The real world is not out there. Rather it is we that are “out there” in it. We are immersed in the real whatever we do, whether we frame it as predictable through the efforts of science to produce repeatability, or as knowable through statements and concepts as philosophy suggests, or whether we grasp it through sensations.

We are immersed in the real even when we attenuate it through forms of representation and media that immerse us up to our perceptual limits: iPods booming our favorite music, cinema teasing our vision and our forms of making order, computer-generated networks bathing us in a different real than those which we live in even as we occupy a virtual world. We are nonetheless framed by and contained within an actual world, however much we may not notice it. (An online flirtation is provocative because it is framed within a real world where flirtations may have implications.) Even more significantly, if there is a real, then it must be in us, making us up, as much as it makes possible an “out there.”

We as living beings are as real as the forces that occupy us. And the real is that which generates such beings and makes possible all their variations and modes of creation.

The real is what resists our representations of it as unmediated truth. The real is itself before truth, before language, before living beings can come to inhabit and understand. It is the forces that enable life, language, and knowledge to be possible, even as they remain limited forms of access to the real. The real is the ongoing provocation of representation, of language, of truth, as well as the condition for the problematization of any existing representations, images, truths. It is what we feel, but it is also more than what we can possibly feel, for it is the condition for all feelings, all perceptions; that is, it constitutes a world, or the condition of many worlds.

Another name for the real, or the outside, is chaos. Chaos is not the absence of order but rather a plethora of incompatible orders. There can be many incompatible truths about any event. Its reality is the condition under which truths, images, and representations, compatible or not, are generated. The real is constituted by forces that affect living beings and material relations. It is what generates problems that science, philosophy, and the arts address and make livable without extinguishing.

There IS something in common among many questions of the form, “Is that a real X?” First thing: the X (not the “real”) determines the point of the question. The noun “wears the trousers” (to use the nicely sexist terminology of J. L. Austin, a linguistic philosopher writing 60 years ago). [Noun X = betrayal] directs us to one set of alternatives, [Noun X = stone] to another, and [X = found object] to yet another set of alternatives. Second thing: the context settles which alternatives to X are appropriate to a particular setting. In my example, what is not a real stone in a pile of rubble might be broken concrete; in the Guggenheim, it might be papier-mâché.

The big mistake is to treat the adjective “real” as if it named a quality like “round.” The shapes we call round do share some properties. But “real” is not that kind of adjective. I know this is terribly unsatisfying to anyone who is caught up, as Elizabeth Grosz is, in thinking out “the nature of reality.” But the first sentence in my first post shows how different are the ways in which we do philosophy: “I am the kind of philosopher who prefers four-letter adjectives to fancy nouns built out of them. ‘Real’ over ‘Reality.’”

I believe Elizabeth Grosz has important things to say about the roles of art and science when we contemplate our experience, but I would not want to try to explain them by invoking “Reality”—or “Real.”

Douglas Hofstadter puts the word “real” in what are often called scare- or shudder-quotes, as if he were not happy using the adjective as he does. (I would not be happy either.) But a word about his last question: “What is ‘real’ about a sunset?” Asked in the abstract, out of context, there is nothing to say. But in context, I am holidaying in the badlands of Utah. “Now that’s a real sunset!”—as opposed to one of those pallid things we have in Toronto.

Maybe Alison Goddard was having me on, or being the “straight man,” when she asked what real stones and real betrayals have in common!

But what is, or was, Holden Caulfield? There’s not now, nor was there ever, any physical body corresponding to the description of Holden in the book, nor is there any cemetery where Holden’s bones have been laid to rest. But there is a pattern in my brain, and in millions of other readers’ brains, and in author J. D. Salinger’s brain most of all, that was created, and this pattern reacts to the world with pain, empathy, outrage, confusion, love, and so on. I’ll call it a “subself” inhabiting my brain (and those of others). So Holden is a kind of smaller self inhabiting my brain—a representation of a certain extremely human way of reacting to the world, much like my brain’s representations of my friends and family members. In fact, this pattern is a very richly “fleshed-out” representation of a person—far richer than my representations of many people I’ve met in the flesh. This ethereal entity springs to life inside me not only when I read the book but also on many occasions when I’m facing one of life’s infinitely many perplexities and recall Holden’s reactions to analogous perplexities in life. And if my representation of Holden is rich, it’s as nothing compared with the representation of Holden in Salinger’s brain. For that reason, I felt doubly sad when I read about Salinger’s recent death. Not only did one of my most admired authors pass from this earth (requiescat in pace, J.D.!), but so did by far the richest version of Holden Caulfield on this planet (requiescat in pace, Holden!).

What I’ve said about Holden Caulfield living inside my brain (and those of others) applies to all people we know well, whether they’re living or dead, whether they ever walked the earth or merely resided as “guest subselves” inside a host brain (such as mine or Salinger’s, but of course yours too). And in fact, the real me—the real Doug Hofstadter—isn’t some 65-kilogram hunk of flesh; it’s an intangible pattern living to varying degrees in many brains, including my own, my sister’s, my children’s, and those of my close friends. When the primary brain housing this entity goes the way of all flesh, the pattern that is I will subsist to various levels of fidelity in all those brains. So what is really real, here—the physical body, or the ephemeral, intangible pattern?