If you haven't read the previous articles "Reality Tunnels" and "Blind Spots" yet, I recommend starting with them, as this article continues the thoughts started there in an attempt to understand how really deep the rabbit hole is.
We have already discussed that our perception of the world around us is limited by the methodological space of the reality-tunnel and that there are “holes” in this tunnel - Blind spots, places that we can walk past every day, but never find ourselves in, not even noticing that they exist. We also found that we can find them statistically by visiting many random points on the map. However, how far will such Blind Spots be from our reality tunnel — how much can their contents surprise us and change our worldview? The answer to this question also lies in the field of statistics.
In methodological space all things tend to cluster with each other by similarity. Since the reality tunnel consists of patterns of our behavior, then for people who are similar to each other, such tunnels will more often intersect in places where their patterns match, and therefore, in general, be closer to each other. For example, such people, due to common habits, visit the same places at about the same time. For this reason, if you randomly walk out of your reality tunnel, you are most likely to end up in the tunnels of people like you, whose lifestyle differs from yours in only a few details. Of course, you can also get into the tunnel of someone very different from you, but the probability of this will be noticeably lower, since there are much fewer places where their tunnels pass close to yours.
In statistics, this probability is described by a quantity called Standard Deviation. We will not consider its mathematical definition in detail and will only say that you can deviate from your reality tunnel only within certain limits, and the larger this deviation is, the lower its probability to happen — you will have to try many more random points. And this means that if we want to go far beyond the reality-tunnel and find such Blind spots that no one has ever seen, we will need something more than just random coordinates on the map.
The most obvious way to expand the variance margins is to randomize more patterns. In Randonautica, it is customary to single out three areas of patterns: space, time, and attention. Spatial patterns influence where you can find yourself, temporal patterns affect when you can find yourself in them and, accordingly, what events you can catch there. Attention patterns determine what things you pay attention to and what you don't, and therefore how you see the world around you. If you accidentally notice some new thing that you previously ignored, you will notice it more and more often, and your view of the world will change.
Everything is clear with space, we turn off its patterns by visiting random points on the map. Attention is a bit more complicated, but we have already dealt with it too, because when we go on a trip, we expect to find something unusual and begin to look more closely at the little things around us, noticing more than usual. The only thing randonauts haven't worked with yet is time. Temporal patterns are the strongest and the hardest to overcome. It is easy to go to a random place, but it is difficult to choose an inconvenient time for this — most likely you are venturing out after work hours, during the day, or on weekends. But by the definition of blind spots, everything that you usually don’t see happens exactly when you are not there, that is, at the most inconvenient times for walking.
For this reason, it is recommended if possible to use a randomizer to select a random time, setting its boundaries for the whole week, so that you do not control which day the trip occurs, nor what time of day it occurs. Then the chance to catch some uncharacteristic events increases significantly. Working with all three space-time-attention vectors should maximize the potential of randonauting for you. By combining these three components of randomness, you will see how much larger and more complex the world around you is than you are used to seeing.
If for a novice randonaut the discovery is the very fact that there are spaces around them hidden from view, then an advanced randonaut who has mastered all the vectors of randomization can realize the complexity and multidimensionality of the space, events and information around. Having mastered this knowledge, you can begin to travel through the reality-tunnels in search of the beyond. But even this approach will not allow you to quickly find something that lies completely beyond the bounds of human knowledge.
To solve such a problem as going beyond the limits of human experience, the collaborative work of the entire randonauts community will be required. The fact is that each person exists in their own reality tunnel, which means that by visiting random points, another randonaut can find something that will be close to his reality tunnel, but far enough from yours. Usually, the further something is from our methodological space, the more strange and unusual it seems to us.
Conversely, what is closer to our reality tunnel seems to be more familiar. And this is logical, because the familiar is exactly what we see all the time, and everything that we have not seen before seems unusual. Therefore, if you look at the reports of many people in the Discover feed and choose the strangest of them, you can go much further, because several reality tunnels will have a greater spread of deviations than a single one.
At the same time, the effect will be stronger if you have the opportunity to personally visit these anomalies or study them closely. The fact is that if you regularly visit and explore the strangest of these places, they become part of your life and your reality-tunnel shifts to the edge of the collective tunnel, and your life becomes full of oddities on the verge of understanding. Being on the edge, your reality tunnel becomes a "liminal" tunnel and by continuing to visit random points, you have a fairly high chance of ending up in an area where things lie that no one has seen at all.
To do this, a "closest to me" filter was added to the Randonautica Discover feed. With it, you can see which places people near you have visited, choose the strangest ones and visit them regularly, doing research and delving into the nature of the strange. So you will create your own "liminal" reality tunnel consisting of oddities, which means that it lies on the border of the known. By uniting in research groups that study closely located anomalies, inventing their own theories and methods for their study, one can gradually shift the liminal reality-tunnel into an increasingly strange area and "dig a mine" to the deepest layers of the Blind Spots and to the wonderland itself.
And if we sum all the reality tunnels of all people on the planet, then they will intertwine into one big reality-tunnel of humanity and everything that anyone has ever seen will be in it. What lies beyond it will be unknown to anyone at all and will be beyond our knowledge. However, in order to go beyond it, we would have to travel around the world and regularly visit all the strangest places that anyone has found by randonauting. We hope that someday this will be possible.
However, even a small group of randonauts, or even one very advanced randonaut, can technically get to the edge of the collective humanity reality tunnel. It will just take longer and require more trips.
All you have to do is master the maximum number of randomization vectors and look for the weirdest things. Having found them, you need to study them, it’s not enough just to see something strange, you need to explore and understand it, acquire new knowledge that will change you. Then, moving towards more and more strange things, you will one day find the line beyond which the inexplicable begins.