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I enjoyed both the piece and your comment. I might be somewhat preloaded (both parents sociologists), but the Boston Review might be right to assume that their readers have some background or at least interest in philosophy, sociology, political discours etc.

And isn't reality even a somewhat bigger term than you describe, in that (loosely: post-modern) reality is always subjective. Your drilling down ("Now imagine ...") still suggests A truth, while for me 'constructing reality' really drives home that reality is subjective, a construct.

Hey wjnc. That's actually part of the problem I have with it. When you say:

> ...for me 'constructing reality' really drives home that reality is subjective, a construct.

That is a large part of why I take issue with the phrase: the idea that 'reality is subjective, a construct' is one philosophical stance, but by no means the only one possible (afaik, it's quite uncommon for those outside the humanities and certain social sciences to believe this), so it's problematic to have it assumed as true, and to encode that assumption subtly into the language you're using (it's a phrase made up of common words, so unless you're familiar with it, you won't know it has a special meaning).

You wrote "afaik, it's quite uncommon for those outside the humanities and certain social sciences to believe this". This is an example of a fragment of your constructed reality. It's something you choose to believe, because it coheres with your other beliefs. It is clearly not a true statement, because the supposed objective reality is constantly updated with new knowledge acquired across all domains of human thought. No single individual possesses the complete view of all the knowledge. In other words any subjective reality is constructed, and the objective reality is not known.

A "constructed reality" is not the same as a lie (or incomplete truth). A lie can stand alone in contradiction with facts and proofs, as your statement above does, by definition. A lie can be integrated into a coherent view of the world, a constructed reality, composed of truths and other lies.

> In other words any subjective reality is constructed, and the objective reality is not known.

Yes, agreed. The only issue I have here is about the contortion of language to support a particular philosophical viewpoint. If the phrase were 'the social construction of subjective reality', there would be no problem. Instead, this underhanded usage of 'reality' is an attempt to remove the distinction between objective and subjective reality. Not only does it do that functionally, but it was also promulgated by people who do not believe in the existence of an objective reality (comically, in part because of then-vogue linguistic theories and bad interpretations of quantum and relativity theories).

To a certain degree the list of people who don't believe in an objective reality includes Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. In fact probing the rather complex and contradictory nature of objectivity has been part of almost every philosophical school of thought or tradition I've ever read about.

It's funny - I find myself violently opposed to epistemological relativism right up until the moment I hear someone else use the term "objective reality". ;-)

Thing is, I think our brains effectively run on epistemological relativism -- it describes the map the brain builds about the world outside -- but "objective reality" indirectly measured via action and reaction is what keeps it honest.

You might believe you're the leader of your country, and you are as long as everybody else also thinks you're the leader - and as soon as they stop believing it, it's no longer true. This is shared, constructed reality in action, and it's also "objectively true": if you imagined a disinterested observer looking at a human society through a set of powerful instruments, they could identify you as the leader. It still doesn't stop you coming down to earth with a bump if you believe you can fly, of course.

> but "objective reality" indirectly measured via action and reaction is what keeps it honest.

Which is great when you're talking about stuff you can poke and kick and study but people very quickly start creating new stuff like "beauty" and "justice" and all the other nouns that you can't kick or poke.

Even things you can kick or poke start to become rather tricksy if you're not careful:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox

It's not unreasonable to argue that the number of things that are amenable to uncontroversial objective study is rather small. We live in a world full of nouns and we aren't terrible clear on which ones are objective and which ones aren't.

I think we're on the same side of this.

Yeah, it's a tricky set of distinctions to master. When I stated doing meditation, I started to "get it", that is I became more aware of the way my mind manufactures reality on a continuous basis, and all we ever really do is interact with this internal simulacrum. But that doesn't mean the same thing as what solipsism means. It means you train and expand your awareness by understanding the limitations of that awareness, just like you exercise a muscle.

You can take this idea and use it as an excuse to retreat into passivity, or you can see it's power and use that to go out and make a difference in the world. It's your choice, your Karma, as they say. :)

Let's agree about the premise that a objective reality exists. Still, the problem persists - we do not know anything about this objective reality or more accurately said, we can not know whether our subjective perception of reality matches this objective reality. There is no way to find out as we are bound to our limited senses.

I'd recommend reading "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" by Nietzsche.

I commend to your attention Isaac Asimov's essay that I believe is called "The Relativity of Wrong". Even if nobody knows everything, not everyone is equally ignorant; even if no model of the world is perfect, some are a lot better than others, and we can tell which is which.

"Even if nobody knows everything, not everyone is equally ignorant;"

I certainly agree. One would hope, I sure do for one, that the cloud of subjective realities trends towards the objective as time approaches infinity, assuming such objective reality exists. The cloud may even ultimately converge on the objective reality when all the knowledge is eventually acquired and made universally known. Then human race can be said to have achieved enlightenment. It is certainly a race against time due to cosmic forces beyond our control. One of the issues this article raises is that humanity is now actively and successfully devising machines that serve no other purpose but to disperse the said cloud of subjective realities away from the objective one. By doing so it is willfully directing resources (time) towards postponing or preventing enlightenment.

Measurements of the usefulness and accuracy of models aren't evidence of their truth value, unfortunately.

"and we can tell which is which" - I doubt that. You think you can, but others will disagree on your truth. So how do we determine who is right? Yes, it's a philosophical discussion, but therefore no less relevant.

"Reality" is ambiguous, I agree. What we experience, even at a basic sensory level, isn't reality. Rather, it's a model that's based on limited perceptions. In an context based on natural selection, at scales from evolutionary through developmental to experiential.

And further, what we experience as reality depends on our model of reality. And then we act, which reinforces whatever reality we think exists.

'reality is subjective, a construct' is one philosophical stance, but by no means the only one possible

I'm not so sure about that. I find Kant is pretty convincing; scientific realism is pretty vulnerable when faced with the fact that theories change. Science is best viewed with an instrumentalist perspective, that's where it is most solid.

We simply don't know if we're brains in vats, or creatures in a simulation. The real reality is unknowable.

While I do understand you rant, note that in the context of Dick's novels what is constructed is actual reality, so this use of the term definitely makes sense here. Dick's characters move in a world where the boundaries between real and unreal have been blurred to the point nobody can be sure anymore of which is which.

"Concealing the truth" is a particularly bad substitute for the concept. Creating worldviews might be a better one. But consider that there are even in our world actual realities that are social constructs. Think of social media. Facebook is real, has a part in our lives and what happens in it has real impacts on us; in turn this relevance is determined by the socially agreed value we attribute to it. At its most basic level, because of a network effect: it's real because it's used, and it's used because people think it's used.

> ...note that in the context of Dick's novels what is constructed is actual reality

My understanding is that he used that as a metaphor for getting at this social construction of reality idea.

Additionally, I take no issue with Dick's usage of 'reality'; I have an issue with the article's.

> But consider that there are even in our world actual realities that are social constructs. Think of social media.

Social constructs are real—agreed. However, that is a very different statement from 'alternate realities are socially constructed' or even that a single reality is 'socially constructed,' even granting the reality of social constructs.

> My understanding is that he used that as a metaphor for getting at this social construction of reality idea.

That would be in itself a good reason to talk about it in the article. I think Dick also had some mild psychiatric issues, maybe natural, maybe drug induced (again, what's the difference?). His religious delusions and paranoid ideation probably made him see reality in a much less clear cut way than, say, a physicist would.

Anyway, I'd say that reality in this context means "subjective reality", the complex of our individual beliefs of what is real. I'm fine with this usage: its meaning is clear in this context. Nobody is trying to say that by believing really hard in it we can defy gravity or walk through walls :)

The important thing is that this fluid reality idea rings a bell with us today. The world is becoming increasingly more complex and layered, and we're less and less able to see through the layers the underlying truth, whatever it might be.

> Anyway, I'd say that reality in this context means "subjective reality", the complex of our individual beliefs of what is real.

That's exactly the problem: the phrase is an attempt to identify reality with 'the complex of our individual beliefs of what is real'. In other words, it identifies the objective with the subjective. It erases the distinction between reality, and what one believes is real. Losing that distinction can only be harmful in our world which—I agree—"is becoming increasingly more complex and layered".

It's one thing to acknowledge the power of of ideas to shape one's perception of reality, but the particular tactic used here (of coopting the world 'reality' to mean something antithetical to its most common definition) is underhanded.

If you are willing to limit your statements about reality to things that can be described by (hard) scientific theories, then sure, I'm on board with you (for the convenience of communication and language, i.e. for instrumental reasons).

But if you think that e.g. the evening news represents reality and that people who deny this reality in favour of an alternate reality are harming the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity, I'm afraid I don't agree with you at all. It's all shades of grey, there is no binary distinction. That perspective is a political perspective, and it encodes whole piles of assumptions about what is and ought to be.

Times were simpler before because the people were easier to fool, not because we had a better handle on "reality".

If it is the article, rather than PKD, that you are taking issue with, why is the part that you explicitly quoted in order to take issue with it the part that was written by PKD?

It's a quote from his introduction to I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon.

Half of my quote is from that, the other half is from the article. I'm not a fan of either's usage, but I take no issue with PKD's because he's just sharing his ideas and fiction; the article has set itself up in way like it's going to objectively present information on some things and people in the world. Using 'reality' to mean what has traditionally meant 'not-reality', in that context, is distasteful, imo.

The only part that you took issue with, and actually rewrote at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16247811 to not use the word "reality", was the part written by PKD.

The origin is this book: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Construction_of_R...

It's probably fair to say that PKD would have found ideas like "consensus reality" (Charles Tart) or "reality tunnels" (Timothy Leary) to be, at least, relevant to his work.

I found this article helpful in sketching the developments that you seem to be objecting to: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-ame...

Yep, my understanding is also that Berger and Luckmann is the source of the phrase.

That looks like an interesting article—I'll check it out.

Here's another (shorter) one that deals with the issue: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2008/11/post-truth-spawn... (There's a very brief summary in the section "The truth about post-truth")

I would argue that you are missing a beat, insofar as he’s not so much about constructionism (although he was about that, too) as a level below that.

There’s social construction in the format of group consensus and shared narrative, but the “reality” PKD typically picks at is much more basic and fundamental - your perception, your symbol set, your very humanness defining your experience of “objective reality”. He thought that “objective reality” was absolutely inseparable from our perception, that we build a gestalt from fragmented chaos, and that that process can break down. Dick has characters in total isolation lose reality not through divergence with social norms, rather through their perception undergoing some shift - it’s no coincidence that he was into disassociative psychedelics.

The article, if anything, misunderstands Dick, as one of the fundamental aspects of his worlds is that more often than not the problem is the protagonist, who is blind to their own corrosive effects on reality, rather than reality being controlled by sinister entities with purpose and direction.

All of these so-called “realities” (I do agree with you on that aspect) are simulacra, mounted atop a further simulacra, ultimately possibly (Bostrom among others has dented my confidence in “probably”) mounted upon some physical base reality.

But it’s equally likely that we’re a Boltzmann brain having one hell of a hallucination - and that’s far closer to PKD’s ultimate truths than anything as mundane as manufactured “realities”.

Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation was directly inspired by PKD’s work, and explores his notions in quite some detail. It’s a light read, and I highly recommend it.

> use of 'reality' in place of 'belief' or 'theory'

Which was of course a fundamental subject explored by PKD.

Most disappointingly, the Amazon Man in the High Castle adaptation tossed all of that overboard (though it was the primary theme of the book) in favor of the frisson of Nazi porn.

That's a shame. I was rather looking forward to watching it but knowing that has rather put me off.

madaxe_again disagrees with me (look at his reply to my comment) so don't make your decision solely on what I say.

Not sure how much of it you’ve seen, as while it does diverge substantially from the book, it does go off down a belief-powers reality route.

The book used the I Ching as a gateway between worlds, producing the Man's book as well of course the insights of the trade minister, who starts to doubt the assumptions and foundations of reality early.

In the TV show there are mysterious films with no explanation, and though the wonderful Embarcadero freeway scene from the end of the book is shown at the end of the first season, without the slow build up it isn't at all insightful.

Admittedly it's just a film, so not expected to be able to express the subtleties possible in text, but I feel they don't even get to the heart of the book at all.

I know - the second season employs the I Ching world interchange too - it's how it concluded. The trade minister becomes pivotal, as written.

I'm bearing with it - I think it's hit closer to the mark than electric dreams did - but the only PKD anything which has been faithfully produced was A Scanner Darkly, in my opinion.

You seem very sure that reality has a precise definition that everyone agrees on.

No, actually, my complaint is that mid 20th century a bunch of people introduced a new definition for it, so clearly not everyone agrees :) Before that, however, the situation was much more clear cut. And even still, 'reality' is mostly just used in the traditional way. For instance, the American Heritage dictionary's entry:

  n. The quality or state of being actual or true.
  n. One, such as a person, an entity, or an event, that is 
  actual: "the weight of history and political realities” ( 
  Benno C. Schmidt, Jr.)
  n. The totality of all things possessing actuality, 
  existence, or essence.
  n. That which exists objectively and in fact: Your 
  observations do not seem to be about reality.
  idiom in reality In fact; actually.

Now, if we jump to something like Wiktionary:

  n. The state of being actual or real.
  n. A real entity, event or other fact.
  n. The entirety of all that is real.
  n. An individual observer's own subjective perception of 
  that which is real.

—we can at least find one entry which match's the article's usage (the last one there). My problem with it is that redefining 'reality' to mean nearly the opposite of what it traditionally has meant is an underhanded way of pushing the philosophical viewpoint that no objective reality exists (which was held by the people who introduced this usage of the word).

> philosophical viewpoint that no objective reality exists

I'll only add not to forget the situation of the leader: his perception of reality is that he is the leader, but it is only true because other people's perception of reality is also that he is the leader. There's no reality here outside perceptions, but it's still true: you can still observe who the leader is in a group of social animals from observation.

(For philosophical purposes, I believe the quoted definition is true, primarily because every alternative seems to be unsound.)