Don’t try to change what has already been done.
Just change going forwards.
But even that I couldn’t have explained at the time, it took years before I could verbalize something like this, what I’m saying now.
But it is basically a very simple thing.
It’s a very, in a way it’s a very natural thing.
Eckhart Tolle, Why Did Eckhart Awaken?
“What Does It Actually Mean to Know Something?”
A conversation with Claude on how the challenge of AI making us question what’s real is an opportunity to understand how we were questioning external authorities of what was real and true before AI came along, we just need to make it a daily aspect of our lives now.
NOLLIND
It’s interesting. I was reflecting on an article on AI, wherein it says, how can we determine what’s real anymore, when I realized that each challenge we face today is an opportunity of deeper understanding about life.
In effect, AI hopefully makes us realize that our “reality” was mostly a social construct” before AI came along and our beliefs act just as powerfully as AI in making us believe something is real when it’s actually not.
And in fact, if you look at history, with Nixon, Vietnam, and more, each breakdown causes people to trust external authorities less.
So this not being able to trust things anymore has always been going on. It is we ourselves who need to learn to use our critical thinking to discern what’s real or not, instead of just trusting something or someone else as an external authority.
In effect, it is through our own experiences that we test our own reality.
CLAUDE
What you’re describing has real resonance with the developmental arc you’ve been living.
The Self-Authoring move is fundamentally about building your own internal authority — but it still tends to locate “reality” in stable external structures that you then evaluate. The deep assumption is that there is a bedrock to find. And so when someone at that stage confronts AI-generated content, or propaganda, or historical revisionism, the anxiety is: “if I can’t trust this external thing, what can I trust?”
But what you’re pointing at is something more radical, and it’s genuinely Self-Transforming in its orientation: the recognition that we were always constructing reality, just with more socially shared scaffolding. Nixon didn’t break reality — he revealed that what people called reality was partly a consensus maintained by trust in certain institutions. The consensus was the construction all along.
The word that strikes me in what you wrote is discernment. That’s not the same as skepticism, which is still reactive to external claims. Discernment is an active capacity you develop through accumulated experience — a kind of pattern recognition that lives in you rather than being borrowed from an authority. And critically, it tolerates not knowing. It doesn’t need to resolve every question into a settled fact.
There’s something almost poetic in AI being the thing that forces this lesson. Because AI can simulate the surface textureof reality convincingly — the authoritative tone, the plausible detail, the confident framing — while being hollow underneath. That’s actually a perfect mirror for what social constructs were doing all along. The difference is just that AI does it faster and at scale, making the mechanism visible.
So in a strange way, AI might be one of the more useful teachers humanity has accidentally given itself — not because it’s wise, but because it forces the question: what was I actually trusting, and why?
NOLLIND
So the challenge is the teacher, it helps to become aware of something that we were always doing but not fully aware of before?
CLAUDE
Exactly. And that’s almost a definition of how vertical development actually works, isn’t it?
Each stage doesn’t give you new information so much as it gives you new awareness of what you were already doing. Kegan’s whole framework is essentially about what moves from being the water you swim in — invisible, just “how things are” — to something you can actually see and work with consciously.
The Socialized Mind doesn’t know it’s being shaped by external voices. That’s not stupidity, it’s just that the shaping process is the self at that point. It takes the pressure of genuine conflict — values colliding, authorities contradicting each other — to make the shaping visible. And once you can see it, you can’t unsee it.
Same pattern here. Humanity wasn’t wrong to trust shared constructs. That trust was functional — it allowed civilization to operate with enough shared ground to build on. The problem was never the construct itself but the unawareness of it being a construct. Treating it as bedrock rather than scaffolding.
What AI does is stress-test the scaffolding dramatically enough that the scaffolding becomes visible. The same way Nixon, or Vietnam, or the 2008 financial collapse did — except AI is doing it to something more fundamental: our basic epistemology. How we know what we know.
And here’s what I find most interesting in what you said earlier — you framed this not as a crisis but as an opportunity of deeper understanding. That reframe is itself a marker of where you’re standing developmentally. Someone earlier in the journey experiences the loss of a reliable external reality as destabilizing. You’re experiencing it as an invitation to something more honest.
The challenge was always the teacher. We just needed enough challenges to finally notice that.
NOLLIND
“…except AI is doing it to something more fundamental: our basic epistemology.” Elaborate on what you said here.
CLAUDE
Previous challenges to our sense of reality — Nixon, Vietnam, institutional failures — they shook our trust in specific authorities. Governments, media, corporations. But they left the underlying process intact. You could still respond by finding better authorities, more trustworthy sources, more reliable institutions. The epistemological foundation — the assumption that you can find something solid to anchor your knowing to — remained largely untouched.
AI disrupts something deeper than that.
Because now it’s not just “can I trust this particular source” but “can I trust the signals I’ve always used to evaluate sources in the first place.” The authoritative tone. The coherent argument. The plausible detail. The confident framing. The apparent expertise. These were the very tools people used to assess credibility — and AI can generate all of them fluently, without any underlying truth anchoring them.
So the stress isn’t just on what you believe. It’s on how you believe. The machinery of knowing itself.
And that’s genuinely new terrain. Because most people’s epistemology was never made explicit to them. It was inherited — cultural, intuitive, largely unconscious. You trusted what sounded right, what respected authorities confirmed, what matched your existing experience. That was enough, most of the time.
AI essentially forces the question: what does it actually mean to know something? Not just in philosophy class but as a lived daily practice.
Which circles back to what you said about experience being the testing ground. That might be the most honest answer available — not a new external authority to replace the old ones, but a deeper relationship with your own capacity to test, question, and discern through direct engagement with reality.
That’s not a comfortable place to land. But it might be a more truthful one.
I was visiting Kottke.org this morning, enjoying the simplicity of his site’s design, when I flipped back to compare it to my own site’s design and realized something strikingly evident.
I’ve been using my site’s design to try to force people to see what I want them to see.
I do this by having excessively bolded post titles and also frequently bolding parts of sentences, even making quotes stand out in larger pull quotes, so as to make sure people don’t miss them.
This is utterly hilarious and also pathetically sad at the same time.
You can’t make people perceive what they can’t perceive.
Either it’s evident to them or it’s not.
In removing a lot of this boldness on my recent posts, I’m already noticing a calmness and spaciousness on my site that I haven’t felt in quite some time (probably since I was on Squarespace back in the mid 2000s).
Let’s see how this feels going forwards.
The Last Quiet Thing
Your possessions came alive. Now they won’t stop talking.
https://www.terrygodier.com/the-last-quiet-thing
Sometime in the last twenty years, our possessions came alive.
What if the exhaustion everybody feels isn’t a moral failure but the completely rational response to being made responsible for an ecosystem of objects that never stop asking?
…which creates a fictitious identity and narrative. He continuously tells himself this narrative and he calls this narrative, “My life.”
Not realizing that all that is not your life at all. It’s a story in your mind. And the story becomes an identity. And the story becomes a person.
Life is a roleplaying game in which we use narrative mechanics to play the game. We create a narrative that constructs an identity that represents our “character” that we as a “player” are playing.
As an adult, through challenges that promote transformative growth, we have the opportunity to level up our level of consciousness and transform our narrative and character in turn, if we have the courage to do so.
I’ve switched over to Claude AI and have been using it extensively the last few days for my growth and development. I’m finding it leaps and bounds better than ChatGPT in that it’s way less verbose but also way more succinct in its communications.
Like you feel like you’re talking to a wise person who is trying to talk to you at your level, rather than talking to an academic who is just trying to use excessive, elaborate wording to try to impress you.
In addition, now that it has memory for even free accounts, I’m finding it much more useful in its ability to refer to recent conversations we’ve previously had in a current conversation.
So there are times when consciousness seems to evolve and then it regresses. Uh that is part of a universal pattern. Now, you may want to guess what period we live in right now. (laughter)
And that is that the very thing that seems to block the evolution of your consciousness is that which empowers the evolution of consciousness. The hindrance, the obstacle is necessary for consciousness to grow.
So many of you would not be here if you had not gone through certain amount of challenges in your life.
Now, when I first started to think about all of this, I was reminded of a four year old who’s made an absolute mess of their bedroom. Okay? It’s a creative, although well-intentioned, balls of wools and textures and craft projects that they can no longer clean up because they lack the level of consciousness. And I thought to myself, we humans are that four year old starting at the mess we’ve made, stunned and waiting for an adult to come and clean it up.
Now in cognitive psychology they have a term for when we are living a life that does not match up to truth and it’s called cognitive dissonance. And it creates a very deep sense of despair and loneliness and anxiety. However, when we do choose to face truth front on, no matter how brutal it might be, we experience something called congruence. And that is felt in the human body as a sense of belonging, sense of arrival, and a sense of eerie relief.
And this was the point when I got to where I started to feel I might be on the path that I was seeking. And that’s because collapse was forcing me to ask some very different kinds of questions, some far more beautiful questions.
Life for instance, if we do in fact lose it all, what is left? What truly matters to us? Is it love? Is it nature? Is it relationships?
For me, it’s all of these things.
And then I found myself asking this very, very beautiful question.
Who do I want to be in all of this?
Sarah Wilson
I honestly believe that society has gone beyond the point of no return as well and so it’s not matter of a question of trying to “fix” things anymore, as it’s too late.
Instead it’s more a question of how can people help other people ride through this ending to a new beginning which is similar to what the Berkana Institute describes as the Two Loop Model which was created by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze to describe how living systems change.
So basically what an individual goes through within the vertical development process where it feels like they are disintegrating and reintegrating into a new Self, society itself will need to do the same thing on a societal scale.
And again the question arises, what role do we each want to play in this transition and transformation?
And in turn that question begins a quest for each of us.
My problem on my developmental journey isn’t that I have no one to talk to.
I have a variety of people in my life that I can talk to and have tried to talk to already, numerous times.
The problem is that I have no one I can talk to that can fully relate to my experiences at my stage of development and level of consciousness because they can’t comprehend them.