There are many elements of the book that have a founding in existing science and philosophy. To make sense of the book, it is important to first make sense of the case for reality that the book puts forward. In simple terms, it answers some of the most fundamental and as yet unanswered questions in these ways:
The basis of reality is information. Alice tells us this and it is never again denied by the narrator. “I think it’s helpful to see the universe as nothing more than information.” However, information is not quite the foundation of the universe (the universe encapsulating both reality and other forms of existence) “the foundation of the universe will always be hidden; if it changed it would destroy everything”.
The soul / essence / subconscious / imagination, however we want to perceive the narrator, is immortal but is only the origin of an individual, it is not the entirety of the non-physical individual, which is made up of all the consequences they have created and the combination of how others have perceived them. This is summed up beautifully in the last line “After all we are, all of us, just an endless chain of outstretched pieces, like the universe itself.” It is made explicit that the narrator will continue to exist in some form "until the end of time" but not whether it existed prior to the reader existing.
“Reality always becomes the perceptions we share.” Reality is only a realm of existence. According to the book it is a “ledger of shared consciousness”. So the soul, or sub-conscious exists in a separate realm that is not reality.
The universe started as nothing. The book does not necessarily advocate a God as a creator (this is a general point which is fiercely contested by some who experience the text as extremely religious in nature). However, as Poppy explains, “You see if there really was nothing, and I mean, absolutely nothing, then nothing would be everything. And if it was both nothing and everything, it wouldn’t be nothing, do you see? It’s why there is something, rather than nothing.” This does not necessarily eliminate the possibility of God emerging from nothing but it suggests that the emergence of something happened before the emergence of God.
The observer is required to make objects that exist in reality perceptible to others by giving them defined, measurable features. This is verified by science at the quantum level but the more problematic question of “what is an observer” is answered here by, “us”. “We create the reality of the flower by viewing it for the first time.” Therefore the way the quantum world works is mirrored outside of the quantum scale and observation is always required by sentient beings to create definition, which in turn allows greater perception and then forms "reality".
Through these proposals for reality, the real universe is only part of existence (the real realm as opposed to the imaginary realm) and is a shared perception. Conscious observers can sub-consciously create reality. Inanimate objects do not have consciousness per se, their boundaries are created by sentient beings. As such, an object would not be conscious it was a particular object, this information would become embedded in the "ledger of shared consciousness" and that is what would limit the possibilities of how an object can be perceived and behave.
If reality is as it is explained in the book, it makes the way in which the book appears from nothing to the reader possible whilst making it impossible for scientific study to either prove or disprove this method of creation. Indeed, science itself becomes limited, in that it can only discover more about the perceptions we share, which then create reality, rather than telling us anything about the perceptions themselves and how they are formed.
But the consequences of this view of the world go further. God, or at least, our shared concept of God is not a single entity but forms part of our perception of ourselves and our ability to influence the world around us. God is everywhere because we are everywhere. God creates the world because we create the world. For the religious, that does not undermine the concept of God, it merely seeks to explains more about how God operates. For the atheist it supports the view that descriptions of God's power can also simply be descriptions of the natural world.
Taken further, this view of reality would mean that we can shape the future as we would like it by sharing the perception of how we would like the future to be. But only to a certain extent. We are limited by the consequences of the things that have happened before, blocking certain possibilities of what we are able to perceive. “Fragments of reality everywhere will continue to exist without us, only taking the shape and form that they do because of the consequences of the decisions you have made.” There is the additional problem that we, as humans, cannot control what we perceive, this is the remit only of the subconscious and "unreal" parts of us, which make up our imagination. So whilst the possibilities seem to be extraordinary, the reality is that the future is tightly governed by those who have been before and the perceptions that are given to us by our subconscious, unreal, selves.
This view of the world also has consequences for the way we view our own identity. Whilst we may feel that we own our identities, the book tells us that this feeling only relates only to a very small part of a universal identity. “You are real because people can see you and feel you. But I only exist within your mind. You are unable to intricately define exactly what I am. It is what makes you so real and what makes me so imaginary.”
The basis of you being real is fundamentally that you’re physically perceived in a defined way. However, the entirety of who you are is based upon:
Your origin (the imagination or soul, the part of you who created the book)
The way in which others perceive and remember you
The consequences of your actions which limit certain future possibilities in reality.
In this way, we may be able to influence how others perceive us, with the help of our subconscious but our fundamental nature is made from the consequences we create and the perceptions others have of us. As we live in between the subconscious part of ourselves and the reality in which we are perceived, without having an awareness of either, our personal concept of who we are only makes up a tiny fraction of our real identity.
This is mirrored in many ways by the text itself. As the narrator grows and believes they are moving closer to reality, their lack of control and the consequences that they create define them far more than the identity they would prefer to have. It is mirrored in the way that the writer (who is also the reader and the narrator) begins to lose control of the characters in the book, who do not act in the way they should and appear to take on their own lives. “The power to create is different to the power to control.” And “Once you have created someone, they can never be uncreated”. The story then, displays this lack of identity ownership throughout, with no characters having any real control of who they are and the most powerful characters of all, unable to use the power they have. It creates a wonderful symmetry with the idea of identity in reality being defined by all those things we can’t control, even though it feels as though it is the one thing we, uniquely, create.
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