How real is real? Can we trust our sense of sight, touch, taste, hearing, and any of the myriad senses that monitor our internal and external environment? With all our interactions with the external world, our senses return to the brain a limited portion of the information available — we ‘filter’ the experience, attending to changes, the unusual, anomalies. Neuroscientists (see: Clark, 2016) propose that our brain operates through a question-and-answer process, continuously questioning its environment in search of evidence of change.
From Kant forward, there has been a debate about whether what we experience are real properties of the external world or simply the reality of our senses. One property of the coffee mug in front of me is its permanence in space and time. But do my sense impressions guarantee its permanence? Are the qualities of my subjective experience of a coffee mug the qualities of a ‘real coffee mug’ on the table just a few inches from me?
Ria, our fairy queen, challenges us to question what is ‘real’ and what is not. The first time Alfur meets Ria, he sees what appears to be a young man in the chair by the fire. The person calls him to sit; he does so, and in that instant, he sees a woman welcoming him. His first sight was of a short-haired male, his second of a long-haired female. What, or whoever it is, it is not in a permanent state; it has changed its physical appearance. Was Alfur’s first impression a mistake, or was he experiencing superposition? The story invites us to believe the person sitting by the fire was in all states of being, but as soon as he looked away to take his seat, a second ‘measurement’ event occurred, and Ria became the female of Alfur’s dreams.
So, is Ria purely a figment of his imagination or a product of his senses engaging with a real entity which does not possess permanence in this world? We soon discover that her visual presence is always transitory. Ria soon tells Alfur that he is her descendant, that he was of a line born of her child who lived a thousand years before. Could she have given birth to a child without permanence in this world? Is she in any sense Alfur’s mother? Is she as present now as she was then? Permanence, in the physical world, implies continuation of physical being, which implies temporal continuity.
Ria, in her presence, challenges our understanding of the nature of reality where superposition and, as the story develops, entanglement are phenomena that are part of ‘being in itself’ but not present in what are senses perceive as real.
Clark, A. (2016). Surfing Uncertainty - prediction, action and the embodied mind. Oxford, Oxford University Press.