Reality as Hallucination

If no one perceives reality directly, then geopolitics is a war of perception.

“We never perceive reality directly, Jiang argues — we construct it. And if reality is participatory, then the deepest contest between powers is not over resources but over perception.”

This page documents Professor Jiang's interpretive, openly speculative philosophy of perception. It describes how he reasons; it does not endorse his metaphysical or historical claims (including his readings of science and the space program), and the tracker takes no position on them.

In one paragraph The epistemic floor beneath Jiang's other frameworks. Drawing on Kant, Hegel and quantum mechanics, he argues that what we experience is a constructed “hallucination”: the thing-in-itself is just vibration and energy, filtered by the mind into time and space. If there is no single objective reality — if “everyone lives in his or her own reality” — then belief is causal, and the real battlefield of geopolitics is perception. His sharp corollary: modern science and media exist less to discover reality than to reinvent it in the service of power.

From metaphysics to a war of perception

We participate

“we are not observers of reality, we are participants”

the observer collapses the quantum wave-function

No objective reality

“everyone lives in his or her own reality”

the noumenon — the thing-in-itself — is unknowable

A war of perception

power is contested through belief, not just resources

“science reinvents reality to serve power”

What it says

Jiang's claim is that perception is participatory, not passive: “we are not observers of reality, we are participants in reality.” Behind the world we see (the phenomenon) lies an unknowable noumenon — Kant's thing-in-itself — which he describes as pure vibration and energy; the mind manufactures the familiar world by imposing time and space on it. He marshals quantum wave-function collapse and the Wigner's-friend puzzle to argue there is no observer-independent reality. The strategic payoff is what makes this a power framework and not just metaphysics: because reality is belief-dependent, “this is a war of perception,” and the function of materialist science, schooling and media is to reinvent reality to keep populations governable.

How the world gets constructed

Jiang's pipeline runs from energy to experience: the raw real is vibration; the mind filters it through the categories of time and space; out comes the stable, solid-seeming world — which is, in his word, “hallucinated.” This is not a denial that anything exists, but a claim that what we know is always our own construction. From there he concludes that two people, two nations, two civilizations can inhabit genuinely different realities — and that whoever shapes perception shapes the outcome.

Science and media as reality-engineering

The provocative move is functional: Jiang argues that the Big Bang, evolution and neuroscience are taught not because they are simply true but because a materialist paradigm — “there is no soul, death is the end” — produces a frightened, controllable population. The space program he reads as perception-warfare against the idea of heaven; AI and data centers as a coming “matrix.” Whether or not one accepts the metaphysics, the framework's geopolitical use is clear: treat narrative as a domain of war.

In Jiang's words

“We are not observers of reality, we are participants in reality.”— Secret History #9

“We imagine reality. We hallucinate reality.”— Secret History #9

“There is no objective reality that exists outside of you… everyone lives in his or her own reality.”— Secret History #9

“This war — it's not over resources, it's over perception. This is a war of perception.”— Secret History #9

“All of science is not about discovering reality, it's about reinventing reality in a way that serves power.”— Secret History #9

Where he applies it

Materialist science (Big Bang, evolution, neuroscience) read as a paradigm engineered to make people fear death and accept control.
The moon landing and Mars program read as perception-warfare against the concept of heaven.
AI and data centers read as a “matrix” that traps perception inside a managed simulation.

What it predicts

The forecasts Jiang draws are civilizational rather than dated:

Transhumanism — uploading consciousness — arrives as the tool to complete the materialist capture of perception.
Because he regards the cosmos as participatory and self-correcting, he predicts the control project ultimately fails — a “reset.”