The Four Types of Reality

We foolishly use only one word to describe what confronts our senses.

“Reality.”

This is what is “real,” it is “what we know,”  that which is “true,” and “out there,” “outside of our minds.”

Well, there are, it turns out, a few realities.

There is, first, your personal reality. This is the reality in your head, your subjective awareness. This is your conscious state, or the sensation of wakefulness upon waking up from sleep.

This where we feel love and anger and pain. This is where our opinions come from, as well as the worldviews which produce them.

Cognitive psychology tells us that human opinion is easily swayed through mental “heuristics,” which the brain produces to easily deal with complex problems in the environment. These heuristics are closely related to mental stereotypes and very often lead to very simplistic, illogical and error-prone thinking.

We also know that human opinion is powerfully pushed around by emotion. Social psychology knows now that most people, most of the time, come to their most cherished political and moral views entirely because of some emotional attachment or emotionally-charged perception. That’s it. The whole concern for logical consistency, evidence and plain old good-reasoning comes AFTER the belief or worldview has been fully accepted as true for emotional reasons.

So our personal realities, our subjective views, are almost tragically, hopelessly untrue.

These constant visions and experiences we call “reality” are, to make matters worse, interpreted through evolution’s own public relations firm: ego-enhancement. We tend to think that ideas we can identify with, feel comfortable with, feel safe and connected with are more likely to be real or true. Our beliefs are usually not only flatly false and a bit ridiculous but often magnificently self-serving.

Yet our inner reality FEELS real. And it is. It’s our personal, subjective reality. It’s just not really worth shit, outside of being able to feel intense emotional experiences.

But hold on, three other kinds of reality exist.

The second type of reality is social reality. This reality exists collectively, that is, it exists because it is shared by two or more personal realities.

When an idea, belief, worldview or whatever, is shared by at least two people (i.e., shared by two personal realities), it takes on a new character.

It’s easy to see that this kind of reality exists with a little trick.

Suppose you are an Occupy Wallstreet protestor (is that movement still happening? I’m a social scientist, so I try to learn about how humans work instead of supporting their political causes). Imagine you have a dream one night about painting a mural on the side of a building. You think that this piece of art will stimulate the protesting spirit of local youths in some truly unique and pathbreaking way.

Yet, imagine that your mural idea is just a little weird. A little off, maybe a little creepy, even. So, though you are personally convinced the mural idea is great, you can also imagine that other people might not find it to be so wonderful.

Now, imagine you attend some job-related social gathering a few weeks later and, offhandedly, tell a few of your colleagues about your dream and about your (somewhat weird) mural idea. Your co-workers smile and clap their hands almost involuntarily. A great idea, they say. That’s genius, and yet so obvious, how has nobody thought of that?

Now imagine how you would feel about your mural idea walking  home from that party. Compare this new,uplifted , feeling to the original doubts and uncertainty about the opinions of others that accompanied initially waking up from the dream.

The difference? Now it seems as though your mural idea really is, in fact, truthfully, in reality a good idea. As more people come to share this belief that the mural idea is good, the mural idea, literally, in social reality, BECOMES a good idea, simply because people believe it to be so. You feel this belief as increased motivation and excitement which wills you to further think about the mural idea.

Its brilliance has become socially real.

Shared personal realities constitutes a second type of reality, a social reality.

The third type of reality is objective reality.

Objective reality is what would exist even if there were no humans alive. It is what exists completely independently of our minds and our feelings and our experiences. When humans talk about “facts” they are referring to this objective reality.

This one’s easy to grasp. Let’s go back to the mural example.

Imagine everyone loves your mural idea and they think it will re-ignite the (dead? God, I don’t know!!) Occupy Wall Street movement. Several unbiased people you know like your idea, and so this idea is now truly, and in social reality, a great idea.

Yet it fails. Fails terribly and pathetically. Suppose your name was “Hailey.” Your mural goes over so horribly, you are legally re-named “Faily” by your scorned parents. Moreover, that mural of a young Mexican boy vigorously fucking a defeated bald eagle (Take THAT America!) draws lawsuits that bury you for decades.

So, in your personal reality, on account of your dream, the mural idea was awesome. In social reality, on account of the shared perceptions of others, your idea was awesome. In objective reality, however, your idea was false — it was calibrated to incite protestors and it simply didn’t.

Lastly, there is a very special kind of reality.

We’ve only been able to truly comprehend this reality for roughly 500 years, but there have been those who’ve had glimpses of it for thousands of years…

Remember that personal realities are embedded in the social reality. Social reality is just a collection of personal realities.

But social reality doesn’t always meet up with objective reality. Sometimes it does, I suppose,  but because objective reality is “outside” of our heads and “outside” of human awareness, our human realities (personal and social) don’t always line up with objective reality. Hell, this why the mural idea failed…

Without further ado, the fourth type of reality is shared objective reality. We perceive this reality when our social realities line up with objective reality.

You would have experienced this type shared objective of reality if your mural idea had ACTUALLY worked. It would have worked because it would have actually tapped into a latent, unmet need of protestors for motivation. It didn’t do this, and that’s why it failed so terribly.

So, then, I propose to you four realities.

As a sociologist, I think these are the four realities that matter: personal, social, objective and shared objective.

Hmm….Oddly, my mind just blanked.

I don’t think I have anything more to say on this.

The “Self”

Everyone has a ‘self’. This is the set of behaviors you show the world and the symbolic narrative connecting the behaviors. Every human culture on Earth has some notion of what a ‘self’ is.

Just to get some nonsense out of the way, the ‘self’ is NOT a thing or a soul or an essence. It is a combination of neural circuits. People do not LITERALLY ‘have’ selves anymore than New York state literally ‘has’ a Big Apple.

You see how talk of the self is absolutely soaked in metaphor? This is a HUGE problem, especially in sociology, psychology and philosophy.

You, that is, your ‘self’, is a set of patterned interactions in your brain. These patterns represent circuits and circuits create themselves after repeated chemical interactions along stable electro-chemical neuronal cell ‘networks’.

In other words, your “self” is composed of networks in the same way New York’s ‘Big Apple’ is composed of individual streets, back alleys and interactions…

Selves differ from on another, of course.

My ‘self’ is different than a lot of the other selves I see on a day-to-day basis.

Actually, that last statement isn’t entirely true. But I like to think it’s true and that there is the whole point of having a ‘self’.

You see, a ‘self’ is, literally speaking, an energy transduction system. That is, it represents the simultaneous caloric and metabolic demands of trillions of interactions of neurons (‘brain cells’). The specific patterns of interaction of these neurons is, of course, unique to your physiology and ecology (environment). In this sense, ‘you’ and ‘yourself’ are unique.

BUT, your conception of ‘me’ is almost always self-flattering because self-esteem helps energy transfer (i.e., social interaction). When energy transduction is consistently low, your ‘self’ experiences a ‘depression’:  a decrease in activity in areas of the brain (especially in areas that suppress negative emotion) which enables a subjective re-analysis of energy (and, thus, ‘self’) options.

The astute reader will notice that what I’ve just stated insinuates that ‘you’ are not in ‘control’ of your ‘self’ display – the neural networks are.

This would be right. Ultimately, this behavioral display of ‘self’ is contingent on the display’s effectiveness in garnering resources. Resources can be anything from obviously important materials (food, shelter, sex) to more second-order needs (status, prestige, power, support, comfort, control).

The specific neuronal networks most conducive to elevated levels of resource access are ‘selected for’  in the brain, calorically and metabolically. Animals (and the micro-organisms and cellular chemistry that help compose them) are, after all, built to consider their own welfare; they would not exist otherwise.

Selves, put simply, are mental depictions of environmentally effective transduction circuits in the brain.

In other words, what you show to the world, your prized, wonderful ‘self’ is ACTUALLY, if we must be literal, a subjectively experienced mental depiction of trillions of chemical and electrical neuronal interactions, optimized for maximum ‘resource’ consumption in a given (and ever-changing) environment. This maximization might be crummy, or miscalculated, but it is, nevertheless, your biologically calculated maximization.

Does this take the beauty out of life and out of each other? Maybe a little, but the most interesting and beautiful and mysterious part of it all is in the description itself…

Even in my rather descriptive explanation above, how much is still simply metaphor? And how much about “me” can ever truly be explained biologically?

Fear of Death as a Variable

We’ll all die. Some of us are more aware of this than others. Some of us regret the fact more than others.

93% of all the people who have ever lived are now dead. The 7% who haven’t died are the 7% alive right now – us. Those numbers are convincing.

Death is more than an event that marks the conclusion of an organism’s life. Death has also a subjective character. We feel death, we fear death, we contemplate what it would be like to finally fade away.

As creatures with a concern for our own lives, such thoughts frighten us. The thought of non-existence is perhaps the first source of cognitive dissonance. It certainly is the most fundamental.

We must reconcile the fact of death with what we think we know about existence. Death is subjectively un-interpretable, yet we have no choice but to cognize it – we are creatures that survive by interpreting. This painful paradox forever remains the spark of our aspiration for explanations, interpretations and intuitions about death.

But there are tragic consequences for those who fear death.

Those who fear death are at greater risk of believing in wish-fulfillment fantasies. Belief in heaven and hell (whatever the religious tradition) is truly a belief in (1) continuance of the subjective self after brain death and (2) righteous judgment after death that will appropriately punish every possible wrongdoing.

Neither (1) nor (2) is possible in the natural world. All of our demonstrable evidence about reality suggests that we appear to live in a natural – and not a supernatural –  world, therefore (1) and (2) are not possible. Despite being impossible, people still believe them. If the very thought of death invokes immediate and intense cognitive dissonance, than believing in the laugh-out-loud preposterousness of heaven and hell ain’t so bad if it makes you feel a little better.

Related to the wish fulfillment of heaven and hell are the unnecessary fears some people have about ghosts, haunted houses and other ‘spirits’, ‘lost souls’ or whatever. This is all make-believe. For those of you who believe in these magical entities: they result from your brain healthily and naturally extrapolating logically (to other people) what you currently believe about yourself (that your soul continues after death).

Such beliefs in ghosts and hauntings are common and cause a lot of fear in both adults and children. About 50% of the American population believes in or is on the fence about the existence of ghosts and spirits. Consequently, ‘haunted’ houses sell for much less on the market, police departments literally throw money away on ‘psychics’ who claim to ‘speak’ with the dead, and people every day thank ‘guardian angels’ for being saved from a dangerous situation by real, flesh-and-blood caring human beings.

Fear of death also causes some people to be excessively timid and fearful. If we have only one life and all the status, power and prestige I have in this life is all I will ever have, I want to protect it, safeguard it. The best way to do this is to cower and hide through life, saying only what one must in order to improve one’s self image. This is the core of selfishness.

Relatedly, since we only have one life, some people find themselves afraid of disowning and abandoning other people. Ah, what the hell, right? We only live once? Why not be a lover and not a fighter? The fact remains that some people are consistently hurtful, unkind, disagreeable and greedy. They deserve to be abandoned in this life, and in any life. Doing the opposite is cowardice and fear of retaliation and that’s all it is.

Luckily, some unexpectedly good things may come from not fearing death (besides being free of nonsense beliefs about heaven and hell, souls, ghosts and ‘secret’, ancient herbal remedies for liver cancer).

The transcendental temptation won’t go away. The desire, the lust, to belong to something greater than ourselves will probably never go away. In essence, even if we disavow supernatural childishness, we still stand to lose everything upon death unless we attach ourselves to a cause greater than ourselves, more significant than our lives, and deeper than our single existence.

Finding oneself attached to a cause (and this can be anything so long as you are 10 fingers and 10 toes devoted) is subjectively equivalent to living forever and enjoyable in and of itself. Once we’re dead, we won’t care that our individual importance is not very significant – we’ll be dead. While we’re alive, though, we can glance and see our mark on some seemingly eternal human project, and glimpse, for a moment, what eternal life might look like.

Death is also, in some ways, a good thing. Bad ideas often die with bad people. Why would anyone want to imagine a reality where the souls of Hitler, Stalin, Genghis Khan, and Osama Bin Laden continue on forever? Also, if all of us will be dead in several decades, doesn’t that mean that our relationships are that much more valuable? If existence endured forever, no sense of immediacy, of passion, of urgency would vitalize our dreams and our affections.

Death is also a reminder of the long quiet that is to come. All the more reason to speak up now, while our lungs still have air.

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Rates of belief in nonsense:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/17275/onethird-americans-believe-dearly-may-departed.aspx