What makes something real?

What makes something real?

First of all, what does “real” even mean?

We use the word constantly.

“That’s real.”

“That isn’t real.”

“This is real life.”

“I know what I experienced was real.”

“Be realistic.”

“Is that actually real?”

But what are we saying when we say something is real?

Are we saying that it exists?

That we can see it?

Touch it?

Measure it?

Prove it?

That other people can perceive it too?

That we believe in it?

That it has consequences?

Or perhaps that it simply feels real to us?

Because those are not the same thing.

And somewhere inside that distinction is an inquiry I don't think we ask nearly often enough.

Not what is true.

That is a different question.

Truth asks us to investigate whether something corresponds to what is actually the case. Truth concerns accuracy, evidence, correspondence, knowledge.

But I am interested in something slightly different.

What makes something real?

And perhaps even more importantly:

Who, or what, gets to decide?

We tend to imagine reality as something fixed.

There is the world, we think, and then there is us looking at it.

The world exists.

We perceive it.

Simple.

Except it isn't.

Because every human being experiences the world through perception.

We don't encounter reality naked.

We encounter it through eyes, ears, memory, language, emotion, expectation, attention, history, fear, desire and belief.

Two people can stand in exactly the same room and leave having experienced two entirely different worlds.

One person sees a crowded room and feels belonging.

Another sees the same room and feels completely alone.

One person sees a stranger and feels threatened.

Another sees the same stranger and feels nothing at all.

One person remembers an event as the beginning of something beautiful.

Another remembers the exact same event as the moment everything began to fall apart.

So which experience was real?

Was one of them?

Both?

Neither?

Or are we using the word “real” to describe several different things without noticing?

Perhaps there is physical reality.

Things that exist independently of whether we perceive them.

The mountain is there whether I look at it or not.

The ocean does not cease to exist because I close my eyes.

A building does not disappear simply because I have never seen it.

But then there is perceptual reality.

The world as it appears to a particular consciousness.

And perceptual reality is strange.

Because perception does not merely receive information.

It selects.

It interprets.

It constructs.

We don't notice everything that exists around us. We notice what our minds allow us to notice.

Our brains filter enormous amounts of information before anything becomes part of conscious experience.

So the world we experience is already, in some sense, edited.

Then there is emotional reality.

Fear is real even though fear is not an object.

Grief is real even though you cannot put grief on a table.

Love is real even though you cannot hold it in your hand.

Shame can alter the course of a person's life.

Hope can keep someone alive.

A belief can change a person's behaviour so profoundly that the belief eventually changes the physical circumstances surrounding them.

So if something produces consequences, does that make it real?

And if it does, what happens to things that exist only internally?

What happens to an imagined conversation that changes the conversation you eventually have?

What happens to a fear of abandonment that changes the way you behave toward someone you love?

What happens to a possibility that never happened but changed everything because you believed it might?

At what point does something imagined begin participating in reality?

Then there is social reality.

Money.

Countries.

Borders.

Laws.

Titles.

Institutions.

Marriage.

Companies.

Status.

None of these exist in quite the same way that a tree exists.

There is no molecule of “money” floating inside a banknote.

There is no physical substance called “country” inside a border.

And yet these things are extraordinarily real.

They determine where we can live.

What we can buy.

Who can enter a place.

Who has authority.

Who can marry.

Who can own something.

Who can be imprisoned.

Who can inherit.

Who can belong.

So perhaps human beings have the ability to create realities simply by collectively agreeing to participate in them.

But then we have to ask:

How many people have to agree before something becomes real?

And what happens when the collective agreement is wrong?

Does consensus create reality?

Or merely create a shared experience of it?

Perhaps there is another category altogether:

Relational reality.

Things that don't exist entirely inside one person or another, but between them.

Trust.

Friendship.

Power.

Obligation.

Intimacy.

Betrayal.

A relationship cannot be held in your hand.

And yet relationships can shape entire lives.

Something exists between two people.

Something happens between them.

And even if the relationship ends, something may remain.

A memory.

A wound.

A lesson.

A changed identity.

A child.

A decision.

A future that would not otherwise have existed.

So what exactly was real?

The relationship?

The experience of it?

The consequences of it?

All of them?

And perhaps this is where reality becomes uncomfortable.

Because reality does not necessarily disappear simply because we stop recognizing it.

Consider memory.

What happens to what is real when you lose your memory?

If something happened to you twenty years ago and tomorrow you forget it completely, does the event become less real?

Did your childhood become less real because you can no longer remember every day of it?

Did someone stop loving you because you forgot that they did?

Did a relationship cease to exist because one person lost the ability to remember it?

Or does reality continue independently of our access to it?

If it does, then memory cannot be the thing that makes something real.

But then memory creates another problem.

What happens when we remember something that never happened?

The memory itself is real.

The experience of remembering is real.

The emotion attached to it can be real.

The consequences can be real.

And yet the event being remembered may not have happened in the way we believe it did.

So we can have a real memory of an unreal event.

A real emotion attached to a false belief.

A real consequence produced by something that never actually occurred.

Which reality matters?

And what happens when we begin believing our own lies?

At first, there is a lie and there is reality.

We know the difference.

We knowingly create a false version of something.

But human beings are remarkably capable of repetition.

Repeat the lie.

Defend it.

Explain it.

Build evidence around it.

Tell it again.

Eventually, perhaps, we stop experiencing it as a lie.

We experience it as reality.

The original event has not necessarily changed.

But something else has.

Our reality has changed.

Our perception changes.

Our behaviour changes.

Our relationships change.

Our decisions change.

And because our behaviour changes, the world around us begins responding differently.

The lie has now produced consequences.

It has entered the world.

So what exactly happened?

Was the lie unreal?

Or did something unreal become real through its consequences?

Perhaps there is a difference between the reality of a thing and the reality of its effects.

And then comes another uncomfortable question:

What happens to what is real when what you know is no longer a factor in your life?

You can know something and not live as though it is true.

You can know you are loved and still live as though you are alone.

You can know you are safe and still experience the world as dangerous.

You can know a relationship has ended while continuing to live emotionally inside it.

You can know who you are and spend years behaving as though you are someone else.

Knowledge does not necessarily govern lived reality.

Sometimes what we know has very little power over what we experience.

So perhaps knowing something does not make it real.

And not knowing something does not make it unreal.

That distinction matters.

Because if reality depends upon our awareness of it, then anything unknown would somehow have to wait for us to discover it before it could exist.

And that seems absurd.

There were stars before human beings knew about them.

There were things happening before anyone witnessed them.

There are probably things happening right now that no human being will ever perceive.

Reality cannot depend entirely upon recognition.

But neither can we ignore perception.

Because whatever exists outside us still has to pass through consciousness before it becomes our experienced world.

And now we arrive at the strange territory between reality and perception.

Perhaps there is a world that exists independently of us.

And perhaps there is the world as experienced by us.

And perhaps those two worlds are never perfectly identical.

Every person carries a slightly different map.

And yet we walk together through the same territory.

We negotiate our maps.

We compare them.

We argue over them.

We establish facts.

We establish measurements.

We create language.

We create systems of verification.

We decide that some perceptions are more reliable than others.

And this is where facts enter the inquiry.

Facts matter.

Of course they do.

Facts allow us to distinguish between what we perceive and what can be independently demonstrated.

They give us something to test our perceptions against.

But even facts do not necessarily answer the larger question of reality.

A fact can tell us that something happened.

It can tell us how something behaves.

It can tell us what we can measure.

But does measurement create reality?

Or does it simply reveal a small portion of what already exists?

And who decides what is measurable?

What happens to something that is real but cannot currently be measured?

Was it unreal yesterday and real today because our instruments improved?

Or was our knowledge simply incomplete?

Perhaps the history of human knowledge is, in part, the history of discovering that reality was larger than our previous ability to perceive it.

And if that is true, then perhaps humility is required whenever we use the word “real.”

Because what we currently perceive may not be the boundary of what exists.

Which brings us back to the question of perception.

Does perception create reality?

Sometimes, perhaps.

If enough people believe something, behave according to that belief, and organise society around it, their perception can produce material consequences.

But perhaps perception also distorts reality.

A person can look at a loving relationship and perceive rejection.

A person can look at danger and perceive safety.

A person can look at themselves and see someone completely different from the person everyone else sees.

So perception can reveal.

Perception can construct.

And perception can deceive.

Perhaps reality is not simply what we perceive.

But perhaps our experience of reality cannot exist without perception.

And if that is true, then every conscious being is walking around inside a reality that is partly received and partly constructed.

Which means that two people can disagree about reality without either of them consciously lying.

They may genuinely inhabit different experiential worlds.

And perhaps that is one of the reasons human beings struggle so much to understand one another.

We don't merely disagree about facts.

Sometimes we disagree about what the world feels like from inside another person's existence.

So does it matter?

Does it matter what is real?

If every person experiences the world differently, perhaps perfect agreement is impossible anyway.

Maybe what matters is not whether we all experience exactly the same reality, but whether we can recognise that our experience is not necessarily the whole of reality.

Maybe reality is larger than any one person's perception of it.

Maybe it is larger than any culture's perception of it.

Maybe it is larger than humanity's perception of it.

And perhaps that is the humbling part.

We may spend our entire lives moving through reality without ever seeing all of it.

We may only ever encounter fragments.

Physical fragments.

Emotional fragments.

Relational fragments.

Perceptual fragments.

Remembered fragments.

Believed fragments.

Measured fragments.

And perhaps we mistake the fragment we can access for the whole.

Which leaves us with the strangest question of all.

What makes something real?

Is it existence?

Perception?

Experience?

Consequence?

Memory?

Knowledge?

Collective agreement?

Independence from consciousness?

Or something else entirely?

And if something can be real without being perceived...

real without being remembered...

real without being known...

real without being believed...

real without being measurable...

then what are the limits of reality?

And what happens when we reach the edge of everything we can prove?

Perhaps this is where the inquiry stops being about the world around us.

Perhaps it becomes personal.

Because every one of us has something we have decided is real.

Something we cannot prove to another person.

Something we experience but cannot adequately explain.

Something we believe exists beyond what we can see.

And perhaps some people will call that imagination.

Some will call it psychology.

Some will call it coincidence.

Some will call it faith.

Some will call it delusion.

Some will call it knowledge.

And perhaps none of those words settle the question.

Because underneath all of them is the same unanswered question we began with.

What does “real” actually mean?

And if we have spent our entire lives deciding what is real according to what we can perceive, remember, measure, know, prove or believe...

what happens when something exists outside all of those categories?

What would we call it?

And then, perhaps, there is only one question left.

Is God real?

________

And this got me thinking. about...

Real, Reality, and Truth

Is something real...

reality?

At first, the question seems almost unnecessary.

Surely if something is real, it belongs to reality.

But perhaps we have been using those words too easily.

Because something can be real without necessarily being reality.

A fear can be real.

The person experiencing it may feel it completely.

Their heart may race.

Their behaviour may change.

Their decisions may change.

The fear may even alter what happens next.

But the thing they fear may not exist.

The experience is real.

The effects are real.

But that does not necessarily make the object of the fear reality.

The same is true of memory.

A person can remember something that did not happen the way they remember it.

The memory is real.

The experience of remembering is real.

The emotion attached to it is real.

The consequences of believing it may be real.

And yet the event itself may not have happened.

So something being real does not necessarily make it reality.

Perhaps real is the inquiry.

We ask:

Is this real?

What about it is real?

In what sense is it real?

What exactly are we making a claim about when we call it real?

Its existence?

Its experience?

Its effect?

Its perception?

Its consequence?

Reality seems to be something different.

Reality is what constitutes what is.

And that distinction matters.

Because something may enter reality through its consequences without the thing that produced those consequences being what we believed it to be.

A lie can produce real consequences.

But its consequences do not make the lie true.

A false belief can change a life.

But the life changing does not make the belief reality.

An imagined conversation can influence a real conversation.

But that does not mean the imagined conversation happened.

Something can therefore be real in one sense without constituting reality in another.

And if that is true...

then real does not necessarily equal truth either.

Because truth and reality seem to share the same room.

Not necessarily the same function.

Not necessarily the same meaning.

But the same room.

And perhaps we have been too quick to separate them.

Or too quick to define their relationship.

So we won't.

Not yet.

For now, we can simply observe what appears to be emerging.

Real is an inquiry.

Reality concerns what constitutes what is.

And Truth is somewhere in that same room.

Which leaves us with the next question.

If reality constitutes what is...

what is Truth doing there?