Enfolded in Living Reality Pt. 1
Plate from Oculus Artificialis, Johann Zahn. 1685.
Tuukka Toivonen August 5, 2025
“…reality is not an animated version of our re-presentation of it, but our re-presentation a devitalised version of reality. It is the re-presentation that is a special, wholly atypical and imaginary, case of what is truly present, as the filmstrip is of life […].”
-Iain McGilchrist in The Matter with Things (2021)
Our modern understanding of reality is a curious thing. We have all been told, at one point or another, to “get real” or to “live in the real world”, lest we veer too far from the parameters of a typical, ordained life course. We are called to engage in regular “reality-checks”, in order to recognize that not all of the ideas and trajectories we choose can succeed in ‘real-world’ conditions. Exhortations and assumptions of this kind are what our familiar social universe is composed of, and how it gets maintained. And then we have the physicists, from Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking to Michio Kaku and Carlo Rovelli, who approach reality and the ways it is constituted as the ultimate question for science. Their mind-bending quantum theories suggest that reality is only produced when particles that simultaneously exist in multiple locations become observed, taking specific properties and therefore becoming real. The infinite possibilities that exist as a wave function suddenly collapse into matter made of tangible particles — although even particles themselves have been shown to become fuzzy under close analysis. Some physicists and philosophers even postulate that we exist inside a simulation, or that reality constantly keeps splitting into parallel worlds, creating infinite copies of us without our awareness. We are, it seems, still far from having reality all figured out.
Being perched between these two extremes — treating reality rather casually and narrowly within familiar social contexts while acknowledging the discoveries of physicists that fundamentally challenge our assumptions of what is real — makes exploring the topic of reality difficult. Theories of how reality is socially constructed, always contested and ever-changing, were useful within sociology in an earlier era, but now seem complicit in flattening our existence by reducing it — indeed confining it — to language, symbols and institutions. The conceptual world of quantum physics, despite a considerable number of thinkers who have explored how it might intersect in ways that affect day-to-day lives, starting with Carl Jung’s ideas on synchronicity, often feels disconnected from human experience, not just for its requirement of expertise. (although). Perhaps, then, there is a terrain between those two poles that, regardless of our relative inattention to it, might be just the right starting point for questioning human reality in the 21st century. What is it, exactly, that we have been missing due to our polarized take on reality?
This gap is perhaps the space of a rarely-articulated living reality, a subtle experiential dimension right there before our eyes (and other sense organs), but that most of us normally overlook and under-value. Artists such as Yuko Kurihara, whose paintings transform the wonderfully uneven, vibrant surfaces of pumpkins, 3 bananas and oranges into an absorbing universe of their own, remind us of the hidden layers of reality and the potential we have to perceive them quite readily, given time and the right quality of mind. Contrary to our belief that the words we employ correspond to an actual reality in the moment that we gesture toward it, what seems to occur instead is that the words themselves come to form their own — superficial and simplified, relationally diminished — world. Perceptual reality, meanwhile, slips away from view in all its unspoken richness, receding to the background as mere potential. We are far too quick to “collapse” the infinite possibilities, depths and textures of reality into an impoverished stand-in. This is, of course, partly unavoidable for it would surely be impossible to navigate daily life if we stopped to perceive every single thing anew each time. Yet it is troubling all the same how unaware we are of our casual reductive habits and how easily they can obscure the living nature of reality, relegating us to live a substitute for a real human existence.
It seems to me that contemporary technological society has not merely inherited our perceptual poverty butappears to be hell-bent on further reducing our reality to fixed categories, prescriptions, images and algorithms. The powerful cognitive technologies we are in a rush to develop and disseminate build directly on our already-impoverished version of reality. It is logical to assume that they will only entrench this thinnest of realities, locking us more firmly within its confines, or specific regimes of power, as foreseen in Yuval Noah Harari’s4 ominous reading of the situation. Many of these technologies will impose progressively stricter and stricter limits on what we can experience and how, drawing our attention to those slivers of presumed reality, based on arbitrary choices, that we think can be easily measured and quantified. Health comes to be appraised and understood through wearables and apps, while the ever-evolving creative process becomes reduced to mere “content”. Unique human voices — our most intimate of expressive instruments — become synthesized into digital production tools deprived of subtlety and immeasurably precious and intrinsically interwoven ecosystems come to be regarded as worthless if they fail to bend to the needs of scalable business and investment. Whatever still survives within this arid, flattened universe of controlled reality could be easily starved to death as the forces of reductionism accelerate at the expense of the kind of expanded, life-giving, delicate awareness I described above.
We have, thankfully, not yet arrived at a full culmination of these developments. There is still time to fight against the inundation of artificial stimuli that pushes us away from a kind of supple, open awareness and quality of mind that allows us to remain in touch with holistic, living reality.
Tuukka Toivonen, Ph.D. (Oxon.) is a sociologist interested in ways of being, relating and creating that can help us to reconnect with – and regenerate – the living world. Alongside his academic research, Tuukka works directly with emerging regenerative designers and startups in the creative, material innovation and technology sectors.
