Three tiers of reality. · 4:48am Jan 19th, 2014
I invented this when arguing with someone about the nature of reality (protip: don't argue philosophy with an engineer) and I've...actually come to find them useful.
1) Tier one. It exists to you. The observer experiences it.
2) Tier two: Consensual reality. Many observers agree that it is experienced (although not necessarily all)
3) Tier three: Objective reality: All observers agree that it is experienced.
("Experience" and "agree" don't imply any thought or sensory input on the part of the subject. A rock can experience gravity and 'agree' by falling that it exists)
So, tier one could be an hallucination (or something you simply imagine), tier two could be something like justice, and tier three would be gravity.
Given that the human reality, the one that we experience, is a composite of all three tiers, and yet there is a significant difference between how we can treat these things, it's an interesting shorthand when considering where and how something exists.
k
That's actually a pretty good breakdown. I'll be stealing that.
As a hard core empiricalest, the idea that the world is formless till we perceive it is irksome to me.
1733792
Yeah it's a pretty incoherent viewpoint, too, unless you're completely solipsistic, and if you're going with solipsism you've effectively ended the conversation.
On the other hand I think we can all agree there are parts of human experience that either can't be measured with instruments, or if even if they could, would only serve as a sort of tautological confirmation ("He says he is imagining a horse and our instruments confirm it! Of course, that doesn't tell us anything about the experience of imagining horses." To fully synthesize the meaning of the experience would require synthesizing the person, so why bother.). I keep running into people who conflate various tiers of reality and then use it to make an argument one way or another, though.
What about individual things that transcend tiers? Two politically-heated examples follow, don't take them too seriously...
Beliefs: Individuals say/think that there is a god, and agree that it is teir 2. Some claim that there is even "evidence" for it being an objective truth.
Disputed Facts/Theories: The preponderance of evidence agrees that evolution is a tier-3 phenomenon, but individuals will contest this and claim it's tier-2.
This reminds me of Descartes
1733844
That's disagreement over which tier to assign something to, rather than transcendence of tiers. Obviously there's relations between tiers. A harsh word affects you because of tier two, though it is briefly incarnated into three (though, interestingly you could claim its meaning never leaves two). A hallucination may occur because of a tier three phenomenon (brain chemistry, whatever). Really, the only reason one and two exist (since anything that occurs there obviously has to occur in three in some form) is because as humans we experience things, and don't just have physics done to us.
1733867
Interesting. The problem with that is that the point is that T1 and T2 are inherently subjective. You can have a hallucination(T3) and realize you are having a hallucination(T1) while outside observers record you having a hallucination(T2 and T1 individually). Experiences, and probably other things, can straddle the tiers of reality depending on how you phrase them.
This brings to mind the rationalistic idea of Correspondence Bias, wherein our perception of reality makes us paint what we think reality actually is, often filling in details wrong. The standard example is seeing a man kick a vending machine. You think he may just me an angry man, but to him, he just had a terrible day and the machine ate his money for the third day in a row.
The different tiers often disagree with each other. The problem lies in differentiating the three.
1733838
On a tangential note: As someone who's area of expertise is writing alien perspective, I'd love to see you do a write up on "Dehumanizing ponies".
This is an interesting categorization, but of course the meat of the debate is whether or not 3. actually exists (to any external world anti-realist) or 2. actually exists (to a solipsist). I'm of a realist bent myself but 3. is still not uncontroversial since our understanding of the world is mediated by our brain processes. All the gappy perceptual data we take in from the outside world has to be put into some semblance of a coherent, consistently ordered map of the world, and that's a non-trivial process with a lot of room for error.
1733792 the perceptual dualist would say, not that the world is formless, just that whatever form it does have isn't capable of being perceived by you, because what you perceive is always mediated by the mental processes that go into shaping it into a reasonably coherent and consistent picture. They say perception is a two-stage process: first you take in sense-data and then you make a mental map to organize it. It is possible to make errors during the assembly process but you get the sense-data that you get and there's no way to know what's "really behind it all."
I'm actually of the opinion that:
1. There is a single, objective reality composed of anything and everything that has, does and will exist.
2. Our own subjective realities are just an incomplete view of the the actual objective reality, as viewed through the lens of our light cone and personal biases. When we are right or wrong, or when it interacts with someone else's subjective view, any of the three could change.
Your T2 is just a construct that exists within the two main realities, and the subjective reality of the individual is just a part of a machine in the main objective reality.
Was half expecting a reference to Bayonetta. Still not disappointed.
And while we are at it, tier 2 applies only to sapients, tier 1 applies to all sentients, and tier 3 applies to all life.
1734212
Basically Plato's Cave then. It's my own belief when it comes to the real world.
It's not incompatible with the tiered approach, though; tier 3 would be the outside of the cave and what all humans perceive of it due to merely being human, tier 2 would be things that large groups perceive due to the similarity between their members, and tier 1 would be things individuals perceive differently from almost everyone else due to their individuality.
There's a caveat here for me, though: I don't apply this to fictional worlds. I find the concept of reality tiers one and two being actual realities, rather than mere perceptions, to be too interesting to discard - think about Luna entering a Dream, for example - as well as the idea of multiple viable tier three realities coexisting (parallel dimensions).
BTW, from a certain point of view, a fictional universe beloved by a large number of people - for example, Equestria - might be considered a real world example of tier 2 reality. We can't enter or fully experience it, but we can still enjoy and share it with other like minded people. It's what this very site is about, after all.
1733931
Huh, I'll think about that. Not sure how much I'll have to say about it since ponies as presented aren't too far off, but there are definite differences.
1734635
Heck, the Equestrian Dreamtime that Apotheosis takes place in is some sort of mishmash of the various tiers, and in the entire trilogy gods are T2 "truths" incarnated into T3 reality. The fact that our reality doesn't work like that is what makes such concepts interesting.
1734738
Concepts like this are also enshrined into a lot of fictional works and mythologies. I believe you mentioning a bit of Australian mythology when describing Apotheosis wasn't a coincidence
The old World of Darkness pen and paper RPG line handled the distinction between realities in a few interesting ways, BTW, some times fitting partially the concept you proposed without using your exact classification.
In Mage, for example, mages do magic mainly by using their imagination and power to turn T2 reality (or, if they are too powerful or reckless, T1 reality) into T3 reality. In Werewolf there's the concept of the Umbra, similar to the Dreamtime, where the deeper one goes, the more the Umbra starts reflecting the realities of individual beings, starting from near T3 reality in the shallow Umbra to pockets of T1 reality in the deep Umbra. Other games in the series built upon those concepts too.
Exploring those concepts, deconstructing how those works were built and putting them together to figure out how they work, is an interesting exercise for me as an engineer, something I would often do when I was still playing those games regularly