Social reality is quite literally another world, in the same sense that the Harry Potter universe is another world. Like the Harry Potter universe, social reality is a world portrayed primarily in text and in speech and in our imaginations. Like the Harry Potter universe, social reality doesn’t diverge completely from physical reality - they contain mostly the same cities, for instance. Like the Harry Potter universe, social reality matches physical reality “by default” wherever there's no particular pressure pushing against that match - after all, it's just easier to make up fewer details rather than more. But like the Harry Potter universe, social reality does diverge in many places, and then the “fandom” tries to make up as coherent an interpretation as they can. Indeed, it's that drive-toward-coherence which pushes both social reality and the Harry Potter universe to be fictional worlds, as opposed to just topics or genres about which people say lots of conflicting things.

And like the Harry Potter universe, sometimes people in the physical world do physical things as a result of goings-on in social reality.

What makes physical reality different from social reality or the Harry Potter universe or any other fictional world? [...]

---

First published:
November 26th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4TwtqcaifcJpi3Xfd/snippets-on-living-in-reality

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Snippets on Living In Reality

LessWrong (30+ Karma)