Once it was simple. Fantasy was the imaginary, reality was the objective world. But in our topsy-turvy, postmodern space, the real has come to look like a mirage created from our fantasies. What is going on, and could our pictures of reality be radically incomplete?

“Reality is the dream of a mad philosopher,” argues Joanna Kavenna in this issue of IAI News, quoting from nineteenth-century writer Ambrose Bierce. Can we ever persuade others of the reality of our subjective experience, she asks, or should we abandon all claims to objectivity? And when does it really matter?

Objective reality is out there, believes quantum computation researcher Chiara Marletto; but we need to question our basic assumptions about the physical universe. Is information fundamental to reality? Did the universe emerge from a bundle of bits? In The Code of the Cosmos, she outlines the new “constructor theory” which seeks to explain life, the universe and everything in it.

Economics, too, is in need of an urgent rethink. In The Growth Delusion, financial analyst and author Ann Pettifor asks whether continuous economic growth can ever be sustainable. Or is it merely a delusion?