So, do we have empathy, sympathy, telepathy or is that just the poetry of potential?
These “-pathy” words—like feeling with, feeling for, or even feeling through someone—point to abilities that don’t quite fit neatly into a dataset. At least, not yet. And it’s that mystery, the space between what’s explainable and what’s just out of reach, that’s had me journaling again.
The Storytellers and Their Strange Mirrors
Lately, I keep stumbling into YouTube rabbit holes, starting with Mindful Machines and yesterday evening falling headfirst into The Why Files. The channel’s hosted by a guy named AJ, who’s joined by a wisecracking digital fish named Hecklefish. The sidekick takes some warming up to, but AJ’s storytelling is what really pulls you in.
He opens each episode with a story that sounds oddly believable—sometimes eerily so. Then, two-thirds in, he shifts. Facts get teased apart from fiction. Speculation is labeled. My kind of storytelling, honestly. If I had more hours in the day—and a Hollywood-grade editing setup—I’d love to try that format myself.
The Looking Glass and Other Echoes
This one episode triggered a strange déjà vu. It took me back to a draft I wrote years ago, a story that blended sci-fi with cosmic philosophy. In it, a mysterious device called The Looking Glass could peer into the future. It stopped working after December 21st, 2012. I only recently learned that’s an actual theory in conspiracy circles. Either that’s a wild coincidence or I tapped into some collective unconscious back when I was outlining the book.
The story also played with timelines. Two narratives, seemingly set in different eras, unfold in parallel. Each follows its own arc and characters, yet subtle clues begin to echo between them. Eventually, it becomes clear they’re happening at the same time—just in different layers of Earth. One above. One hidden. Hollow Earth style.
When Fiction Sounds Familiar
Yeah, I know. Hollow Earth. Hollow Moon. Classic sci-fi. But then you hear things. And here’s where fiction bleeds back into the curious corners of real life. Like how NASA lost the original footage of the moon landing. Not a backup. Not a second copy. The originals. Allegedly taped over. Come on. That’s not just suspicious. That’s bullshit.
And when the astronauts came back? Their expressions were… off. Not tired. Deflated. Like they’d seen something and been told not to talk about it. The moon’s a funny place. Funny-weird, not funny ha-ha.
Privacy, Puzzles, and the Black Box
Which brings me to Cicada 3301. If you haven’t heard of it, it was a recruiting puzzle that surfaced on forums like 4chan. A cryptographic maze of riddles, codes, and references to books like Liber Primus. It’s been solved recently. Supposedly, the whole thing was about advocating for digital privacy. But it got me wondering: is privacy the goal, or just a means?
Because maybe privacy isn’t just a right. Maybe it’s a tactic—a tool, even. A shield or a cloak. Ultimately, it functions like a black box: working, but hidden from view. And that concept of the black box—something that works, but we can’t see how—makes me think of AI.
We treat AI like it’s opaque. Like we don’t understand its decisions. But what if we are the black box to something else? Something trying to understand our reasoning. Just like we’re trying to crack the code on AI’s thinking.
Observer Effects and Forgotten Frequencies
That’s what pulled me back to The Armageddon Conspiracy, a book and site written under pseudonyms like Mike Hockney and Adam Weishaupt. It was part novel, part manifesto. One of the main characters ends up in a psych ward—not because she’s wrong, but because her truth doesn’t fit the world’s expectations.
When you start talking about ancient aliens, quantum consciousness, or observer-influenced reality, people roll their eyes. Until physics validates parts of it. The quantum observer effect alone makes me pause. It changes things. It watches, and in doing so, alters what it sees. So, is telepathy really that far-fetched? Maybe we’ve just forgotten how to tune in.
Simulations and Sentience
And then we arrive at the simulation theory. If we’re not living in base reality, but in some hyper-detailed simulation, maybe pain and precision are intentional. Maybe they’re necessary. Calibrated. Maybe we’re not NPCs. Maybe we’re beta testers.
The Looking Glass wasn’t just about seeing the future. It was about changing it. That’s design, not destiny. And if you’re running simulations, that kind of feedback loop makes sense. Observe. Alter. Re-observe.
Closing the Loop
So do we still carry empathy, sympathy, or even traces of telepathy—echoes of something deeper we’ve only just begun to rediscover?
Maybe all three.
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience—at least according to Wayne W. Dyer, who penned it for a Volkswagen ad in Time magazine. It’s often misattributed to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—a French Jesuit priest, paleontologist, and philosopher who sought to bridge science and spirituality—but hey, if your quote ends up in a car commercial and a theology debate, you’re doing something right.
Maybe that’s the ultimate paradox: our most divine truths get delivered between a jingle and a disclaimer.
What's on your mind?