We tend to think we live in a shared reality, with differences in how we experience the world attributed to differences in perspective. But according to philosopher and founder of social epistemology, Steve Fuller, this is a radical mistake. Breakthroughs in neuroscience, quantum mechanics, and AI show that we don't have different perspectives on the same reality. We inhabit different realities altogether.

Steve Fuller will debate reality in the age of perspective with the founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales and social theorist Sally Haslanger this 19-20 September at HowTheLightGetsIn London. Also featuring are the likes of Louis Theroux, Roger Penrose, Sabine Hossenfelder, and many many more. Book your tickets now. 

Our default understanding of reality is more specific than we might first suppose. Its specificity is well captured by the biases built into philosophical appeals to “realism.” For the realist, reality is discovered, not constructed. The reality of something is suspect if the knower is knowingly involved in its realization. Moreover, reality is one thing for everyone, not different things for different people—that’s “relativism.” Everything exists in this one reality, regardless of how independent these things might seem from one another. Realists tend to be vexed by talk of “multiple realities” that cannot be reduced to multiple perspectives on the same reality. Indeed, some realists expect that science will someday provide a common understanding of this shared reality.

Of course, down through the ages there have been honorable dissenters to this rather specific conception of reality, and I believe that recent developments in science and technology will give them greater voice in the future. These developments come from different directions—neuroscience, quantum mechanics, generative artificial intelligence—but they point to an emerging alternative sense of reality and the need to rethink the nature of knowledge.

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Recent neuroscientific research has revealed the full extent of the variability and plasticity of the human brain. In this context, “neurodiversity,” a coinage of sociologist Judy Singer, has come into common currency. Slowly but surely, society is abandoning the idea of a normal functioning brain, in terms of which conditions such as autism are deemed to be disabilities, if not pathologies. Instead, the normality of differently abled brains has gradually come to be accepted. The neuroscientist Karl Friston has described this in terms of brains being differently tuned to respond to environmental inputs. Eventually, this shift in perspective might even underwrite what the educationalist Howard Gardner more than forty years ago called “multiple intelligences.” Instead of training all brains to align with one shared reality, environments will be customized for these diversely tuned brains to realize their full potential.

Quantum mechanics presents a view of reality in which we inhabit many worlds at once. As the political scientist Alexander Wendt has put it in Quantum Mind and Social Science, we are “walking wave functions,” which “collapse” at decisive moments, when everyone is forced to accept the same reality, but in a way that reconfigures each person’s view of how the past was and the future will be. Niels Bohr introduced the word “incommensurability,” which Thomas Kuhn popularized, to characterize the kind of “coherence” involved here. For example, Galileo could imagine living in both a geocentric and a heliocentric world, until his telescopic observations convinced him of the latter. At that moment, he started living exclusively in the heliocentric world and proceeded so much in that way that he eventually faced a Papal Inquisition.