In today's installment of Philosophy Mondays I start to tackle reality. My goal is to stake out my own position by contrasting it with what I consider to be the major ways philosophy has run afoul. In last week's post on language I wrote that language is the map. Reality is the territory.
There are two big failure modes in thinking about reality. The first is to deny the existence of the territory entirely. The most extreme form of this are speculations that nothing exists outside of conscious observers - an idea that George Berkeley famously advocated in the 18th century. Not only does a tree not make a sound when it falls with nobody around, but there is no tree altogether. People have more recently arrived again at this position via weird and mistaken extrapolations from some aspects of quantum mechanics. Somewhat less extreme versions but still in the same failure mode are claims that all attempts to describe reality are always and forever subjective.
The second failure mode goes in the opposite direction. It is to postulate a fully objective reality that exists independently of any conscious observers, and for which humans can derive a completely objective description in what philosopher Thomas Nagel called "the view from nowhere." In the extreme it denies any interactions between the map and the territory. This failure mode leads to claims that we can know reality with certainty, echoing René Descartes' quest for absolute foundations of knowledge rooted in human perception. A related failure mode is to assume that reality is entirely predetermined without any way for conscious beings to make choices that could be considered free will. This view too is the result of an overly strong claim derived from our current scientific theories, in particular superdeterminism.
My own view of reality is as a world for which we can develop explanations but which is simultaneously shaped by those explanations. I will write more about explanations in the future but I mean them in the sense of David Deutsch who in turn builds on the work of Karl Popper: a useful but preliminary (potentially falsifiable) understanding. The map and territory metaphor extends to encompass my interactive view of reality. Surveyors provide data used by cartographers to make maps. The powers that be draw lines on maps that dramatically reshape what happens in the world. Map and territory are not distinct but shape each other. Humans are shaped by reality and we shape reality.
Reality is further complicated by its recursive nature in which the maps themselves become an important feature of the territory. Subsequent human interactions are deeply mediated by the maps and then those interactions and their outcomes in turn belong to the territory. My perspective bears some similarity to the “transactionalism” of John Dewey whose approach is based on organisms and their environments being deeply intertwined.
Now you may already detect the pattern here with this second post. My philosophy tries to claim a middle ground away from extremes. This was the case for language and is the case for reality. Extremes exert the attraction of intellectual elegance: everything is subjective, everything is objective. Reality, like language, is deeply messy. This to me is exactly the purpose of philosophy: to help humans live the good life by guiding decisions in a messy reality. Aristotle was spot on when defining the virtues as a middle ground in the Nicomachean Ethics, what he called the "golden mean" between excess and deficiency. Similarly I propose a golden mean of reality sitting between the extremes of subjectivity and objectivity. Holding the middle requires choices. Holding the middle is hard. Holding the middle is virtuous.
In future posts, I will explore how my view of reality relates to questions of truth, knowledge, and ethics. If reality isn't purely objective but also isn't purely subjective, how do we determine what's true? How do we know when our maps are getting better at representing and productively shaping the territory? These questions will be central to my larger project of developing a philosophy for the Knowledge Age.
Illustration by Claude Sonnet 3.5 based on this post.
