The book was set on another world, and I believe it was called “world”, where citizens lived in some kind of “shared reality”. If a citizen broke reality by committing murder or something like that, they would be seen by the rest of society as “not real”.
The main character is a female who has committed a crime and is seen as not real. There is also a science element where I believe they are studying some flowers or something.
I think perhaps humans landed on this world and they are meeting them and studying one another.
I read it in a science fiction literature class in undergrad in 2018, and I know it was obscure enough that I couldn’t find any cliff notes (or similar notes) on the book at the time.