The apple looked fine.
Red, maybe a little too red. Glossy enough to reflect the dashboard glare. It was a Cosmic Crisp—marketed as the perfect hybrid. I’d packed it as a snack for the long drive east, just something to break the monotony between home and Pullman. I picked it up, turned it in my hand. It felt real. Solid. But something about it struck me as off. Not wrong, exactly. Just… overly composed.
That was the same stretch of highway where I fell into Hoffman.
Donald Hoffman, cognitive scientist. I was listening to a podcast—some interview I’d queued weeks ago and forgotten about. His claim hit quietly but hard: reality isn’t what it looks like. Evolution didn’t shape our senses for truth, he said. It shaped them for survival. And truth, in raw form, is dangerous.
You don’t see the world. You see an interface. A set of icons. The trash can on your desktop isn’t a real bin—it’s a symbol. Behind it is a cluster of abstractions: digital files, metadata, raw bits. Not garbage, exactly—just opaque representations of information you’re meant to discard. The apple isn’t fruit—it’s a trigger. A learned shortcut your brain uses to say “food.”
That part didn’t rattle me. It made sense. I’ve seen people misread a situation and walk away safe. Others notice everything and still end up blindsided. Maybe fitness really does beat truth.
But Hoffman doesn’t stop there.
He says neurons aren’t real either. Nor is space. Or time. Or your body. Everything you experience—rendered. A perceptual GUI overlaying something you’ll never touch directly. Consciousness, he argues, is fundamental. Reality doesn’t generate minds. Minds generate what we call reality.
So what you see as a table, a clock, a person—those are icons. Not outputs of a physical system. Constructions inside awareness. Objects arranged on a user interface built for navigation, not accuracy.
That’s when I felt myself grip the steering wheel.
I like the idea of boundaries. I like knowing where I end and the car begins. I like the illusion of gravity keeping things sorted. I like the sense of being inside a world.
But I’ve also dreamed vividly enough to feel betrayed by waking up.
So now I keep wondering: if this is an interface, what’s behind it? And who designed the menu?
There’s a moment late in a long day—just before sleep—when the whole world goes translucent. You stare at your phone and don’t remember unlocking it. You say goodnight and can’t recall the words. You walk into the bedroom and the edges feel… provisional.
That’s when the questions start to flicker.
Not what’s real? but what’s this interface steering me toward?
Not is the world fake? but who benefits from the rendering?
If Hoffman’s right, the weird part isn’t that reality’s a hallucination. It’s that we might be hallucinating in sync. Linking up through culture, language, and biology—co-stabilizing a mirage we share. Enough of one, anyway, to act like it’s real. To keep moving. To not dissolve.
That’s a lot of trust—to believe that what we see is shared, stable, and worth acting on.
I haven’t changed much since that drive through the Palouse. Still walk the dog. Still sort the recycling, most days. Still get annoyed when my neighbor hotboxes the stairwell like it’s a test of civic patience. But lately I’ve been seeing more. Looking more closely at everyday things.
Not because they’re gone.
Because they feel overproduced. Like someone kept the UI but swapped out the physics engine.
Maybe that glitch we sometimes feel—the hum of dissonance while washing dishes, the unearned anxiety on a perfectly normal afternoon, the sudden awe at a ballet performance that feels too precise to be chance—isn’t malfunction.
Maybe it’s the interface, surfacing.
Letting us know there’s a patch coming.