## On Generative Unreality and the Return of Miracles Perception isn't a window into the world - it's something closer to a continuous bet. Your brain runs a predictive model, checking it against sensory data that can vary from high-precision (touching a hot stove) to low-fidelity (glimpsing a shadow over a foggy lake). The ratio is a dynamic negotiation, and it is never fixed. Expectation shapes what you see more than we'd like to admit. Those expectations are trained on direct experience, of course - but they are also trained on simulated experience. When you watch television, your nervous system hardly knows the difference. It's still pattern-matching, still building expectation, still updating its priors about how the world works. Your proprioceptive system learns from Sci-Fi movies and your sense of social reality is scaffolded by sitcoms. This has always been true, but the bandwidth was limited. Enter: Virtual Reality. Three-dimensional worlds that feel almost as real as this one. I've spent enough time in VRChat that my expectation has become trained on it. What does this look like? Every so often, I get the impulse to teleport across a room. My nervous system has been trained on physics that don't technically "exist" (whatever that means). You probably have your own version of this. Trying to "ctrl-z" a real-world mistake, or react with an emoji to something someone said out loud. The line between digital and physical muscle memory is already dissolving. Enter Video Models (really, World Models) and their descendants. We're flooding the visual field with content that doesn't follow the laws of physics. And unlike movies, these aren't carefully crafted narratives with consistent internal logic. Simulations of your own body flying through the air, Joe Biden throwing fireballs, your friend turning into your cat. The surreal is being personalized and democratized simultaneously. As people consume more generated content, and the worlds they see through their screens become increasingly untethered from physical law, their predictive models are going to drift. The guardrails will loosen. Their perceptual systems will become trained on realities that don't match this one. I predict we're heading toward a state where people's proprioceptive and sensory experiences of the world will become genuinely stranger. The brain's Bayesian priors are being updated by a dataset that's increasingly surreal. Your expectation of what's possible shapes what you perceive, and we're about to collectively expect the impossible. This will actually manifest as observable phenomena in consensus reality. Reality has always been more collaborative than we admit. Consensus reality is held together by collective expectation. We trust the scientific method, empiricism, repeatability, and so the world behaves accordingly. But once ground truth becomes contested, once everyone's perceptual training data is contaminated by generative chaos, the consensual scaffolding loosens. You won't be able to trust video evidence anymore. You already can't, really. And once "seeing is believing" breaks down completely, something strange happens to the category of the Real. If someone performs what they claim is a miracle on the corner of Fourth and Fifth, and you can't verify it through any technological means, and everyone's perceptual systems have been trained on content where miracles are commonplace... what stops you from seeing it? When I've mentioned these predictions to friends, they worry we're headed for collective psychosis. They're right to see the danger. The same loosening of perceptual guardrails that lets in miracles also lets in propaganda. It makes memory as malleable as generated video and conspiracy look like obvious truth. The question isn't whether we'll become psychotic, but whether we can cultivate disciplined permeability: the ability to hold multiple frames without losing the capacity to check them against consequences. The re-enchantment I want isn't a free-for-all; it's epistemic humility sharpened into a tool. The empirical scientific mindset has been load-bearing for consensus reality, but it's also been poisonous to meaning-making and exhausting to the parts of the human experience that don't submit to measurement. We need the numinous. We need miracles. The same permeability that dissolves our grip on reality also admits the miraculous. There's a kind of perceptual flexibility, a hallucinatory openness, that we've systematically eradicated from the modern psyche. Generative AI is going to give it back. It's not that empiricism is wrong or useless, it's that we let it colonize every part of our lives. When you're out in the woods and you see something you can't explain, maybe it's not a bad thing to believe you witnessed a miracle. Maybe the distinction between "seeing through the veil" and "productive hallucination" isn't one we should be making anymore. Maybe it never was. I think people are suffering from a crisis of disenchantment. The solution is to let the world get weird again. To let perception become permeable. To acknowledge that reality has always been collaborative, and that the Age of Empiricism was just one particularly rigid consensus. The world is about to get stranger. After five hundred years of pretending reality was something we could lock down, we're about to learn - whether we want to or not - that we never could.