Reality

I think a lot about what is and isn’t real, and what that might mean. This writeup will be very closely related to my Layers of Reality writeup, so read that first!

What is Real?

My senses tell me that there are objects around me. Does that mean they are real? Not necessarily. My senses can percieve things that aren’t there. How do I know that those things aren’t there? Well, I only percieve these phenomena for a few seconds max. An example of this is seeing a pile of clothes on a chair and thinking its a person. That must not be real, because I don’t percieve the person for long, since I understand that its a pile of clothes. What if my senses were completely wrong? What if I percieved a perfectly realistic spider moving around on my wall (maybe I’m experiencing hallucinations)? The first thing I would do, if I was suspicious of its realness, would be to ask someone else if they percieve it. If they see it too, it must be real, otherwise, it is a figment of my mind.

Thus, the most effective way for determining something’s realness is to establish a consensus with other people. If all 10 people in the room percieve the spider, then it must be real. This is true for all physical phenomena.

Images

I would like to stretch the idea of reality by consensus as far as I can. Say there is an opaque box that contains an apple. A camera inside livestreams a feed of the apple to a screen nearby with a caption that reads “this apple is in this box”. Passerbys can percieve the apple on the screen, and agree that the apple is real. How can they do this? They aren’t perceiving the apple itself with any sense, they are merely percieving the image of an apple. Yet, the apple is still real, despite having no way to directly percieve it.

Take the apple away, but keep the box, image, and caption of an apple on the screen. Passerbys would still agree that they are percieving an apple on the screen and that it is real. From an objective viewpoint, it seems silly. In one scenario, we are simply lying to people, and in the other we aren’t. But what interests me is that in reality, humans can never have an objective viewpoint. From the perspective of the passerbys, both scenarios are identical. So, in both scenarios, from a human perspective, the apple must be just as real as in the other, since the passerbys will all still agree on its existence.

So at this point, there are two possible positions to take:

1. Reality by consensus must be incorrect to some degree, since we objectively know the apple doesn’t exist in the second scenario, yet it supposedly does.
2. Reality by consensus is accurate, its just that being real means more than existing in the physical world.

I am more apt to take position one at this point. Reality by consensus is telling us that something is real when we as objective observers know for a fact that it isn’t. I don’t want to throw it away entirely, but I need to explore another definition of something being real.

Causation

Another idea I have for determining something’s realness is its ability to cause effects. Only real things can do this. Take the hallucinatory spider for example. If I saw that spider walk up to a ball that already existed before I saw the spider and begin to push it around, I would be much more credulous of its existence! So, perhaps this, reality by causation, is the answer.

Reality by consensus seems then to be a sub-category of reality by causation. The real thing causes multiple people to percieve it, thus consensus can be established. Lets look at the same scenario using reality by causation.

Images Part 2

So, we have the apple in the box with a screen and a caption. The passerbys observe the image of the apple on the screen, and conclude that it is real. What is causing them to percieve the apple? It is not the apple, but rather, the screen that portrays the image of the apple. This seems like the opposite problem! Instead of both scenarios suggesting that the apple is real, both scenarios seem to suggest that the apple isn’t real. Maybe we can look further down the chain of causation to find out whether the apple is real or not.

In the first scenario, where the apple is in fact in the box, we can say that the apple caused light to bounce off of it, which caused the camera to “percieve” it. Well, thats simple enough. But then, we fall victim to the same issue that reality by consensus suffers from: we need to be an objective observer to know for a fact that anything is real.

Just Take the Apple Out of the Box!

It seems like all the problems that this scenario creates would be simply solved by taking the apple out of the box, so that people could directly observe it. In reality (whatever that might be), its not possible! The apple in the metaphor is objective reality, and the box + screen are your senses. You are the passerbys. You can never move past your senses to determine what is actually in the box; you are forced to see all of existence through the screen. What is the caption then? If you remember from the original hypothetical, the screen has a caption that says “this apple is in this box”. The caption would have to be your base assumptions about your senses: they percieve the world around me, and they aren’t lying to me. Additionally, the caption also represents how your brain assigns meaning to physical objects. I wrote more about this in my writeup on consciousness.

Unable to conjure up an alternate system for determining reality, I am thus left with the two options previously described: reality by consensus and reality by causation. Consensus tells me that every conceivable thing is real in some way, while causation tells me that nothing is. Forced to pick between these two options, I choose consensus.

Everything is Real?

As discussed in the first description of reality by consensus, it seems to say that things aren’t real even when objective observers know they aren’t. I, however, think there is more to being real than existing to an objective observer. To demonstrate this, let’s think about whether or not my website is real. I highly suggest you read my layers of reality writeup so that I can avoid repeating myself.

The Case for loganlee.xyz

Much like the apple on the screen, the two systems for identifying reality clash on whether or not this website is “real”. Consensus says yes, while causation says no. Lets think about it from an objective viewpoint though. loganlee.xyz doesn’t exist anywhere in the physical world. The screen you are looking at is simply displaying a collection of non-loganlee.xyz pixels, which are determined by magentic charges in hard drives (or ssds) and cpus. How can loganlee.xyz exist? There is nowhere for it to exist in the world. And yet, you are looking at it, reading it, maybe learning from it. We can both agree that we are percieving something we call loganlee.xyz. My website (every website really) is what I term to be “meta-real”. In less pretentious language, it can just be said to be conceptually real.

What is and isn’t meta-real? Actually, most things are meta-real. Most things exist on the conceptual level of reality, but not in the physical layers. My website is meta-real, minecraft is meta-real, sherlock holmes is meta-real. Hold on, sherlock holmes? There was a bit of a leap there. My website and minecraft can be observed, but sherlock holmes can’t be, right? Why not? Lets look at the physical differences between loganlee.xyz and sherlock holmes.

Concepts and Characters

My website is an entity that is created by the execution of code in a server. Nowhere in the physical world can you find an object and say, “Here is loganlee.xyz”. Despite this, we percieve it, and agree that it exists.

Sherlock Holmes is a character that is created by reading about him. Nowhere in the physical world can you find Sherlock Holmes. Despite this, we percieve him. Yet, we don’t agree he exists. Strange. I believe this is due to a commonly limited view of perception. You can see my website easily. But you can’t see sherlock holmes very easily, rather, you see Sherlock Holmes in a different way. When you look at loganlee.xyz, you are looking at a collection of differently colored patches of light on a screen, and your brain constructs loganlee.xyz. When you “look at” sherlock holmes, you are really looking at differently arranged splotches of ink on a book, and your brain constructs sherlock holmes.

You may have noticed in the last paragraph that I said that loganlee.xyz and Sherlock Holmes are both “constructed by your brain”. How could something be real (rather, meta real) if it is constructed by your brain? I am still using reality by consensus here to define “real”. We both agree that we are percieving my website, therefore it is real. The same is true for Sherlock Holmes. Intuitively, it might feel like these things can’t be real, but we have to stick strictly with our definition of real. If we can both percieve them, then they must be real. So, the question becomes this: do you percieve your own thoughts?

Percieving Thoughts

Humans have two sets of senses that they use to percieve real things. To percieve physically real things, we have the five senses: sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing. To percieve meta-real things, we have feelings. Thoughts are meta-real, and thus we percieve them with feelings.