Chet Raymo, “Telling Stories: ‘Real’ Life”

We live in an imagined world. Some parts of that imagined world are so tightly bound to sense perceptions that we call them “real.” The chair I’m sitting in is real. Atoms are real. The common ancestry of humans and raccoons is real. Strings and branes and multiple universes are not yet real, but they spring from the same storytelling tradition. Democritus and Lucretius told stories of atoms long before atoms were real. It is ever for us as it was for the singer in a famous poem by Wallace Stevens: 

Immediately adjacent to the perception plane are constructs that correspond to direct sensations: “blue,” “bitter,” “pungent,” “brittle,” “shrill.” The construct “dragonfly” is a bit further from the perception plane, but not very far away. I feel a sensation on my finger (“tingle”), I see a color (“blue”), a quality of light (“iridescent”), a shape (“long and narrow”). I name this ensemble of sensations “dragonfly,”

As my experience of the world increases, the construct “dragonfly” becomes enmeshed in a web of other constructs at varying distances from the plane: “insecta,” “Jurassic,” “mitochondrial DNA,” etc. Resilience and interconnectivity of the web are the defining characteristics of the real. “Atom” is bound to the perception plane by a dense and sturdy web of constructs. “Cosmic strings” and “branes” are way out there, far from the perception plane, dangling by a gossamer thread.

Perception and cognition are hugely complex processes, endlessly debated by psychologists, neurologists and philosophers. Margenau’s simple schematic of connected constructs is itself only a construct, a useful way of describing the devilishly complex business of perception and cognition. The important thing is to realize that our ideas about the world are not the same as the world itself (a point often missed by true believers). Nevertheless, only the most obtuse idealist would hesitate to call “dragonflies” or “atoms” real.”