What can We Know about Reality?

The Nature of Reality:
Quasi-Realism
Representational Realism
Existence and Natures
Knowledge of Reality
The Language of Reality

We have spent the Nature of Reality series developing the idea that we do not see reality as it is, but as our brains create from the information we receive through our senses. In fact, it is impossible for us to perceive reality as it really is, because the very act of perception is at least one step removed from reality. This leads to mistakes. We perceive things that are not there, and we are blind to things that are. Furthermore, the only way we have to determine whether something is real is to compare it with the rest of reality as we know it, all of which is contained within our heads. Just like every word in a dictionary is defined by other words in the dictionary, so we judge the reality of every concept and perception in our brain by other concepts and perceptions in our brain. So the question arises: are we stuck? Is there any way we can know anything about true Reality, or are we forever doomed to subjectivity and relativism?

There is one thing we can know about true reality. That is because perception itself is a part of reality. You can know with absolute certainty that you are conscious, and that your consciousness has a variety of qualia. You are looking at light gray lines on a dark gray background. As you read these words, you are sounding them out in your head, in a way that is kind of like hearing them, but not quite. It may be impossible to directly know the true nature of the computer screen, or even if the computer screen exists, but you do know with absolute certainty that you are experiencing perceptions as if there is a computer screen in front of you.

Abstract Painting 599 by Gerhard Richter. You may not know what it is supposed to represent, but you know that you are perceiving colors and textures.

But our direct perceptions are only an infinitesimally small part of reality. In order to know anything about the rest of it, we need to be content with the representations of it we create in our minds. The question then becomes, what makes some representations of reality better than others? What does it mean for a representation to be true?

The place to start is the fact that Reality obeys the law of non-contradiction. Something that is real cannot be both true and false at the same time. See the previous entry in the series, Existence and Natures. Now you may wonder if that is true. After all, if we both look at a ball, and it looks blue to me, but it looks green to you, isn't that a contradiction? No, because my perception takes place in my brain, and your perception takes place in your brain. Neither of our perceptions is the ball. The ball is itself. The ball reflects the wavelengths of light that it does, which just happens to look different to you than it does to me because our cognitions work a little differently.

Because Reality obeys the law of non-contradiction, we can apply logic to the information brought to us by our senses. It is true that the models of reality we create are not themselves reality, they are only models. But if a model accounts for the information we get from our senses, and it does not contradict itself in any way, that is enough to say the model is true. And if the model makes predictions for new information you would get through your senses in the right circumstances, and you create an experiment to test those predictions, that increases the certainty that the model is true. You may find this familiar; after all, it is the scientific method as it is taught in grade school.

Today we learned that even though it is impossible to know reality directly except for the small fraction of reality that is your own perception, that doesn't mean reality is forever out of our reach. Reality is governed by logic, and we can know logic. So if we have models of reality in our minds, and the logic that describes the models is the same logic that describes reality, then we say that we know that part of reality. If a concept or belief has the same logical structure as the real thing it describes, that is what it means to be true.

Resolutions of Truth

In his Ted Talk, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman talks about how he and his associates did many simulation experiments where they created a variety of virtual worlds and creatures to inhabit them, and ran them forward using Evolutionary algorithms. They found that, with natural selection, the trait of seeing the world as it was went extinct, and fitness won out every time. Hoffman suggests that we see our world like a computer desktop, an interface full of icons that help us interact with the world, but are completely different from the objective parts of reality they represent.

Life evolves to see the world in ways that are useful, not in ways that are true.

We already know that the Universe is different from how we see it. The Earth looks flat, but it is really more like a sphere. Solid objects seem like continuous matter, but really they are made of atoms, which are mostly empty space. Planets seem to follow Newton’s idea of gravity as a force, but as Einstein discovered, objects in space really take as close to a straight path as possible in curved space-time. Hoffman’s idea, however, is more like what I discussed in Representational Realism, where reality-in-itself is fundamentally different from anything we can imagine, because the act of constructing a picture in our minds is automatically at least one step removed from reality itself.

In their public conversation, Michael Shermer of the Skeptics Society and professor of psychology Jordan Peterson discussed Hoffman’s interpretation of an icon-based perception of the world. They disagreed slightly with his interpretation, because our perceptions and mental pictures inform us to some degree of what will happen when we interact with them. Thus, it is not correct to say that the icons we see are nothing like reality, but they are versions of the truth at a low-resolution.

This fits with my own experience, and I presume the experiences of most people as they progress through life. In our quest for nobler purpose and deeper truth, we keep finding that the truth as we see it is not entirely correct, and that some nuance at the edges of it speak of something more complex. We continually find ourselves looking closer at things we thought we understood, only to find new insights about them that cause them to make even more sense and explain things more thoroughly.

As reality pertains to the human experience, the lowest resolution is one of stories. We see how the patterns in the world and our lives line up with the archetypes buried in our unconscious minds—or how they deviate in tragic or amusing ways. At a slightly higher resolution, the world is made of agents of choice,* people with free will who craft the future through effort and action. At a higher resolution, we find deterministic biology and physics, with organs, neurons, and fluid systems performing their tasks like clockwork. And at the highest resolution known to humankind, we find probabilistic quantum physics, where two systems that start out exactly the same can end up differently, but with well-defined probabilities for each. That might be the highest resolution, or there might be more layers hidden beneath it. No one knows.

You might wonder, as we come to understand higher and higher resolutions of truth, if there is any reason to look at the world in the lower resolution pictures. Shouldn’t we just go with the clearest, most in-depth understanding of reality, and throw out the naive views we had before? I’ll answer that question with another question: is it better to look at a map of the world, to walk along a beach, or to examine a handful of sand? All of the layers are important, because every time we peer closer, we lose a little of the big picture. What I’m saying is that reality comes in layers. At one level, physics is probabilistic, but at a large enough scale, it behaves deterministically. At one level, human beings have free will and the power to make the future, and at another level we act out our archetypal instincts like actors on a stage. All of these pictures are true, and we find the richest, fullest understanding and engagement with the human experience by taking all of them seriously.

*I am actually not sure what order free will and archetypes come in. It may be that free will is sandwiched between telling stories at a lower resolution, and acting out archetypal instincts at a higher resolution. I left the main text as it is, though, because its lower-resolution explanation gets my point across nicely, while this higher-resolution explanation in the footnote would bog it down.