Metaphorical realism

Perception is a kind of stop motion studio where for every frame the largely subconscious perceptual mind intervenes to make fine adjustments to a world model made of mind clay. This is our main orientational interface to a reality we can’t access directly. The conceptual mind abstracts from it—as well as relying on other sources of trustworthy information—to extend our model beyond the limited horizon of our senses. The combined result is a tenuous, vague sense of a conceptual universe of vast scope in time and space, with a narrow focus area of clear and concrete perceptual experience, limited to the situated immediacy of a first person perspective. Where is ‘reality’ in this picture? 

There are many answers to this question, and I want to roughly sort them according to what I believe is a developmental order of worldview maturation, whether in one individual life or in culture at large. This will lead into philosophical skepticism, which disassembles the whole concept of reality, but I will reassemble it again in terms of ‘metaphorical realism’, a picture of how our minds relate to reality that I think is both liberating and constructive. 

This position has lots of parallels. I don’t claim originality, I’m just a hobbyist trying to find my own way up the old mountain.

The story of a Venn diagram separating

A baby presumably lives in a near complete confusion with regard to where its mind ends and reality begins. A Venn diagram representation of its implicit metaphysics would be a near total overlap of two circles representing mind or experience on the one hand and reality on the other.

As we grow up, we discern that there is something independent of our minds, and form the concept of a reality beyond our control. However, we maintain the assumption that we can access this reality directly. In terms of the Venn diagram, the circles have started to separate, but there is still significant overlap. Perception is assumed to be real, in the sense that what we see when we open our eyes remains unquestioned: it’s simply what reality looks like. This state of mind is called naive realism, and it’s an extremely adaptive way of being in the world, in the sense that it allows us to go about our days without impractical concerns getting in the way. More advanced reality conceptions can complicate even simple things, so for reasons of ease of interacting with the world, as well as plain energy conservation, naive realism is the mode of experience most of us spend most of our time in, regardless of how different things might look to us in contemplation. 

Religious realism is worth mentioning as well, if mostly for historical reasons—that is to say, it is no longer necessarily a step in one’s personal development. Religious realism is distinguished from naive realism by the concept of reality shifting its weight from perception toward a carefully curated selection of conceptions. The history of religion, at least in the West, is itself one of gradual separation of the Venn diagram: present and personal gods gave way to a single, impersonal God. Divinity receded further and further out into the clouds of abstraction. This is a fascinating story in its own right, and I hope to be able to do it justice one day.

With scientific realism, both perception and the more fantastical kind of conception is deemed unreliable. Our searching minds deny themselves rest until they’ve constructed an abstract roof over their heads with sufficient empirical cover. Crucially, the building materials are restricted to a narrow spectrum of our conceptual imagination: unambiguous and losslessly communicable patterns, i.e. math. Its features make it possible to accumulate findings and insights over generations, which has made this approach astonishingly successful. The scientific realist, having grown up with a concept of reality receding into abstraction, still clings onto it, but more or less strictly in these mathematical terms. The models produced by science are assumed to be real, or so close to reality as to encourage exclusive belief in them.

If this last stand for the literal-minded concept of reality is surrendered, the consequence is the dreaded situation of philosophical skepticism. Much of the modern history of philosophy has circled anxiously around this drain, escaping it again and again. With skepticism, the reality concept’s recession into obscurity concludes by it detaching completely. At first glance, the Venn diagram representing this situation would be two non-touching circles. However, it quickly gets more perplexing, because how can we know anything beyond the mind? How can we assume the existence of a reality we are denied access to entirely? It’s an unstable position that might seem to threaten a collapse into metaphysical solipsism, but that too would be to make an unwarranted assumption. What it does lead to, however, is epistemological solipsism: that all you can ever possibly experience is, in a sense, your own mind, and that one must remain agnostic with regard to any reality beyond this screen, even when what’s rendered on it insists on mind-externality.

Painting by Rozzi Roomian. Instagram: @rozzidreams. Used with permission.

At least with regard to perception, a lot of scientists actually agree with this, e.g. the neuroscientist Anil Seth, who describes waking perception as a “controlled hallucination”. In his view, our experiential world is a predictive model, continuously updated to account for the stream of sensory data coming so to say from below, through layers of pattern-determining predictive processing. In the case of sight, for example, this means that light itself doesn't look like anything at all. What we see is the high level result of our brain's attempt to make sense of the stimulus of our optical nerves: it’s a brain generated virtual environment, which, when tuned just right, allows us to skillfully adapt to our actual surroundings. The world of our experience is just that virtual world, which means that the content of our waking consciousness is of precisely the same kind as that in dream, just adaptively shaped by this subconscious attunement process to track and predict our trusted informational sources—prominently including our senses. In so doing, it makes up an orientational interface for our organism, one that is so rich and reliable that we find it difficult to snap out of literally mistaking it for reality.

A scientific realist might concede everything up to this point, but the epistemological solipsist understands conception, too, as merely part of our experiential apparatus: that it takes on purposive shapes, but never touches reality in any meaningfully ontological sense. Note that this entails a sort of self-undermining self-reference, since this whole picture is itself a product of conception. Here’s the edge of a bottomless recursive well, a source of endless confusion. Some would call this a logical fallacy and a reason to dismiss the whole line of thinking that led to it, but I strongly disagree. I think it’s a profound finding about the nature of our minds: It’s like a singularity where model space breaks down, similar to how spacetime breaks down in black holes—and just like the study of black holes is crucial for understanding physics, the study of model recursion is important for understanding the mind. This will be the topic of a future post.

Many scientifically minded people point to the causal relation we presumably must stand in to the reality external to our minds, but a true skeptic would object that causality itself is in question, as something we bring to our experience of the world rather than find in it—like a conceptual connective tissue in the temporal dimension of our worldviews, and as such, it has no privileged access to reality. 

Skepticism is clearly destructive, in the sense that any true connection to literal reality is severed. The foothold on firm ground is lost, leaving you adrift on an ocean of meaningless, disorganized impressions. It is a mad state of mind, reasonably feared like death. And yet, the way forward is through. The concept of reality has to implode for us to be released from its obsessive-compulsive grip. Thus, both by the fear we have of it, and its potential for deliverance, skepticism is comparable to the ‘ego death’ experience known from spiritual traditions as well as from psychedelic trips. Both ego death experiences and philosophical skepticism have features of purgatory: they are painful purification processes that can potentially lead to bounteous reward. In the case of skepticism, my claim is that metaphorical realism is this reward. It is a non-literal and thereby more flexible way to frame the concept of reality, one that allows us to regain access to the full spectrum of its possible uses.

Skepticism can feel like the Sun going out. And yet, once our eyes get used to the darkness, after having been blinded by literal realism for a lifetime, we can reflect back and reinterpret events in light of the fact that this has actually been our situation all along. How did we make “reality” appear all that time? Obviously, this is something our minds are able of doing, and we’ve made excellent use of the ability. On the naive end of the spectrum of uses, the reality concept has helped us to function in the world with ease and confidence, and on the scientific end, it has helped us hone our mathematical familiarization tools to such an extent that we’ve accomplished simply incredible technical achievements. The fact that the sense of reality underlying these endeavors was never literally true is only an argument against it as long as we hold out hope for the possibility of some kind of more privileged ontological access. With epistemological solipsism, all such hope has been surrendered, and so we can slowly warm up toward embracing these immersive “illusions” for their useful applications—’truth’ no longer being a meaningful criterion for our conception of whatever might be beyond our minds. This is not to say that we are free to choose what to believe, but rather that the criterion for what we believe cannot be ‘truth’ or ‘reality’, as knowledge in this sense is plain impossible. In a future post, I will propose and explore a pragmatist alternative that ultimately relates to health.

Skepticism is not a dead end but a portal, on the other side of which the world is renewed, in a sense richer than before, because we gain the freedom to explore the fullness of what our experiential instruments can do. Expressed symbolically: the reality concept is like the pupil of an eye. From a hyperdilated starting point, we've been gradually contracting it toward the blindness of a single point. The ‘metaphorian’ turn allows us to dilate it again, to adaptively take in all the colors of experience.

It’s a little difficult to relate this development to the Venn diagram, but in some sense the various uses of the concept of reality is now seen as internal to the mind and yet projected outside of it. We form ideas and perceptions, and allow some of them to represent reality. The relation these representations stand in to reality is metaphor-like: products of the mind’s invention are “carried over” projectively to the strictly inaccessible beyond-the-mind. Perceptual experience as such can be understood as a multisensorial metaphor for our immediate surroundings; our conceptual worldview, an abstract cosmic tapestry hung up on the walls of our transcendental firmament—another metaphor.

Projection and immersion

Literal reality having been completely denied us, realism re-emerges as a meaningful organizing principle, but reframed as metaphorical, meaning that we always maintain a slight detachment, like experience as such going from fullscreen mode to windowed mode. The sense of realism becomes understood to be simply a function of immersion. For most of our lives, our lever of immersion has been stuck in an in-position, at least with regard to certain ideas. Now that we’ve been unjammed by taking the bitter medicine of philosophical skepticism, we can not only detach but also go back into things: to explore immersive worlds with a reduced risk of getting stuck again.

The term ‘metaphorical realism’ appropriately suggests both the undermining of literal realism and the elevation of metaphor. From its conceptual vantage point, the entire range of possible reality concepts—including the naive, religious and scientific—opens up to us again, and each of them has their use. Of particular interest is the end point of the story of the separating Venn diagram, where mind and reality were portrayed as non-overlapping spheres—previously described as an unstable position. Viewed as something internal to the mind but projected outside of it, however, it no longer collapses in on itself. The diagram can be useful as a metaphysical map where the empty circle representing ‘reality’ stands to remind us of an attitude of complete epistemic humility with regard to anything beyond the mind itself. In a sense, this use of the reality concept is an expression of faith, but it is a faith in an unknown, and as such represents an opening of the mind to experience and experimentation rather than the opposite sort of self-assured closing in that faith often involves. 

This mindset of utmost detachment is like a hub state from which we can enter into any of a wide selection of more determinate frames, and back to which we can always return from our various adventures of immersion—kind of like the castle in Super Mario 64, where Mario jumps in and out of framed paintings on the wall to visit a variety of worlds.

Illustration by Abby Pace. Used with permission.

In principle, we can experience just about anything as real. Any idea, any kind of perception. At some level, it is a choice that our nervous system makes. Gaining consciousness of the underlying dynamic means we have to make some conscious choices in this regard. In a sense, how to utilize our concept of reality is a design question, where we have to make both pragmatic and aesthetic considerations. On the one hand, we need our convictions to be adaptive, in that we need to gain a handle on the mind-external objects of our concerns: a sense of familiarity, whether rendered perceptually or in math. On the other hand, we need to take good care of our minds, and this can take the form of tending a worldview like a garden, optimizing it for pleasantness and healthy produce.

Epistemological solipsism reveals that the concept of reality is like a canvas within the mind, on which we have drawn what we most trust as representative of reality, and as we’ve grown to be more skeptical and selective, this canvas has seen a fair few revisions, developing toward a more and more abstract picture. Full on philosophical skepticism cleared the canvas, leaving us, the painter, confused and dejected. However, after mourning the loss of our illusion of true contact with reality, we realize that the canvas is still there, and that we actually have a full palette available to us—far richer and more colorful than the restrictive formality of science. We may no longer find rest in fully mistaking what we put on our canvas for reality itself, but it is a joyous interfacing tool, one that allows us to develop a nimble, high resolution sense of familiarity with practically anything we expose ourselves to. So we can return to the canvas to allow and explore immersion in all kinds of things, including rather exotic conceptions, both fantastical and mathematical, or to explore giving epistemic priority to embodiment and the felt presence of perceptual experience—something many uptight literal realists deny themselves. Some experiences and conceptions will be more valuable and practical than others, to be sure—and this sorting process is important—but all are barred from even hinting toward the exclusive rights and absolute authority of an ontological connection.

This is a very different way of being, and difficult to navigate. The transition from monolithic and non-contradictory to fragmentary and compartmentalist is dramatic, and requires a new way to steer clear of harmful delusion. Ultimately, I think this must involve recognizing that delusion is at the heart of how we interface with reality. It is not possible to escape it, and so the only question that remains is how to go about finding healthy, purposive, responsive ways of understanding. How to discern good and sensible kinds of shadow play from unhealthy and misleading ones. 

Our epistemic situation is subterranean, in the sense of Plato’s analogy of the cave, but contrary to Plato, we must recognize and emphasize that this cave has no exit. I’ve previously attempted an intestinal reimagining of the cave analogy based on the metaphor of mental digestion, wherein consciousness is portrayed as a homunculus trapped inside the informational digestive system of our organism, picking out flotsam from the stream of perceptual experience to try to make sense of the outside world. I believe stories of this kind can play a role in helping us to navigate our disorienting circumstances. Myth is simply a narrative mode of expression—a particularly human language, in that our minds are deeply narratively inclined.

The metaphor metaphor

The essence of realism, whether naive, religious, scientific or otherwise, is to mistake a mental construct for reality. The trick consists in allowing something to stand in for reality: to represent it. In other words, metaphor is the perfect metaphor for how our minds relate to reality in general.

This framing is enormously versatile, and I wish to use it to basically recontextualize everything having to do with reality claims: Religion, science, perception—all can be reinterpreted in terms of metaphor. Taking reality claims literally traps our minds—but as I’ve probably emphasized to excess already, immersive use of the very same ideas and perceptions does not require taking them literally. Putting metaphor front and center is a useful reminder in this regard, because metaphors should never be taken literally, however much seriousness they nonetheless deserve. With metaphor, a familiarity is described, a resonance captured, but true reality eludes it, and so relying too heavily on it is an obvious fool’s errand. This is how we should relate to all our ideas about reality.

Metaphorical realism, then, is intended as a universal lens, one that permits a lighter, more versatile mindset, with which we can more easily avoid getting bogged down in superstition and confusion.