The Worlds We Live In

Multiple realities are real.

Once, in the early days of the internet, someone told me I was wrong.

I know, I know. It’s hard to believe. But it really happened. What’s even crazier is I thought about it and decided they were right.

My original position was that people should be judged only by their actions and are free to believe what they want¹. Therefore we shouldn't classify what people believe about themselves as a mental illness. They disagreed and said that going along with a lie wasn't true compassion. I don’t recall their response verbatim, but the paradigm they used has stuck with me. What it boiled down to was this: minds can lie, but bodies don’t. If they disagree, the mind is wrong. Thinking about that some more has led me to expand on it. We live in multiple realities, and it’s important to make distinctions between them.

There are, give or take, just over 8,000,000,000 different realities. Everyone has their own mental reality, and each one is unique. It’s how we see the world and ourselves. To us, it is reality - the only reality. But we all live in one shared physical reality as well. In my reality, the comforter on our bed is green, but in my wife’s reality the comforter is blue. In the physical reality, white light reflected from the comforter primarily has a wavelength somewhere between 490 and 510 nm. No matter what I call it in my reality, that won’t change the physical nature of the reflected light. The physical trumps the mental.

So why does this matter? Because we have forgotten that the only way to handle eight billion different realities is to agree that the physical reality is what matters. That doesn’t mean we’re all going to agree on everything, but where there’s a clear conflict between the physical and mental we have to put the physical first. No matter what my wife and I think the color is, the reality is that it’s a color somewhere between blue and green (but mostly green) as those colors are defined. If we want to get curtains that coordinate with that comforter, they have to match with the color it actually is regardless of what we call it.

Let me give a different example. In my mental reality, I’m pretty much the same person that I was 30 years ago. In the physical reality, I’m obviously not. Thirty years ago I was in excellent physical condition. I could run a mile in under six minutes, do 75+ pushups at one time, 30+ pullups, and so on. I’m not going to be doing anywhere close to that now. But even back then my mental perception of who I was didn’t always match reality. If I played in a game of basketball, somehow I’d always end up playing right under the basket. That would have been fine if I was one of the taller guys playing. I’m 5’ 5”. I was never one of the taller guys playing (unless I was playing with kids half my age). Inevitably I'd take an elbow to the face.

Same thing with football. I weighed about 130 pounds back then, but I didn't see any problem with taking the ball right up the middle like I was a 210 pound fullback. It doesn’t matter how strong your legs are (and I had really strong legs) if any defensive player that can get ahold of you can pick you up with one hand. Basically I think like a tank, but I'm not built like one. The NBA and NFL don’t care what my mental reality is. Nor should they. If I sued them and insisted that I be allowed to play professional sports because I feel like I'm physically capable, I would rightly be laughed out of the courtroom. It doesn’t matter how I perceive myself, I can’t impose that perception onto the physical world or force anyone else to agree with it when it differs from our shared reality.

All that said, there are some aspects of life that only exist in our mental realities. Our tastes, our emotions, our preferences, those all have no shared physical component. You can tell me it’s a bad idea to love biscuits and gravy² as much as I do, but you can’t tell me I don’t love it or that my love isn’t real. I can't deny the physical reality of those calories, but it doesn't change how I feel.

We can’t let people impose their own mental reality in place of the physical reality, but neither should we try and deny the parts of everyone's reality that are their own. Understanding this is key to getting along.

1. While I still think that's mostly true, it's not absolute.

2. Or macaroni and cheese. Or chocolate. Or a nice, thick, ribeye steak cooked just on the rare side of medium rare. Or Buffalo chicken cheese dip. There were a lot of foods I could choose from here. Also, I should have eaten lunch before I started writing.