Experience and reality
Reality itself is colorless, it is generally agreed, as science suggests that color is a feature of experience generated by the brain. We have three types of light-sensitive cells in our eyes, and the signals from these are wired to the back of the brain, where they are processed somehow into the subjective experience of color and shapes and so on. We can’t find color in physics, only wavelengths. However, experienced color correlates in a predictable way to wavelengths. It isn’t arbitrary. It maps out features in a way that helps us to get a handle on reality even though the features themselves aren’t real in any meaningful sense.
Why should this only be true for color, and not also the rest of experience? Surely, the whole world of experience comes about through some sort of processing in our bodies. Without the body, there is presumably no experience, not even darkness. No experience of time nor space. So the whole scene is produced by the body. The experience of anything and everything must be brain-generated, just like how it is with color.
Now, it is easy enough to imagine a colorless world and that our subjective experience sort of paints it. It is much more difficult to imagine a world without the experience of space and time. If we try to imagine such a thing, we might end up with something like a timeless, formless, entirely undifferentiated all-concept, but this itself would be a brain-generated conceptual experience. It would have no more of a claim to reality than our normal experience of time and space, and arguably much less of a claim, since a timeless, formless concept doesn’t give us a handle on anything.1
The proper contrast is this: Experience against non-experience. However, this is an impossible comparison to make, as we cannot experience non-experience, by definition. Thus, if we are to understand reality as not just colorless but beyond experience as such, it recedes into utter mystery.
We arrive at a strange conclusion:
Reality is all that exists, but all that can be experienced is virtual.
That said, it still seems entirely reasonable to think that our world of experience maps out features in such a way that we get a handle on this unexperiencable reality, even though it is impossible to make the case other than by, essentially, metaphor, like by comparing it to how color can be true in the sense of predictive accuracy – true as in “true aim” – without being real. The problem being that we can’t step outside of experience to verify the mapping.2
Our position – call it virtualism – reframes the whole color situation too though: not only is color virtual, but so too is the concept of wavelengths. These are just two kinds of virtual features aiming to map roughly the same thing. The comparison between them is not between experience and reality, but between perceptual and conceptual virtuality. The former was learned by growing up and having our sensory system attuned by interacting with our surroundings, and the latter was learned by a scientific process that was accumulated and refined over centuries.
The almost paradoxical knot at the heart of virtualist metaphysics is part of its strength, because it describes a real tension in how we relate to experience: we naturally tend to mistake it for reality itself, as that is how we use this interface. It costs energy to add the meta-cognitive layer of framing experience as a mere interface. The deep instinct to conserve energy is like a gravity we have to actively struggle against.
A part of the problem is conceptual confusion from a lack of precise terminology. We use the same words for experiences and ideas whether they’re considered as virtual or real, which effectively papers over the epistemic gap. We can’t help but talk about experience as if it is real, and since it is impossible to talk about reality beyond experience, experience is all we have to go on anyway. We have to triangulate our way to truth from our many different perceptual and conceptual maps. All we have are virtual forms, but they correlate and point in a direction that gets increasingly more trustworthy through a history of systematic testing. We have to make assumptions, not only about what reality is, but about how our realm of experience relates to it.
Through the history of philosophy, this has been a problem of selecting which parts of experience are real and which are not. Virtualism takes this to the radical conclusion that no part of experience is real, and reality cannot be experienced. This is itself an assumption, not something that can claim to be real. But according to virtualism, nothing can claim to be real, and assumptions are all we have. The claim is thus merely that virtualism itself is a good foundational assumption, one that helps us to make sense of things while reminding us of epistemic humility.
Virtualism is not of mere theoretical interest, but reframes how we relate to consciousness, belief and meaning. It also makes it possible to hold multiple perspectives without conflict. These and many other aspects and consequences will be explored in future posts.
The idea of reality as timeless and formless can be interesting for other reasons, however, in contexts that are not reality-oriented, e.g. as an object of meditation.
This is the real hard problem of philosophy. Chalmers questioned how we can make sense of consciousness given scientific realism, but scientific realism isn’t a given, only experience is. And so the hard problem is turned on its head. It becomes a problem of reality rather than of consciousness. I might elaborate on this in a future post.