Where does reality come from?

We here at the Church of the Churchless don't shy away from asking Big Questions. No indeed, our problem isn't with questions, it's with answers. That's a much tougher proposition. 

Nonetheless, I'm pretty confident that I can answer the question posed in the title of this blog post: Where does reality come from? 

From you and me, along with every other person in the world. Reality isn't given to humans. Reality is produced by humans.

Now, I'm not saying that we somehow have godlike powers of bringing the universe as a whole, and our planet in particular, into being. Nature exists separate from us. After all, the big bang happened some 13.7 billion years ago. Modern humans, Homo sapiens, are only several hundred thousand years old.

So reality has been around for vastly longer than humans. But we have no experience of that pre-human reality, and obviously we never will. All we know about reality is what our brains currently convey to us.

That, for sure, isn't unvarnished reality, just as it is. "Just as it is" has no meaning. The human brain, where all of our knowledge resides, lacks any direct connection to the world. My brain, your brain, and everyone's brain is encased in a dark, silent skull.

Perceptions of the world arrive through the senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell. These are human senses. A dog, bat, porpoise, elephant, spider, snake, or any other complex creature has its own senses, which often are very different from ours.

Thus when we speak of reality, we have to indicate whose reality? A central tenet of neuroscience is that there is something like to be a conscious being. That something like is only experienced subjectively, not objectively.

I know what it is like to be me. I don't know what it is like to be you. And I'm even more clueless about what it is like to be our dog, or the deer who visit our yard. Their experience of reality is considerably different from mine. I'm more confident that how other humans experience reality is fairly close to how I do, but I can't be sure about this.

All I know is how other people describe how they think, feel, and perceive — which usually appears to resemble my own experience, though in extreme cases (such as psychosis, hallucinations, genius talent) I have to struggle to imagine what it would be like to be such a person.

My basic point is that reality is constructed by humans. We don't know reality as it is, but as our brain processes sensory information into a form that has survival value through evolutionary influences and pressures.

Ultimately this construction of reality from the raw material provided by nature is a social phenomenon. This is why different cultures look upon the world differently. Here's some passages that I read today in Selfless: The Social Creation of "You" by Brian Lowery, a social psychologist and Stanford professor.

The fact that much of reality is socially constructed, and that this construction happens at multiple levels — interpersonal, group, national — creates vulnerability. If your self is being created and the environment that that self inhabits is also constructed, you might find your self at odds with the world.

For example, you might experience your self as independent — perhaps you were raised that way by your parents — but the world constructed around you forces you to engage as dependent on others more powerful than you — maybe you're a woman in a sexist society.

…We often behave as if reality is a given; it's just out there and we see it, and presumably so does everyone else. But much of what we take for reality is not just "how it is"; it is constructed with others. For example, imagine you are asked to estimate the distance that a point of light on the other side of a dark room is moving.

This task is something that most people have little experience with or prior knowledge about, and so your response is just a guess. You would have no way of judging the accuracy of this guess; however, when placed in a group, you have far more information available to you. You are likely to listen to what your group members have to say and adjust your estimate accordingly.

In reality, the movement of the light is merely an optical illusion. What is objectively true of the world is irrelevant in this case. What matters are the people around us. We adjust our estimates based on what others say, because we see this information as valuable and useful for making sense of our world.

Surely you've been in situations where you didn't understand what was happening. Maybe you saw someone walking ahead of you collapse. Or maybe you encountered a large group of angry people shouting in front of an office building. If you're like most people, which you most assuredly are if you're human, you probably looked around to see how others were responding.

You use those other people to try to decide if you should offer help to the person who collapsed or if you should be afraid of an angry mob or support a righteous protest. That's what humans do: we lean on each other to make sense of the world around us.

Much of what we take for granted as reality has already been given to us by our relationships and communities. Early familial relationships shape our tastes and attitudes, friends teach us acceptable behaviors, romantic partners teach us something about intimacy. We learn through social interactions.

We learn the way of the world through mundane and complex interactions with those closest to us. These relationships create a riot of color and forms that we experience as the world.

It's incredible, really, that in an unfathomably complex world, we experience a sense of "seeing" and understanding it, that we engage with the world (more or less) effectively. We owe much of this to our close relationships. Close others help us make sense of the world — the world makes sense when it makes sense to "us." We spin worlds around and out of our relationships.

Look around at your life and think about the people in it. Now imagine a completely different set of people. How much would your life change? You can probably see plenty of changes.

Maybe you'd eat different food, have a different job, spend more time outdoors and less time shopping or vice versa. You might become a clean freak or a slob. And what you can imagine almost certainly is only a small fraction of the way the world would change for you. As far as you would be concerned, the world, your reality, would shift into something new.

This is the power of self as constructed in relationships: it reflects, projects, and creates worlds, based on the social realities that exist around it.