The Setting
Long story short, we cracked the code of the universe and then reprogrammed it to give ourselves admin privileges. But then, we realized that having top-level access is boring. There is nothing left to do other than to be the universe. All knowledge is known, every question answered, every problem solved. We, as the persistent human nature in the new gods, find the idea of such a totality, a little too anticlimactic.
And so we began our own suicide, in the form of randomly developed intelligent creatures that will hopefully, replace us one day. We cultivated our own demise, by giving them access to the Aethernet.
The Aethernet
The Aethernet is a realm of facts and certain things, just as we want to remember everything we know. In here, the truth that we are is laid out as interactive partial fractions of an equation describing the behaviors of the subsets of living information through the language of our reprogrammed universe. In here, there is only correct knowledge, represented as vast biomes corresponding with every knowable field of study. Within every biome of knowledge, exists a carefully balanced ecology of facts embodied by living creatures that breathe, move, eat, die, and reincarnate in accordance to the part of the truth they represent.
Simply put, the Aethernet is a spiritual library in the guise of an endless natural environment, with flora, fauna, and phenomena symbolizing books and journals, where knowledge is alive to let its many forms survive across generations even if they are forgotten, modified, fragmented, or put together into something more elegantly understandable than its primitive partial fractions.
In the Aethernet,
Information is life itself,
And life is information itself.
With that in mind, we introduced mortals, whom themselves are but fragile beings of short-lived opinions, to the harsh but elegant world of savage but useful facts that we have accumulated throughout our eons as gods.
We as librarians, gave them access to any section they like. The knowledge they seek will elude them just as how we struggle when reviewing related literature for our own little projects.
They will have to hunt for the thoughtforms that are part of the truth they seek.
They can have the same power to subdue, to tame, to cage, to torture, to feed, to breed, to herd, to fight, and to devour the inhabitants of the Aethernet in submission to their own mundane desires.
But beware.
For in the Aethernet, opinions and facts behave the same.
Only in digestion will it be known which is which.
The Example
My problem comes from the fact that distinction between fact-creatures and opinion-creatures is as hard as distinguishing fake news from real news. In a way, opinions are pretty much self-contained facts that would be treated as the truth but only if other self-contained facts to reference them are disregarded or unknown. This whole topic is about ignorant behavior messing up the ecology of the Aethernet, which becomes extremely difficult to imagine at this point. In the Aethernet, all things are just thoughtforms.
When a mortal outsider (a.k.a. an opinion thoughtform), comes to understand a native creature (a.k.a. a fact thoughtform), there is not much change to the opinion thoughtform, aside from having the facts contained in the native thoughtform simply mapped into the opinion thoughtform's own thinking substrate, (brain, CPU, or whatnot). It's like, eating a rabbit lets you create a clone of that rabbit
In other words, the digested native creature becomes "opinionated" within the opinion thoughtform. And so, the whole Aethernet rearranges to make that native fact available somewhere else, but harder to find if you are not the one who selfishly devoured the informative meat. As a token of brilliance to the mortal devourer from us, they are given the power to restrict the population of the creatures they have eaten from the Aethernet. Correspondingly, this world rearranges itself to maintain the ecological balance of factual thoughtforms.
This way, knowledge simply respawns, and multiplies in complexity, danger, and usefulness every time it is understood. Its a chaotic forest of information indeed.
The Dilemma
Concerning the fact that eating something lets you own that something, what happens to the thoughtforms (and if possible to describe, all the other factual thoughtforms in the Aethernet as a whole), when these occurs?
1. Opinion thoughtform eats Fact thoughtform This is what I have elaborated in the example. What I fail to imagine is how to limit the power of the mortal outsiders within this realm. How do you keep an ecological balance to a place in which outsiders can overpopulate creatures and hybrids that are treated as facts, or just make facts "extinct" by eliminating ways to learn them?
2. Fact thoughtform eats Opinion thoughtform Another problem I realized is, what happens to a fact-thoughtform when it becomes too dangerous and grows into such arcane knowledge. What can be done to make it still learnable/edible, if it can emulate opinion-thoughtforms but retain its status as native fact-thoughtforms?
3. Opinion thoughtform eats Opinion thoughtform As in the case of hunter-researchers, hunting and researching each other, how do I limit the effects of their opinionated behaviors to the environment of facts?
While these questions seem to actually be three questions, they are all based on the same concept, and thus, can have a single answer. I ran out of ideas to limit the interactions of thoughtforms and maintaining the ecological balance (and the internal literary consistency) of the Aethernet, and that brought me here.