Projects

»Wirklichkeitsdatenbank«

May 2020



Flat - Round, Left - Right, Liberal - Conservative, Believer - Atheist, Rational - Irrational. Some say, there is the world conspiracy. The others say, all fantasies, it does not exist. Conspiracy or not, the world must be saved, that is a fact, say some. No problem, science will save us, say the others. Science has its limits and has created more problems than it has solved, change must come from us, retort some. Exactly, Jesus loves and will save you as long as you believe, preach the others. How can Jesus save us if we are Islamized by foreigners, some shout. All nonsense, don't stress, it's too late anyway, live who can, say the others. For every predicate there is a negation - so there is also one for every personal opinion, for every opinion and for every world view. Assuming that one's own reality also consists of one's opinion, one's personal attitude and one's own view of the world, we have to admit that with nearly eight billion individuals there can certainly be more than one reality.

We humans classify, archive, give names, try almost like by an obsessive-compulsive disorder to interpret an apparent order into the world, in which possibly there is none. Every living being, every thing, even things that are not things, are assigned acoustic and graphic identifiers, the main thing being that one could point at them and proudly make sounds. With all these designated things, which are mostly of linguistic nature, the human being is so convinced to perceive the real one reality. There may be doubts whether the thing that is designated in the everyday life is an X or a Y. It may also happen that we are not aware of it. It may also happen that we say X and others object in the opposite way by saying Y. A single perceived reality, which is of course one's own, has to remain consistent in itself, but contradictory identifiers or relations are anything but consistent. The only possibility to create consistency in these cases, to bring reality in order, is to adjust one's own opinion or to reject the other. In the latter case, also called difference of opinion, conflict is often pre-programmed, if only by holding a small grudge against the other individual. It may also happen more rarely that the signified is neither X nor Y nor any other known signifier, in these cases the human compulsive neurosis of wanting to give a name to everything, both material and non-material, comes to full effect. With radiant joy of discovery, a combination of sounds is tried out and assigned to the (un)thing, often in the hope that other individuals will adopt these sounds. However, what may also not be next to several realities is that things could remain nameless and thus cannot be put into a linguistic order.

reality databse image But haven't we just admitted to ourselves that there are potentially eight billion realities, which are still to be named, mind you? Why not classify these, archive them, bring them into an order with each other and thereby recognize that one's own reality is one of many, no more or less important, that most realities are possibly unique and moreover, through the process of classifying, at the same time let one's obsessive neurosis live out more? Instead of compulsively putting one's reality in order, why not put one's reality, one's reality, in order?

This is precisely where the reality database project comes in, joining all the other countless databases, from gene databases to product databases. This digital database, which can be accessed via the Internet, allows each individual to classify his or her reality, archive it and put it in order with other realities. For the classification process semantic maps are used, for the ordering machine learning methods are used, which among other things cluster and calculate similarities between different semantic maps. This makes it possible to compare one's own reality with the reality of others, to recognize where there are compatible labels in order to find common topics of conversation, where there are labels with which one has differences of opinion, in order to enter into discourse there, or to find completely new topics and labels that expand one's own reality, which one would not otherwise have discovered oneself. Vaccination causes autism, the earth is flat, Corona is a lie? Clustering in this case would bring one's reality close to other similar realities and suggest new possible appropriate identifiers or themes for one's reality such as jet fuel can't melt steel beams or lizard people. Or maybe one is tired of one's own reality and wants a change, in which case one can find countless inspirations in the database. Or maybe you realize that you are not so unique after all, or more positively not alone, and that you largely overlap with millions of other realities.

By default anonymous, in order to contain the possible dystopian scenarios somewhat, the realities can also be stored with the personal identity for a good reason. Politicians could, for example, present their reality to the voters and the voters could start a direct comparison of which politician best represents their reality. The repeated redefinition of one's own reality over a period of decades is also possible; the ontogenesis of one's own reality would thus be traceable. To the own childhood photos perhaps one day childhood realities would gel. The phylogenetic change over decades or hundreds of realities could be analyzed more easily by historians in the future and anthropologists and ethnologists would have a new tool with which they could analyze entire cultures today.

The reality database is financed by donations and managed by a non-governmental organization. In the event of government intervention, the project is to be deleted immediately, as the risk of the project falling into the wrong hands and being misused for dystopian scenarios is too great.