Abstraction

Look at the people around you and try to feel — not think — that they are the same one thing you are, taking different shapes. It's hard. The interface is doing exactly what it was built to do: making each person look completely separate from the next.

Life is Perfect's claim is that separateness is the costume, not the substance. There's one underlying thing, and it diversifies into infinite forms so it can experience itself from infinite angles at once. You aren't a piece broken off from the whole. You are the whole, locally rendered.

Hoffman's conscious-agent network puts a mathematical version of this in front of you. He models reality as a vast graph of interacting conscious agents whose joint dynamics generate every apparent ‘object’ — including bodies, including selves. The agents aren't separate things that happen to interact. They're nodes of one connected structure whose interaction is what creates the appearance of separation.

The practice from this: when you catch yourself certain that someone is fundamentally other than you, pause. Run the third-perspective shift not on your feeling but on your sense of separation. You don't have to feel oneness. You only have to notice that the certainty of separateness is itself an interface rendering — and quite possibly wrong.