Our Evolving Archetypes of 'Realness'

[DocWatts]

Thought I might share a section from the philosophy book I'm writing, 7 Provisional Truths', which is a type of 'field guide' to Construct Awareness. In this section, I go into some of our intutions about 'realness', as a prelude to an in-depth discussion of scientific realism (which I'm currently working on).
 

Our Evolving Archetypes Of ‘Realness’ 

“What is real? How do you define 'real'? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.” - Morpheus, The Matrix

In The Matrix (1999), Morpheus embodies the Wise Sage archetype, who asks us to question our familiar assumptions about Reality. An archetype refers to patterns in our collective consciousness, which tend to pop up over and over again in stories, myths, and legends. The Sage is an archetype that stretches back to our distant past, serving as conduits of wisdom for their respective cultures. 

The Sage fulfilled an especially important function in pre-literate societies. Within these cultures, oral traditions were the primary vehicle through which collective meaning and purpose was preserved and transmitted. It’s a societal role that stretches back to the dawn of human culture, with tribal elders preserving a group’s mythological identity, and shamans serving as conduits to spiritual domains. Even as writing became more prevalent, the Sage archetype has endured, persisting across cultures and millenia. From its tribal roots to modern fictional portrayals such as Morpheus, the Sage is our lantern to the unknown, illuminating important truths about our connection to the world.

In keeping with this archetypal role, Morpheus challenges us  to ease our grip on the everyday assumptions that anchor us to Reality, and see if they hold up under scrutiny. In this intent, Morpheus is in good company, echoing time-honored wisdom traditions which suggest that there’s a ‘true’ Reality hiding behind the veil of everyday appearances. His question taps into archetypal allegories that liken our sense perception to cave dwellers looking upon shadows, mistaking these two- dimensional images for the full depth and richness of Reality. It’s a metaphor whose power stems from life’s hard lessons: appearances can deceive, and what we see isn’t always what we get. This deep-seated resonance with the ambiguities of daily life helps to explain the enduring appeal of these allegories.

Since our aim at this juncture is to scrutinize our intuitions about the ‘realness’ of the everyday world, Morpheus’s challenge is of obvious interest to us. While these ‘tales of two worlds’ are undeniably captivating, it remains to be seen whether they’re apt metaphors for our relationship to Reality; or whether they’re elegant dead ends that obscure more than they reveal. Our task, then, is twofold: dig down to the foundational assumptions of these grand metaphors, and see if they’re sturdy enough to bear the weight of our embodied experience. After all, proposing an intriguing question is one thing, and providing a robust answer that illuminates the subject matter is another thing entirely. So while Morpheus might be onto something here, let’s use the Enactive framework we’ve been developing to dig deeper.

What Morpheus is calling into question is a folk-understanding of Reality that should be deeply familiar to someone within a scientific culture. This intuitive view aligns closely with what philosophers classify as ‘Realism’. Realism is an umbrella term for viewpoints which posit that Reality has an ‘absolute ground’, or a fundamental basis for what’s ‘really real’. In this stance, an entity’s ‘realness’ comes from its connection to ontological primitives within Reality - essentially, basic building blocks from which all else is derived. Although Realism is a well-defined perspective within philosophy, in most other contexts it tends to operate as an unspoken background assumption. In sum, Realism isn’t just a philosophical perspective; it’s an invisible lens through which we tend to interpret Reality. 

To appreciate just how deep the Realism rabbit hole goes, consider the ease to which its assumptions become embedded in our sense-making frameworks. Physics isn’t ‘just’ an iterative approximation of how Reality behaves, it’s an objective description of what Reality is. God isn't 'merely' a felt presence that provides meaning and purpose to our lives, but the ultimate ‘first mover’ from which all of Reality springs forth. By that same token, consciousness isn’t ‘only’ our direct perspective within Reality, it's the promised contender that will dethrone physics as the actual bedrock for all that exists.

Note that the use of 'just', ‘merely, and ‘only’ here isn't intended to diminish these viewpoints. It’s meant to highlight a commonality for how these frameworks are interpreted, which tends to slip beneath our notice. The shared thread of these diverse perspectives is that entities and phenomena need to have an existence which transcends our human perspective within Reality to be ‘truly real’.

So that’s a high level overview of Realism. Now, let’s dive into the nitty gritty of its hold over the perceived ‘realness’ of our conceptual distinctions. To that end, we turn to two of its key variants - twin Rosetta Stones which operate so seamlessly that we rarely notice their presence. We could think of them as our background interpreters for daily life; content to quietly transcribe our perceptions until an encounter with the unfamiliar or the paradoxical brings them to the fore. So without any further ado, let’s introduce to the stage naive realism and scientific empiricism - representing the ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ sides of Realism’s coin.

To kick things off, we’ll capture a snapshot of the ‘simple’ manifestation, known as naive realism.  The crux of this stance is that the world is exactly as it appears to us in ordinary perception, and that others perceive it in the same way. We can think of it as the unexamined orientation that we tend to default to in daily life, when we’re taking our sensory impressions at face value. Settling into naive realism’s comfortable rhythms, we see a red apple and assume that its redness exists independently of our perception. We look up at the night sky, and take it for granted that the stars themselves are actually twinkling, instead of recognizing it as an effect of the Earth’s atmosphere. 

When stated explicitly, one might be tempted to write off this way of relating to the world as ‘crude’, and thus devoid of any value. But let’s not judge it too hastily. If we look beneath the surface, we find that far from being intrinsically ‘wrong’ or ‘useless’, it’s instead a vital component of how we navigate the day-to-day world. For a large proportion of everyday situations, these quick and basic impressions are perfectly sufficient. Take crossing the street: we see a car, assume that it’s really there, and react accordingly - no deeper reflection required. Then multiply this example by the hundreds of similar interactions that make up daily life, and we can gain a deeper appreciation of why it’s an indispensable presence in our lives.

However, in spite of their practical utility, these snap-judgements have glaring limitations that can leave us ill-equipped to deal with a complex world. They can be a serious hindrance when we encounter ambiguities that demand a more nuanced level of engagement. This becomes especially important when surface appearances are misleading, or when there are relevant complexities that can’t be fully grasped without analysis and reflection. Precisely because naive realism is a largely unreflective stance, it tends to collapse like a house of cards when subjected to sustained scrutiny. Science has revealed a world of microorganisms and fundamental forces that are invisible to ordinary perception, which profoundly shape our lived reality. Moreover, psychology and neuroscience have uncovered a host of unseen cognitive processes that direct our thoughts and behavior, outside of our awareness or control. In sum, while naive realism is a potentially useful heuristic in day-to-day life, it can become a serious obstruction in situations whose ambiguities call for a more deliberative approach.

So that’s the ‘simple’ version of our folk-understanding of Reality. But what of its more refined variant? For that, we set our sights upon scientific empiricism. Before examining its hold over the perceived reality of our conceptual distinctions, let’s first draft a blueprint of empiricism. To that end, we’ll introduce empiricism in its broad, historical sense. We’ll then reveal how its partnership with modern science propelled it into the familiar, folk-interpretation of Reality that many of us take for-granted today. Empiricism posits that our sensory experience and its extensions are the final litmus test for what’s ultimately ‘real’. Its key tenet is that observation of the ‘external’ world is where the rubber meets the road for verifying that our ideas have a basis in objective Reality. What empiricism drives home is that if we want to know whether it’s raining, we’ll have to go beyond armchair theorizing and actually look out of a window. 

While this may overlap with naive realism’s shared focus on the primacy of sense-perception, empiricism sets itself apart by acknowledging the potential gap between appearances and reality. Yes, empiricism still holds that accessibility to sense experience is determinative for what’s objectively ‘real’. But unlike naive realism, it insists these surface-level observations aren’t where inquiry ends - it’s where it begins. The basic aim of empiricism is to go beyond what’s immediately obvious, by using reason to interpret and extend our sensory observations in ways that can explain and predict phenomena. To illustrate this difference, let’s return to an earlier example. While naive realism would also acknowledge that it’s raining, it takes empiricism to tease out patterns for when it’s likely to rain, and how different levels of rainfall affects the vegetation in our garden. In other words: empiricism isn’t just sense-observation, it’s sense-observation paired with reason. 

So that’s a broad overview of empiricism. Now let’s trace out where science enters into the picture. Though popular perception will sometimes conflate the two halves of scientific empiricism, in actuality there can be no doubt as to which is the senior partner. Case in point: when modern science was getting off the ground roughly four centuries ago, empiricism was the millenia-old bedrock from which it took flight. Emerging relatively independently in both Eastern and Western thought, empiricism’s early practitioners included such paradigmatic heavy-hitters as Aristotle and Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha). Though Aristotle and Siddhartha explored life’s mysteries through highly distinct philosophical lenses, they were united in stressing the importance of direct observation paired with reason, albeit in different domains. (Aristotle’s emphasis was on how we fit into the systems of the world, while Siddhartha’s was on how we experience it.)

While pre-scientific empiricism significantly expanded the scope of our problem solving repertoire, key aspects of it could be considered outdated by today's standards. As we shift our focus to its more rigorous scientific variant, we’ll gauge whether this perception of early empiricism’s obsolescence is justified. Are we just flat-out better off with this more precise iteration of empiricism? Or are we throwing the baby out with the bath water by discarding this foundation for modern science entirely?

As we explore these questions, we’ll illustrate how this refined form of empiricism morphed into scientific realism, and what this has meant for the perceived ‘realness’ of our conceptual categories. We’ll also trace out how this metamorphosis unwittingly codified a seemingly unbridgeable gulf between our 'inner' experiences and 'external' Reality - and why this split is significant. What we hope to highlight is that this subject-object division is ultimately a mental construct that masks a deeper underlying unity. 

But here’s the kicker: mentally constructed does not mean ‘imaginary’. There are sensible reasons for why this bifurcation of Reality is intuitive for us. With this in mind, we’ll show how the Enactivist framework we’ve been developing offers a promising path for bridging this subject-object divide. A key pillar of this approach is that it doesn’t deny the ‘realness’ of our conceptual categories. It instead reframes them as interactionally real, emerging from our concernful involvement with the world. In essence, Enactivism aims to reconcile this underlying unity with scientific realism’s valid insights. But to get there, we’ll first need to understand why this subject-object gap exists, and how scientific realism entrenched this dichotomy in our thinking.

Edited October 8 by DocWatts

[Staples]

Very nice work. I like this enactivist framework. Interactionally-real also seems like a good way of holding categories. Do you think categories or things can exist without conscious interaction?

[DocWatts]

1 hour ago, Staples said:

Very nice work. I like this enactivist framework. Interactionally-real also seems like a good way of holding categories. Do you think categories or things can exist without conscious interaction?

Thanks! Under the Enactivist framework I'm developing, categories are products of the mind - but that doesn't mean they're 'imaginary' or 'not real'!  They're the end products of a cognitive process, but they also depend upon our interactions with a shared Reality.

In essence, Enactivism isn't a solipsistic framework - but it is mind-dependent, because Reality is always accessed and reasoned about from within a particular perspective. To that end, Enactivism could be considered a version of philosophical pragmatism. The focus of Enactivism is on elucidating how Reality is disclosed to us in our lived experience.

This view is agnostic on metaphysical questions about what Reality ultimately 'is' (not saying those questions are without merit, it's just not the focus here). Whether Reality itself is 'really' atoms floating in the void or pure consciousness makes no difference to what's being explored here, since the focus is on scrutinizing our subjective, lived experience - along with the interpretations we attach to that experience.

Here's a bit more on 'interactional realism' as it relates to our conceptual categories, if you're curious:
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So if our conceptual categories aren’t a retrieval of absolute features of a mind-independent Reality, then what, if anything, makes the distinctions they embody ‘real’?

The short answer? These distinctions are ‘real’. Just not in the absolute, mind-independent sense espoused by Transcendental viewpoints. Instead, our conceptual distinctions are ‘real’ in a different way; they’re interactionally real. They have substance because they’re grounded in our shared experience of Reality, distilling actionable generalizations that are attuned to our needs, capacities, and interests. These generalizations matter because they’re how we reflect upon our embodied experience. In essence, they’re the basis for the mental models that allow us to draw inferences, predict patterns, and solve problems. Essentially, they’re the key hallmarks of our distinctly human brand of intelligence; refined yet rooted in our shared evolutionary heritage with other animals.

Crucially, this grounding within a shared, experiential Reality is what allows us to meaningfully differentiate these interactional realities from ‘imaginary' phenomena. Consider dreams and hallucinations, to list a familiar example. Though these mental phenomena may echo aspects of our shared world, their connection to it is inherently tenuous and inconsistent. The erratic nature of what we encounter within these domains renders them too unreliable to serve as a stable conduit to our shared, experiential Reality.

If we return our gaze to the conventional wisdom about categories, the unrealistic assumptions of this familiar folk-theory come more clearly into focus. The crux of the matter is that our conceptual distinctions aren’t a glimpse into a ‘neutral’ Reality that exists apart from us. When this goes unacknowledged, it’s all too easy to treat these distinctions as if they’re variables in a universal equation with one right answer. Where it’s imagined that Reality will spill its secrets to whoever cracks this universal cipher. While this makes for an alluring metaphor, it’s a misunderstanding of our situation within the world. While we certainly have access to a staggering array of stable truths about our universe, the core illusion comes from how this relationship is framed. The crux of the matter is that Reality isn’t a ‘problem’ that can be ‘solved’. We put these distinctions into the world. They exist for us, inseparable from how we interact with Reality.

By dropping this insistence that our conceptual distinctions are only ‘real’ insofar as they correspond to a God’s-eye view of Reality, we clear the fog that obscures their true purpose. Which is to help us grapple with our existential situation within Reality.

Edited October 9 by DocWatts