The Four Realities

This is a quick introduction of the distinction between subjective, intersubjective, objective and potential reality. More will be written on this at some point.

Most people are talking about objective reality, when they use the term reality on its own. The shared physical world seems to obviously be the only reality worth dealing with. Other people talk about “my reality” and thereby mean the subjective reality, which is a filtered individual sum of perceptions or interpretations. Both are right but it is important to distinguish the two and also explain intersubjective reality, a term hardly ever to be found in popular discourse. In addition to clarifying the distinction and overlap between these three realities, I will introduce the concept of potential reality, which is mostly useful for hypothetical considerations.

Subjective and objective reality are easy to grasp concepts. They run in parallel and should therefore be distinguished in discussions pertaining the matter of reality. A little example and two definitions should be shared here to make the point clear enough and thereby build a transition to the following important point of intersubjective reality.

A discussion about colors is something many people presumably take as being about objective reality. But we do not talk about colors objectively. Any given specific color is the distinct frequency/wavelength of photons radiating from a surface. Machines are able to accurately determine these objectively. The perception of a color is something purely subjective though. It happens within the brain-regions responsible for processing visual input. Therefore, a color you see is only within you and you are discussing your personal impression of this color. The objective reality of it is merely that of reflected light. That becomes clear when one thinks of a color-blind person. Or an animal that is not seeing light on this end of the spectrum of light but on the other hand gets a visual impression of photons with other wavelengths us humans would not recognize at all.

Objective reality is the existence of all objects that, independently from any perception, exist with clearly identifiable or measurable attributes at a given moment. E.g. all forms/processes of matter and subatomic particles/waves.

Subjective reality is the individual not yet fully shareable perception of sensory stimuli and mental processes. E.g. the feeling of getting touched, thoughts, emotions and dreams.

Intersubjective reality is the intersection of these two. It pertains to the objects and phenomena all beings that are able to communicate with each other can perceive in a mostly similar manner. As for the color example, we can assume that light with a wavelength between 560-590nm is seen as yellow by most people. But even if the perceptions were to vary individually with one person seeing it as pink and another person seeing it as red, if it is a stable perception, those people could still talk about some yellow object and know what the other meant.
There are also certain qualities outside of such easily distinguishable characteristics of reality such as physical attributes. Beauty is a good example of that. There are many aspects that, in the right combination, can make a human to be perceived as beautiful.

A showcase for deviations from intersubjective perceptions: It can be claimed that Scarlett Johansson is found exceptionally beautiful by most people on the planet, male and female alike. I personally have to admit that I don’t have a thing for her. She is just not my type. Despite that, I can still see why everybody finds her beautiful. Still, there are people more exceptional than me in perceiving her beauty in so far as to not being able to see it at all, due to their more extreme variation from standards in that regard. People that for example can only find females of a certain race beautiful or aren’t able to see the appeal of a woman that is not morbidly obese. These are cases comparable to color-blind people.
Intersubjectivity can be relatively hard to grasp and delineate since, as mentioned before, subjective perceptions cannot be shared in their entirety. On the other hand, subjective reality often seems obvious due to the assumption that it is as similar to objective reality as it gets. One should take care of not falling into the trap of The Likeness Fallacy when discussing it with other individuals or confuse intersubjective reality with objective reality.

Potential reality can best be exemplified by some examples. There are supercomputers busy day and night with determining prime numbers of very high orders of magnitude. Numbers reach into infinity. One example to showcase it is the number “googolplex”, which has so many zeroes that even if one of its digits were to be “written” on every atom in the known universe, not even a billionth of a billionth of its digits had been written out. In that order of magnitude are also numbers that are not divisible. So, there are prime numbers that are impossible to ever be determined. They will never be used for anything, never spoken, never written, never computed - yet they are real.

Another example: Everybody has experienced anticipating a conversation and imagining what to say during it but ended up not choosing the preconceived words after all.
Potential reality covers all the unspoken words one thought of and even those that one has not thought of but just as well could have said. And it also encompasses every possible scenario of interactions of matter in the distant future that might or might not happen.