I suspect that humans (and possibly most animals) possess a sense of reality. It’s similar in nature to the sense of proprioception. Proprioception allows us to know our toes are still there when we aren’t looking at them. Realtaception (for lack of a better name) provides a secure feeling that reality is real, even if the person in question doesn’t have the faintest concept of how it works.
There are several things that make me suspect this is the case. First, humans are notorious for entirely misusing words like fact, objectivity, or theory. People commonly believe that theories become facts, rather than fully understanding that in the empirical methodology to which they refer, theories are made up of facts. This sort of common error seems to point to a human inclination to be able to describe or identify reality, without much investment in whether it’s been described successfully. It’s the feeling surrounding reality that’s more important than the understanding.
The misuse of the concept of objectivity is particularly interesting, because it indicates that we fold our individual education and experiences into this realtaception. The way that humans will commonly refer to their own experiences as being objective or indicative of larger objective truths implies an essential internal link between knowledge/experience and our feeling of reality. We rely on this internal link to ascertain what information and experiences enable effective physical and social interaction with the world around us. It’s necessary for our development to take our feeling that we’re engaging with something real as a fundamental implicit premise for all these interactions, without ever having seriously considered the question, premise, arguments, or implications. The ways that we engage with this external landscape and what we learn about it, alongside the resulting effectiveness of this learning and engagement, are both heavily subject to the whims of context and the individual in question. We might learn that the world is hostile or friendly, that humans are stupid or smart, that certain things are inherently dangerous, conditional consequences of actions, varying spiritual truths, etc. We then use this sum of concepts and experiences in tandem with realtaception to form a picture of reality, having likely never specifically investigated reality at all. Despite our lack of questioning, we then refer to the picture we’ve formed as objective, unless we possess further education to break down the larger complexities of objectivity and subjectivity.
The individual educated in philosophy, psychology, higher math, or advanced science likely has some understanding that it’s actually quite difficult to pin down where objectivity becomes separate from subjectivity. Some think, myself included, that we’ll eventually somehow demonstrate that humans will never be capable of firmly differentiating the two. Perhaps that’s playing my own hand too early, but I do find it intriguing regardless that the concept of objectivity is one that people so readily latch on to. Why would anyone uneducated in advanced theoretical and philosophical studies have such a strong investment in a concept that really only becomes relevant at those levels? People will make fiercely impassioned, poorly-constructed arguments insisting on the objectivity of their own opinion or experience. The motivation for these arguments alongside their deep attachment to their own feeling of objectivity is unclear.
My hypothesis is that this realtaception is part of the fundamental systems of human development allowing an individual early unearned security in engaging with the internal and external world. Humans possess a very early understanding of dichotomies like fact vs fiction or lie vs truth. We create games and circumstances of play that we differentiate from reality as both children and adults. Despite all of this, the average child would not be able to clarify the differences contained within these dichotomies beyond a simple expression of something aligning with reality and something else that doesn’t. These dichotomies are also notoriously difficult to define clearly even in adulthood. I don’t see clear evidence or argument that what’s occurring is a complex conceptual model, rather than a simple aligning with the feeling of reality. Children and adults both take a certain amount of joy in jokes or scary stories that disrupt the feeling of reality in safe ways where it then returns to alignment later.
It’s also particularly telling that the majority of people stop with questions of what’s real or how we know as soon as it stops being relevant to their own life and environment. The drive to question reality at all generally only extends through the formative years followed by more limited inquiries on usable or relevant knowledge for the individual in question. Frequently the knowledge gained describes very little about the nature of reality, yet that knowledge is still felt in some sense as satisfactory. This satisfaction is as nebulous and inexplicable as the questions that led to it. Even in instances where an individual questions reality itself to some degree, answers taken to be satisfactory often simply dodged the question. It takes an unusual mind to extend that questioning further with any rigor. It also generally seems to take a major life or psychological upheaval for a particular individual to bring questions of reality back into significant play again once their initial drive has been satisfied.
This has many implications that I’m sure will frustrate some and vindicate others. If we could neurologically locate realtaception, we might discover that certain psychological conditions stem from it possessing fewer connections. We might also find that certain forms of annoying certainty stem from that center being larger or somehow more predisposed to making connections. Obviously take my armchair uninformed neurospeculation with a shaker of salt, but the point is that it offers some explanation for why some people seem to take entirely for granted things that other people can’t even believe.
The potentially more frustrating implications for some, and more exciting for me, lie in the need for much stronger justifications in ontological argument. If we have an internal physical localized sense of reality then arguments about what is real take on an aspect of absurdity until we’ve adequately defined what we mean by real. Certainly some philosophers have been saying this for centuries, but it’s rarely moved into the larger modern sphere. It would mean we can no longer take reality or realness as an implicit assumption in arguments both within and outside of philosophy.
Empiricism thus retains its discoveries and methodological forms of validation, but it would need to somehow concretely demonstrate its primary claim on the definition of reality. We could no longer simply rely on the implicit assumption that shared external observation is an innately significantly better descriptor of reality than internal qualitative analysis. Empiricism is unquestionably better at creating tools and external predictive mechanisms, but the snowball argument that uses those assertions to claim accurate definition on the whole of reality would need further justification. The existence of realtaception would mean that everyone innately feels and is predisposed to think that their view of reality is the real one — therefore no claim on reality can be viewed as correct simply because it aligns with the views of others. It would mean that humans are born social solipsists. The claims of empiricism and major religions to accurately describe the whole of reality becomes argument by majority. The claims in psychology and neuroscience that any deviation from shared empirical reality is inherently unreal become straw man arguments based on the contemporary primacy of empiricism.
How would we know that a hallucination is a hallucination, rather than an aspect of human perception only unlocked if/when realtaception is broken or functioning differently? This is not to say that the hallucinations themselves gain inherent reality, but rather that they cannot inherently be seen as totally unreal. That might seem a paltry semantic distinction, but it holds radical implications. It means we could not dismiss aspects of individual perception as in some way unreal before we can adequately define what exactly is meant by real or unreal. Much of the history of Western intellectual thought (particularly post-Renaissance scientific thought) seems to take reality for granted and then investigate from there. In a field like medicine, this has a degree of necessity. It’s more important that we save someone’s life than debate whether they’re actually bleeding. There are reasonable limitations on what degree of ontological speculation is immediately contextually valuable. However questions of reality have often been quarantined to the fringes of philosophy for their potentially corrupting danger to dominant paradigms, even while they spin off to create fields like physics or define much of psychology, how we classify people, and the resulting social systems.
If humans do, in fact, possess a sense of reality that enables us to interact with the world in our limited forms without constant ontological panic, that could have far-reaching implications for science, philosophy, spirituality, and psychology. It could even be a potential meeting point between those areas of thought. It could provide a foundation to explore how imagination plays into our ability to imagine alternate or other realities, and to feel some sense of attachment or realness within those imagined realms. It could even bring philosophy, spirituality, and individual experience back into the fold as equal players with science in the playground of ontological argument specifically, though I’m sure that statement might make some want to throw this through a window. The notable distinction to me is that it would do no damage to the advancements and grounded understandings of empiricism and the sciences — it would simply mean that we haven’t figured out nearly as much about the larger whole as our own realtaception might feel like we have.
Empirical investigations of the physical have proven incredibly useful, but ontological empirical physicalism begs the question. It asserts that the sum total of reality is empirically physical, while also asserting that the only possible premises for ontological argument are themselves empirically physical. As an ontological argument, it’s circular. The existence of realtaception provides a reasonable explanation for why humans are obsessed with the veracity of their own view of reality. Empirical physicalists have simply taken that obsession to the extreme of ontological panic by inverting Descartes’ demon. Anything external to themselves and observed the same way by someone else must be real — everything else must not be. Above other motivations, this points to a very social animalistic anxiety surrounding anything that might put a dent in realtaception. A threat to realtaception causes anxiety and distress in much the same way that a threat to proprioception or any other fundamental sense would. From this, I draw the hypothesis that reality is one of our undiscovered senses.
