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

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? And why does this shared objective reality appear deterministic on the surface but indeterministic underneath? 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. 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.