The Sense of Existence

 Today's post is by Alexandre Billon (Université de Lille) on his recent paper, "The Sense of Existence" (Ergo 2023).

Alexandre Billon

Things we perceive typically seem to be real to us. Unlike Bigfoot or Pegasus, this sparrow flying above the building for example seems to be real to me and I indeed judge that it is real. The sense of reality is the kind of awareness or seeming that underlies such judgments of reality. 

There has been a lot of work on the sense of reality lately in the philosophy of mind, in psychology, and even in aesthetics (think about the difference between an apple on a trompe l'oeil and a regular painting). The terminology is not quite settled, however: some talk of the sense of reality, others of the sense of presence, yet others of "real presence". Nor is the conceptual landscape: it is sometimes unclear whether all authors who talk about the sense of reality talk about the same thing.

Although it is usually ignored, there is also a long tradition, in philosophy of studying the sense of reality. Hume and Kant have had interesting insights about the "idea of existence", the 18th century Encyclopedists  (Diderot, Turgot), 19th-century Ideologists (Condillac, Destutt de Tracy, Maine de Biran) as well as major 20th-century figures such as  Dilthey, Husserl, and  Bergson developed interesting accounts of the "feeling of existence" or the "feeling of presence" some of which  were based, or at least closely tied, to the psychology of their time.

My aim in this paper was twofold. First I wanted to draw on the contemporary literature and on the philosophical tradition to brush a landscape of the various possible theories of the sense of reality and put forward a consistent terminology for these theories. That required to get clear on the meaning of "real", and I decided to focus on reality in the sense of existence: what is real in this sense is what really exists.

My second aim was to assess these various theories. Focusing mainly on "derealization" (a condition in which people perceive their surroundings and themselves as unreal) I argue that no extant theory of the sense of reality quite succeeds, and that we should carefully distinguish the sense of reality from the various senses to which some theories have identified it: 

- the sense of  resistance, 

- the sense of phenomenological depth (the awareness that the object has hidden parts exhibited by so-called “amodal completion”), 

- the sense of perceptual presence (the awareness that the object belongs to the same spatial manifold as me),  

- the sense of the temporally present, 

- the sense of directedness (the awareness of being directly related to the object), 

- and the sense of affective value (the awareness of the object is or at least can be affectively moving).

At the end of the paper, I put forward an alternative theory of the sense of reality that given our present state of knowledge seems to fare better than all other theories. This alternative theory construes the sense of reality as a sense of substantiality. I indeed suggest that normally, we are implicitly and more or less determinately aware that unlike say, virtual objects, the things we perceive have a certain ordinary substrate that gives them substantiality and that this substrate endows the things with a sense of being real. This sense of substantiality would be lacking in derealization.