Under Construction

Facts, and What 'Real' Means

The world is the totality of facts, not of things - Ludwig Wittgenstein - Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

We have built a world out of nothing and watched number grow inside it. Now we have to say plainly what all of this is made of - and the answer is not stuff. It is facts. But Virtualism means something exact by that word, and once it is pinned down, the everyday difference between what is real and what is merely an idea turns out to be a good deal stranger, and more useful, than it looks.

Index

The World Is Made of Facts

A Heart With No Particle In It

The Same, Not Merely Alike

True, Ideal, Real

Real Is Not the Opposite of Virtual

The World Is Made of Facts

A fact, here, is not a sentence and not a claim that somebody makes. It is a relationship, considered as a thing that exists in its own right. Take two things that are partly alike, and the likeness between them is itself a fact - it is there whether or not anyone notices, and it is whole, a single something standing over and above the two it joins.

This quietly rewrites what a property is. To say a ball is red is not to pin a coat of paint called redness onto the ball. It is to say the ball stands in a relationship of likeness with every other red thing - and that relationship, redness, is a fact that exists. The ball does not own its redness privately; it partakes of one redness shared across everything red. Every property you can name works this way. A thing's qualities are its relationships, and its relationships are facts.

A Heart With No Particle In It

If facts have no stuff of their own, it is fair to wonder whether they are really there at all. The cleanest answer is a place you can point to: the Earth's centre of gravity. It sits somewhere very precise. It steers the Earth around the Sun and the Moon around the Earth, and whole space missions are aimed by it. Yet if you travelled to the exact spot you would find nothing there - no particle, no marker, no stuff. It is the virtual heart of the Earth taken as a whole: not a thing, but a fact about how all the parts stand together - and a fact with its hands firmly on the controls.

That is what every virtual whole is like. No stuff of its own, and yet able to push the stuff around. Keep the centre of gravity in mind as the picture, because the whole world, on this view, is built of facts of exactly that kind.

The Same, Not Merely Alike

Here is the move that makes those facts solid rather than airy. When two things are indistinguishable in some one respect, Virtualism takes them - in that one respect - to be not two lookalikes but literally the same. Not this charge and that charge, which happen to match, but one charge, showing up in two places.

All electric charges are instances of the same electric charge.

This sounds wild until you keep the levels straight. This electron and that electron are easy to tell apart - different places, different histories. But their electron-ness is not two faintly different things that resemble one another; it is one fact they both partake of. The same goes for the number two, for redness, for every shared feature there is. What looks like a crowd of separate likenesses is, underneath, a single fact wearing many hats. That is why a likeness can be a genuine whole and not a mere coincidence: sameness, taken seriously, is identity.

True, Ideal, Real

Now we can sort the facts, and this is where the word real earns a sharper meaning than usual. Begin with the broadest: a fact is true when the likeness that grounds it genuinely holds. Truth, here, is not something sentences have; it is what a real likeness is. Identity is truth.

Among true things, some carry no difference at all - they are pure sameness, with nothing in them that could change. Numbers are like this, and so are the laws of mathematics and the shapes of geometry. Virtualism calls these ideal. They are perfectly true and entirely outside time; the number two is in no danger of becoming something else next Tuesday.

Numbers are the most ideal of ideals.

Other true things have difference built into them - and the moment difference is part of what a thing is, that thing is exposed to everything difference brings with it: position, motion, mass, change, time. These are the real things. So the line is clean: real is true plus difference. A number is true but not real, because nothing about it differs or moves. A stone is real, because it sits somewhere, and somewhere can change.

One consequence is worth flagging now, because a later page is built on it. If real means caught up in difference and change, then strictly speaking only the present moment is real. The past is perfectly true - it happened, and nothing can make it un-happen - but it is no longer real, because it is no longer changing. That is a strange thing to say out loud, and it is left here as a promissory note, to be paid under Change.

Real Is Not the Opposite of Virtual

All of this clears up a confusion built into ordinary speech, where real is the opposite of virtual, or of abstract - the solid table set against the mere idea of a table. On this account that opposition is a mistake. Everything whatever is virtual: everything is made of facts, of relationships, never of stuff, because there is no stuff at the bottom for it to be made of. Real is not the opposite of virtual. Real is a particular job that some virtual facts are doing - the ones tangled up in difference and change. The table and the idea of the table are both virtual; the table is also real; and that is the whole of the difference between them.

So there is no layer of solid matter underneath holding it all up, no separate heaven of numbers off to one side, no mind-stuff apart from the body. There are facts, all the way down, behaving reliably enough to pass for solid - which is exactly the as-if this site is named for. With what a fact is now settled, and what makes one true, we can at last look at what happens when two facts will not agree. That collision is the engine of the whole theory, and it goes by the name of paradox.