Is there such a thing as reality?
Let me take you on a thought experiment
A few months ago, I was wandering through the Fotomuseum in Antwerp, one of my favourite musea of all times. There I stumbled upon the work of Issei Suda, a Japanese photographer known for his surreal and strangely subjective imagery.
In his series ‘My Japan,’ he uses a tiny spy camera to photograph strangers in various settings, documenting the ordinary and reveal the extraordinary. Suda uses the photos as a confirmation of his own existence the moment he pushes the button, perhaps that’s why the series contains a few self portraits. Suda’s photography transforms reality into something surreal.
It was one of my favourite exhibitions of the year because it sparked an interesting discussion between my friend and me: is there such a thing as reality? And if so, how do we define this reality?
What do you see?
Suda’s photographs catches people in a certain moment. He looks at them through his lens and captures an image which, in turn, I get to see though my own ‘lens’: all the stories, experiences, people and places I’ve known during my years of being alive.
For example, when you look at the photo above, what do you see? I like to think that Suda captured this moment because it shows tenderness. He saw a father carrying home his child, asleep on his shoulder after an exiting day out.
When I saw the photo for the first time, I didn’t see tenderness. I saw sadness. Having a troubled relationship with my father, this photo confronts me with a moment I’ve never experienced myself.
And what about the people in the photo? Did they feel anything at all? Or is this man just carrying home this child, thinking about what they’ll have for dinner later?
Ask yourself: what is the reality shown in this photo? How did you come to this conclusion?
Let’s put a cat in a box
Art is subjective, we all know that. So what about physics? Suda’s work reminds me of an interesting thought experiment called ‘Schrödinger’s cat’. In this experiment, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger proposes a scenario in which a cat is a put in a sealed box where a random quantum event has a 50/50 chance of killing it. Until the box is opened and the cat is observed, it is both dead and alive at the same time.
In other words, the cat’s reality is uncertain. As long as you don’t open the box, there’s no way of knowing the reality of this cat. Anything is possible.
Ask yourself: what role does duality have in experiencing reality? Can you ever be one thing, without being something else at the exact same time?
You can’t predict the unpredictable. Or can you?
Let’s stick with quantum mechanics for a bit. Have you ever heard of the Heisenberg principle? German physicist Werner Heisenberg states that the position and the velocity of an object cannot both be measured exactly, at the same time, even in theory.
Reality therefore depends on the eye of the beholder since the very concepts of exact position and exact velocity together, in fact, have no meaning in nature. We made it all up. This adds a whole new meaning to the phrase, “I see your point, but I don’t know where you’re going with it.”
Ask yourself: How can I be sure that what I’m seeing is the same thing as you’re seeing?
And to lighten things up a bit, here’s a joke I found when researching Heisenberg:
Heisenberg and Schrödinger are in a car that gets stopped by the police.
Police officer: ”Do you know you were doing 75mph?”
Heisenberg: “Oh great, now we’re lost!”
The officer is not happy and checks the trunk of the car.
Officer: “There is a dead cat in here!”
Schrödinger: “Well, there is NOW!”
Sensory overload
Right, so even physics can’t pose an answer to the question: what is reality? Perhaps neuroscience can.
Neuroscience is the study of the brain and nervous system in all its aspects: how it is structured, how it works, how it develops, how it malfunctions, and how it can be changed. It tries to figure out how our conscious and unconscious systems interact in order to create our experience and sense of self.
Right, back to our question. Before trying to define reality, let’s look at how we experience it: through our senses. Our senses bring information about physical stimuli into our brains so we can process, interpret and react to that stimuli. They’re our link to the external world.
Typically we think of five senses: vision, hearing, touch, smell and taste. However, we receive a lot more information than that, such as the position of our limbs (proprioception), gravity and acceleration (vestibular), temperature and pain.
So does every human uses their senses the same way? Can we ever be sure that what I see and interpret as the color ‘sunny yellow’, you see the exact same shade? What about those whose senses work totally differently?
Synesthesia, for example, is a neurological condition in which information meant to stimulate one of your senses stimulates several of your senses. If you have synesthesia, you might notice that your senses sometimes intertwine, giving your perceptions of the world an additional dimension. Perhaps every time you bite into a food, you also feel its geometric shape: round, sharp, or square. Maybe when you’re angry at someone, you close your eyes and see certain colours playing at your field of vision.
So do people with synesthesia experience a different reality? They must do. Hearing in color or reading colours into words on a page adds a dimension to life that I can only dream of.
Ask yourself: Can you ever be sure that another person sees the exact same reality as you do? How can you make sure?
Where you are is what you are
So art, science, and even our own senses can’t guarantee reality’. Perhaps it’s time to look at others.
We could try to tweak the definition of reality by saying it’s something that appears to a sufficiently large group of people. But those of you who have visited foreign countries know how odd it feels when everyone’s doing something you don’t do at home.
For example, when I was backpacking through Asia, I sometimes had dinner with locals I met along the way. One time, I ordered a soup and the person next to me asked if it was any good. When I said it was delicious, they took my bowl and slurped a few spoonfuls, just like that. Another time, someone took my bowl of rice and dunked half of it on their plate. I was stunned. It wasn’t until someone explained to me that in Asia, it’s very normal to share food, I understood the odd custom. But still it felt weird to me and I didn’t dare to take anyone else’s food until months after.
I’m not sure how relevant this story is to the question we’re trying to answer, but it did make me think: is reality perhaps defined by culture and societal customs?
Ask yourself: if reality is something most of us experience the same way, what happens to that reality when someone doesn’t agree or recognises that reality?
Tell me how you feel and I’ll tell you what I see
Let’s move to one of my favoriete subject of all times: language. In my work as a Conversation Designer, I understand how important shared language is for exchanging information, stories, and other human experiences. Language is how we connect to one another. It helps us express ourselves and explain to others what we’re seeing and how we’re feeling.
But just because you can understand someone, doesn’t mean you get them. In Belgium, the tiny country where I grew up in, there are three official languages: Flemish (spoken by 57% of the population), French (42%) and German (1%). In Flemish alone, linguists estimate that there are between 267 and 613 different dialects. So yes, we all speak the same language, but with lots of nuances, like words that hold different meaning depending on the area you’re at. It’s these nuances that can cause confusion.
To make sure we all understand what we’re talking about, us humans came up with a dictionary. In this book, all the words are clearly explained. For example, the Cambridge dictionary gives the following definitions for the word ‘horse’:
- Noun (ANIMAL): a large animal with four legs that people ride on or use for carrying things or pulling vehicles.
- Noun (SPORTS EQUIPMENT): a tall piece of equipment that people jump over in gymnastics.
- Noun (DRUGS): slang for heroine, a powerful illegal drug.
Right, so the word ‘horse’ can have three very different kinds of meaning. So how do we know we’re talking about the same horse then? The answer is context.
When I tell someone I was at the gym and jumped over a horse there, the other person will probably know that I’m talking about the sports equipment. But what happens if I remove the first part of the sentence, and tell the person I ‘jumped over a horse’? Would that person still understand I was jumping over a horse, as in sports equipment, or would they think I jumped over a horse, the animal?
Ask yourself: are there words that hold different meaning for you than they do for someone else? How can you make clear what you mean exactly? Can you explain your reality to another person? If so, which factors matter?
The harsh reality
After reflecting on these thought experiments, I think there is no such thing as an absolute reality. But I do believe in my own reality. What I’m experiencing right now feels very real to me, even if I’ll never be able to explain it (well) to others. The fact that I can’t always share my perceptions with you doesn’t mean they’re not there.
So… Is there such a thing as reality?
