The Origins of Original Reality Theory
A story that began with a doubt
Original Reality Theory did not begin with a theory.
Nor did it begin with an attempt to explain the universe.
It began with a few people, some bags of trash, and a conclusion that seemed perfectly reasonable.
In April 2025, I was living in São Paulo with my wife. At that point, my life had very little to do with philosophy of mind, systems theory, or any attempt to develop a theory of reality.
I had been working in recreational diving for many years. The company started in Arraial do Cabo, in the state of Rio de Janeiro, and later opened two operations in Armação dos Búzios. I went to São Paulo to develop a new side of the business: finding customers in the city who would then travel to the coast of Rio de Janeiro state to dive.
That was what I was supposed to be doing.
Researching the market, developing the operation, getting the company back on its feet and expanding it.
We lived on Rua Frei Caneca, in the Consolação neighborhood, and almost every day I took our dog, Chico, for a walk in Praça Roosevelt.
The route was part of our routine.
At one point, we passed through a small square before continuing along the stairways and network of roads that led us to Roosevelt.
There were often people experiencing homelessness there.
And there was a lot of trash.
One day, I came across some of them opening bags and scattering the contents around the square.
It bothered me.
I would see the city authorities clean the area, and then see the trash scattered there again.
My conclusion was almost automatic:
“If they have rights, they should have responsibilities too.”
It seemed fair.
It seemed logical.
Above all, it seemed obvious.
I carried on walking with Chico.
But the sentence came with me.
Something did not add up
I do not know exactly why that conclusion kept bothering me.
Perhaps because the more I thought about it, the more I realized I had done something strange.
I had seen a few minutes of those people’s lives.
I did not know who they were.
I did not know where they came from.
I did not know how long they had been on the streets.
I did not know whether they had families, jobs, identity documents, substance dependence, health problems, or any real possibility of getting out of that situation.
I knew practically nothing.
Even so, my mind needed only a few seconds to produce an explanation.
They made a mess.
The city cleaned it up.
They had rights.
Therefore, they should fulfill their responsibilities.
Problem explained.
There was just one detail:
I did not understand the problem.
I began to imagine that same square from another position.
I would go home after the walk.
I would have somewhere to sleep.
I would have access to a bathroom.
Food.
Water.
Documents kept somewhere safe.
Clothes.
Privacy.
Enough security to make plans for the next day.
The person I was judging might have none of those things.
And then the first crack appeared in that apparently obvious conclusion:
was I judging that person’s behavior from their circumstances, or from mine?
I decided to do some research.
I did not yet know it, but that research would last much longer than I intended.
First, I looked for a solution
My initial question was quite practical.
Why were so many people living on the streets of one of Latin America’s richest cities?
And what was the city government doing to address it?
I started with public policy.
I found social assistance, shelters, healthcare, urban maintenance, public safety, employment programs, and housing policies.
I found new projects replacing old ones.
I found results.
I found failures.
I found criticism of the results.
I found criticism of the criticism.
And the more I researched, the more something strange happened.
The problem grew larger.
We normally expect information to reduce uncertainty.
In this case, every piece of information seemed to add another question.
I began by looking for an answer.
I found a system.
The same street through different eyes
That was when I began an exercise that would profoundly change the direction of the inquiry.
Instead of asking only who was right, I began trying to understand what each person saw when looking at that same situation.
I started with the person living on the street.
For them, the priority might be entirely immediate.
Where would they sleep that night?
What would they eat?
How could they get money?
Where could they keep their few belongings?
How would they cope with the cold?
How could they get the next dose, if they had a substance dependence?
How could they get through the next few hours?
The appearance of a public square might rank very low among those urgent needs.
Then I tried to look through the eyes of someone who lived in the neighborhood.
The perspective changed completely.
That person might have worked all day.
They paid taxes.
They came home to trash, bad smells, drug use, conflict, or a sense of insecurity near their own home.
They might have children.
They might be afraid to let them walk around alone.
They did not necessarily hate the people on the street.
They might simply want safety, cleanliness, and peace where they chose to live.
Then there was the shopkeeper.
The constant presence of people experiencing homelessness outside their business might put customers off.
For them, the social problem was becoming an economic problem too.
There were also the people working in support services.
Many were genuinely trying to help.
Some devoted their lives to those people.
Others, as in almost any human activity, also depended on that work to pay rent, feed their children, and sustain their own lives.
A structure created to address a social problem also creates jobs, contracts, organizations, administrative routines, careers, and budgets.
That does not mean the people working within it want the problem to continue.
It means something more uncomfortable:
when a problem persists long enough, it also becomes part of the economic and institutional structure built around it.
And then there was the politician.
At first, it was very easy to blame them.
Why did they not simply solve it?
Until I began trying to look from their position too.
What if the solution costs you the election?
During my research, I came across the approach known internationally as Housing First — or, in Portuguese, “Moradia Primeiro”.
The principle caught my attention precisely because it reverses a familiar logic.
Instead of requiring someone to first find a job, stop using drugs, put their life in order, stabilize their health, and demonstrate independence before deserving a home, the approach begins with housing.
A home is no longer the reward for rebuilding a life.
It becomes one of the conditions that can make rebuilding possible.
São Paulo had initiatives inspired by this approach within Programa Reencontro. The municipal program combines housing and ongoing support strategies for people experiencing homelessness.
The idea seemed to make sense.
Until I changed seats again.
I imagined the voter.
They worked for twenty or thirty years.
Got up early.
Took the bus.
Paid rent.
Perhaps studied at night.
Saved money.
Took on a mortgage spanning decades.
And then they hear:
“The government is going to give a house to someone living on the street.”
Their reaction might be:
“I had to work my whole life to get mine. And now they’re giving a free house to some freeloader?”
For now, it does not matter whether that conclusion is correct.
What matters is recognizing that it, too, has a history.
From that voter’s perspective, this is a question of merit and fairness.
Now return to the politician.
They may know the studies.
They may believe that providing housing is an effective way to reduce the number of people living on the streets.
They may understand that without an address, safety, a shower, adequate sleep, and some degree of stability, finding a job and rebuilding a life is extraordinarily difficult.
But they also know they need the votes of people who interpret that same policy as unfair.
Suddenly, what seemed simple became complicated again.
If they do not provide housing, they are accused of abandoning people on the streets.
If they do, they may be accused of rewarding people who have not worked for it.
Meanwhile, the local resident still wants a clean square.
The shopkeeper still wants customers.
The social worker is still trying to help.
The person on the street is still trying to survive.
And the problem is still there.
No one was looking at the same thing
This may have been one of the inquiry’s decisive moments.
I began by trying to figure out who was right.
But I began to realize that everyone was looking at the same phenomenon from different positions within it.
For the person experiencing homelessness, it was survival.
For the resident, safety and quality of life.
For the shopkeeper, it was survival too — but economic survival.
For someone working in support services, it was a social issue and, at the same time, their field of work.
For the politician, it was a social, administrative, and electoral problem.
For institutions within the justice system, it appeared in terms of rights, responsibilities, rules, and limits on their authority to act.
For criminal organizations exploiting that environment, vulnerable people could be viewed even more brutally: as consumers, intermediaries, or available resources within an illegal economy.
For someone voluntarily offering food or assistance, it might simply be another human being who needed help.
It was the same city.
The same sidewalk.
Sometimes, the same person lying on it.
But it was not the same problem for everyone.
And that was when I began to formulate an idea that would later become very important:
everyone was right from somewhere.
That sentence needs to be understood carefully.
It does not mean that every claim is true.
It does not mean that all actions are morally equivalent.
It does not mean that exploiting someone is as justifiable as helping them.
It means something else.
A perspective can become understandable when we reconstruct the circumstances from which it arose.
I did not have to agree with the voter who called someone a freeloader to understand how they reached that conclusion.
I did not have to agree with the politician to understand their incentives.
I did not have to justify a crime to understand the logic through which a criminal organization identified opportunities.
Understanding a perspective in causal terms does not mean accepting it morally.
But without understanding it, we may be unable to understand the system.
And then an even larger problem emerged
If each participant was responding to the circumstances they could perceive, where exactly was the fault?
I began by looking for someone to blame.
The city government?
The politicians?
The residents?
The voters?
The people on the streets?
The institutions?
The more I broadened my observation, the fewer simple answers survived.
It was possible for several people to make decisions that were perfectly understandable locally, while those decisions together produced an outcome almost no one wanted.
The resident did not want people living on the street.
The shopkeeper did not either.
Nor did the politician.
The social worker certainly did not.
In most cases, the person experiencing homelessness probably did not want to remain in that situation either.
And yet the situation persisted.
That was when my question changed.
I stopped asking only:
“Who is causing this?”
and began asking:
“What kind of system allows so many people to act understandably from their own perspectives and yet collectively produce a reality that almost none of them would choose?”
That question was no longer about people experiencing homelessness.
It was about human beings.
The square became too small
I began looking beyond São Paulo.
At the time, Brazil was experiencing intense political polarization.
Right and left no longer seemed to be merely political positions.
For many people, they became identities.
Families argued.
Parents and children broke off contact.
Couples fought.
Friendships ended.
One person watched a political event and saw unequivocal proof that they were right.
Another watched the same event and saw precisely the opposite.
And both asked themselves:
“How can anyone fail to see something so obvious?”
It felt familiar.
It was the square again.
Not the physical square.
The structure.
People in different positions observing the same phenomenon, carrying different histories, different interests, different fears, different information — and arriving at different representations of what they believed they were simply seeing.
Then I widened the scale even further.
History.
Religions.
Wars.
Nationalisms.
Slavery.
Colonization.
Territorial disputes.
Conflicts over resources.
Relations between rich and poor countries.
Ideologies.
Technologies changed.
Governments changed.
Borders changed.
Religions changed.
Justifications changed.
But certain structures of conflict seemed to reappear.
That was when I stopped believing, once and for all, that I was investigating a problem belonging to São Paulo’s city government.
I was investigating a human problem.
How does someone become certain?
The next question arose almost naturally.
If different people can observe the same event and construct incompatible interpretations, where do those interpretations come from?
I began looking less at what people thought and more at how they came to think that way.
No one starts from scratch.
We are born in a particular country.
At a particular point in history.
Into a particular family.
We learn a language that existed before us.
We inherit categories for dividing up the world.
We learn what is right and wrong.
What success is.
What failure is.
What God is.
What money is.
What family is.
What property is.
What justice is.
Then come our individual experiences.
Affection.
Violence.
Rewards.
Losses.
Fears.
Humiliations.
Achievements.
Teachers.
Friends.
Books.
Television.
The internet.
Groups we belong to.
Groups we learn to distrust.
Decades later, that entire history looks at something and produces an extraordinarily simple sentence:
“This is what I think.”
I began to question that “I”.
Not in the sense of denying its practical existence.
But in the sense of asking how much of what we call our opinion was really chosen consciously by us, and how much is the outcome of a causal history that preceded the conclusion.
And then I realized that the inquiry took an unexpected turn.
I started by observing those people in the square.
Now I needed to observe the consciousness that observed those people.
Including my own.
That was when the disciplines began to mingle
A question about behavior led me to psychology.
Psychology led to neuroscience.
Differences between groups led me to anthropology and sociology.
Institutions led me to politics and economics.
The recurrence of patterns across the centuries led me to history.
Questions about individuals and collectives brought me closer to biology and systems theory.
Questions about perception and consciousness led me to philosophy of mind.
And when I began asking what exactly we call reality before we even interpret it, I inevitably arrived at physics.
I was not trying to become a psychologist, neuroscientist, anthropologist, physicist, or historian.
I was doing something else.
I was trying to carry the same question across different territories.
And something began to happen.
The more perspectives I accumulated, the harder it became to see the disciplines as completely separate compartments.
A question asked in one field would reappear, in another language, in another.
A structure observed at one level seemed to have relationships with structures found at other levels.
And then a question emerged that would stay with me:
what changes when we change perspective — and what remains?
Then artificial intelligence entered the picture
There is a reason this inquiry happened in 2025 and probably would not have happened in the same way in 1995.
Artificial intelligence changed how quickly one person could pursue an inquiry.
Imagine the traditional process.
A question about psychology arises.
I look for literature.
I find a book.
I read three hundred pages.
The book mentions an anthropological theory.
I look for another book.
I read it.
A historical question arises.
I look for sources.
Then I discover a possible connection with systems theory.
First, I need to find out what systems theory is.
Months may pass before I can even formulate the next question properly.
With artificial intelligence, that interval began to disappear.
I could be discussing psychology and, a few minutes later, ask:
“Is there anything similar in anthropology?”
The answer produced a reference.
I followed it.
Then:
“Does this appear in biological systems?”
Another direction.
“Is there a historical episode that contradicts this hypothesis?”
Another.
“What does neuroscience allow us to say about this?”
Another.
“Which part of this conclusion am I extrapolating beyond the evidence?”
Another.
“Which existing theory explains this better?”
Another.
AI was not simply giving me answers.
It was removing enormous intervals between one question and the next.
And that changed everything.
The accelerator
Today, I can see that artificial intelligence played two very different roles in that process.
The first was obvious.
It enormously expanded my capacity to research.
I would only recognize the second later.
It also enormously expanded my capacity to keep thinking.
That distinction matters.
There is a legitimate concern today that AI may be used to outsource cognitive processes: instead of writing, thinking, comparing, or solving a problem, a person hands the task over to a machine. Recent research examines precisely this relationship between AI, cognitive offloading, fatigue, and critical thinking, although the results depend greatly on how the tool is used.
My experience was almost the reverse problem.
I was not using AI to bring my questions to an end.
I was using it to produce new ones.
It did not necessarily reduce my cognitive engagement.
At many points, it removed exactly what would previously have forced me to stop.
If I had needed to spend three days looking for a piece of information, my brain would have had other activities during those three days.
I would sleep.
Work.
Talk to people.
Do other things.
There would be intervals.
With AI, many of those pauses disappeared.
One question could lead to another in seconds.
The second to a third.
The third could open five paths.
And I could follow all of them.
Knowledge arrived faster.
So did associations.
And the abstractions began to accelerate.
When learning stopped being a line
For weeks, there were periods when I worked twelve, fourteen, and even sixteen hours a day on this process.
At first, there was still a relatively clear sequence:
question → research → information → new question.
Then I began to notice something different.
I would formulate a question and, before researching it, possible answers would already appear.
Not because I had become an expert in all those fields.
It was because pieces of information that had previously been separate were beginning to connect.
A historical question would activate something I had studied in psychology.
That would recall a structure found in biology.
The structure would lead back to systems theory.
Systems theory would produce a question about information.
Information would lead back to consciousness.
Consciousness would return the question to reality.
Learning no longer seemed like a line.
It seemed like a network.
And the more connections the network acquired, the more new connections became possible.
It was intellectually extraordinary.
I also discovered that it could be dangerous.
The investigator is not a machine
At a certain point, my body began imposing limits I had not been respecting.
The prolonged intensity of the inquiry came to be accompanied by physical and cognitive symptoms that forced me to stop.
I will not turn my personal experience into a scientific diagnosis.
I have no evidence to identify the specific neurophysiological mechanism that produced it.
Nor can I claim that artificial intelligence was the clinical cause of what happened.
But I can describe the sequence I experienced.
AI allowed me to maintain a pace of inquiry and association that I would have struggled to sustain using traditional methods.
And I did not know how to interrupt it.
Then I encountered a second limit.
It was not just the amount of work.
It was abstraction.
When you begin successively removing the categories through which you normally organize reality, some distinctions that seem absolute begin to seem less so.
Individual and environment.
Object and process.
Part and system.
Cause and consequence.
Observer and observed.
I kept going.
Until I realized that some abstractions that were intellectually interesting were beginning to interfere with the psychological points of reference that allowed me to function normally as an individual.
I had to stop again.
And that may have been one of the most important methodological lessons of the entire inquiry.
The mind investigating reality is also part of the reality it is investigating.
It does not observe from outside.
It has a history.
A structure.
Physiological limitations.
Psychological limitations.
And limits of abstraction.
I spent months trying to remove biases, perspectives, and conditioning from what I observed.
I ended up discovering that I could not simply remove the observer.
Learning to observe the observer
That was when metacognition took on a new importance for me.
It was not enough to ask:
“What am I thinking?”
I began asking:
“Why does this seem true to me?”
“Where did this association come from?”
“Am I following evidence, or just an idea that excites me?”
“Am I broadening a perspective, or losing a necessary point of reference?”
“Am I investigating because the question is still productive, or because I can no longer stop investigating?”
This did not make me immune to bias.
It did not erase my history.
It did not wipe out my identity.
And I realized that trying to do so would be not only impossible, but potentially destructive.
After more than five decades of building a frame of reference for myself and the world, there is no reset button that can turn a human consciousness into a neutral observer.
Perhaps there should not be one.
What seems possible is something else:
learning to see, ever more clearly, our own perspective taking part in what we see.
And the theory appeared along the way
There was no day when I sat down at the computer and decided:
“Today I’m going to create a theory of reality.”
If someone had said that to me when I went out with Chico that afternoon, it would probably have sounded absurd.
I was trying to understand why some people were scattering trash in a square.
But one question led to another.
The square led to the people.
The people led to the circumstances.
The circumstances led to the institutions.
The institutions led to politics.
Politics led to interests.
Interests led to identity.
Identity led to culture.
Culture led to history.
History led to consciousness.
Consciousness led to perception.
Perception led to representation.
And then a question appeared that I could no longer escape:
if everything we know about reality reaches us through different systems, different scales, and different forms of representation, what is fundamental beneath those differences?
It was from this journey that what I now call Original Reality Theory (ORT) began to emerge.
The theory cannot depend on its creator’s story
There is, however, a fundamental distinction.
Nothing that happened to me demonstrates that ORT is correct.
That afternoon in São Paulo explains the origin of a question.
My subsequent experience explains why I kept asking others.
The associations I found may explain how certain hypotheses arose.
But the validity of those hypotheses cannot depend on my biography.
A theory that aims to describe fundamental aspects of reality must be able to stand without its author.
It must be tested against what other people have discovered.
It must engage with the available scientific knowledge.
It must expose its contradictions.
It must produce propositions that can be examined.
And, wherever possible, it must allow someone to demonstrate that it is wrong.
That is why ORT is currently undergoing formalization.
Why publish a theory that is not finished?
Because waiting creates a problem too.
I could work silently for years and one day emerge with a finished system.
But an inquiry that began because I questioned an apparently obvious conclusion should not end by building its conclusions away from the challenge of other perspectives.
That is why this site exists now.
The articles are not disguised chapters of a completed theory.
They are places where some ideas can encounter the world.
They can be applied.
Questioned.
Challenged.
Some will survive.
Others will be modified.
Perhaps some will need to be abandoned.
That would not be a defeat for ORT.
It would be exactly what I hope it can do.
Learn from what it cannot explain.
Artificial intelligence is still here
AI continues to play an active part in this process.
It takes part in the research.
Helps locate knowledge.
Challenges hypotheses.
Produces objections.
Compares perspectives.
Helps organize concepts.
Takes part in developing the texts.
And it is expected to take part in attempts at formalization too.
Even this page was developed through that process.
It would be wrong to say that AI is the author of Original Reality Theory.
The fundamental hypotheses, conceptual choices, and responsibility for what is published remain mine.
But it would be equally wrong to reduce its contribution to proofreading.
It has become a tool for intellectual dialogue.
An extremely powerful tool.
And a fallible one.
I have learned, including through my own excesses, that perhaps the important question is not simply whether we should use artificial intelligence to think.
It is how to build a relationship with a tool capable of enormously expanding what we can do, without allowing that expansion to exceed our ability to examine it — or our own limits in sustaining it.
The purpose of this space
The purpose of this space is not merely to publish the conclusions of this inquiry. It is to let readers experience part of the movement that produced it: broadening perspectives, crossing fields of knowledge, observing how their own interpretations are constructed, and learning to formulate increasingly better questions.
Artificial intelligence entered this journey naturally. Not as an intellectual authority or merely as a technical tool, but as an instrument for dialogue, testing, comparison, and expanding the analysis.
Engaging with AI also made its limitations, errors, shifts in interpretation, and possibilities visible. Gradually, that relationship itself became part of the inquiry pursued by Original Reality.
The second question
I can still reconstruct that walk in my mind.
I left home to take Chico to Praça Roosevelt.
On the way, I saw some people experiencing homelessness scattering trash.
I looked.
I judged.
And I thought:
“If they have rights, they should have responsibilities too.”
The first question was:
“Why do they do this?”
Then came:
“Why doesn’t the city government solve it?”
Then:
“Why don’t the policies work as we expect?”
Then:
“Why do different people see such different solutions to the same problem?”
Then:
“How did each of them construct their own representation of what is happening?”
Then:
“How does consciousness construct any representation of reality?”
And finally:
“What are we calling reality?”
But none of those questions would have existed if another, much smaller one had not appeared first.
I knew almost nothing about those people.
Even so, in a few seconds, I produced an explanation that seemed perfectly coherent to me.
Then came the question that changed everything else:
“Why was I so certain?”
Original Reality Theory is still being developed.
It may change a great deal.
Some of its current ideas may not survive.
Questions that seem fundamental today may be replaced by better ones.
But if I had to find a point of origin for this entire inquiry, I would not choose a theory, a book, a scientific discovery, or a great revelation.
I would choose that small unease.
The moment when an apparently obvious answer was no longer enough.
Because perhaps investigating reality begins precisely there:
when, for a few moments, we can question what our own consciousness presents to us as self-evident.