Good. I do have your attention. Now, moving right along, let us delve a little deeper into this topic, if you will forgive a bit of a metaphorical shift. You didn’t really think this was about tits and ass, did you?

Consider the general at Headquarters, surrounded by his aides and his subordinates, the walls are papered with maps with pins stuck in them, and a sand table dominates the room, men huddled around it push flag markers representing military units. Intelligence reports come in from the front, orders are sent out, teletypes and radios crackle, and an orderly distributes cups of coffee to the officers.

A hundred miles away, a private huddles in his foxhole, trying to dig himself deeper into the mud, the air just inches above him is filled with flame, smoke, flying metal and loud noises. He’s just watched one of his comrades bleed to death.

So the question naturally arises. Who is fighting the real war? The general or the soldier? Actually, we already know the answer. They are both fighting the same war, they just see different pieces of it, and have different effects on the result. We could even say that one man experiences a part of it, the other the whole, but that each trades range and field of view for resolution. The general sees the big picture vaguely, the private experiences a tiny piece of it in exquisite detail.

The general sips on his coffee, thinks about his elder son at the front, and his younger son at the Academy, he wonders about his career, and what his adversary in a bunker a thousand miles away is thinking. The private, between artillery barrages, wonders how is wife is getting along at home, and whether he will be able to get his old job back when he is discharged. Are any of these worlds any more real than the other? Which is the more legitimate one, the more important one? Does it even make any sense to ask that question?

No, reality is composed of an infinite layering of distinct universes, all simultaneous and interconnected, parallel and nested, yet separated by the granularity of space-time, and the priority we choose to impose on them.

These are not simulations, or dream-worlds, or fantasies, they are all equally valid interwoven timelines we all exist in. Many of them are unknown to the participants, the chemistry and mineralogy of the mud the soldier huddles in, the political and economic factors that led the politicians to send that army to war, why it is starting to snow on the battlefield now, why the shell that might have killed our soldier had a malfunctioning fuse that spared his life.

These realities are real, and the participants must deal with them, often as if none of the others mattered, or even existed. We deal with the world we perceive, not the universe as it is. That universe is real, but the perception is totally subjective. We prioritize, and we analogize, and sometimes we even make things up. We create mental models of that reality, based on how we interpret the raw data flowing through our senses, and how our reason and experience tries to fit it into those models. The world is real, but we do not live in it, we live in our own mental world, that is the one we analyze and interact with.

The world is real, but a dream is not. But we don’t know whether we are in a dream or not, and when you think about it, we all exist in a dream because we only are aware of so little of that reality around us, and we must perform and respond as if that bit were all of it. We are constantly in a state of simultaneous information glut and deficit, we have to ignore what doesn’t matter, and carefully study that which does, and most of the time we can’t tell which is which.

That’s why it doesn’t matter whether we are a breast man or a leg man, but it does matter that we know why we are one or the other. It makes all the difference in the world.

Do you still follow me? We’ll talk more about this tomorrow,