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Consensual reality is a perspective shared by a group of people. That perspective can be an agreement about facts (the population of the world is about 8 billion), morality (stealing is wrong), religion (there is an afterlife), justice (murderers deserve the death penalty), art (Picasso is disturbing), etc. It is, in particular, a shared view of people, such as public figures. Is the President too old? Is his opponent a bad apple or a savior? In our case, and more specifically, users assign trust values to those who provide information. It is easy to see how communities who regard certain individuals highly (high in trust) could form. These high trust individuals would then have a ready audience for future material in much the same way that influential columnists in newspapers have their followers. Obviously consensual reality will also define those whose trust is low so we can filter them out.
We believe this system will be a force for good even though any consensual reality will be possible. It will allow the formation of "bad" opinion bubbles in the same way they exist on other platforms. However, it will also have methods to escape from them. The algorithmic flexibility alone is one way to do that. Just by adjusting certain parameters the user will be able to "tune in" to a different reality. Our system will have some preset algorithms, tuned a few different ways, to serve as guidance but users will ultimately be able to adjust things for themselves.
The idea of flexibility allows users to take control of their information ecosystem and realize that it is conscious choice that enables this. Doing so has the additional benefit of giving users the tools to think for themselves with the understanding that the ecosystem they are choosing is merely a tool to help them do that.
A personal anecdote might help illustrate this. A long time ago I had a Sirius satellite radio which had several political talk stations. Two of them were clearly labeled: "Sirius Left" and "Sirius Right". It was fun switching between the two on long car trips. I could tune in to one political universe or another. Sometimes they would even talk about the same news event at the same time from completely different angles. At some point, listening alone would get boring and the game would switch to critiquing both sides, supporting them with additional commentary they failed to mention, or just laughing at the strategies the hosts would use to hook their listeners. So now I'm no longer just controlling what I hear, I'm enabled to think for myself. I might sketch out positions in the middle or farther to the left and occasionally farther to the right, or sometimes none of the above. I suppose the opposite could have happened, ie I could have been sucked into the bubble created by one station, but it didn't. The tool, limited though it was, enabled control and thought.
Consensual reality is often referred to by a related term, consensus reality which is said to have largely broken down in our society. Pre-internet, our information came from fewer mass-media sources which shaped a more homogeneous view of ideology, politics, etc. Institutional trust was significantly higher as well. Returning to this may seem desirable but it also seems antithetical to the path of a supposedly free society. We'd have to impose such a heavy hand on media, traditional and social, that it would require a fundamentally anti-democratic shift in our society. We've already become accustomed to decentralized information. The only issue is how to move forward. The creation of tools to easily control information can lead to a future where fact-based consensus and reasonableness emerge on their own, by choice. Without additional tools, it is hard to see how our present chaotic informational state can be advanced.
One idea in this vein is to help people develop their own philosophy and apply it to the information system they are interacting with. Most people, in my view, will try to think rationally if given a supportive environment. The Sirius radio only had two options, Right or Left, but it would have been nice if more positions in between and further out existed. Indeed, a system that can be dialed to ones own philosophy and evolve with it is exactly what we can achieve here. Furthermore, the positions that are staked out would be easily testable, either in formal debate with another side or in simply allowing the opposite point of view to be easily accessed. The system could be designed to ask challenging questions, ones you might even ask yourself, such as "what is the best argument for the exact opposite point of view?". It could then allow you to find what people on the other side are saying about that very question.