Reality Bending Lab › News › Facets of Reality 💎
Facets of Reality 💎
People mean different things when they say that something is, or is not, "real". A real photograph as opposed to an AI-generated one, real information as opposed to fake news, a real sensation as opposed to an imagined one, and a vivid experience that felt more real than usual. The word does a lot of work, and all these aspects are often conflated, in everyday talk as much as in the literature (ours included). A clarification seems necessary.
It is something I have been turning over for a long time. The first chapter of my PhD thesis argued that the sense of reality is not one thing but rests on two dimensions, feeling reality and believing reality. Feeling had two mechanisms, self-presence (the felt located experience of oneself in the world) and perceptual presence (the felt physical existence of objects in the world); believing had source monitoring, telling the endogenous (imagination) from the exogenous (perception), and simulation monitoring, telling the genuine from the staged; and absorption was already drawn as the attentional aperture around conscious experience, with interoception and exteroception feeding in.
The figure at the top of this post is an updated version. I first showed it, as a sneak peek, at the end of a talk at the Truth in the Machine symposium in Singapore. It grew a bit, and got (hopefully) more scientifically supported. At the core, the two main dimensions remain: feelings of reality, which are graded and private qualities of conscious experience, and beliefs about reality, which are judgments one can be right or wrong about.
Phenomenal Reality (feelings)
Presence is the feeling of being real, in a real environment: that we (or things) are here, in the world. Two aspects could be distinguished.
- Autopresence (self-presence, see also Seth et al., 2012) is the presence of the self: the feeling that I, my body and my thoughts are real and mine. Its loss is depersonalisation, where one watches oneself from the outside, or feels that one's body is not quite one's own.
- Allopresence (perceptual presence, see also Seth, 2014) is the presence of what is not the self: objects, places, people. Its loss is derealisation, where the world goes flat, distant or dreamlike. It also varies in ordinary life, and can be specific to particular objects: a person on the phone can sometimes feel very much there, more so than if they were across the table.
Doxastic Reality (beliefs)
- Ontological reality is about what the thing is, and likely has sub-dimensions. First, representation: is this the thing itself, or a representation of it? Magritte's pipe (Ceci n'est pas une pipe) is the canonical example. Second, authenticity, is an event or object a genuine instance, or is it staged, fictional, fabricated or simulated? This is the level our own work on fictional reappraisal and simulation monitoring targets: believing that something is "just a simulation" changes what we feel about it. Third, origin: what is the causal history of an object? A current example is whether images or texts are human- or AI-generated.
- Epistemic reality is about whether something is true: real news vs. fake news, a truth vs. a lie. It is distinct from ontological reality: a human-written article can be false, and an AI-generated one accurate.
- Veridical reality is about whether my experience of the thing matches the physical thing. Visual illusions are the textbook case: the object is perfectly real, but what I see of it is not what is there. The illusion itself is phenomenal, and seems mostly unaffected by beliefs: knowing that the two lines are equal does not make them look equal. That makes it, in some way, the mirror image of fictional reappraisal, where knowing that something is fictional does change what we feel about it.
- Perceptual reality is about whether my experience is externally or internally generated: am I perceiving this, or imagining it? This is the facet the word "reality" has historically been attached to in psychology, from Johnson and Raye's reality monitoring to Nadine Dijkstra's recent work on how the brain tells imagination apart from perception (and sometimes fails to). Crossed with veridicality it gives four types of experience: externally caused and accurate is perception, externally caused and inaccurate is illusion, internally caused and known as such is imagination, internally caused and taken as external is hallucination.
Other Candidate Mechanisms
These facets of reality connect to various other concepts and mechanisms, including absorption (which sets the attentional aperture, i.e., how much of the experience the object is allowed to fill, and so modulates how present something can feel), interoception, and cognitive (and phenomenological) control. And there are many open questions, such as how to explain particular syndromes and map them onto the model: Cotard's syndrome, in which people hold that they, or the world, no longer exist, with nothing wrong in what they perceive, or the Capgras delusion, where a person believes that close family members, spouses or pets have been replaced by identical-looking impostors.
One important caveat is that the terminology in this area is anything but settled, and I have used the labels above in the sense that suits me rather than in any canonical one. For instance, Anil Seth defines perceptual presence in the sense that perceived objects are really out there in the world rather than imagined, and his conscious presence is the feeling of being a real self in a real world, the one that goes missing in depersonalisation. Reality monitoring in the memory literature is a judgement about the source of an experience, whereas reality testing in psychiatry is closer to a belief one can lose, and presence in the virtual reality literature covers both being somewhere and what happens there being plausible. Same words for different things, and sometimes different words for the same thing.
This is a sketch rather than a theory, for now. More development and details will hopefully be coming soon.
