The Nature of Reality

The first thing to be said about the nature of reality is that there is nothing natural about it. "Reality" is a human concept. It's not something you stub your toe against. There are different ways in which that concept has been understood (see Absolute Reality, Relative Reality, and Groundless Reality for sketches of three philosophic stances). There are many shades and subtleties to the views that have been put forward over the centuries. We will be ignoring the subtleties and chunking big.

Why bother, though? What's reality to us? We (Gordon and Dawes) emphasize again and again the importance of beliefs in understanding how we humans think, feel, act, and even how we perceive. Beliefs are not stand-alone mental furniture. They cluster together into suites and hang out together in rooms. Sometimes it is as if there is no communicating door between one room and another. Sometimes this leaves us operating out of contradictory beliefs, something we only notice when they are simultaneously stimulated by the same context, creating an "internal conflict."

To push the metaphor to the limit, the rooms of belief-sets are contained in a building, located in a country, on a planet, within a cosmos. When it all starts going cosmic we come to beliefs about things like the meaning of life, the spiritual and religious sets of beliefs, and . . . yes, beliefs about the nature of reality.

In fact, when modeling, we are normally dealing with levels of beliefs that operate within the realm of these "higher" beliefs (or "deeper" beliefs if your metaphoric preference is archeological).

Most of the time we are not thrown into cognitive disarray by any demand that we re-negotiate our beliefs about reality. These tend to be stable, and historically they tended to be even more stable (almost geologic). There weren't too many noisome types going around discombobulating our certainties; and if they did turn up we could always rely on the Spanish Inquisition. Today, though, there is more of a free-market of realities, with a carnival of believers of every stripe and fashion setting out their stalls in the world Mind. So it is now possible to consider ideas about reality as ideas, rather than their simply being the givens of a time and a culture.

This is not to glibly imply that we can simply choose realities at will. Designer realities might sound like fun but there is a mass of personal and cultural connective tissue holding the ones we have in place. This does not mean that nothing can be done. We are not condemned to remain walled in the house of our beliefs. For instance, many spiritual practices exist which are designed to effect such door-opening changes and, as more is learned about the architecture and internal ecology of beliefs, the efficacy of our methods will increase until it becomes apparent how we can choose to accelerate to escape velocity.

At this point, our ambitions are far more modest. The presence of different ideas about reality allows us to consider the influence they have on our experience and their consequences for our behavior, just as we can with regard to our more everyday beliefs. For us, the interest is in how ideas about reality help or hamper our operating effectively in our exploration of experience through modeling.

The Question of Reality

There are many different accounts of the philosophic status of Reality. As the American comedian, George Carlin, put it, "Reality! What a concept." But the conceptions of Reality can, roughly, be clustered around two positions, which we might call that of Absolute Reality and that of Relative Reality. To these we will add a third term, Groundless Reality.

Absolute Reality covers the conventional Enlightenment view, prevalent until the latter half of the twentieth century, and still the prevailing worldview. It is often characterized (by those who don't like it) as the correspondance view because it holds that we have direct access to reality. It is right there before you, unproblematic. What you see is what you get. Reality stands there, unadorned, open to the gaze of anyone willing to "divest themselves of their passions" (the traditional requirement of the scientist) and look. All rational people will be able to agree on the evidence of their senses, at least once we put those pesky passions in their place.

Relative Reality challenges the Absolute Reality stance on a number of grounds, the favourite within NLP being the observation that our perceptions are mediated by neurology. Consequently, there is no direct, unmediated access to Reality. Reality becomes a concept without an unambiguous referent. It does not point to anything knowable in absolute terms. Our experience of Reality is dependent on how we look at it. And how we look at it is relative to the perspective we take.

Both of these views have their benefits and also their limitations. The mode of Absolute Reality, characteristic of the modern era, provided a sense of confidence, of knowing what's what. It is how it is. Everything and everybody knows its/their place. This gives both stability and restriction. If things are as they are, then they are likely to remain so; the possibilities for change are curtailed. We are stuck with the status quo.

The mode of Relative Reality, characteristic of the postmodern era, provides for change and for individual perspectives. There is a greater sense of freedom; absolutes can be challenged, they are, after all, only one point of view. And your view is every bit as valid as anyone else's. However, because your experience is mediated, by neurology, by culture, by race, by gender, by what you just ate, even, you are unable to claim any contact with Reality. It exists but you are forever unable to contact it, stuck as you are in the sliver of your own experience of it, which will be different from everyone else's. Locked alone in your own constricted world. And with no (absolute) basis for judging any one view more valuable than another, that world offers only a flat moral landscape. This gives us today's world of Absolutist institutions staggering under the attack of Relativist views, with the ensuing "crisis of legitimation."

The Groundless Reality view (our name for it) was developed recently, as a reaction to the drawbacks of the other two clusters of views and as a result of their biological research and autopoetic theorizing, by Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana though supported by the work of other cognitive scientists (working in hybrid disciplines) such as the linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson. While the Absolute and Relative views both have the notion of the existence of an objective reality - in the one case directly accessible to us, in the other completely inaccessible - the Groundless Reality view dispenses with the notion of an absolute reality at all. After all, if you can't get to that reality (accepting the arguments of relativism) what point is there in harking back to it; let's just forego our nostalgia for an absolute reality and recognize that our reality is our experience.

That's as real as it gets, and that is a reality to which we do have direct access. The concept is nicely captured in the title of a Varela paper, "Laying Down A Path In Walking." In this analogy, the path does not exist until it is brought into being by our actions, by our walking. Similarly, reality is not a pre-existent given (an absolute) but it is brought forth in and through our actions. (Thus our actions regain the moral dimension they lost in Relative Reality.)

Absolute Reality

The idea of reality as an absolute is common, in particular, to the Judeo-Christian and Islamic religions, to political ideologies, and to the natural sciences in their positivist phase. For the religions and the political ideologies, the absolute lies in texts. For religions it lies in the word of God, for political ideologies it lies in the words of the ideologue. For the natural sciences, though, the absolute lies in Nature. This is a significant difference. Whereas the path of the theologies and ideologies is the way of faith, the path of science is the way of experiment.

In recent times, science has been especially successful in promoting its own version of absolute reality in the form of objectivism. In brief, the objectivist position is that our sense data correspond directly with reality and that reality exists independent of perception.

Characteristic of Absolute Reality is that the ground of reality is external to the knower. In religion and politics, the external source is in the words of the revered texts. In science, the external source is Nature. Always there is the search for a singular Truth. This is part of the tyranny of Absolute Reality. Instead of the Truth setting us free, the idea of Truth enslaves us. It underlies both the "givens" of society and of the individual. For the individual there is the assumption that our experience is, itself, a given. Experience just happens to us. Our emotions fall upon us, and we recognize no part in their production. Typically, we experience our emotions as coming from the environment, as having been caused by something outside ourselves. And it is to the environment that we often turn to change them: through a strong drink, a drug, the social whirl, a movie, etc.

If reality determines experience, then experience is immutable. Not a good basis for the full-blooded pursuit of the modeling of experience. In modeling we want to be putting our experience on the workbench and using it to explore how experiential structures give rise to abilities.

Relative Reality

This position on reality claims that knowledge and value are not absolute but are relative to a person's nature and situation. Post-Einstein physics is emblematic of this stance, though the cultural relativism was also greatly influenced by anthropologists and reinforced by the increasing prevalence of travel, supercharged by the increasing rate of social change.

Because relativism has developed in a time of declining influence for religion, it is to science that it addresses its challenge. The relativist argument against the objectivist position is frequently based on the existence of constraints on our ability to directly perceive the world. There are neurological constraints, such as our ability to see and hear only within certain band-widths of the electro-magnetic spectrum; social constraints, such as the influence of a language on a speaker's experience together with the recognition that different cultures make sense of some things in very different ways; and individual constraints, such as the different preferences that derive from our very different personal histories. All of this leads each of us to experience the same event in quite different ways.

Characteristic of Relative Reality is that the ground of reality is in the knower. This position is well represented by the familiar story of the blind men and the elephant. Because one man is feeling the elephant's trunk, another its leg, another its flank, and the last one its tail, each has a very different experience and gives a very different description of the elephant.

At present we live in a mixed state of reality, part absolute, part relative. Assailing the absolutes has been something of a sport since the Sixties. This led, in the social world, to the "crisis of legitimization." Since authority had justified itself on the grounds of one or another absolute, its basis became less convincing. And those who held authority seemed less confident in its exercise. Moral relativism undermined the basis for evaluating behavior and even the certainties of Law.

Moving out of Absolute Reality into Relative Reality can feel as if all certainty is evaporating in a moral meltdown, and spur you to reach for the door to the past. But Relative Reality can feel like freedom if all that certainty had been weighing you down. The problem with living in a relative reality is that it can be alienating. I'm alone in my reality; you're alone in yours. We may have consensus about something, but even "consensual reality" is itself not real. Moreover, we have no way to contact the real reality; it is forever beyond our grasp. This can diminish our experience. It isn't real and we're alone with it.

Groundless Reality

While Absolute Reality and Relative Reality will be familiar, "Groundless Reality" may be less so. The position of Groundless Reality is that there is no foundation to our experience, neither external to the knower nor internal. The world we experience is not determined by the external world nor is it determined by our internal world. It is brought forth in our actions as living beings.

To give you a flavor of the Groundless Reality position: Right now I am communicating with you in language, and I ask: Where is the meaning? In Absolute Reality it would be found in the words on the page. In Relative Reality it would be found in the mental processes of the reader. However, if either the words on the page or the mental processes of the reader were to change, a different meaning would be brought forth. The meaning, then, cannot be said to reside in either one. Meaning is co-determined by both. (Even this illustration makes a cleavage in the world which, though consonant with the other two positions, is not a feature of Groundless Reality.)

This position is often confused with the Relative Reality position. Before moving on to a second illustration it may be useful to mention one significant difference. Relative Reality shares with the Objectivist strain of Absolute Reality the notion that there is an objective reality. Objectivists claim this reality is directly knowable, while Relativists claim that it cannot be known. Those who favor the Groundless Reality position differ from the other two in considering the question of the existence of such a reality operationally meaningless. Reality, for them, is an immediate and intimate experience, even though it is one for which no foundation is to be found.

Our second illustration is a simple experiment that undermines the commonsense understanding that our experience of color is determined by the wavelengths of light coming from an object. A white light beam and a red light beam are both focused on a screen giving it a pink color. If a hand is held in front of the white light, because it obstructs the while light with its own shape, we see a reddish shadow of a hand on the pink background. However, if the hand is held in front of the red light its shadow stands out in a sharp blue-green hue. We would have expected to see a whitish hand on the pink background. Indeed, taking a reading of the light in the blue-green shadow area will indicate that it is white. But that is not what we see.

While many visual illusions, such as those where the same length lines appear to be of different length, can be resolved by measurement, the blue-green hand shadow is not such a case. On the contrary, while the phenomenon can be understood, no ground can be found on which to resolve the question of the real color. For the Groundless Reality position, this is always the case. There is no ground to anything; it is groundlessness all the way down.

The disappearance of an absolute ground, in the move toward relativism, has a shadow side in that some react by sliding into nihilism, with an attendant despair (either catatonically quiet or violently raging). Historically, the groundless reality approach appears to have been hidden behind many layers of initiation. Within the Buddhist Mahayana tradition it is explicit that an understanding of "emptiness" (their term for groundlessness) needed to be tempered by the development of compassion.

An appealing aspect of Groundless Reality is that you are totally inside your experience. There is no outside to it. It wraps you like your skin. In this position, the word "reality" can only refer to your experience. Experience is all we have. We might have the ability to imagine ourselves outside our own experience (just as we can imagine unicorns) but we remain inside our experience as we do so. Both the strangeness and simplicity of living in Groundless Reality is nicely captured in the title of one of Francisco Varela's papers: "Laying Down A Path In Walking."

References:

Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (1987) The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, New Science Library, Boston.

Humberto Maturana (1988) "Reality: The Search for Objectivity or the Quest for a Compelling Argument" in The Irish Journal of Psychology, 9,1, 25-82.

Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch (1991) The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Why Change Is Impossible

In many different ways we have sought to soften up the rigid concept of Reality that still pervades our world. We have done this through presenting the perspectives of relativistic and groundless reality, and by examples that propose a more supple grasp of experience. There are many reasons for this emphasis, not the least of which is that most compelling of reasons, our personal preference. Moving right along to those reasons that you might find more compelling, the most salient two are that our ideas about the nature of reality can (1) influence how we approach the enterprise of modeling and (2) how we approach the related enterprise of personal change.

We want to briefly consider the second reason, that is, how notions of reality relate to personal change. For while the process of acquiring the model(s) for a new ability is akin to that of learning, the process of dealing with any hindrance that comes up along the way to acquisition is akin to personal change.

The strictly absolutist view of reality is, to a degree, a straw man in this discourse. It is the view that has been most influential throughout known history. Consequently, whatever our espoused beliefs, there's likely to be a bed of straw somewhere in our attics, with absolutism lolling around on it. It's dead seductive, and few of us could claim to be too hip to fall for its blandishments on occasion.

In that light, let's take a look at some of the entailments of an absolute reality. Some may seem appealing at first blush, such as "certainty." Within the absolutist view, the Truth is the Truth is the Truth. There is one right way, one true church, and a stake for disbelievers. (Okay, so we got off onto some of the downsides.) But certainty can be calming. It's a case of: questioning stops here. Time to exhale. The claim of classic science was that to perceive the truth all we had to do was to divest ourselves of the passions (which cloud our view) and with goodwill and application the truth would be ours to see. In those slower times there wasn't another experiment published this afternoon to disconfirm your theory, nor a postmodernist taking a crowbar to the well-rounded tale you've told.

The crux of the matter is that in the world of absolute reality, Meaning is singular. It can only be one way (no matter what the "it" is). When it comes to personal change, though, Meaning is mutable. Underlying almost all of what we would designate as "personal change" is a change of meaning. In this sense, the process of reframing is paradigmatic of personal change. Bringing a different frame to the situation, viewing it in another way, a new perspective, etc., all of these lead to a change of meaning. It is not that every change method employs reframing as a central process (they don't) but that, regardless of the change method, unless it ultimately leads to a change of meaning the change is unlikely to stay.

The "single vision" of Newton's (classic) science (as characterized by and castigated by William Blake) speaks to an abhorrence of the multiple perspectives of the present. In the single vision, absolute reality realm of meaning the only valid criterion is Truth. This proscribes the idea that beliefs can be adopted on utilitarian grounds. Meaning is not a matter of choice. Change comes only from the outside. The external world is its avenue, and any change in the external world decrees the resultant change of meaning. And, so, choice and most notions of personal change blip off the radar. They mean zip.

It is in this sense that within Absolute Reality change is impossible.