Real world, Actual world. Virtual world

“Just wait until you get into the real world.”  “Things aren’t like that in the real world.”

We hear these jeremiads when we are in…what?  The unreal world?  The surreal world?  Mostly we hear it from people who are in the commercial or business world, the world of pirates, con artists, “masters of the universe”, the population of the “competitive” world, which exerts most of its energy and time scheming and scamming ways to avoid direct competition…the kind that happens in the actual world. 

But that’s not my point.  My point is about our blithe acceptance of the word “real” to mean something akin to “substantive.”  Whatever is real is not only what we perceive but also how we perceive it.  All that is in our real world runs through the filter of who we are and what made us who we are.  For example, a person like me, partially color blind, does not see a green traffic light but rather a sort of grey-blue-green (maybe) light.  My wife sees orange lights, not yellow lights.  That person over there is really tall only because the perceiver is really short.  That’s the easy stuff.  There’s harsher stuff.  For example, every Vietnam veteran I talked to told me the experience “over there” was reality; this homeland stuff isn’t reality.

So any “real world” is about the perceiver of his or her outer experience.  The world exists as perceived, not as it is. This used to be called subjective idealism.  I’m certain it has a more obscure label now.  So, is there another world? Yes.  It is the “actual world.” 

The actual world is a stand-alone world.  As I look out the window to my left, I see various tree and bush leaves gently swaying in a shadowed breeze.  Seen from my air-conditioned room, it is a cooling experience.  But the outside temperature is actually nearly 100 degrees with high humidity, not at all cooling.  I know there is a bird feeder on the other side of the house, but I don’t know what its current condition is.  Have the squirrels ravaged it?  Has a new species decided to visit it?  Are the chipmunks having a picnic underneath it?  These things have occurred, and actually might be occurring now.  Before we humans actually landed on the actual moon, the moon held all sorts of visionary realities for humanity. Actuality has a nasty tendency of draining the romance from reality.

And these days, because of the new magic of digital imaging, we have the virtual world.  The virtual world is a created combination of the real and the actual.  Some of each is placed in there, depending on the whimsy and perception of its creator.  In this sense, the virtual and the real worlds share a common progenitor—the mind of the perceiver/creator.  That is, the individual human.

The irony in all this is that most of us prefer the real and the virtual to the actual.  We seem to prefer our perceptions of the actual world to the actual world, in fact.

This, of course, affects what we mean by the “truth.”  The truth is not the same as the fact.  The truth is the meaning we give to the fact.  A fact has no significance to anything but itself, its ontology, its measurable characteristics and its history.  With truth, as with reality, its meaning and significance are determined by perception.