What is Real?

 A response to Curt Jaimungal's "Do You Exist? What Exactly Is Existence?"

Curt's recent article begins with a wonderfully unsettling observation. We all feel quite confident that we exist, yet the moment we try to explain what exactly that means, things start falling apart.

His example of Batman is perfect. We confidently say "Batman doesn't exist," yet somehow we all know exactly who we're talking about. Russell, Kripke, Meinong and a century of philosophers then arrive with increasingly sophisticated explanations for how we can successfully refer to something that supposedly doesn't exist.

Reading the article, I couldn't help thinking that perhaps the problem is not Batman at all.

Perhaps the problem is the word exist.

We use the same word for rocks, dreams, numbers, nations, scientific theories, memories, people, stories and mathematical truths. Then we wonder why paradoxes appear. It is a bit like using the same word for water, steam and ice and then being surprised when we get confused about their properties.

Three Worlds

This is where Roger Penrose's famous "Three Worlds" picture becomes helpful.

Penrose argues that reality presents itself in three irreducible domains. There is the physical world of matter, energy and spacetime. There is the mental world of conscious experience. And there is the Platonic world of mathematical truths, abstract structures and objective patterns. The remarkable thing about Penrose's diagram is not merely that these three worlds exist, but that each appears to depend upon the others.

Conscious minds somehow gain access to mathematical truths.
Mathematical truths somehow govern the physical world.
The physical world somehow gives rise to conscious minds.

Round and round the arrows go.

Roger Penrose's three-worlds diagram: the mental world, the Platonic mathematical world, and the physical world, each giving rise to the next in a cycle nobody fully understands.

As Penrose himself puts it in the video below, as physicists try to close in on what reality is at a fundamental level, "reality itself is slipping away, and the theories are becoming less concrete and more abstract."

Roger Penrose introduces his three-worlds picture. The video weaves Penrose's interview with Karl Popper's parallel framework and imagery from The Matrix (mash up I made years ago...).

Popper, The Orb, and the Noosphere

What fascinates me is that this picture appears repeatedly throughout culture, often emerging independently in very different contexts.

Karl Popper described something remarkably similar when he spoke of three worlds: the objective physical world, the subjective world of conscious experience, and a third world consisting of objective contents of thought. Scientific theories, mathematical discoveries, languages, stories, works of art, institutions and ideas all inhabit this strange domain. They are not merely physical objects, yet neither are they private mental experiences.

One of my favourite samples from The Orb captures the idea perfectly:

"There's a third world, the world of objective contents of thought…
Teilhard de Chardin called this third world the Noosphere,
the world of mind."

That sentence lodged itself in my imagination years ago.

The Noosphere. The world of objective contents of thought.

The phrase sounds mystical until you stop and think about it. Shakespeare is dead, yet Hamlet continues to shape minds. Euclid is dead, yet geometry still governs architecture. Nations rise and fall, yet ideas survive them. The Pythagorean theorem existed before Pythagoras discovered it and remains true after every mathematician who studies it has died.

These things are not physical objects in the ordinary sense, but they are certainly not nothing.

Batman Belongs Here

Batman belongs here too.

This is why I think Curt's paradox dissolves once we stop treating physical existence as the only kind of existence. Batman does not exist as a biological organism wandering around Gotham City. But Batman certainly exists as an objective pattern. Millions of minds can refer to him because there is genuinely something there to refer to. Not a physical person, but a stable informational structure inhabiting Popper's World Three.

This also softens the need for Russell's elaborate logical machinery. Russell wanted to avoid referring to nonexistent entities by treating existence as a second-order property. But perhaps the reason he felt compelled to perform this logical surgery is that he assumed there were only two possibilities: either something exists in physical reality or it is nothing at all. Once we admit multiple modes of existence, the pressure eases considerably. Batman is not a flesh-and-blood individual, but neither is he an empty linguistic accident.

Likewise, Meinong begins to appear less eccentric than generations of analytic philosophers have portrayed him. His intuition was that objects need not exist in order to be objects. Stripped of some of its more extravagant consequences, this seems remarkably close to ordinary experience. The number seven is not a physical object. A perfect circle does not appear anywhere in nature. The Pythagorean theorem existed long before human beings discovered it. These things are not physical, yet they are not fictional in the same sense as Batman, and neither are they reducible to nothing. Penrose's Platonic realm offers a natural home for such entities.

Even Kripke's famous problem of rigid designation looks different through this lens. If names are direct references rather than disguised descriptions, what exactly does "Batman" refer to? Kripke's account seems to leave the laser pointer aimed at empty space. But perhaps the pointer is not aimed at empty space at all. Perhaps it points to an abstract object or "code" — a stable informational structure that persists across different media and different minds. The reference succeeds because there is genuinely something there to refer to, even though it is not physically instantiated in the way Bruce Wayne would be if he stepped onto a stage tomorrow.

What Is Real? Ask Morpheus.

At this point The Matrix becomes a surprisingly useful metaphor.

The Matrix triptych mapped onto Penrose's three worlds. Neo's body in the real world, his pattern in the code and his avatar in the Matrix (sorry, can't depict a first person view!), represent the physical, Platonic, and mental modes of being - three ways of existing that no single image can fully capture, which is exactly the point.

The genius of Morpheus’s famous question is that it exposes the hidden assumption beneath most discussions of reality.

“What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.”

Look closely at the triptych. On the left stands Neo in the real world - the body, the physical thing that can be unplugged, weighed, touched. In the centre, rendered in cascading green code, is his pattern of being: the information structure, the Platonic self that the Matrix is running. But on the right is the strangest and most important panel: Neo as he appears inside the Matrix, the avatar, representing the first-person experiential presence - what it is like to be Neo from the inside. It’s like looking at a photo of yourself - the memory generated is the experience you were having, not the picture 'from the outside'. Here's the paradox. Everyone inside the Matrix can see the avatar. But they are not actually seeing Neo's inner experience at all. They are, as Morpheus tells us, receiving electrical signals interpreted by their brains. 

The avatar is not the soul - it is the soul's shadow on the wall. Neo's actual first-person presence, his mental world, cannot be painted, photographed or rendered. It can only be pointed at. This is precisely the problem Catholic artists faced when they tried to represent the Father in Trinitarian iconography. Everyone knows the Father is unseen - the tradition insists on it - yet the icon still shows an elderly figure, because the painting is not attempting a portrait.

It is mapping relationships: Son, Spirit, Father, and the bonds between them.

The Neo triptych works the same way. Body, pattern, presence. Physical world, Platonic world, Mental world. The three panels are not three photographs of the same man. They are an attempt to hold together three modes of being that normally escape any single frame.

If reality is merely what you can touch, taste, smell and see, then reality reduces to electrical signals interpreted by the brain. Yet those signals themselves are not what we directly experience. What we experience is a conscious reality generated from them.

The Matrix was never really about computer simulations. It was about epistemology. It was about the disturbing realisation that our access to reality is always mediated.

The green code functions almost as a modern icon for Penrose’s Platonic realm. Not because reality is literally computer code, but because code serves as a useful metaphor for intelligible structure. Behind appearances lies pattern. Behind pattern lies meaning.

The Map Generating the Territory

The same point is true of mathematics, and mathematics may be the strongest example we have.

As the Penrose interview makes clear, modern physics keeps discovering that reality becomes increasingly abstract as we dig deeper. The solid world dissolves into atoms. Atoms dissolve into quantum fields. Physical objects become mathematical descriptions. The closer we move toward the foundations of reality, the less concrete things appear and the more mathematical they become.

This creates a strange inversion of the materialist story.

Materialism often imagines mathematics as something produced by brains. Yet physics increasingly discovers that brains themselves appear to be produced by mathematical structures. The map seems to be generating the territory.

That is why Penrose takes mathematics so seriously. He is not saying mathematics is useful. He is saying mathematics is discovered. The truths of mathematics seem to possess a reality that transcends both the physical world and the minds that apprehend them.

The Horrid Doubt

The deeper question is why human beings can access these patterns at all.

This is where the evolutionary argument raised in the video becomes so interesting. If our cognitive faculties evolved merely to survive in the Pleistocene, why should we trust them when they wander into quantum mechanics, higher mathematics, cosmology or infinity? As Darwin himself admitted, there is a certain “horrid doubt” lurking here. Why should minds selected for survival possess such astonishing access to abstract truth?

The materialist answer is often that this is simply a fortunate byproduct. Perhaps. But it is worth noticing how extraordinary the coincidence is.

A species evolved to hunt antelope and avoid predators somehow discovers tensor calculus, non-Euclidean geometry and quantum field theory. The universe appears strangely comprehensible. As Einstein observed, the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.

Do You Exist?

This brings us back to Curt’s original question.

Your examples expose the inadequacy of simplistic answers. We survive the replacement of body parts. We survive interruptions in consciousness such as sleep. The self appears more persistent than any particular collection of atoms and more stable than any uninterrupted stream of awareness.

Penrose’s framework is suggestive here. Human beings seem to participate simultaneously in all three worlds. We possess physical embodiment. We possess conscious experience. And we possess enduring informational and mathematical structure. Our identity is not reducible to any one of these alone.

The question “Do you exist?” turns out to be underdetermined. Before answering it, we must first ask what sort of existence we mean. Physical existence? Mental existence? Abstract existence? The word itself conceals multiple categories beneath a single grammatical form.

Perhaps rocks exist physically.

Thoughts exist mentally.

Mathematical truths exist platonically and stories exist informationally.

And human beings participate in all three.

Body.  Spirit.  Soul.

Matter.  Meaning.  Mind.

A Map of the Mystery

From this perspective, much of the century-long dispute surveyed in Curt’s article appears less like a disagreement about existence and more like a disagreement about ontology. Russell, Kripke, Meinong, and the abstract realists may all be describing different regions of reality while attempting to force them into a single conceptual box labelled “existence.”

The paradoxes emerge not because reference is broken, but because the map is incomplete.

The most interesting thing about Penrose’s diagram is that it never quite closes the mystery. The arrows connect the worlds, but nobody fully understands why the connections exist. Why should mathematics describe reality? Why should brains generate consciousness? Why should conscious minds discover eternal truths?

The diagram is not an explanation. It is a map of the mystery.

Yet for me, it points toward something even deeper. The more we investigate reality, the less it resembles a collection of disconnected objects and the more it resembles a unified act of intelligibility. Physical reality emerges from mathematical order. Consciousness emerges from physical reality. Consciousness discovers mathematical order. The circle closes upon itself.

Do you exist? Of course you do. The more interesting question is:

in which world?

In the next post I want to push further: if reality divides into these three domains, what holds them together? And does the necessity we find in the Platonic world - the sense that truth cannot not be true - point beyond itself toward something personal?