The Conversation Project

1). Is What You Can See All that there is?
Material Views
-"What we experience is not what we sense. Rather, experience happens when our sensations are interrupted by our subjective brain, which in the moment brings a library of personal memories and idiosyncratic desires", from ‘Proust was a Neuroscientist’. Each of us constructs our own reality.
- At the end of your days, what your life was will be summed up to what you paid attention to.
-”You cannot fact check someone out of their feelings”, David French. Apparently we all stick with our views of reality.
-“The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion”, Einstein wrote in a letter in 1955.-“Nothing happens until something moves. When something vibrates, the electrons of the entire universe resonate with it. Everything is connected. ...” Albert Einstein.
-The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference, Richard Dawkins, “River Out of Eden,” 1995. This suggests that the spiritual realm is at best a comforting balm.
-There does seem to be a sense in which physics has gone beyond what human intuition can understand. We shouldn't be too surprised about that because we're evolved to understand things that move at a medium pace at a medium scale. We can't cope with the very tiny scale of quantum physics or the very large scale of relativity.
-“Reality is frequently inaccurate,” Douglas Adams
Non-Material Views
-There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Hamlet has been told by the night watch that the ghost of his father has appeared to them.
- In addition to the various sensory and abstract contents of consciousness, consciousness provides access to an awareness (however dim) of what we can variously describe as supersensory, transcendental, or spiritual dimensions of reality. In the human form, there has emerged a consciousness through which there is the recognition that reality consists of Something More than the totality of the sensory realm of matter, energy, space, and time. Through human consciousness, we find an awareness of a spiritual or transcendent dimension that reveals the presence of meaning and value in the Cosmos.
-“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish it but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.” Albert Einstein
· Christianity: Reality is often viewed as the creation of God, with an emphasis on the importance of salvation through Jesus Christ. The material world is seen as temporary, with eternal life in heaven being the ultimate reality.
· Islam: In Islam, reality is defined by the will of Allah. The universe is a sign of Allah’s greatness, and the purpose of life is to submit to His will, with the afterlife as the ultimate reality.
· Hinduism: Reality is understood through the concept of Brahman, the ultimate reality, and Atman, the individual soul. Life is seen as a cycle of birth, death, and rebirth (samsara), influenced by karma.
· Buddhism: Reality is perceived as impermanent and interconnected. The focus is on understanding the nature of suffering and achieving enlightenment (nirvana), transcending the material world.
2). Consumption

Consider a growing group of shoppers who are fed up with a constant barrage of marketing in their social feeds and phone alerts. Low Buy 2025” or “No Buy 2025” and sharing the ways they are curbing their spending.
The zeal that is driving this trend is as much a pushback against the forces of a consumerist culture as it is about saving money, with scorn for corporate manipulation mixed in with tips for changing personal habits. In 2025, businesses are expected to spend nearly $103 billion in advertising on social media, a 175 percent increase since 2021.
People are also buying things on Instagram, Face book Marketplace and YouTube. According to a Bank rate survey released in September 2023, Americans spent $71 billion on impulse purchases on social media over the previous year — purchases that often ended in feelings of regret.
“Attentive”, which has more than 8,000 clients, including Crate & Barrel, Hoka and Supergoop, began using artificial intelligence that uses profiles of customers to create personalized messages for them.
Now the company can analyze micro moments of shoppers’ behavior, including the time of the day they usually browse or whether they zoom in on an image of a product on a retailer’s site if they leave the website without purchasing. “Attentive” can tailor a message to entice the shopper back to the site, tailoring messages through texts, ads or emails. The industry is expected to become a $786 billion business by next year.
Extent, effect and value of advertising on ourselves and society
Consider further: Product placement in video, Streaming ads, Movie theater ads, Billboards, Digital ads in our feeds, Digital ads in sporting venues (on the ice and boards in hockey) or on uniforms, Public service messages, Messaging in the content of books, movies, music...
An exacerbating factor is the nature of market economics itself, which requires continual long-term growth, increasingly driven by consumption, says Mark Hudson, University of Manitoba professor of sociology, who co-authored the 2021 book Consumption.“Consumers must buy stuff, and they have to keep buying stuff at an accelerating rate,” he says, adding economically, “if we’re not growing, we’re dying.”Western democracies increasingly moved toward a consumption-driven economy after the Second World War, when mass production techniques were shifted to consumer goods, he says. “The problem wasn’t scarcity,” Hudson says, it was potential over-abundance**. “How do we convince people to buy all the goods we can now produce?” Advertising became fundamental to the paradigm, positioning consumption as an expression of freedom.**
JOEL SCHLESINGER, Free Press March 28, '26.
Is there a less consumptive world model that could ever be a new norm? Is that a valuable goal or are we content with getting more consumer goods?
What A.I. will bring? Will there be any ad free places - night sky, wilderness...? Is there value in advertising? Are you fine with being the product when you get free services (Google search…)?