Consiliensus. Virtual-social consensus standard of evidence relying on the convergence of multiple, independent sources. Personal consilience outmoded by deepfakery.

— Zygote Glossary (2016)

The Wired consuming the Real [1] occurs in conjunction with post-media truth formation [2] due to the advent of accessible deepfake-grade tooling [3]. Belief must be formed through network consensus verified in the conspiracy mode of consilience [4]—consiliensus reality [5].

1. The phenomenon described (prophecized/hyperstitionalized) in Serial Experiments: Lain whereby digital reality takes prominence over ‘IRL reality’ leading to virtual events manifesting real ones; see [5]

2. Media records—writing, photographs, video—have long held status as reliable for historical verification however we are quickly entering an age where records can be easily faked, casting doubt on our grounding of history. Orwell famously explored this in “1984” from the perspective of State manipulation, but we see it occuring as a decentralized symptom of advancing technology [6]

3. Early publicly released GAN platforms have demonstrated ability for ML/AI to reliably and efficiently generate highly plausibly media. Deepfakes pass the “media turing test” of plausibility.

4. The consilience approach relies on a concordance of evidence to find reliable truth necessary when individual data points cannot be verified in isolation, but their validity can be made more certain by the number of confirming points. Conspiracy research, hinged on the principle that evidence is being covered up, follows this mode—“proving” a fire by identifying many points of smoke until it appears more likely to be true than not true. Note that degrees of “likely” is best truth we can receive in this mode, never certainty.

5. Belief is reality, “reality” as perceived by the individual is a personal perception of consensus perception; what is believed by the individual is expressed through them as personal reality, influence on consensus—collective belief in something makes it effectively real.

6. Technology has a teleology; its advancements follow natural law, each new result an inevitability, rapidly distributed & decentralized. Only counter-thesis to counter this undeterring march relies on the destruction of human consciousness itself, we can talk about that later.