This is an extremely thought-provoking article that I haven’t been able to get off my mind, so thanks.
I think we can all agree that reality (the ‘territory’) as a whole is real, but this is nigh-tautological. The question of whether a particular concept is a true part of reality (e.g. atoms) is more interesting but not as straightforward.
jsalvatier suggests that ‘the “reality” of a theory is point on a continuum, not a binary property’, and it seems there’s something to this. My gut response to the question of ‘are atoms real?’ was ‘of course! we’ve got photos and everything!‘. But what is a photo other than the result of a scientific experiment that gives us strong evidence in favour of the theory? Going back to the everyday definition of ‘real’, we consider something to be real when there’s so much evidence that we can’t imagine any alternative. ‘I’ll believe it when I see it with my own eyes’ some say. But our eyes are just partial evidence, not a final arbiter of reality on their own. Others believe Uri Geller’s powers to be real because he can perform his tricks in plain sight, in front of a camera.
Eliezer has claimed that “A peer-reviewed, journal-published, replicated report is worth far more than what you see with your own eyes.”. So my gut response was wrong. All we have is evidence, and some theories have more of it than others.
So, if the theory of atoms was supplanted by a superior alternative, would atoms no longer be real? It doesn’t seem right that something that happens in our mind should affect the world out there. “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away”. So all we can confidently say is our probability estimate that a certain aspect of our map is complete (a.k.a. ‘atoms are real, 99%’). Which is not as satisfying and of course, given that our definitions can change over time, this may get more murky as the definition of an atom is refined to be in line with incoming observations and new theories. For instance, while we know the original definition of atom (indivisible) to be false, we consider that it’s coiner was in fact right in some sense.
Altogether I think the problem is that while ‘atoms’ are concepts that appear in our theories, and therefore maps, ‘real’ is a word that refers to the territory. So I guess the question could be restated as ‘Is the map (atoms) the territory (real)?’. At this point perhaps it could be claimed that with perfect processing of perfect information, the map does become the territory but I don’t think it’s worth kicking this dead horse any further.
I think we can all agree that reality (the ‘territory’) as a whole is real, but this is nigh-tautological.
For some reason, this sentence struck a chord with me and made a number of somewhat confused thoughts fall into place (a mini-epiphany). Indeed, real means the territory, whatever that is. I could have consoled myself in moments of panic fearing that reality wasn’t really ‘real’. However real reality feels, there isn’t something else ‘more real’.
So what did I mean when I felt that reality didn’t feel real?
Thinking about it for a few moments, ‘feeling real’ subjectively means not only empirically based (seeing it, touching it, hearing it) but that the sensory information is integrated and familiar. A very new environment, a chemical imbalance in your brain that make it difficult to process sensory data and even an inner ear infection all cause feelings of unreality.
Something abstract, likewise—“a mother’s love”, for example—can be considered subjectively real, if you have lots of familiar and empirical examples of such love (she held me, she drove me to school, I had happy feelings). I don’t know if this feeling of “real” isn’t just an analogy your brain makes. That is, that it feels integrated on all sensory levels and familiar like a familiar physical object.
Finally, by analogy, atoms and photons should subjectively feel real for someone studying them if there is a lot of integrated empirical evidence of them and they are familiar objects. Thus the subjective feeling of something being real is scalable: they feel somewhat real if you can see their effects, but more real if you can see/hear/touch them directly. And then regardless of the kind of empirical evidence, it’ll feel more and more real as you become more familiar with them.
All of this is relevant to the post only to the extent that the statement, “X is real” has a subjective component.
This is an extremely thought-provoking article that I haven’t been able to get off my mind, so thanks.
I think we can all agree that reality (the ‘territory’) as a whole is real, but this is nigh-tautological. The question of whether a particular concept is a true part of reality (e.g. atoms) is more interesting but not as straightforward.
jsalvatier suggests that ‘the “reality” of a theory is point on a continuum, not a binary property’, and it seems there’s something to this. My gut response to the question of ‘are atoms real?’ was ‘of course! we’ve got photos and everything!‘. But what is a photo other than the result of a scientific experiment that gives us strong evidence in favour of the theory? Going back to the everyday definition of ‘real’, we consider something to be real when there’s so much evidence that we can’t imagine any alternative. ‘I’ll believe it when I see it with my own eyes’ some say. But our eyes are just partial evidence, not a final arbiter of reality on their own. Others believe Uri Geller’s powers to be real because he can perform his tricks in plain sight, in front of a camera. Eliezer has claimed that “A peer-reviewed, journal-published, replicated report is worth far more than what you see with your own eyes.”. So my gut response was wrong. All we have is evidence, and some theories have more of it than others.
So, if the theory of atoms was supplanted by a superior alternative, would atoms no longer be real? It doesn’t seem right that something that happens in our mind should affect the world out there. “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away”. So all we can confidently say is our probability estimate that a certain aspect of our map is complete (a.k.a. ‘atoms are real, 99%’). Which is not as satisfying and of course, given that our definitions can change over time, this may get more murky as the definition of an atom is refined to be in line with incoming observations and new theories. For instance, while we know the original definition of atom (indivisible) to be false, we consider that it’s coiner was in fact right in some sense.
Altogether I think the problem is that while ‘atoms’ are concepts that appear in our theories, and therefore maps, ‘real’ is a word that refers to the territory. So I guess the question could be restated as ‘Is the map (atoms) the territory (real)?’. At this point perhaps it could be claimed that with perfect processing of perfect information, the map does become the territory but I don’t think it’s worth kicking this dead horse any further.
For some reason, this sentence struck a chord with me and made a number of somewhat confused thoughts fall into place (a mini-epiphany). Indeed, real means the territory, whatever that is. I could have consoled myself in moments of panic fearing that reality wasn’t really ‘real’. However real reality feels, there isn’t something else ‘more real’.
So what did I mean when I felt that reality didn’t feel real?
Thinking about it for a few moments, ‘feeling real’ subjectively means not only empirically based (seeing it, touching it, hearing it) but that the sensory information is integrated and familiar. A very new environment, a chemical imbalance in your brain that make it difficult to process sensory data and even an inner ear infection all cause feelings of unreality.
Something abstract, likewise—“a mother’s love”, for example—can be considered subjectively real, if you have lots of familiar and empirical examples of such love (she held me, she drove me to school, I had happy feelings). I don’t know if this feeling of “real” isn’t just an analogy your brain makes. That is, that it feels integrated on all sensory levels and familiar like a familiar physical object.
Finally, by analogy, atoms and photons should subjectively feel real for someone studying them if there is a lot of integrated empirical evidence of them and they are familiar objects. Thus the subjective feeling of something being real is scalable: they feel somewhat real if you can see their effects, but more real if you can see/hear/touch them directly. And then regardless of the kind of empirical evidence, it’ll feel more and more real as you become more familiar with them.
All of this is relevant to the post only to the extent that the statement, “X is real” has a subjective component.