Great post. I enjoyed the videos as well.

I don't think it's "all illusion" as much as a rather unbounded and finely detailed reality being filtered by conscious perceptions and understanding into a structure that appears to possess quite holographic features. Whatever experiences someone has are entirely "real" in that reality is ultimately subjective (it's ironic that subjective reality is actually the tangible version and not the assumed truth of an objective version of it - the existance of an objective reality that differed from immediate subjective observations is quite similar to expecting someone to believe in the objective existance of an intangible being).

I also don't believe there's much use in saying we directly create reality from thought because there's a vicious cycle in that you couldn't deterministically construct anything beyond what you already possess (if you create something that's not a part of you, there's really no way to control it - if we look at it from an information perspective, if we have X units of information that define "self" and we then attempt to add Y units of information to define the larger structure (self+creation), it should require greater than X units of information to do this, which does arise from X units of information, without new information being injected, which, rather by definition, is not a part of self - so growth is inherently uncontrollable though I see "will" as a process of integration of effectively new and random information into ones self.

I enjoyed the first link that referenced some of the ideas regarding fractals and chaos as these do appear quite relevant to how a smaller quantity of information that defines our perceptions and conscious understanding/sensations can be superimposed upon the properties of a larger external reality - the commonalities of physical laws and matter appear most likely defined by properties inherent to individuals which exist similar to a filter through which physical reality is interpreted, though it's interesting to consider to what extent physical laws are a product of statistical properties derived from the aggregate influence of a large collection of physical laws, versus precisely predictable and deterministic interactions (the statistical effects could actually represent a large number of physical forces and properties that haven't been untangled as of yet, whereas the precisely deterministic physical laws have no uncertainty - for example, most electromagnetic interactions appear discrete and likely fundamentally predictable, though with observer uncertainty over the information presented, whereas gravitational force appears likely to be a statistical diffusion to space that could arise from the aggregate influences of a very large number of physical properties that we only experience the net influence of - the trend in physics has been one of continually finding new an subtle forces and interactions that had previously existed as part of another more obvious and stronger force).

There are fundamental rules for cognition itself and they appear rather simple and are universal to physics as they must be in order that we can understand any of our experiences. Objective reality is a process of bidirectional communication and if you want to communicate with something you need to both have a set of rules by which you transmit information as well as a consistant manner in which that information is transformed externally and then received back. Such deterministic processes in themselves do not create information though but simply transform the representation of already existing or "randomly created" (which is a great subject as to how randomness can exist and what properties should something truely random possess, I don't think there's a single model of "existance" that effectively include such an unknown input of information as a source - logic molds it into specific forms with specific properties, but neither pure randomness nor pure logic in themselves are capable of creating both time and rules by which things change and it appears that time is likely infinite and ultimately defined by an unbounded number of properties and experiences - if you attempt to place a boundary to experiences, then at some point there must be an end and that all experiences could be encapsulated in X moments of time, but in order to select one of these moments, you need additional information outside of those X moments to point to which is the current moment and that information resides outside X, so X cannot encapsulate subjective time - or maybe another example would of watching a spinning ball - the perception of time does not arise from the rotation of the ball itself because a ball needs something external and stationary relative to it in order to determine it to be rotating - imagine a universe with only a spinning ball - from any perspective within the ball itself, there is no way to determine the ball to be spinning as all angles of rotation appear identical from any point within the ball, instead it requires an external "non rotating" object exist, but even this isn't sufficient as it requires a manner to count rotations and denote rotation #1 and rotation #2 etc. and these counts are not inherent to the ball but to states of an observer denoting a rotation as #1 or #2 etc., so the rotation is determined by the observation of it which extends to properties beyond the rotation of the ball itself and the same would be true for ideas of a cyclic universe - if the universe were closed and finite, then it would have to either repeat or end as there would only be a finite number of permutations of the information possible to construct from that finite system. In that case, we could rule out the possibility of repeating universe, because we'd be required to then append additional information to the universe after one repetition to denote a moment of time as residing within one repetition or another, which is not something definable from within the universe itself (if it repeated a second time, then some state would need to be different to designate it as a second iteration of the universe, but because it's closed, that state would have already have been defined in the first pass, hence it's impossible to encapsulate continual repetitions within a finite system), the idea of the universe having a beginning or end is a bit harder to analyze for me, but a few notes - it implies there's something beyond the universe to constrain it to existing within a finite boundary of time - which effectively, for an observer, means that they can/will only experience, or be able to differentiate between X number of states in sequential order and those states must include memory as well, as we could interleave those X states an infinite number of ways over time, that along with memory would allow for an infinite number of historical sequences to exist, and so those X states must possess both the memories of prior states as well as a pointer to the next state, but this still leaves the problem of those states not being able to define which is the current/present state/moment from within the system. Though if we had only a finite physical ability to distinguish between physical states, then only a finite number of possible moments should be able to be physically experienced (if we ignore memory and context outside a moment - which is difficult to do as a recognition of moments is constructed via. memory) - anyway, if physical senses and memory are ultimately constrained, then only a finite number of physical experiences should be possible to differentiate between and the universe could only be experienced over a finite time, though it's quite possible that conscious perceptions are ultimately unbounded, but I've still been trying to find whether or not this must be true - the infinitely cyclic yet finite universe model doesn't work, but it's more difficult for me to find a simple and obvious reason why the start/end version couldn't be true - in order for it there not to be an end, it would appear conscious experiences would have to potentially encompass an infinite number of distinct possible states, which would appear to require either an infinite memory or infinite sensory capability - which is not necessarily impossible from a typical perspective if there is a manner in which conscious qualities of perceptions are unbounded - in which case a finite amount of physical information can occur within an infinite number of possible conscious qualities surrounding them)