Now I can't stop thinking about _The Experience Machine_ by Andy Clark. It theorizes that this is how humans navigate and experience the real world: Our brains generate what we think the world around is like and our senses don't so much directly process visual information but instead act like a kind of loss function for our internal simulations. Then we use that error to update our internal model of the world.

In this view, we are essentially living inside a high-fidelity generative model. Our brains are constantly 'hallucinating' a predicted reality based on past experience and current goals. The data from our senses isn't the source of the image; it's the error signal used to calibrate that internal model. Much like Genie 3 uses latent actions and frames to predict the next state of a world, our brains use 'Active Inference' to minimize the gap between what we expect and what we experience.

It suggests that our sense of 'reality' isn't a direct recording of the world, but a highly optimized, interactive simulation that is continuously 'regularized' by the photons hitting our retinas.

I think this is pretty well established as far as neurologists are concerned and explains a lot of things. Like dreaming for instance.. just something like the model running without sensory input constraining it.

A kurzgesagt on this: Why Your Brain Blinds You For 2 Hours Every Day https://youtu.be/wo_e0EvEZn8 and the sources for that video - https://sites.google.com/view/sources-reality-is-not-real/

Like, "Your Brain Hallucinates Your Conscious Reality" as exposed by Anil Seth[1]? Found that one while searching for something like "the illusion of the self" a few years ago.

It’s also easy to find this treated in various philosophy/religion through time and space. And anyway as consciousness is eager to project whatever looks like a possible fit, elements of suggesting prior arts can be inferred back as far as traces can be found.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyu7v7nWzfo

Another analogy that kinda fits in with what you're saying is the post-processing on smartphone "photos."

At what point does the processing become so strong that it's less a photograph and more a work of computational impressionism?

Also check out The Case Against Reality by Donald Hoffman

Let me introduce you to Idealism

And more specifically Analytic Idealism

https://youtu.be/P-rXm7Uk9Ys?si=q7Kefl7PbYfGiChZ

Google DeepMind’s Project Genie is being framed as a “world model.” Given a text prompt, it generates a coherent, navigable, photorealistic world in real time. An agent can move through it, act within it, and the world responds consistently. Past interactions are remembered. Physics holds. Cause and effect persist.

From a technical standpoint, this is impressive engineering. From a philosophical standpoint, it’s an unexpectedly clean metaphor.

In analytic idealism, the claim is not that the physical world is fake or arbitrary. The claim is that what we call the “physical world” is how reality appears from a particular perspective. Experience is primary. The world is structured appearance.

Genie makes this intuitive.

There is no “world” inside Genie in the classical sense. There is no pre-existing ocean, mountain, fox, or library. There is a generative substrate that produces a coherent environment only when a perspective is instantiated. The world exists as something navigable because there is a point of view moving through it.

Change the character, and the same environment becomes a different lived reality. Change the prompt, and an entirely different universe appears. The underlying system remains, but the experienced world is perspective-dependent.

This mirrors a core idealist intuition: reality is not a collection of objects waiting to be perceived. It is a structured field of possible experiences, disclosed through perspectives.

The interesting part is not that Genie “creates worlds.” It’s that the worlds only exist as worlds for an agent. Without a perspective, there is no up, down, motion, danger, beauty, or meaning. Just latent structure.

Seen this way, Genie is not a model of consciousness. It’s a model of how worlds arise from viewpoints.

If you replace “agent” with “local mind,” and “world model” with “cosmic mental process,” the analogy becomes hard to ignore. A universal consciousness need not experience everything at once. It can explore itself through constrained perspectives, each generating a coherent, law-bound world from the inside.

That doesn’t prove idealism. But it makes the idea less mystical and more concrete. We are already building systems where worlds are not fundamental, but perspectival.

And that alone is worth sitting with.