online portions of the world, month by month, year by year, and it gets me thinking about how one of the most defining characteristics of human beings is how adaptable we are. We get used to things, and we get used to them pretty fast, it seems. Which is where our exploration here is pointed. Does real really matter to the human mind?
• 3:03
  Have we ever cared that much about how authentic something is? I'm curious to find out what experiencing something real is like for our brains. And in a setup to a potential existential dread, I'd like to know how the future may look as we adapt to new sources of a perceived reality. It's no surprise that you don't have to go far to find stats on AI usage. And you may be like me and just be tired of hearing those two letters back to back all the time.
• 3:43
  But recent numbers show that over a billion people worldwide use AI tools now, with over another 500,000,000 using AI powered features that have been added to existing products. What is crazy is that the spread of AI to over a billion users in less than three years actually makes it the fastest spreading technology in human history, more than cell phones, the internet, personal computers, which means globally, we are getting used to this technology at an alarming rate. Research from Stanford University is showing that sentiment towards AI is trending towards optimism and anxiety at the same time, which feels kind of right, just based on day to day experience I think. A technology that is capable of fracturing reality in the snap of a finger, and is growing at warp speed. So this episode though, I'm not planning on going into some deep dive on AI stats, know, there's a billion podcast episodes and think pieces and newsletters writing about those topics every day, diving into data centers, energy usage, how we're all gonna die and the world's gonna end, and so on and so forth.
• 4:51
  But in order to avoid committing one of my oldest sins as a writing podcasting rambling man, picking an idea that's too broad, which is a fair point from my internal critic. The aim here is gonna be to look at how our ability to tether ourselves to what is real fits into this picture. So how to narrow the focus and get on track? Well, gonna start with the basics, and two episodes in a row to start this show, Dan runs to the dictionary to start his little fun word game that he enjoys so much, but nevertheless this time I'm a Merriam Webster man. And do you have a favorite dictionary?
• 5:28
  No? Oh, you have actual hobbies and interests? Well la di da, aren't you fancy? But if we're looking up the word real, we get a handful of ideas that we can toss into the sandbox and then wrestle with. According to Miriam and or Webster, real is defined as having an objective or independent existence not artificial, fraudulent, or illusory occurring or existing in actuality or behaving or presented in a way that feels true, honest, or familiar and without pretension or affectation.
• 6:01
  Gets a little wordy at the end there, yeah, but I was rolling in skepticism right away, and here's why. On the surface, those definitions seem kind of obvious. I mean, they are in the dictionary after all. And also, I feel like we might think that real things are all the things that make life worth living. You know?
• 6:20
  Real love, real friends, real experiences, tangible, actual, grounded in reality things that motivate people to act, to feel. But then if you kinda simmer those definitions for a second, something real being something independent, not fraudulent, not an illusion occurring in actuality, immediately I found myself disagreeing. People spend vast portions of their lives, energies, and time investing their emotions and their efforts and changing how they live and view the world based on things that really fail to meet those definitions. Like social media. You know, it drives people into like minded bubbles, hardly independent thought.
• 7:01
  And then day after day, they may invest themselves in online communities, having their personalities and identities shaped by things that, as we now understand, are more often than not, built on things that are fake, deceptive, unreal in many ways. And what about those labels of not artificial, fraudulent, or illusory? The world is filled with an overwhelming amount of artificial presentations, Artificial personalities based on curated, perfectly designed images and brand optics. How many people go on emotional tirades over fictional characters or how a video game was made or who was cast in some movie? Or the details of some movie they just saw not adding up to their own version of their reality. All of which are based off things that aren't real by those definitions, but it's real enough when it impacts people in a meaningful way, or motivates them to real actions and emotions.
• 7:59
  So immediately my feeling is that reality may not be so easy to define, or more so, not so easy to recognize. You know, I fall down the rabbit hole myself every now and then with my forms of entertainment or stimulation. Definition wise, reality as many of us experience it already feels like it's a little detached from what we would define by the dictionary standards as real. So as I started working deeper into the weeds here, there were a couple of things that floated around in my head off the start, existing crumbs to be spilled if you will and keeping with the theme. For one, I know that there is this phenomenon of parasocial relationships.
• 8:42
  These are the attachments people form to their media personalities or even fictional characters from the consumption side of media. Yet that is a form of illusion, or inauthenticity, that becomes very real for so many people, especially now in this overwhelming age of personality branding where anyone can become a marketable brand or product. Real people adopting less real personas or identities and then putting it out there. Kind of folding in on itself a little bit it feels like. But another thing I think of is this neuroscience concept that I learned once when I was in my first year at university.
• 9:18
  And it suggested that, you know, as a mental preparation technique, for example, like athletes who are about to compete, when you focus on imagining something, like swinging a golf club or running your gymnastics routine, whatever you got, just imagining yourself physically doing something activates the same pathways in your brain that fire when you are actually physically doing those things. And I find that cool. It's the concept of visualization with a neuroscience foundation. But that idea of an imagined reality having the same effect in your brain as well an actual reality? It's just part of the itch I'm feeling here.
• 9:57
  You know, just from my own brain banks are these two ideas where things that don't really meet the definitions of real have the ability to influence a person's behavior, emotional attachments, physical responses even, and in turn all of that, their actual reality. So then chasing that thread, I started to wonder how does that work? Let's actually get into the deeper cuts on that. And so off I went to find out what I could about how reality as we know it, or as we are best able to know it I guess, how that actually works in our brains. Along the way, as I was digging around for some answers, I got reminded of a long gone cultural moment.
• 10:38
  Sort of a classic meme internet sensation from the year 2015, a lifetime ago.
• 10:43
  Speaker 3: It's simply a photo of a dress. And the issue is, what color is it? It's obvious, isn't it? It's white and gold. Okay.
• 10:51
  What color is it?
• 10:52
  Speaker 2: Blue. Gray blue.
• 10:55
  Speaker 3: I see white and gold.
• 10:57
  Speaker 2: No way. It's not it's not white and gold.
• 11:01
  Dan: Yes. The infamous cultural moment where a picture of a dress ignited the debate of what any person saw. Was it black and blue or was it white and gold? I admit, I was team white and gold and team white and gold stand up. But depending on which one you saw, you were convinced of being right.
• 11:18
  You had a lot of people who were on your side either way. Perception is reality as we've all heard at one time or another. An idea that I feel will be a bit of a cornerstone of where we had this episode, but that questionably colored dress points to one of the first pieces of the puzzle to work with here. We perceive reality through our senses what we can taste, smell, touch, hear, and maybe most of all, see Psychologist Daniel Kahneman coined the phrase what we see is all there is as a way of pointing out that people make decisions and act in the world based on what knowledge they have. You know what you know, and you don't know, well, what you don't know.
• 12:00
  Oh, I've been promoted to the rank of Captain Obvious now. So although Daniel Kahneman wasn't speaking exclusively about what we visually see, he makes a good point that we perceive the world not necessarily as it truly is, but how we see it through our own lenses, our own filters, past experiences, and current knowledge. If your eyes took in that picture of that infamous dress as black and blue, that was your reality as your senses took it in, even if you were totally wrong because it was white and gold, which actually as it turns out, you weren't wrong at all. The dress really was black and blue. So it turns out I was totally wrong, painful as that is to admit.
• 12:42
  Now next I found this 2019 article from Scientific American written by neuroscience professor Anil Seth, which led with a quote from author Aeneas Nin from the book Seducing the Minotaur that reads, quote, we do not see things as they are, we see them as we are. It's a more poetic way of hammering home the point that I've been making, no doubt. But part of this article that led me to think more about how visual perception is foundational to reality was in this context of color and color blindness. You know, just a little anecdote for you. Way back in a previous relationship for me, I was out with my then partner when we got this free pair of sunglasses at this fair.
• 13:22
  And I thought they were pretty funky, maybe wearable even from time to time. And she was a little skeptical because she looked at them and said to me, there's no way you're gonna wear those, they're way too purple. To which I had to double take and look again because they were clearly deep navy blue. And I thought, what are you talking about? Turns out, more to her surprise than mine I think, but she was a little color blind when it came to the colors of deep blue and purple.
• 13:46
  She would just see them all as purple. And having not discovered this for a real significant portion of her life was certainly a little jarring. And it raises another stoner like philosophical idea of like, man, what are colors to people anyway? Which in another sense is kinda true. Like, is my idea of red the same as your idea of red?
• 14:05
  How would you even be able to describe it and compare notes? You know, person to person, evidently, it's not always the same. It's not always the case that a color is the same, and sometimes people maybe wouldn't even know it. It depends on the eyes that are seeing it. So this felt like a good example of reality kinda being your own in a way.
• 14:26
  That Scientific American article also dove into the idea of a predictive brain, that we see the world based on our predictive understanding of the world around us. Like Daniel Kahneman said, what we see is all there is. We understand the world based on what we've learned and what we've accepted about it. You know, I know what a car is. I know it moves a certain way.
• 14:47
  And I see its front facing my direction when I look left to cross the street, and then I judge the speed to be enough that I'm going to have to wait for it to pass before I step out onto the road. The accumulation of these little bits of the world, the object, the perception of speed, my physical ability to even see those things in the first place, they add up to me experiencing the world, predicting an outcome, if I step out, I'm gonna get hit, and so I react accordingly. That would be the predictive brain. The article also brought up a classic allegory of the cave, one of Plato's greatest hits, where prisoners forced to look at a wall of a cave all their lives would only see shadows cast on the wall in front of them lit by the fire that's behind them. Why they never decided to get up and move or turn their head a 180 degrees?
• 15:31
  I guess I'll leave that to the philosophers. But in this case, in this classic allegory, these people that name the shadows on the walls because it's all they know. It's their whole reality that they get to experience. What is shown to them, what they get to know in a sense, is all their minds have to adapt to, and that's the world as they experience it. So as humans, our cave, so to speak, is the entirety of the world we live in and that we're familiar with.
• 15:59
  Our senses take in all the information they can handle, do our best to make sense of it in a way that allows us to sleep at night and function as best as we can in the day to day, and that's pretty much it. It seems that our reality is sort of a constant work in progress, with us consistently updating our predictions and understandings as we learn more or as we're corrected, and I guess also depending on how open we are to change after all? Then in another piece that I found from a 2018 study out of Stanford's Mind and Body Lab, a few more ideas came up that caught my eye, and I guess therefore helped shape my reality this episode. Another way the mind can shape physical reality is the placebo effect. It's when people seem to get better just by believing they're in the process of being treated.
• 16:47
  Or how about this, where there's these few studies that they talked about, one where people who believed that their physically active occupations counted as well as physical exercise. Those folks who believed that lived longer lives than those who didn't think a physical job also counted as physical activity. I don't know why they wouldn't, but apparently some people don't. Or even when you tell a person that they drank a drink that had caffeine in it, even if it didn't actually have caffeine, it still raised their blood pressure as though they actually had drank caffeine. Even for kids apparently believing that they can improve themselves and become smarter actually leads to better educational outcomes.
• 17:29
  All of which from that little rapid fire round add up again to just drive home the point that perception and how we actually see our world really influences the realities we live in. And this gets me thinking about this AI overloaded world of ours now, especially as this technology develops so fast. Think of all the updating to our predictions and our understandings that we have to do when suddenly there's these very convincing unreal people, unreal voices, fake images, shit full damn movies at times. Our technology was already really good at creating non real things. Think of stuff like CGI or video games even, how amazing those have gotten.
• 18:14
  But now it's kind of on steroids a little bit. Deep fake pictures and videos, or entire human personalities just popping up and looking as real as our eyes need them to be in order to be convincing? How many brains around the world are self correcting their predictions to catch up with what their eyes and ears are suddenly taking in? What fresh new surprises of unreality will we all have to recognize and adapt to as time goes on? All of that to say, we build our understanding of the world and what we feel is real based on all the information and experiences we take in, you know, how our minds use all of it and how we cross examine it with the world our senses are taking in, and all we can do in the end is a best mashup of all of that that we then function within.
• 19:02
  And what we consider real has already kinda got a bit of a shaky foundation to it from what it sounds like we've learned here this episode.
• 19:09
  Speaker 4: So when a human brain is creating a category, you have to ask what features of similarity is it using? Is it these sensory and motor features? An apple is round, an apple is hard and crunchy, or is it these abstract features? Abstract multimodal summaries of patterns of features. I could take a bunch of apples and I could say, well, these are good for baking and these are not good for baking.
• 19:42
  And these patterns, this summary, only exists in your brain.
• 19:46
  Dan: That clip there comes from psychologist doctor Lisa Feldman Barrett, which I felt like was a good example of what we've touched on here, about how our minds take what we know and try their best to then make sense of the world. Is it possible opportunity right now to take a minute, stare at your hands, wonder what the nature of life is itself? Just me? Well, feel free to join along. What about when something not real still comes across our minds as being real?
• 20:14
  You know, what about the simulated versions of things that exist, and how can they leave impressions on our brains? That's what I wanted to dive into next here. And the next place my journey took me on this note was to an article talking about a study in the journal Neuron from 2025, which touched on the visualization idea that I was mentioning earlier on. In the study, the lead researcher, Doctor. Nadine Dijkstra, talked about how the brain operates when imagining things versus perceiving them in the world.
• 20:42
  As a good doctor put it, Imagine an apple in your mind's eye as vividly as you can. During imagination, many of the same brain regions activate in the same manner as when you see a real apple. Until recently, it remained unclear how the brain distinguishes between these real and imagined experiences. End quote. And is it just me, or are apples kind of a popular motif here for neuroscientists?
• 21:07
  But I suppose that's not important to each their own. And this also felt like a good follow-up to that freshman neuroscience class that I was talking about. According to the study, a part of the brain known as the fusiform gyrus, which is a great name to begin with, but it's a part of the brain that processes visual input and recognition, well this fun little guy activates when people both are seeing something, and also when they are imagining that they are seeing something. Apparently the brain can tell the difference between real and not real based on how much activation there is in this part of the brain. The level of fusiform gyrus activation that makes us believe what we see.
• 21:48
  Doctor. Dijkstra referred to this as a sort of reality threshold, which is an idea I love. It feels like a lot of life sometimes falls below the reality threshold. But I think there's something impactful about that concept right there in relation to the topic of this episode. That the difference between imagining something is really there and actually seeing something that's really there is just a matter of activation in a part of your brain.
• 22:15
  Not like a a meter you can see fill and then know if it's real or not, but whether or not something inside you actually hits that threshold and then accounts for something being real. Now the researchers were looking at this whole concept as a way to hopefully understand conditions like schizophrenia better, where imaginings are perceived as real, and then how these thresholds might be a way to distinguish why reality gets distorted for those suffering from conditions like these. The study also touched on how the fusiform gyrus interacts with other parts of the brain to keep our grips on reality and stay grounded, including the anterior insula, which is a part of our prefrontal cortex that influences our decision making and our ability to think about our own minds. Like, if we get caught in a delusion and the next part of our brains allows us to act on them, it becomes a bit of a multilayered failure inside of our old noggins here. It's So not just one part of our brain that lets reality get away from us, it's many working together if they get that far.
• 23:15
  And I pause again here for a moment to feel validated that my hunch from my old neuroscience class about imaginings and realities, and how those two things have similar impacts on the brain, it actually came through in the research here. I pat myself on the back even though I had not much to do with it in its elemental forms. Now the other scrambled egg thought that I had earlier on in the episode was the idea of parasocial relationships, because I'm fascinated by them, especially now when the idea of presenting a personality is so widespread everywhere. You know, the term parasocial relationship was coined in 1956 when two researchers Donald Horton and Richard Wohl examined the relation between media personalities and their consumers. It's a byproduct of the burgeoning television age at that time.
• 23:59
  And although the concept wasn't really researched much until the nineteen eighties, great job letting that one slip through the crack science, but the funny thing about it that I found along the way was that in the Wikipedia article about parasocial relationships, it describes these interactions as an illusory experience, which according to our dictionary definitions at the top of the episode, would make them not real. And I think I wouldn't argue that. Is a parasocial relationship with an influencer a real relationship? Not in any way that I think any of us might assume on the surface. But they are in a lot of ways real to the people caught in the throes of them, experiencing them.
• 24:43
  And so digging into how this works in the brain, the research has shown that our brains process these parasocial interactions in similar ways that we process real life, person to person interactions. And as I was reading on, I found that from an evolutionary perspective, our ability to recognize faces and interactions, even one-sided ones, are still rooted in our basic natural past. Our psychology hasn't evolved past or even to the level of our technology at this rate, it likely never will. What that means is that we aren't really programmed to distinguish an influencer seeming authentic and genuine through an app from a friend who's sharing something with us from across a table. Both register pretty clearly in our brains, especially if the social cues are there.
• 25:36
  You know, if an actor is good enough at displaying emotion, we really do feel for them without being stonewalled by the recognition that this is just purely performance. It can draw real emotion from a non real place. It is interesting to me to think about this concept anyways, you know, that our minds haven't evolved to distinguish the experiences of this fast changing world and what it offers us. Our brains are still in the caveman years, and we're dealing with god like technology. Recognizing a face is the same for a human mind whether it was 10,000 ago in a field, or right now, sitting on the toilet watching someone tell you
• 26:16
  Speaker 3: a story through your phone.
• 26:18
  Dan: And then there's this. The emotional draw of any scenario apparently strengthens the experience of these connections even when they're not real. The emotional investment of a fictional character or how good someone is at selling a story when they tell it, hell, even a podcaster's ability to lure you in with interesting facts and a little charm, you too can feel a deeper connection just like this right here with me right now. And as I continued to search for some relevant bits and not go too overboard fighting my urge to lose focus, I did also find another piece describing the research of a social neuroscientist named Dylan Wagner, which shook up what I had already picked up just a little bit. Because when studying the emotional connections to Game of Thrones characters, Wagner used brain scans to track activity in the medial prefrontal cortex when participants thought about their favorite Thrones characters versus real people.
• 27:17
  And what they found was that the activity in this part of the brain actually differed between fictional and non fictional people in the participants' lives. And this might be the first thing that kind of deviates from the reality, non reality being the same in the brain, but the highlight of this experiment was that the more lonely a participant reported being in their life, the more that distinction between real and not real faded away. I just wanna focus on this for a moment because, you know, I I know that over the years now, I keep reading about how lonely people are becoming in our world, how disconnected and isolated they can be. You know, adults report having fewer friends than in decades past, and people are much more likely to actually just withdraw from the physical world now and dig deeper into digital ones. And this study by Dylan Wagner pointed to the idea that when we are less connected to real people in the real world, the more that we're willing to accept a heavier dose of perceived reality from these artificial sources.
• 28:23
  A parasocial friend by any other name would still be something important to a person who struggles to connect in the real world. This idea really kind of busted things open a bit for me because it starts to become clear to me that what we believe to be real is subject to so many bits of our sensory perception and also to the shortcomings of our natural wiring. You know, we're we're okay to accept the best reality we can piece together based on our environments and our exposures. If you're someone who struggles to socialize, you can feel a real connection to unreal things. And then to argue that point to that person really could be a fruitless effort.
• 29:01
  You know, who's to tell another person what is real, what they should feel, or how they should or can experience their own reality? I think about myself when I was younger. I had real struggles with social anxiety, and I often retreated to the inner world of my own mind or to the digital escapes that were available to me. It's taken a lot of years to build myself up enough to move away from those tendencies, but that's not always possible, and it's certainly never easy. And my reality was at the time the best one I could scrape together.
• 29:37
  All of this adding up to what exactly? I started by asking the question of whether it really mattered how real something is if the world of rapidly evolving unrealities is one that we have to fear for yet another reason I guess. Maybe? Maybe it is? Maybe it's a matter of perspective?
• 29:58
  Just why at this point I started to have a little bit of a shift in the question we started with, and started to think that maybe it's less a matter of whether real is mattering less than ever, and more maybe a matter of if real was ever much of a thing to begin with. I once read the suggestion that when human beings first started to form thoughts in their minds with language and an inner monologue that some of them believed they were being spoken to by gods or they were hearing the voices of their ancestors guiding them from beyond the grave. To those people, to those human beings who our brains are not crazy different from necessarily, that might have been the reality they perceived based on what they understood about the world. Like think about it for a second, human history is littered with myths, legends, entire belief systems that shaped societies and drove people to unimaginable actions, war and horrible terrors, but also incredible creations and developments in technology, so many of these things were based on a way of thinking that wouldn't ever really meet the definitions we had at the start of real.
• 31:12
  This may be a case, and I'll just throw it out here for you, but there might be a case to be made that detachment from what we think is reality might be a much more defining piece of human beings history than we maybe give credit for. And to jump back here to my own existential dread about creating anything at all, if this podcast wasn't even a real voice, me speaking into a microphone and it wasn't a real set of words that I had taken time to write, would it matter? Sure, I'd like to believe it would. I'll give you credit as a listener as well, and think that you likely wouldn't want to hear an AI generated voice. But if in time, if that voice suddenly became good enough that it sounded like a really awesome person or sounded exactly like me as I am for the last however many minutes now, it's likely not that far away and it's probably already here if somebody has the right technical know how.
• 32:13
  It may matter to people now, but will it still matter as what seem like miracles become less and less remarkable? Will we still cling to some standard of what counts as real and what doesn't? Now look, I get that exploring the nature of reality is something that maybe a simple single podcast episode isn't well equipped for. And in terms of where we started to where we ended up, I'm not sure I head towards the finish line with a better idea of what it means for someone like me trying to be creative in a world of dying hyper optimized creativity, trying to make something that feels real when maybe that isn't so important after all. As a creator, I know this is a brave new world or a scary new world, and there feels like a growing sentiment of acceptance that AI generated art and content is the wave of the future, maximum productivity and output.
• 33:07
  I don't like it. It's not something that I'm for, but I also know that I can't change everyone's minds if the tide starts moving one way. Although it would be extremely typical of me to push back anyways. Personally, I see the utility side of AI as a tool, like a research assistant or a better version of a search engine since, you know, Google gave up on being anything more than an advertising machine a long time ago. But I I certainly don't see it as a replacement for human effort in making things.
• 33:39
  If I did, I would have one pump out a script for me and then read it verbatim. It's an uncomfortable level of ability that absolutely makes a person wonder why they would ever sit in a coffee shop, clickety clacking away onto his computer, and then making an episode out of it. But I am a firm believer that art, music, writing, creation as a whole is the byproduct of examining the human experience and then making something out of what you find. And to change that into an instant process of just pure output, without the toil of experience and the process itself, really makes all of it feel like it loses meaning. But on the flip side, I still see every day more and more people throwing their hands up at any problem just saying, you know, ask chat GPT, and all this unreality feels icky.
• 34:29
  But based on how our brains work, based on what I've learned here and about how flimsy reality maybe really is to a human brain, and how subjective an experience is to any individual, I get this worrying sense, you know, that as time goes on, it may not matter much longer if the music that you're listening to was painstakingly created by a human, or if it was generated by some keyboard technician in their apartment in seconds. If the beat gets someone's foot tapping and head nodding, it starts to be a matter of preference in a lot of ways. Our minds are well acquainted with accepting real and not real as more or less the same. So does real really matter? Maybe not.
• 35:20
  Maybe the authenticity we theoretically crave was always just another convincing act. Yikes. Honestly, it's not where I thought I would go this episode, really. I think I chased this idea naively thinking that I get something more optimistic out of it. You know, that there's something just truly essential to absolute reality.
• 35:42
  To declare fully, I don't like the way this future ahead looks right now, but I also know that the future is wildly unknowable and unpredictable, and that what lies ahead would be as hard to imagine as right now would be to anyone alive even a few generations ago. I was curious about how people take in reality because I found myself thinking about how we'll adapt to a world where things can be faked so easily, where we can have reality imitators unleashed with no limits, no guardrails, and these brains of ours that are as still pretty much as advanced as they were when we thought fire was the bee's knees of technological advancement. And what I think that we found here was that human beings are extremely vulnerable to all kinds of inauthentic, illusory, detached from the physical world types of experiences. But at the same time, to act like in the AI age, that this is some new alarming trend, I think also would be a little disingenuous upon reflection. The way it feels to me is that AI creations and all the content and all the offshoots that come from it aren't opening some fresh loophole in our brains.
• 36:58
  This is not some new hellscape that's never been there before and is totally unfamiliar. A lot of it feels more like it's just the latest thing to go walking through a door that's been opened within us for as long as we've been able to daydream or get attached to a fictional character. As long as we've had abstract thoughts, we've had abstract realities. At the end of the day, the world changes, and as time goes on, I may just not be able to compete with something like A charming automated podcaster with cool, interesting facts and stories, and that if your head nods and your interest is piqued by that charismatic Robodan in his Crumbs podcast generated in seconds by a dude with a sweet vibe coded AI program, your experience of that reality will be as acceptable as the one I put out there. And then, which one you go with when both are available, it's just a matter of preference.
• 37:56
  Be honest, did you notice that that wasn't me for a moment? Maybe today you can, but for how much longer will that be the case? Pretty freaky, isn't it? Certainly made me a little uncomfortable. After all we found along this journey this episode, knowing what we know about how our brains figure out what qualifies as acceptably real to them, we might just be left again with the question we started with here this episode.
• 38:23
  Speaker 2: Well, if you can't tell, does it matter?
• 38:28
  Dan: I guess it's up to us to decide for ourselves.
• 38:35
  Thank you for lending me your time for this episode of Headcrumbs. I hope you'll come back and follow another trail with me here in the future. If your curiosity was sparked at any point or if you have an idea that you're wondering about, reach out to me and let me know what's on your mind. You can email me at headcrumbspodcast@gmail.com. Headcrumbs is an independent podcast written, produced, and hosted by myself, Dan Felton.
• 38:58
  Music for this episode was obtained from Epidemic Sound. If you know someone who might find this episode interesting or is wondering about the nature of reality for themselves, consider sharing the show with them. It helps me as the creator and I hope it helps them too as another listener. Where will the wonder of curiosity take us next? Come back again and we'll find out together.