Constructing Honest Narratives Is Your Duty

“Reality” is hard to pin down for two reasons.

The first problem is that each of us is only modeling reality based on sensory inputs from an organic body. The light that hits your retinas is real, but your brain can only use the resulting electrical signals to estimate what you’re looking at. Any distortion in your senses is a distortion of your reality. On top of that, biological creatures like humans only possess the senses that were necessary for their ancestors to propagate their DNA better than the competition. Much like the eye only needs to perceive a limited band of the light spectrum, the mind only ever needed to perceive a limited band of reality at large.

The second problem, which we can actually do something about, is that we rely on language to build a consensus about reality. Brains may hallucinate models of their environments, but it appears that every brain's model is based on the same reality. Unfortunately we can’t just look inside each other’s heads to verify that our models match up, so we have to compress our understanding of the universe through the Play-Doh factory of linguistics.

Words are famously slippery things. The controversial 180-degree semantic shift undertaken by "literally" shows that a word is nothing but a symbol whose meaning comes from a speech community’s mutual understanding of it. To paraphrase the Zen poet Ryōkan, a word is a finger pointing to the moon. The finger isn’t the moon, and to split hairs over the finger is worse than useless. Look where it’s pointing and the moon will speak for herself. Ceci n’est pas une pipe, a rose by any other name, yadda yadda.

Language doesn’t merely describe reality, then, but shapes it according to our biases. To invoke a silly example, language allows me to express things like “My landlord is a rat.” Take a moment to appreciate the bizarre power of metaphor. Rats and my landlord both exist in reality but the relationship between them is purely linguistic, dependent on our mutual understanding of what it means for a person to be a rat. In other words I’ve constructed a narrative, and you can tell because the metaphor describes my experiences rather than anything inherent about my landlord. If I said “My rat should get a real job,” an innocent bystander would rightfully extrapolate a very different model of my reality. “Rat” is a finger pointing to another finger, which shifts our shared understanding one step further from reality.

My landlord, in turn, will have constructed her own narrative regarding our property-based relationship, and she's probably not a rat within her own model. Our realities are—forgive me—literally different, and yet this is only weak evidence that either of us is delusional. She and I build models with what we’re able to sense, and what we’ve sensed of each other is far from flattering. In my heart of hearts I hope I am mischaracterizing my landlord, but all the evidence gathered so far points a certain way and I must act accordingly. The finger pointing at the moon is, after all, a real finger.

That said, delusion is never off the table. Language can effortlessly construct a narrative that’s comfortable, convenient, and detached from the reality to which we are all beholden together. Symbolic thinking gives us the power to conceive of things that have never existed, and this power should be duly cherished, but the fact that we’re all trapped in the same reality together means everyone is obligated to construct their narratives honestly.

Story is fundamental to our species. Much like the eye, narrative is a flawed but load-bearing part of the way we interpret reality. And much like the eye, its precision and its fragility are two sides of the same coin; even evolution's greatest marvel is rendered useless by a grain of sand. The critical thing is that any narrative worth telling must change in the face of new evidence. The finger must follow the moon as she moves across the sky.