About this Project

Before I continue with this blog (and my thanks to those of you who have given it your attention), I want to first stop and make a couple statements about my intentions.

What is the purpose of this model?

Human beings are creatures whose minds are constantly working to structure and organize their perception of the world around them. This has immense benefits when we are successfully able to organize our vision of the world into a model of reality that is useful (as in scientific theories, for example). But this also a significant problem for us when we are unsuccessful in our ability to organize our own perceptions.

There exist many cultural patterns throughout the course of human history which demonstrate that we, as a species, often feel a deep conflict between rationality and irrationality. It is usually seen as a conflict between logic and emotions. I believe this is a false dichotomy. The conflict that exists within us is not between rational vs irrational, but simply between what we understand and what we don't yet understand.

Humans perceive emotions as irrational because in the context of the objective world, emotions don't make any sense. They don't follow the laws of physics, and they certainly don't seem to follow the laws of logic. In other words, they don't conform to any model of reality that we yet possess. Thus, my goal here is to create a model of reality in which our mysterious, maddening, convoluted, complex emotions - and the rest of our inner world as well - make logical sense.

I want to add here that this model, like any other model, is not necessarily about defining reality, but describing it. We don't use models to tell us what things are. Instead, we use them to tell us how things work. For example, the illustrative ball-and-stick model that you remember from high school Chemistry class is not in any way descriptive of what chemical reactions actually look like in real life - but it is exceptionally useful for describing chemical reactions in a way that human beings can easily conceptualize.

What I want to convey here then is not a belief system or even a scientific hypothesis. I want to create a functional model that describes how reality works, in a way that is useful to us – and to do that accurately, it must fit any and all data points that exist within reality.

This is obviously an ambitious goal, and I suspect that I cannot do it entirely alone.  If you find any logical holes in my ideas, or data points that don’t align with my model, or if you come up with a better model piece that fits the data more elegantly, please let me know! Ideally, I would like to head this as a community project rather than just a personal one. I am also always interested in discussing these concepts, and learning about others’ experiences of reality, so if you have any interest in contacting me, please leave a comment or email me at aethereal@gmail.com

Thank you for reading, and I look forward to continuing this journey with you.

-Marisha