Causal realism, or should you eat your pet?

"where to draw the line?": everything is, in fact, real, but in a weird way

Upstream from:

The Void Between Us

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The famous "where do you draw the line?" meme is surprisingly versatile in the range of things to which it can be applied. The original appearance of the meme is photo of a billboard showcasing various domestic animals: cats, dogs, rabbits, horses, chickens, cows, pigs, ducks, et merda that's supposed to make a point about veganism, poignantly saying "All animals want to live... Where do you draw the line?" with a supportive visual pet⟷food spectrum. Knowingly, though sometimes stereotypically so, different geographical locations prefer to draw the line in their own way. See, the more you ponder it, the more questions you have: you can eat a rabbit but somehow you don't eat a cat, or you can eat a cow but don't eat a horse, or the other way around... You have a few options and justifications to draw that line somewhere, but nevertheless draw it, based on your culture or ideological inclination or personal belief. However, when the predicament, such as an apocalyptic crisis, dictates the situation, famished, you'd find yourself more fond of the idea of drawing the line somewhere on the left.

Abstracting from the original, concrete message of the meme, and applying it to Reality and Truth we find ourselves in the somewhat similar conundrum, asking, what is real? what is true? what should be trusted? what can't be? everything? nothing? some things? The existence of those questions is natural and has always been following us, but the sole fact that many people chose to draw the lines on the left side rather than on the right side of the not-real-to-real spectrum (or continuum) or withdraw from line drawing completely indicates that we're indeed approaching the "apocalyptic crisis" of sorts. Somehow, the terms Reality and Truth are so loaded that they themselves now require definition based on context, which only indicates their ongoing corruption by New Age nonsense and misunderstood contemporary philosophy, which are often intertwined. It terrifies and enrages me that those terms now beg for an asterisk whenever used.

You could read at length about mechanisms and consequences of algorithmic manipulation, misinformation, fake news, dead internet, generative slop, et merda, perhaps, you've read all that already, for it's hard to avoid. Those things have become so tolerable and normalised that, just by judging by the fateful proportion of "discourse" vs "action", nobody seem to care, not because they don't care — many do, including myself — but because caring itself has become quixotic, absurd, cosily Chekhovian, hence my use of "seem". The powerlessness is what causes it: quiet caring or even loud speaking haven't been forcing the situation to change for the better, and seeing only stagnation and deterioration, it's easy to dismiss any care as ingenuine.

Every day you wake up, look around, and have to draw the line on what's real and what's not. It wasn't a problem when everything a human could see in his or her entire life was physical and contained within a few dozen kilometres, but now it has become an impossible task, without an "almost" even. When things aren't constrained by the visible circumference of one's own existence, the one naturally starts doubting whether what's beyond it is indeed real. The oecumene, or "known world", of today is infinite, not constrained by the physical boundaries and becomes cardinally more infinite every day, so the only way to establish any boundary is to say, "fuck the boundary, thank you very much," that is to boldly draw the line on the "everything is real" side. Engaging further with pseudo-transfinite mathspeak: we don't simply have "more stuff", but are in fundamentally different order of infinitude, such as moving from the countable infinity of natural numbers to the uncountable infinity of real numbers. As if a decision on having a breakfast with your cat as a part of it instead of a companion would have far-reaching, unpredictable implications.

Now, let's think of your cat as a unit of information in your possession, an idea or a belief you might care about or the negative, anti- version of that, something you disbelieve, despise, or consider irrelevant due to the falseness or unreality of it. That idea, regardless of the method of organisation — as a text, an image, or such — only realises its potential when interacted with, by yourself or by someone else, who then can propagate that effect to you. It does not originate from nowhere and doesn't exist in some impenetrable, unreachable, ignorable vacuum as phantasms that do nothing, otherwise believing in it would lead to a cognitive dissonance.

Just like a pet, as soon as a unit of information, knowledge, or language, enters the domain of thought, it immediately acquires potential to alter what we'd proverbially consider "real" (read "edible" or "acceptable to eat"). A book can change the course of history, a tweet can tank the stock-market or start another World War, a computer-generated picture can initiate frenzy in people's head and motivate them to either believe in something or amplify their current belief so they go and "do something", such as wreak havoc on the streets or, on contrary, do something unknowingly beautiful. Moreover any physically-denyable or untrue God is as real as a prickly cactus on your windowsill or the Sun in the sky, because it can, regardless of your position, affect the physical through people's brains and hands, and hence you, too.

The question of what's real and what's true, nothing or anything or some things, is now meaningless. On par with physical expansion, such as further exploration of the Earth or the space or wholly-so kosmos, now our world's expanding into and merging with khaos much faster, making the previously working methods of discernment of "real" and "true" within the kosmos increasingly difficult or completely impossible. Beyond good and bad, it's first and foremost a new thing, and the new is often confusing and terrifying. The described dichotomies of true⟷untrue, real⟷unreal, kosmos⟷khaos have become a luxury we can't afford anymore, for where was a boundary now is a gradient. Not because Truth doesn't exist and doesn't matter and we should abandon all attempts of finding her (quite the opposite) but because the old methods of truthseeking have become so slow, contested, ineffective, and tribal, often resorting to primal binaries, that they and their deconstructions are now useless for actually responding to what's happening.

One could call it "causal realism", where the degree of realness is determined based on its causal power instead its factualness, physicality or truth status. Intangible, false, inconceivable things gain prominence in reality, too, first via human thought, then via human hands. Within that, meaningful causation is the one that can lead to a tangible effect, both constructive and destructive, both ugly and beautiful, both moral and immoral, or anything in between, without dissolution of the ends of the gradient. In causal realism, everything can be real, and in its potential — everything is. The "matters | doesn't matter" axis is becoming more and more important. Fake news, misinformation, forged screenshots of social media posts, porn deepfakes of your mother, myths and religions, AI-generated photos of explosions that never happened are real, not "in a sense real" but actually are, for they do have consequences. You can't just up and dismiss them as "unreal" or "fake", for there are some people, often many people, often half of the population, or even more (sometimes everyone), that would believe in them and then act based on those beliefs. Often fiction that leads minds is more true than a cherry-picked true fact, or a fact genuine but which has no effect. A fake piece of information, be it a deliberate deceit or a innocent joke, can be taken seriously or can represent Reality more than something we traditionally deem real.

Here, to clarify, I don't defend conspiracy theories as "real" because they have consequences or falsehoods as acceptable because they made someone do something, neither do I say we should make peace with the madness and live in fictional world mumbling "it is what it is". We just have acknowledge that the continuum exists and to draw the lines somewhere to stay sane, to act upon it, but don't think that this line is one and final, and the lines drawn by others don't matter. Real⟷unreal, true⟷untrue, matters⟷doesn't matter are only few axes. The traditional binaries obscure how information actually works. They often get squashed together as the means of simplification of the problem or use as mechanism of escapism from that problem, such all "it's untrue so it doesn't matter", "it's real so it's the only way", "only what's real and physical matters", "it's untrue, unreal hence we can ignore it and leave it be", "this is true, nothing else can be", "nothing real, nothing matters", do not help to solve the problem. You might not eat cats or dogs or horses or pigs but your neighbour might consider eating it regardless of your beliefs, or a story, an image, a video, a rumour of you eating them might exist, and everyone will believe it, assemble into an army of lunatics and come to eat you (not in a sexual way, mind thee). It can be fatal to confuse fluid for constant, dogma for Truth, doldrums for harmony, false for meaningless and deny that everything, both the physical domain and the domain of thought, is one inseparable whole that cannot sliced, isolated, ignored, forgotten and not dealt with.

June 2025

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