What is Real? Maybe It’s About Time

don Quixote, by Pablo Picasso

What is real? And who even cares?

Arguably, applying one’s decision-making process to what’s real is more productive than applying it to tilting at windmills.

This is, of course, a reference to don Quixote.  According to Wikipedia, The phrase “tilting at windmills” is sometimes used to describe “either confrontations where adversaries are incorrectly perceived, or courses of action that are based on misinterpreted or misapplied heroic, romantic, or idealistic justifications. It may also connote an inopportune, unfounded, and vain effort against adversaries real or imagined.”

So maybe it’s worthwhile to know what is real and what isn’t.

In my book Hoodwinked: Uncovering Our Fundamental Superstitions, I argue that most of our understanding of the world and ourselves is based on misinterpretations and romantic ideals.

So again, what is real?

It’s a question that’s been argued about for a long time, both in popular culture and in scientific circles. Here’s a quote from Psychology Today:

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” — Phillip K. Dick

From dictionary.com:

“Existing or occurring as fact; actual rather than imaginary, ideal, or fictitious: a story taken from real life.

And attributed to Albert Einstein:

“The further quantum physicists peer into the nature of reality, the more evidence they are finding that everything is energy at the most fundamental levels. Reality is merely an illusion, although a very persistent one.”

What do we all believe about what is real?

The human mind seems to contain a number of perceptual biases. Perhaps the primary such bias is the one about what is real. Human beings seem to come inevitably to believe that what is real is that which is identified by the senses as being the actual configuration of the physical world. “I believe what I see with my own eyes,” people say.

People can, and do, argue about how the senses actually work. They argue about whether the pictures the brain assembles from sensory information actually correspond to a fixed configuration of all the atoms and molecules we say make up the world.

And then there’s the question of whether quantum theory tells us that there is always uncertainty about that configuration, how the distribution of possible configurations collapses into the one observed, and all that.

Here’s one more way of looking at this question about what is real.

Let’s consider the relationship between reality and time. The physicist Carlo Rovelli, in his book “The Order of Time,” points out that “usually, we call ‘real’ the things that exist now, in the present. Not those that existed once, or may do so in the future." We say that things in the past or the future ‘were real’ or ‘will be’ real, but we do not say they ‘are’ real.”

Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Rovelli then goes on to challenge this view in the light of the special theory of relativity, which shows that time is different for different observers. He concludes from special relativity that the “present” is not defined for distant observers, that is, distant from us.

This understanding of the “present” from physics may, however, be misleading in defining reality for us human beings. That’s because any theory about anything is conceptual. It’s an explanation for what we observe and experience. The special theory of relativity, for example, is a mathematical explanation of why we always measure the speed of light as being the same, no matter how fast we or the light source is moving. It’s a model of the physical world, not the world itself.

For a human being, the present is defined experientially, not in terms of time. For us humans, now is all there is. We can’t experience “then,” any more than we can experience “there.” It’s always “now and here,” for us in our experience, in our reality.

What about those things we say “were real” in the past, or “will be real” in the future? A human being can’t experience past or future. Experientially, there is no past; there are only memories and records. And experientially, there is no future; there are only pictures in the mind of what we think might be.

What about “solid, physical reality”? I contend that “solid” is a concept, created in the mind after we experience certain electrical stimuli in the brain. “Solid” is ultimately a memory. That’s the nature of what we think of as the physical world. It’s a memory.

So again, what is real?

To go back to Rovelli’s initial statement about things being real in the present, none of what we remember is real, because it’s not taking place in this moment. And, nothing in the future is real, because it’s only a picture in the mind. So reality isn’t about solidity, or about a particular configuration of atoms and molecules, or even about what everybody knows. Reality is about the present moment, about what you and I are experiencing in this right-now. If you’re in the present, you’re experiencing what’s real. As soon as you think about it, it’s not real anymore, though it can be useful to think about it. It’s about now. It’s about time.