Let me give you something practical as an example. I am going to assume that you are sighted for this, so correct me if I’m wrong. We know that where the optic nerve connects to the retina, there are no sensory nerves. This is the “blind spot,” as they call it. Yet you do not observe this blind spot, nor, in your memories, is there a big black smudge in the middle of them. Here is proof positive that the Universe of our perception is inconsistent, for we can actually do simple experiments to show objects popping in and out of existence as we move them in and out of our blind spot.
As I bring your attention to it now, you will be able to see your nose. However, if you think back to, say, the events of yesterday, your nose is not present in your memories. In fact, I think you will find that most of your memories consist of seeing yourself in the third person, a view you could not possibly have obtained through your eyeballs.
Yet it is these memories and these perceptions which we refer to as reality, and it is here that we exist. I don’t know about your parents, but mine were naive materialists. When I first discovered Plato and tried explaining to them the difference between the Ideal and our perceptions, they mocked me and forked food off my plate, saying, “If you don’t exist, then you won’t mind if we eat your dinner, haw haw haw.”
Ah, but the question is, until we established the “fact” (in the Kantian sense of meaning “so many people agree, that we consider this to be accurate, even though it is not a metaphysical truth”) that, for example, the world was roung – was it? The probability wave representing a flat Earth and a round Earth did not collapse until we had some way of testing the system. And since not everyone accepts the Copenhagen interpretation, there is every possibility that the Earth may, indeed, still be flat; it is highly unlikely, but since the wave never collapses into a single Eigenstate, it always remains a possibility. And the Universe itself, being simply an overlapping series of probability waves in constant flux, may one day simply… pop. Like a soap bubble. And, in fact, may already have done so, many times. The Everett-Wheeler model suggests this is happening constantly.
So as you go through life with your mores and knowledge softening and changing – is it really you that’s changing, or is it the Universe? And is there a difference? The Participatory Anthropic Model suggests there isn’t.