Comment by AIorNot
13 hours ago
Let me introduce you to Idealism
And more specifically Analytic Idealism
https://youtu.be/P-rXm7Uk9Ys?si=q7Kefl7PbYfGiChZ
Google DeepMind’s Project Genie is being framed as a “world model.” Given a text prompt, it generates a coherent, navigable, photorealistic world in real time. An agent can move through it, act within it, and the world responds consistently. Past interactions are remembered. Physics holds. Cause and effect persist.
From a technical standpoint, this is impressive engineering. From a philosophical standpoint, it’s an unexpectedly clean metaphor.
In analytic idealism, the claim is not that the physical world is fake or arbitrary. The claim is that what we call the “physical world” is how reality appears from a particular perspective. Experience is primary. The world is structured appearance.
Genie makes this intuitive.
There is no “world” inside Genie in the classical sense. There is no pre-existing ocean, mountain, fox, or library. There is a generative substrate that produces a coherent environment only when a perspective is instantiated. The world exists as something navigable because there is a point of view moving through it.
Change the character, and the same environment becomes a different lived reality. Change the prompt, and an entirely different universe appears. The underlying system remains, but the experienced world is perspective-dependent.
This mirrors a core idealist intuition: reality is not a collection of objects waiting to be perceived. It is a structured field of possible experiences, disclosed through perspectives.
The interesting part is not that Genie “creates worlds.” It’s that the worlds only exist as worlds for an agent. Without a perspective, there is no up, down, motion, danger, beauty, or meaning. Just latent structure.
Seen this way, Genie is not a model of consciousness. It’s a model of how worlds arise from viewpoints.
If you replace “agent” with “local mind,” and “world model” with “cosmic mental process,” the analogy becomes hard to ignore. A universal consciousness need not experience everything at once. It can explore itself through constrained perspectives, each generating a coherent, law-bound world from the inside.
That doesn’t prove idealism. But it makes the idea less mystical and more concrete. We are already building systems where worlds are not fundamental, but perspectival.
And that alone is worth sitting with.
It's pretty clear you used an LLM to write that, given your post history. I'm not sure that's allowed here, but at least put a disclaimer.
Yes I used an LLM - to post my thoughts from my phone as typing that down and spell checking/grammar cleanup is hell on mobile -
- but does it mean I don’t believe all the words written above are valid? No absolutely not.
I reviewed and copyedited what I posted and the meaning is exactly what I intended to post so I’m not sure what’s the issue here
If we use LLMs to expound on our own thoughts is it a crime? They are literal masters of wordplay and rote clarification on complex topics so I think this is a very legitimate use-case for them, since I was going for clarity as an objective- esp considering the topic
Also none of my previous posts were LLM written (including this one)
People are a little over-sensitive on this topic these days
Consciousness and perspective are temporally stable fixed points in the universe. You come to understand yourself as "you" or "I" because it's the only thing in the world around you that does not immediately change under many transformations.
For example, you can spin around, or change position, or close your eyes, and you're still you. As you navigate and interact with the evolving universe, the only continual, relatively unchanging part of the experience is what your brain uses to differentiate itself from the rest of your perceptions.