"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." ―Franklin D. Roosevelt


I had been thinking about Wade Watts in Ready Player One and how he approached the OASIS metaverse as a rogue or singular player. Watts was adamant in the beginning of his journey for Halliday's Easter Egg in saying he did not "clan," meaning he played alone and followed his own path. It wasn't until Watts encountered IOI's pervasive control that he realized the strength of multiple minds and joined with friends in their united quest.
​
In Ready Player Two, author Ernest Cline takes this theme a bit further with the character of Samantha who will not use the first operational ONI (OASIS Neural Interface) headset to access the metaverse, partially due to the possibility of death by Synoptic Overload Syndrome when the device is used for more than 12 hours at a time. Samantha's stance is so strongly felt, that the romantic relationship between her and Watts (who embraced the ONI) is severed.
​

"Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth."  -Simone de Beauvoir

Absolute truths are hard to come by, which is the basic premise of ‘hyper-perspectivism’. Rather, truths are always in the eyes of the beholder, truths are always observer-relative, truths are “made” by a “truth-maker.” You can approach our multifaceted reality from an incredibly large number of angles. Everything is perspectival, in other words, it all depends on your perspective, your frame of reference. Since our informational world is of mental abstractive construction (as I make my case in the present book), it’s always up to you to decide what’s real to you – everything you find real is indeed real to you, not necessarily real to others who are at the same time, for a lack of a better word, your past and future incarnations. We all are different points of view on oneself, within our own holographic self-reflection. We all are like droplets on the cobweb of reality reflecting one another. That said, like any other ideology or methodology, science is not always to be taken for absolute truth – it’s a collection of systematized up-to-date knowledge with provisional models of reality. 

​“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”  -Albert Einstein
 
As a little kid I remember hearing from my father all kinds of stories sort of like this one: A father wanted to test the intelligence of his two sons. He assigned to each of them the task of looking after a cherry tree, and promised to reward the boy whose tree would yield the best berry when harvested.