(Image from https://www.smh.com.au)
~ M.L.Stedman
M. L. Stedman is an Australian writer and lawyer. She has lived in London and is notably reticent about sharing personal information, preferring her work to speak for itself. Wikipedia
Born 1971 (age 54 years), Western Australia, Australia
| Marianne Williamson May 31, 2026 |
Katsumi Murouchi
Visiting Paris for a few days, I’m reminded of the intense beauty of this city. Anyone who travels here has to be.
Driving around the Luxor Obelisk at the bottom of the Champs-Elysee, I started thinking about where all that beauty came from. It doesn’t take away from its magnificence to realize how much money had to be hoarded by a small group of people in order to create it. Century after century, a vast majority of the French population lived like serfs in order to support the unbelievable extravagance of a few. And while we gaze with awe at the gorgeous art, sculpture, and architecture in such places as the palaces of Fountainebleau and Versailles, you can also understand the anger of the French people that built up generation after generation, century after century, among those who witnessed all that while having no way to feed their hungry children. Millions of people with no hope of anything ever being better. People whose frustration and despair would lead in time to the grotesque horrors of the French Revolution and the overthrow of the French monarchy and aristocracy. All that beauty led to all that ugliness.
There’s a whole lot to ponder there.
It’s when you realize the human dimension of history that your own point in time opens up to you. Monarchic and aristocratic systems throughout Europe led some of its citizens to simply accept what was, many like the French to revolutionize their societies from within, and some like the American colonists to seek a new life elsewhere. The North American colonies were not settled by people who wanted to separate from England, but they moved to a new continent in hopes of achieving things they felt they could not achieve in Britain. When even in America they felt the frustration and anger of living at the effect of an oppressive King, they declared their independence, fought a revolutionary war, and created their own way of doing things.
So began the United States of America, as an audacious experiment in repudiating the reign of kings. What a sad and bitter irony that our 250th birthday celebration is overseen by someone who clearly doesn’t get the point. Our president has no sense of the radicalism of the American ideal. He doesn’t seem to understand that our country was founded to reject the dictates of an oppressive king; quite the opposite, he wants to be one. Just like Napoleon had the letter N written everywhere, Trump wants his name to be everywhere. Absolute monarchs and imperialistic Emperors appeal to him, actually, both those of the past as well as the present. But the United States does not have a king. The role of our President comes with restraints, and President Trump doesn’t like restraints. He wants it to be all him, all the time, doing whatever it is he wants to do. He sees any limits to his power as a personal affront. And while he has cunningly purged the government of almost anyone who would hold him accountable, every day it’s more and more obvious that the American people plan to do so. He knows this, which is why his rigging of the midterms has begun in earnest. We are already in the throes of a cold civil war.
The American people are the heirs of our original ideals, and we are not the first generation needing to defend them. We’re called on now, as others have been before us, to stand for our liberty despite intense opposition. Our Founders understood the horrors of a system in which the whims of one person, enabled by an aristocracy of sycophants, suppressed the hopes and dreams of ordinary people. Nowhere in the Constitution is it written these words, “Don’t worry, it will all be fine.” Quite to the contrary. It’s a document written by people living hundreds of years before us, trying the best they could to protect us from the worst aspects of ourselves.
What an audacious bunch they were. It’s not enough to celebrate those men; we need to embody their audacity. This 250th birthday celebration should be a time of recommitment and rededication. The sign-off to the Declaration of Independence was this: And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor. We need to do that too.
Those 56 men, by signing the Declaration of Independence, were committing treason against the King of England. Had the British won the war, each of them would have been hanged as traitors. It’s one of the great ironies of history that 41 of the signers owned slaves – the most egregious transgression against the very principle of human equality – they nevertheless risked their lives placing into the ethers of human possibility that one day such evils would not exist. It’s been left to every generation that followed to make real in its own time the actualization of the document’s vision. Before we rush to cynically judge those who came before us – which is, after all, so chic to do these days – perhaps we should ask how well we ourselves are doing
America has never completed the task of “creating a more perfect union” – but at our best we have tried. Against great odds we have moved forward, we have self-corrected. Today, however, we’re not just not moving forward. We are not just standing still. We are walking backwards. We have regressed.
July 4th, the official signing of the Declaration, is considered our country’s birthday. The Constitution was ratified twelve years later. With the Declaration of Independence, we separated from England. With the Constitution, we established how we would be doing things our own way.
While Donald Trump’s name is not written in the Constitution, the document was created to ensure that no one such as he would gain power in this country. It happened nevertheless, of course, but not only because of the aggressive nature of the political darkness he represents. It happened just as much because of the political light we failed to commit to. We failed to keep it in our hearts and to teach it to our children. “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” It’s not that we don’t have a vision; there has never been a more visionary statement than our Declaration of Independence. But our vision has been sidelined, and we the people allowed that.
Generation after generation, compromise heaped upon compromise, particularly over the last fifty years, we farmed out our best thinking to those unworthy of the trust. With every passing year our political institutions have become just another form of aristocracy-lite. When Thomas Jefferson said “The only safe repository for power is in the hands of the people,” he meant it. But somehow we forgot.
Let’s go over the four basic principles of the Declaration of Independence, just in case anyone needs to be reminded. 1) That all men are created equal; 2) That all men are endowed by their Creator with the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, 3) That governments are instituted to secure those rights, and 4) If the government if not doing that job, it’s the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.
Although Donald Trump neither understands nor respects those American First Principles (it was so clear in his interview with Terry Moran that he had never read the Declaration – he said it was about “unity and love and respect”) what ultimately matters is that we do. We can, despite the difficulties of this moment, protect our freedoms and the ideals they signify. That our country is in a state of decline is irrefutable; the question that remains is whether or not that decline is reversible. I choose to believe that it is, but then again I believe in miracles. Americans are in the process of a great remembering. We ourselves created the conditions of our brokenness, and we ourselves are the source of our repair. As we become more humble, as we become more receptive, as we become more available to the great work that lies before us, the seas are gonna rise and the winds will start to blow. The waters are gonna part I tell you. I feel it in my bones.
Stav Dimitropoulos
Sun, May 31, 2026 (Yahoo.com)
“Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links.”
Imagine slipping into a multiplayer VR version of Grand Theft Auto, racing cars against players scattered across the world. You see a red Corvette speeding beside you. You immediately grip the steering wheel of your matte-black Porsche 911, slam the virtual gas pedal, and tear through the glowing digital streets of Los Santos chasing after it. How dare the Corvette come for your crown? Now, if someone logically asked you, after taking off the headset, whether the rival car was true reality, you’d likely laugh and say no. You can grasp, even faintly, that what you experienced existed as millions of bits being toggled in precise sequences at blinding speed somewhere inside a supercomputer. There is no actual Corvette inside that machine. For Donald Hoffman, PhD, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Irvine, this may be the best metaphor for reality itself. “We’re playing a multiplayer game,” he says. “My body is just an avatar in a VR game. It’s not the truth.”
In Hoffman’s “interface theory” of perception, evolution shaped us not to perceive objective reality directly, but to experience a simplified survival interface. Just as a VR game hides the incomprehensible complexity of the underlying code, Hoffman argues that space-time may function more like a navigational dashboard than objective reality itself. In such an interface, our senses evolved not to reveal the truth, but simply to help us play the game of life. And after a while, the game becomes so immersive that we lose ourselves inside it, thinking our avatars are all there is.
Hoffman arrived at the theory through an unusual reading of Darwinian evolution. If natural selection rewards survival rather than truth, he wondered, why assume humans evolved to perceive “raw” reality accurately at all? Then he turned to evolutionary game theory, which is a mathematical framework for modeling survival and competition.
In these mathematical models, organisms survive not by discovering objective truth, but by maximizing what scientists call “payoff functions,” which are strategies that increase the odds of survival and reproduction. A hungry lion chasing a gazelle, for example, receives a high evolutionary payoff. A hungry lion trying to eat a rock receives almost none, Hoffman says. Over time, evolution preserves the sensory systems associated with successful payoffs, not necessarily the ones that perceive reality accurately.
That realization led him to what he considers the theory’s most radical implication. Mathematically, Hoffman says, the question becomes whether the sensory shortcuts favored by evolution preserve the true structure of reality itself. Using evolutionary game theory models, he argues they do not. “What’s the probability that, you know, I see a rock because there really is a rock? I see the tree because there really is a tree?” he asks. “The answer is 0 percent. Exactly 0 percent.”
Natural selection, he says, never shaped organisms to perceive objective reality accurately, but simply to survive long enough to reproduce. It made us competent enough to navigate the world through simplified survival shortcuts—a user interface optimized for fitness rather than truth.
“Most of us think that means we’ve been shaped to see reality, because of course seeing reality would make you more fit,” Hoffman says. “And the answer is no. Period… When you do the math, the probability that seeing the truth will help you reproduce is zero.”
But if the body is merely an avatar inside the interface, where exactly is the “real” self, the consciousness? This is a question we shouldn’t even be asking, according to Hoffman. Because the true self is “nowhere in the game.”
“The very notion of being in the game is just wrong for who you really are,” Hoffman says. Questions like “Where am I? When am I?” assume that we are thinking in terms of space and time coordinates. But this returns us back into the VR headset—the trap of space-time itself. “Whatever you really are transcends the very notions of where and when,” he says. In other words, the very interface that allows us to navigate reality may also prevent us from perceiving what we truly are beyond it.
That idea, strange as it sounds, partially overlaps with a growing crisis in modern physics. Many high-energy physicists increasingly suspect that the fabric of space and time may not be fundamental reality after all. At the smallest scales of the universe—the Planck scale—the equations underlying modern physics appear to break down mathematically. This dilemma is pushing researchers to search for deeper structures beyond both conventional quantum theory and our ordinary understanding of the cosmos. Case in point: physicist John Wheeler of Princeton, who famously proposed “It from Bit,” the idea that physical reality may ultimately emerge from underlying information rather than matter itself.
“Space-time is doomed,” believes Hoffman. “It’s not just a cognitive scientist crying wolf about spacetime. The physicists themselves are saying we need to look beyond,” he continues. But if space-time is not fundamental reality, then what is?
Theoretical physicists have long struggled to reconcile quantum mechanics with gravity, and many of the equations of modern physics begin to break down at the Planck scale. So in 2013, some researchers began stepping outside of space-time itself. What they found were enormous geometric structures with strange properties—including giant diamond-shaped objects later dubbed amplituhedrons—that could predict particle interactions without relying on conventional notions of space and time at all.
These so-called “positive geometries” are exotic mathematical structures that attempt to derive the behavior of the physical universe directly from geometry itself rather than conventional space-time equations. They are the next clue outside of the space-time headset, Hoffman says. They may not yet represent the final truth, he quickly adds, but perhaps a crucial clue pointing toward it.
However, given the relatively young age of these “magical” structures in scientific research, Hoffman says: “Nobody yet knows what they really are.”
Still, the broader possibility that humans may not perceive reality directly is increasingly spreading to fields other than theoretical physics. Mona Sobhani, PhD—a cognitive neuroscientist and author who studies consciousness and anomalous experiences—says Hoffman’s theory at least aligns with one uncomfortable implication of evolution itself: Survival and truth may not be the same thing.
“Seems like a reasonable theory that is in line with the idea of evolution,” Sobhani says. “I think we are finding more scientists open to the idea, especially younger ones, although I’d say the mainstream explanations still sway toward the physicalist,” meaning theories that still treat matter and the physical universe as fundamental.
Critics are much more skeptical, however. While evolution may simplify perception, they argue, that doesn’t necessarily mean space-time itself is merely an interface or illusion. Some philosophers have also questioned whether Hoffman’s argument becomes self-defeating: If evolution shaped human cognition for survival rather than truth, why trust the conclusions produced by that cognition in the first place? A 2021 critique of Hoffman’s interface theory further argued that under more realistic environmental conditions, organisms disconnected from objective reality would actually be pushed closer to extinction rather than survival.
Still, such criticisms have not deterred a growing number of scientists from describing perception as a heavily filtered construction—a kind of shared hallucination even. Meanwhile, theorists such as Wheeler explored whether the physical world ultimately arises from deeper informational structures beneath space-time itself. Likewise, Stephen Wolfram, PhD, of the University of Illinois has argued that reality itself may emerge from hidden computational rules.
So, what if we ditched the headset altogether, directly dug into the deeper machinery of reality itself, and confronted the truth head-on?
“If you were smart enough, you could go into the supercomputer and toggle the millions of bits really, really quickly, and that would also be a way to play the game,” says Hoffman. Almost instantaneously, he circles back to evolution and what Darwinian payoffs have taught us, though not before wishing those who attempt it “good luck.”
For the interface of reality is essentially rigged against the searcher. Take Grand Theft Auto. The winner is rarely the player who stops to wonder why the Corvette is red, the Porsche black, or who designed Los Santos. The winner is the one who plays. For Hoffman, evolution clearly favors organisms that successfully navigate the game, not those that spend their time trying to understand the code running underneath it.
“Searchers will always lose to someone who can simply turn the steering wheel and hit the fake gas pedal inside the VR headset we call reality,” Hoffman says.
(Contributed by Janet Cornwell, H.W., m.)
First edition cover: Chatto & Windus / Wikimedia
PRONUNCIATION:
MEANING:
noun: A radically transformed world, situation, or era, especially one with both promise and peril.
ETYMOLOGY:
After Brave New World (1932), a novel by Aldous Huxley. Earliest documented use: 1933.
NOTES:
The world in Huxley’s dystopian novel is technologically advanced, but individual freedom has been traded for stability, conditioning, consumption, and chemical contentment. The future arrives with everything included except the user’s soul.
Huxley took the title of his novel from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in which Miranda says:
“O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O, brave new world,
That has such people in ‘t!”
