Objective Reality

“Do you think that’s air you’re breathing?”

Morpheus asked this in The Matrix to challenge Neo’s assumptions about reality. But if you stopped to ask yourself the same question, how sure would you be about the answer?
You probably believe in objective reality.  This reality feels like it exists independently of us, composed of the space and objects in our environment.  The objects in objective reality all follow consistent rules, and everybody in objective reality partakes in the same universal stage.
This all seems obvious and intuitive, but history shows us that our understanding of reality changes over time as science evolves through the ages.  For example, is sickness the result of God's wrath, an imbalance of the body’s humors, or the workings of hormones and cells? Does the universe revolve around the earth, or do the planets orbit around the sun? Different periods have had their own ways of depicting objective reality, and although the modern age has an evolved understanding, I’m comfortable assuming that we are mistaken about reality in a similar way that past ages were also mistaken.

Even within our own era, objective reality looks different depending on which discipline you consult. For example, physics describes objective reality as mechanical motion, measuring the world’s objects and manipulating them in its system of mass and energy.   On the other hand, the discipline of history describes objective reality as a story, with points of consensus appearing across connected documents, telling the tale of reality as a reconstruction of evidence left by human behavior. Neither one presents a whole picture of what objective reality truly is, but they each provide their own angle of illumination on the way things work. 
The Default Intuitive Model

I have my own model for objective reality, my own angle of illumination that I use to depict what’s there.  The discipline of Blob Theory describes objective reality based on the default intuitive model. The model shares a common goal with disciplines like history or physics: it describes the world in a way that seeks to be consistent and non-contradictory.  Objective reality, as told by the default intuitive model, is the gateway to understanding Blob Theory. The model is similar to phenomenology or solipsism, and uses subjective experience as the basis for understanding the world at large. 
I explained the model in greater detail last episode, but as a quick recap: the model outlines the underlying cognitive processing system that we all share.  The model assumes that we exist as divided selves, meaning that we have internal divisions with distinct motivations that can cooperate or compete with each other — like the automatic, reactive part of ourselves and the reflective, deliberate part. In the model, the intuitive, automatic part of you is responsible for supplying information to the conscious part of you.  The conscious self, in part, makes decisions based on the foundational data provided to it.  

Illustration: Three major components to the default intuitive model
In other words, the model is effectively a sorting algorithm, and it provides a quick layer of processing to the incoming data being absorbed by the senses.  Our default intuition presents the information to consciousness in a way that is reliable and digestible, providing basic assumptions about the world. The conscious part of ourselves, in turn, can draw more complex conclusions by using the intuitive information as its foundation. 
The most basic assumption drawn by the default intuitive model is that we live in a material world, in a shared space filled with physical objects. This assumption is done in order to simplify the broad spectrum of chaotic sights and sounds into concrete units that are easy to understand. 
Physical Objects"Our whole knowledge of the world is, in one sense, self-knowledge. For knowing is a translation of external events into bodily processes, and especially into states of the nervous system and the brain: we know the world in terms of the body, and in accordance with its structure.” — Alan Watts
Our intuitive model for reality transforms raw sensory data into familiar objects. No two people experience the world in exactly the same way, but our default model assumes that a single shared, material world exists independently of us. To manage this complexity, the model recognizes patterns in sensory input and identifies "objects" as consistent groupings of sights, sounds, and other sensations.
Take, for example, an apple. When our senses detect a pattern close enough to past "apple" experiences, the mind codes it as an "apple" with minimal effort. This isn’t limited to vision. The smell, taste, and feel of an apple reinforce the pattern, allowing us to quickly sort it into a stable mental category. The idea of "appleness" emerges from our familiarity with the pattern, and our mind does not need to deduce it from scratch each time. 
This process reveals the core aim of the default intuitive model: to convert raw sensation into stable 'information units' that are clear, consistent, and easy for consciousness to process. It’s a system designed to prioritize simplicity and stability.

‘This is not an apple’ by Magritte: a visual representation of an apple, but not exactly the apple itself.


Next Week: Information Units

Next week, we'll trace how this same system shapes more than just our sensory world. It shapes how we think, how we measure, and even how we define knowledge itself. We'll explore the 'clean information units' at the heart of Western science — and the limits they impose on how we see reality.