Reality as Fold: A Compositional Model of Experience
Why I struggled the past months of perception of reality
Introduction
You wake. Light strikes your retina. Sound enters your ear. Breath slows. A memory surfaces. None of this is passive. Each event alters the internal configuration. You don’t receive reality — you build it, moment by moment.
You are not a fixed entity observing a changing world. You are a changing system folding the world into itself.
Reality is not a sequence of events. It is not an objective stream. It is a function:
f = fold(interaction, initial_state, inputs)
This framing recasts perception, identity, and world-modeling as the recursive accumulation of state over time. Every input alters the system. Every moment is a reduction. There is no static “you” outside the fold. There is only state-as-a-function-of-history.
I. The Fold Function
In functional programming:
foldl(function, initial_state, list) This takes a binary function, an initial state, and a list of elements. It applies the function cumulatively:
(((initial ⊕ x₁) ⊕ x₂) ⊕ x₃) ⊕ ... ⊕ xₙTranslated to cognition:
function = how you interpret or integrate experience
initial_state = pre-conscious biological configuration
list = stimuli, interactions, environmental conditions
result = your current mental structure
II. A Simple Human Example
Initial state: newborn
Input sequence:
Mother’s touch
Sound of language
Hunger
Milk
Cold wind
Repeated eye contact
Each input modifies the internal model:
Touch → associates warmth with safety
Voice → encodes tone-response links
Hunger → generates first aversive signal
Milk → links relief to a specific act
Cold → embeds a sensorimotor aversion
Eye contact → starts self-other boundary modeling
Result: state is now a layered response engine. Future experience routes through these early fold-steps.
III. Real-Time Folding
Every interaction rewrites the model.
“We do not live in the world. We live in a model of the world.”
— Karl Friston
Reality is filtered through an interpreter that has been cumulatively constructed. You do not see truth; you see the output of fold(f, state₀, events).
Example:
Two people witness a dog barking.
One folds past trauma → interprets threat
Other folds affection → interprets joy
Same input, divergent state-driven output.
IV. Quotational Reflection
“I am large, I contain multitudes.”
— Walt Whitman
A fold structure is multitude. State is the compression of thousands of interpreted moments. You are not a self. You are a data structure shaped by f.
“What we call ‘reality’ is a certain consensus of memory.”
— Jorge Luis Borges
Consensus = convergent folding. Reality becomes stabilized only by repeated co-processing of inputs within a shared reduction path.
V. Application Examples
A. Emotional Reactivity
You react in anger. Why? The fold contains repeated pairings of shame + correction → defensive encoding. Reaction is not free will. It is output.
B. Learning a Language
Each word, each context is a reduction:
stateₙ = learn(stateₙ₋₁, inputₙ)
Vocabulary is not stored — it’s inferred via the layered model. Fluency is fold-depth.
C. Identity Shifts
You move cities. New people, culture, stimuli. Old fold chain ends. New inputs begin. After 6 months: you “feel like a different person.” You are. You folded in new structure.
VI. Compression: The Function as Identity
If all you are is fold(f, init, X), then changing f changes your self.
If f is updated to include reflection, metacognition, and non-reactivity, the outputs shift.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space.”
— Viktor Frankl
Insert f′, a modified function, into the fold chain. New state emerges.
Conclusion
You are not a static entity. You are the real-time output of an invisible fold function, acting on a long stream of inputs. This is not metaphor. This is structure. All experience is downstream of the fold. If you want to understand reality, stop asking what it is. Ask what has been folded into your state — and whether you can rewrite the function.
I’m wondering, what is your idea or perception of reality? Let me know what you are thinking!