I have always felt an almost instinctive distrust toward explanations that multiply “realities” whenever something becomes hard to understand. Every time I hear someone talk about “another reality”, “social realities”, “symbolic realities”, or “worlds constructed by language”, I notice an immediate resistance in myself. For me, the word reality carries a specific weight: it names what exists independently of our descriptions, our metaphors, and our desire for the world to be kinder or more poetic than it actually is. In that strict sense, reality is physical. Everything that exists does so in space and time, under material conditions that have nothing to do with our narratives or our ways of interpreting the world.
This stance is born from an attempt not to mystify the world any more than philosophy students already do. I find it intellectually more honest to say that the universe is brutally simple in its ontology and overwhelmingly complex in its configurations. There is matter, energy, fields, interactions. Everything else we experience emerges from that as organized patterns, stable over certain intervals, and interpretable from different levels of description. When I say that there is only one physical reality, I am not denying the richness of the human, the social, or the symbolic. What I mean is that this richness does not float in some separate metaphysical plane. It lives, quite literally, in brains, in circuits, in electromagnetic waves, in material structures organized in sufficiently sophisticated ways to produce language, institutions, theories about language, institutions, and software. There is no magic in that process, but there is enough complexity for magic to sometimes feel like the shorter explanation.
Over time, I have learned to distinguish between two opposite temptations. The first one, and one I admit I have fallen into, is the temptation of clumsy reductionism: the idea that since everything is physical, talking about levels of abstraction is some kind of ontological betrayal. This temptation leads to responses like “that doesn’t exist, it’s just electrons”, as if mentioning electrons solved anything beyond a metaphysical argument. The second temptation is ontological inflation: the habit of speaking as if every level of description inaugurated a new “reality”, as if the fact that something can be understood socially or symbolically emancipated it from its material substrate. Both temptations strike me as different forms of conceptual laziness. The first takes refuge in the micro-level to avoid dealing with emergent complexity, and the second takes refuge in language to avoid the hardness of the physical.
My position became sharper when I started thinking in terms of systems. An operating system, for example, is not an entity floating in an abstract limbo, as some might be tempted to think. It is a pattern of organization of physical states in a concrete piece of hardware. But it is also not “just electrons” in any sense that would be useful for understanding why a process deadlocks, why a scheduler prioritizes certain tasks, or why one architecture is more resilient than another. The operating system exists as a level of description because there are stable regularities in the behavior of those physical states that can be captured by higher-level concepts. There are not two realities here. There is one physical world described in different languages depending on scale and purpose. Ontology is one; epistemology is plural.
This distinction between ontology and explanation has become, for me, an interesting way of seeing the world. It allows me to accept without conflict that we use “cognitive shortcuts” to think about reality, without turning those shortcuts into parallel ontologies. Models, metaphors, social categories, and conceptual structures are tools. They are compressions of the world’s complexity that make it possible for limited agents like us to orient ourselves, decide, and act. They do not describe the world at its fundamental level, but neither are they arbitrary fictions. They work because they capture real patterns in the underlying physical dynamics. In that sense, they are true in a pragmatic way, even if they are not fundamental in an ontological way.
When someone says that language “constructs realities”, what I hear, at best, is a claim about how our linguistic categories shape the domains of meaning within which we operate. Language does not create mountains or electrons, but it does create institutions, roles, norms, and expectations that coordinate the physical behavior of humans in the world. There is a deep difference between saying that language constructs interpretive frameworks and saying that language constructs the world. The first is a reasonable sociological and cognitive observation; the second is a confusion of levels that, although it sounds profound, usually obstructs more than it clarifies. I prefer the less romantic and more precise version: language does not create reality, but it creates the games within reality that we play.
This way of thinking has also shaped my relationship with abstractions in general. Mathematics, formal structures, data types, and conceptual architectures are not “things” in the world in the way a rock is, but neither are they illusions. They are ways of describing regularities in physical systems or possible configurations of those systems. They exist as cognitive practices embodied in human brains and in computing devices. When I think about linked lists, I am not invoking a Platonic entity floating in an abstract heaven, but a conceptual scheme that can be implemented in multiple ways across different physical substrates. A linked list is not a separate reality; it is a possible pattern of material organization. And yet, speaking of it as if it were “something” makes sense at the level where we design algorithms and systems. That tension between “not fundamental” and “indispensable” is, to me, one of the most productive tensions in modern thought.
There is also an ethical dimension to this stance, even if it is not always immediately visible. Believing that there is only one physical reality does not lead me to dismiss the social or the symbolic, but to take them more seriously. If institutions, norms, and economic systems are not a separate “reality” but real configurations of coordinated physical behaviors, then their effects are as real as any natural phenomenon. Poverty is not less real because it is not a fundamental physical entity. It is a stable pattern of material deprivation produced by social systems operating in the same physical world that I inhabit. Denying its “reality” (I dislike using the word “reality” in a non-physical sense) because it is not a quantum field would be a refined form of indifference.
Over time, I have come to see my physicalism as a kind of conceptual discipline. It is a way of reminding myself not to reify my models, not to confuse my tools of understanding with the world they aim to understand. At the same time, it is an invitation to respect emergent complexity without turning it into mysticism. I can accept that I need multiple levels of description to move through the world without believing that those levels inaugurate new ontological universes. I can speak of systems, institutions, software, and language without forgetting that, in the end, all of it lives within a material cosmos that does not need my categories in order to exist.
Perhaps, at bottom, this stance is a form of cognitive humility disguised as ontological toughness. It forces me to accept that my concepts do not govern the world, that my explanatory frameworks are always partial and provisional, and that physical reality will remain there even when my theories change or become obsolete. And, paradoxically, it is precisely this hardness of the world that makes our abstractions valuable, because they allow us to navigate, with a little less clumsiness, the only reality there is.