“Take the example of being at a party in an open room where everyone is standing. In theory, you could talk to anyone—it’s not like there are any physical barriers limiting your movement toward any of the others, any overt rules limiting who you might be able to chat with. That’s why you go to parties, right? To meet people! But what feels like an omnidirectional, unconstrained range of motion in the space of that room is mostly a simulation of autonomy—the relevant barriers just happen to be internal to your brain (or the brains of others). Even when you’re the one making the choices, unconscious behavioral patterns and cognitive biases guide you into a self-selection process where you converge on the same relatively narrow set of possible experiences. Now multiply this general principle by everything you could ever say or do, and you arrive at the satellite view of the metastructure I described above. Your consciousness is an individual bubble being pulled along the summed path of these vectorized forces, a beach ball taking a trip down a plastic waterslide. This is why it’s so hard for us to understand each other. The natural assumption that everyone makes—an assumption sufficiently automatic so as to be invisible—is something like I am the one living in base reality, and everyone else is here with me too.”