The reality illusion

Imagine an ideal world. Or a personal dystopia of some kind. Or just some random imagined place or situation. You probably have no problem whatsoever conjuring up at least the vague beginnings of such worlds in your imagination, and given some time, you’ll probably be able to elaborate quite a lot on them, without any further guidelines. Now, here’s a question I’d like you to think about: What is the relation between your imagined worlds and the real world? It’s an awkward question, and I guess you are at a loss for how to deal with it properly. Perhaps your most immediate response would be to start looking for similarities and differences, something which would result in a list of realistic and unrealistic properties of the imagined worlds. But this isn’t the kind of relation I’d like to have established, as you probably suspect. The question is ontological. What I want to know, to be specific, is what kind of world the real world is, what kind of world an imagined one is, and whether or not the latter can be reduced to the former.

We could take a reductionist approach: What are the respective worlds made of?

Reality, at least as far as science have been able to discover so far, is made of leptons, quarks and bosons with completely incomprehensible properties. Space and time is somehow interconnected, and there might be quite a few additional dimensions to the four we actually (if indirectly) do perceive. It’s an exceedingly strange world, far bigger, older and more complicated than any pre-scientific thinkers dared to suggest.

I think imaginary worlds can be separated into components as well, but doing this requires some care to avoid having one’s imagination start detailing further as one investigates. Take an imagined tree for instance: One might not originally have given the color and texture of the tree beneath the bark any thought. Therefore, filling this in would be tampering with the subject matter under investigation. A better approach would be to label the insides of the tree as “undefined”. Only the appearance of the tree was originally rendered, and this “skin” we might do well to define as one of the separate components we were looking for. Other components might include individual leaves or branches, if the level of detail in the imagined scene is sufficiently high. If not, the tree crown might be found to be defined in imagination as a whole. As a general principle, the imagined world is optimized for fast rendering in the mind, not for accurate modelling of whatever elements of reality it happens to imitate.

In one sense, it does seem perfectly plausible that the latter kind of world is reducible to the real world, as the organs presumably responsible for creating mentality are made of real stuff, with no supernatural components. A perfect theory should be able to account not only for the normal stuff of physics like matter and electricity etc., but even the far more elusive nature of mind. Thus, it seems very plausible to declare that the ontological domain of reality includes that of imaginary worlds.

But in another sense, the only reality we have access to — the one described above — is but a set of accepted beliefs rendered in mind. True reality is not to be equated with what in fact is merely a set of beliefs, even when these beliefs are perfectly reasonable and confirmed by all currently available empirical evidence. If we truly believe that mind is created somehow by computational activity of leptons, quarks and bosons (or whatever), we have to admit that the reality we can perceive, think about and talk about must be on the same level of ontological status as completely fictional, imaginary worlds. That the latter is not encompassed by the former, but that they are both encompassed by the ontological domain of an unknown true reality beyond the reach of mind.

We mistake our beliefs for reality all the time. In fact, that is essential for how our minds work, because our brains have limited resources and have to optimize for the greatest possible efficiency in the tasks we set ourselves to. So the illusion is our friend, as it saves us a lot of headache in most practical areas. But in certain theoretical areas, philosophy prominently among them, it is an obstacle we have to be very aware of. Philosophers should strive to become thoroughly acquainted with the reality illusion, to master it in the sense of being able to brake or restore it at will, as per required by practical and theoretical circumstances encountered. And what’s more, they should come up with theoretical accounts of mind and reality that can make sense of this aspect of our human situation.

This, I think, is what should be the defining role of philosophy.