Determining Real is more than a common philosophical pastime. It is actually a vital part of our decision making ability. Prediction, from a model of reality, allows us to act in a timely manner, not after the fact. If that model is too separated from reality, then our actions are poor and we may not survive. Mostly a rough model of real is good enough, but what got really wild is when we started comparing our models and testing them against reality.

The landscape of what humans have learned and determined to be fairly accurate is massive. In every field of knowledge there are areas of specialisation, and within each of those is yet another layer or two of specialisation. A world expert in one of these fields knows more about it than the vast majority of every other human being, and still knows next to nothing about the whole field of human knowledge. To make this worse, humans keep learning more things every day and adding to the scientific pool of knowledge.

So how can we possibly what is real? Following are some guides to help you in determining real.

The Reality Heuristic

These are a set of steps to consider when you are trying to figure out what is probably real and what is probably fiction.

Step 1 – Our World is Well Known

We live in this world, here and now. As stated above, we have a pretty good measure on what is and isn’t at a human scale. While there are things that we still don’t know (such as around 70% of the ocean has not had a high resolution ocean floor scan), most of what we humans interact with has been mapped, tested and well explained. The statistical odds of you running into something that has not got a reasonable amount of investigation into it that turns the majority of the basic science that we humans have developed around is very, very, very low.

It is helpful to be humble about what we don’t know and embrace learning from our mistakes, rather than doubling down on doubt that we might be wrong. We need to be mindful of ideological beliefs that go against consensus scientific opinion – more on that later.

Here are 3 ways that we can philosophically talk about reality:

• Objective Reality – the measurable universe that our senses are based on
• Consensus Reality – what we (society) agree is true, but might be wrong [constructs live here]
• Subjective Reality – what you think is real, your personal experience and your feelings

Objective Reality, What we Base our Senses On

Objective Reality is what really is. We don’t know what it truly is, but it is what is Real with a capital R, and True with a capital T. Our search for determining Real is to get as close to that as possible, which we need to recognise is impossible. That is, approaching Real and Truth. The universe is vast and complex, and quite beyond our true comprehension. While our scientific devices have got good at knowing about the universe beyond what our mortal, finaite, human senses can detect, they only get us closer to Real and True.

By being methodical in our fact finding, honest with ourselves and our results, we can move our understanding of reality closer to Truth, which gives us a better understanding of what is Real. The best tool we have for that is the Scientific Method, where ideas drawn from generalisations are tested in a rigorous way to determine the truth of an idea / model. We will cover the limitations of models later. An important point, as Albert Einstein explained, the opinion of 100 science experts is undercut by evidence.

If we accept false information (being lied to or failing to do due diligence of the information), we can get further away from Truth. Some people will claim to have done the research for you, but didn’t (or did it poorly). They may have genuinely tried, but failed to grasp the basic principles of rigor and did ‘bad science’, or they are con artists trying to part you from money and safety for their own benefit. Pseudoscience (literally false science) is the attempt to use sciency sounding words and concepts to convince you that what is false is Real.

Since we can only get closer to Truth, but never get there, then anyone who claims to truly know Real and Truth is lying, deluded, or trying to con you. An expert can have a high level of confidence in what they think is accurate due to the study, research and experiments that they have done or researched, but they also know the limits to that knowledge and should be able to explain that to you (error margins).

Consensus Reality, What We Agree is True

This is the world that most of us agree on. Philosophically, I may not ‘see’ (perceive) exactly the same chair that you do, but we both agree that the thing there is a chair. If I put enough things on it, we might agree to define it as a table.

There are different levels, or hierarchies, of consensus. Scientific Consensus is the top, rational observers are in the middle, traditional views are the worst.

Scientific Consensus is where most of the experts in the specific field agree that this is the best representation of Scientific truth we have. There will always be some who disagree, but unless you are that expert, the wise person defaults to the consensus opinion of relevant experts. That is, if you had to place a bet on whether some hypothesis is right or wrong, you will win most of the time if you go with the scientific consensus.

“Relevant” is an important word here, as people who have expertise in another area are only able to give regular opinions on a matter outside of their field, as their knowledge of a field of science outside of their expertise does not well compare to the expert opinion and knowledge of the relevant expert in that field.

To understand that, most people have an area of speciality. Perhaps that is as mechanic, or a master of spreadsheets, or someone who is excellent at cleaning houses efficiently etc. Recall a time that someone who is not an expect in your field tried to give you advice about your field of expertise. Most of the time, their expertise sounds very foolish and ignorant, because their actual knowledge of your field is very poor. That is what you sound like when you talk outside your area of expertise. To an experts in a field, an expert in other fields talking about their field sound equally foolish. We need to guard against the Appeal to Authority, where we are expected to believe an important person who isn’t actually an expert on that topic.

Most people are mostly rational and will form a collective view of what things mean. In general terms, this is often true enough, and is good enough to make most non-critical decisions. Collections of random rational people are not experts, so their understanding may be shallow or only moderately good predictors, which can lead to specific times where people make really poor choices because they didn’t know about some aspect of the thing.

I appreciate this all seems a bit vague, but this is actually quite hard to describe in any specific sense. Here are two ways to try to think about it.

When you travel to other countries, people often feel a bit of culture shock when they realise that the things we took for granted in our own country / area because “that’s just how things are”, are not the same in the other country / area. The default expectations are different.

Most people know that when you drop things, they fall down. That is good enough for most folk to manage dropped or thrown objects. The reason why things fall is the concept of gravity. Most experts will also talk about surface area, air resistance and wind speed. A specialist will talk about mass, entropy, general relativity and special relativity as well as a great deal of other macro level emergent phenomena. Most of the last two sections aren’t needed for most people to know what to do when you throw a ball at them.

Some of what we think is true is because of folk tails or because that is how we traditionally view it. This has the lowest accuracy and frequently wrong, yet forms the basis for many of our cultural moral and ethical defaults.

No matter what kind of consensus view exists for a thing, if it is different to the evidence, then it is wrong.

Consensus Reality is the Average of people’s understanding of the world.

Subjective Reality, What you Experience

No one knows your life. No one truly knows you. No one has experienced what you have experienced.

While people can know a great deal about your life, but they don’t know as much as you do.

People can know you very well, but much like Objective Reality, they don’t really know the true you. Then again, you don’t either. Also keep in mind, the true you changes from experience to new experience – you are dynamic, not static.

People may have experienced similar things to you and mostly get what you went through, but it will never be exact. Nor do you really know what someone else experienced.

Your personal experience is your own, and you can no more know the mind of another than they can truly know yours.

And that is okay.

You can have a different opinion than others, because your experience was different to theirs. Your experience is not going to be completely different though. If you are in the room where something happened, then everyone in that room experienced that something from different present personal perspectives (as we aren’t in the same four dimensional space-time) filtered through different past perspectives (understood through each person’s different past). That is, I won’t be describing a stand out incident like a knife attack while you fail to do so at a birthday party that we both attend at the same time and place (unless it is a murder mystery birthday party), but I may have missed the argument that occurred in that far corner where you were near.

Step 2 – The Null Hypothesis

The Null Hypothesis effectively assumes that there is no useful connection between events unless there is good evidence to show that there is. Aka, the world is average on average, and any anomaly should be treated as suspect until good evidence shows it is real.

When a new thing happens and we think it is related to another thing, we often start trying to prove that they are connected. Instead, start off assuming their isn’t a real connection between a new thing and the old, and look for evidence that this is the case before you start looking for evidence that it is connected. This is a way to stay sceptical of claims, but not become a denier. A denier refuses to see the good evidence that shows them that they are wrong and only looks for evidence that they are right (confirmation bias).

Speaking of being a good sceptic, let us look at “special pleading”. By default, most things are not connected. If you have to have an elaborate explanation for how a thing is connected to another thing, then it likely isn’t. The elaborate series of links to explain a thing is called “special pleading”, and while not always wrong, when not aligning with a lot of research it is often wrong.

Technically speaking, the Null Hypothesis is a mathematical tool to first assume that two things are not related to each other. That is, one does not affect the other and vice versa. If testing shows that one does indeed affect the other, then they are connected in some way and that relationship should become clear as you examine it. It is another way of trying to avoid mistaking correlation for causation, or attributing agency or purpose behind coincidence.

Step 3 – The Average is King, Beware of Confirmation Bias

Most of the time, what is happening is a repeat of what has happened, on average, before. We tend to notice the things that are unusual more than we notice what is usual.

Each of us develops a model of the world. From that model, we make predictions about what is going to happen. When that model is correct, we don’t really notice it, unless we had a good reason to suspect we might be wrong. We tend more to notice when our model is wrong, and that can set us to pausing, waiting, trying to fix the model, and then making changes (grief, dealing with change).

Our model of the world is created in the idea of what is average. The sun has risen every day so far of my life, and so I expect that it will rise again tomorrow (yes I know that the world spins, the sun rising is an illusion of perspective), because so far its average is excellent.

A form of average that we instinctively use is the Normal Distribution Curve. This looks like an upside down U with curved tips going off to zero on 1 side and infinity to the other, kind of like a hump. The most likely thing to happen is at the top of the hump, the next most likely to either side of that, and so on until we get very unlikely things at the far ends. The power of this form of average is incredible and I’ll cover that another time.

Because we notice the things that break our model of average, and we don’t notice things that fit nicely, we over represent in our minds how often the unexpected happens. We will additionally highlight any model breaks that seem threatening as those really need our attention, but that leaves us with a faulty impression of how often we are in danger. Sometimes, though, we really are in danger, and we need to do something about it.

Confirmation Bias is when we give too much credence to the unlikely because that fits the faulty model we have been making based on noticing rare unusual events and missing the common usual events. A classic example of this is people noticing when both people act oddly and there is a full moon. This creates the faulty impression that people act oddly more often when there is a full moon, than when there isn’t. There have been lots of excellent robust studies to check this common idea out, and it is not true. This erroneous idea is formed by forgetting or ignoring odd behaviour when there is no full moon, interpreting the full moon as a several day event, and interpreting people’s behaviour as odder during a full moon when the same behaviour is deemed less odd during a non-full moon time.

Step 4 – Occam’s Razor and Einstein’s Warning

In Philosophy, a Razor is a system that allows you to eliminate (or shave off) unlikely explanations and avoid unnecessary steps. Thus, Occam’s Razor.

William of Occam – ‘The simplest explanation is usually the best one’

William of Occam created a principle for trying to work out which of multiple options was the most likely to be accurate. William created a Principle of Parsimony, which most lay people know as “The simplest explanation is usually the best one.” Here, simple means “with the fewest steps that properly explain the thing”.

Put simply, if you have two explanations for a thing, and one needs extra steps to make it make sense, then the one with fewer steps is more often correct. BUT if the one with fewer steps skips important explanatory and evidence steps, then the one that properly explains the thing, even though it needed more steps, is the better explanation.

I’ve said “usually” and “often” a few times here. It is important to know that Occam’s Razor doesn’t promise the ‘simplest is best’, it points out that often it is, sometimes it isn’t. Due diligence is needed.

Einstein’s Warning – ‘but not too simple’

Albert Einstein loved simplicity and elegance. He worked hard to make his physics and math as simple and elegant as possible, and still do the job of describing the world.

Einstein’s Razor is often paraphrased as “make things as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

What he actually said was “The supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.”

Step 5 ‘Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful’ – George Box

George Box, a British statistician, working on quality control, time-series analysis, design of experiments, and Bayesian inference

“Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful”, George E.P. Box, Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces

Remember what I said about Object Reality is Real but beyond our understanding? All of our science and all of our personal understanding of the world are mere models of Objective Reality. They are all wrong, as they only model what is complex in a way that we can comprehend. So long as they model is useful, we can use it, but we need to keep in mind that it is not actually Objective Reality.

Isaac Newton created a model of physics back in the 1600’s that we still mostly use to describe how physical objects move. Albert Einstein created a more specifically accurate model with his General Relativity. We often don’t need Einstein’s physics for everyday calculations, because Newton’s is good enough for most things, even though Einstein’s is a bit better.

All of our models have limits of accuracy. So long as the model is useful in getting us mostly the right answers most of the time, it is good enough. Don’t discard the model just because it isn’t perfect, but do replace bad models with better ones.

Step 6 ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’ – Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan reworded Laplace’s principle “the weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness” with the catchy “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. [Source: Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence: The Case of Non-Local Perception, a Classical and Bayesian Review of Evidences by Patrizio E. Tressoldi]

Keeping in mind Step 1, that we know the world fairly well. We have an excellent scientific knowledge of what has been shown to be real and true, and the scientific method continues to push that real and true towards Real and Truth by testing the idea and gathering evidence to find the simplest accurate explanation.

A claim that goes against that consensus of scientific knowledge (scientific consensus) and your expectation of a standard Consensus Reality is extraordinary.

The person who makes the claim has the burden of proof to show it is true, unless that is the Scientific Consensus

If most of the majority of the world agrees that this object here is called an apple, then Bob’s claim that it is actually an orange should be met with Scepticism. I’m using a capital ‘S’ their to refer to the proper use of the word, where Scepticism follows the evidence, which is generally the consensus of experts, rather than one’s own personal belief or outright denial of any evidence. If Bob claims that the object is actually an orange, it is upon Bob to give extraordinary evidence to outweigh the current evidence that it is an apple. If Bob does not, then we can dismiss his claim.

Step 7 – The World is Amazing, no magic needed

The world is pretty remarkable. Knowing how a rainbow works doesn’t take away from the beauty of a rainbow, or how amazing it is that our brain pieces together millions of dots of reflected light to create the rainbow illusion.

People often want to add some kind of magic back in, some explanation less helpful but seemingly more profound that understanding the science behind a thing. Frequently they will say “understanding has made the world boring” or “you are making the world less amazing with your explanation”. Sorry if this is you, but really, the more you understand about the world, the more amazing it is.

Some are looking for a static origin point to pin their understanding of the world on. Some people are searching for god.

The Thing About God

The idea that there are powerful beings called gods (or just one powerful being called god and a bunch of angels), has been classified as an idea that has no practical predictive power, so it isn’t considered to be scientific.

The definition of a god is a being that is more powerful than a human, that transcends human comprehension, and can change the rules of nature as it sees fit. Even when a god fits into a hierarchy of gods and must abide by some kind of god rule set, they are rules that we mere mortals do not properly comprehend. As such, if these being truly exist, as they can just change any rule the we think we have worked out, they effectively invalidating trying our ability to make accurate predictions. Because these beings are beyond our comprehension and able to modify the rules of nature as we known them, we cannot apply science to them, and if they change the rules of nature, we would have failed to model the world.

On macroscopic experiments, the bit of reality that we live in and are affected by, our experiments are very, very, very consistent. We still do get some odd results when we are exploring the fringes of the nanoscale and the cosmic scale, but neither of those areas affect how my life, or yours, unfolds. That may change certain future technologies, but has no real effect on what happens to you today.

For the sake of argument, let us say that such beings are possible and might be present. If they are present, with the amount that we scientifically now know about the world, we would have detected their tampering with the laws of nature. That is, certain experiments would consistently fail. Yet we have not detected such things. If such beings do exist, this indicates that they don’t make changes to the world, and thus to your life. If they do, you are probably the only one, as tampering in how nature works in a general sense would be scientifically detected. If this is true, it seems odd. Why would a being of this much power and ability be only concerned with you, and no others?

Perhaps the god only acts in very minor and subtle ways, so minor and subtle that they can’t be detected. If that is the case, such subtlety is not only undetectable, but also would make no real difference to your life. What is scientifically likely to happen to me next will look the same whether a subtle god interferes, or does not. Effectively, scientifically, if a subtle gods changes of the rules results in the same prediction happening, then the presence or absence of that god makes no real difference.

You certainly have the right to believe in what you want to. Science has not proven that your god isn’t real, science has shown that your god is not affecting the world in any detectable way – and the ability to scientifically detect changes from the expected model have get very darn good.

Step 8 – Know your Cognitive Fallacies

The easiest person to fool is yourself, the next easiest is someone who thinks they already know the answer

We fool ourselves all of the time. It takes humility to recognise that we filter our memories, perceptions and expectations based on what we want, what we fear and what we expect. It is useful to occasionally take a fresh look and think “what else could be true?” and then follow that up with “how can I test that?”

It takes humility to recognise we don’t know everything and that what we think we know may be wrong.

Being wrong is human. To insist on continuing to be wrong is foolish. I applaud people who discover that they are ignorant and do something about it. I pity those who are wilfully ignorant. I dislike those who wilfully lead others to become more wrong.

When we think we already know the answer to something, or how something will come out, we need to reserve a bit of awareness for the possibility that we are wrong, that we can learn more, or that we may need to adjust. Those who close their minds to knew information and possibilities are fooling themselves.

Do not mistake that as tipping out wisdom, logic, reason and scientific evidence. Keep in mind that extraordinary claims part from Carl Sagan – the more extraordinary the claim, the greater the evidence needed to substantiate that claim. Once we receive that sufficiently great evidence, we need to be able to adjust to the superior model.

Logic and Logical Fallacies

Logic is a mathematical process to work out how valid something is through correct reasoning. Formal Logic is the study of deductively valid inferences, also called logical truths. From a premise, a logical argument is created to show a result. If done correctly, Formal Logic is always correct. Informal Logic is similar to Formal Logic, but we accept that there may be exceptions to when this logic may be wrong. Informal Logic is often the heart of where people use faulty logic to try to prove their claims.

Common Informal Logical Fallacies

Cognitive Biases

To use logic correctly, we need to know what the premise is and understand the logic that shows our result. Often we fool ourselves with an internal bias, or we accept someone else’s bias.

Common Cognitive Biases