The Sense of Reality in Consciousness Science

Consciousness science has focused on how perceptual contents become conscious, but has paid less attention to what makes an experiential world feel real. This article treats the sense of reality as a distinct phenomenon—the pre-reflective way a current world is experienced as present, coherent, inhabitable, and resistant to doubt. It proposes that this sense is multidimensional, comprising felt presence, ontological weight, perceptual coherence, bodily situatedness, action-guidance, and public validity.

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Abstract

Consciousness science has made substantial progress in studying how perceptual contents become conscious, yet it has paid comparatively little attention to a broader question: what makes an experiential world feel real? This article treats the sense of reality as a distinct explanandum, understood as the pre-reflective way in which a current world is experienced as present, coherent, inhabitable, and resistant to doubt. I propose that this phenomenon is best understood as multidimensional, comprising felt presence, ontological weight, perceptual coherence, bodily situatedness, action-guidance, and public validity. On this view, ordinary waking reality reflects the coordinated stabilization of these dimensions, whereas altered states including lucid dreaming, derealization, hypnosis, psychedelic states, meditation, and immersive virtual reality reveal different configurations of experiential worldhood. Building on predictive processing and active inference, I introduce a computational framework in which the sense of reality is formalized as a higher-order reality-model that evaluates the standing of the currently active world-model. This framework distinguishes self-model, world-model, and reality-model processes, and suggests that reality endorsement depends not only on sensory, interoceptive, and sensorimotor evidence, but also on social and symbolic constraints such as shared attention, reciprocal prediction, communicative alignment, and institutional framing. The article concludes by outlining an empirically tractable research program and arguing that consciousness science should explain not only how contents and states are generated, but how worlds are experienced as real.