Objective reality as the spine and subjective realities as the bushes of a Kesten tree of consistent stories

Tarek Halabi, PhD

First posted: 2025-10-24. This version: v1.4 (2025-11-21).

Abstract. Explaining how subjective experience comes out of today’s physics is hard. And we can’t deny experience — it’s the one thing we’re sure of. So flip the problem: start from experience and explain how “objective reality” shows up. This work addresses long-standing questions in idealism and physics: Why does there appear to be a single immortal objective reality shared among many subjective realities? Why is there no apparent direct interaction between subjective realities? Why does influence appear to run one-way from objective reality to subjective realities (a main reason why materialism dominates science and philosophy)? Why does this shared objective reality appear deterministic on the surface but indeterministic underneath? And why does today’s physics struggle with subjective experience? An idealist reading of the anthropic principle leads to a Kesten tree of consistent stories. The Kesten tree’s spine is identified as objective reality, with the bushes representing otherwise independent subjective realities. Causally, influence runs one-way from the spine to the bushes; inferentially, conditioning on bush level events updates the posterior over spine trajectories — an attractive entry point for exploring agency. To maximally extend the tree’s life, features of nodes on the spine that influence the spine’s evolution (read: observed features) are chosen so as to minimally collapse the space of possible completions. Because the evolution of observed features in objective reality adds little information — and is therefore highly predictable — macroscopic determinism emerges. Although conditioning on long‑run survival modifies the kernel along the spine, bushes continue to evolve under the original kernel. This split helps explain why today’s physics struggles to speak directly to subjective experience.

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How to cite

Halabi, T. (2025). Objective reality as the spine and subjective realities as the bushes of a Kesten tree of consistent stories. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17626635

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