The “seven realms of truth” framework

Here’s a framework I use to think more clearly about complex debates and philosophical questions about whether something is “true,” “exists,” and is “real” (e.g., “is this painting art?”, “is everything subjective?” and “is morality real?”). I find that thinking in terms of this framework can make it easier to figure out what’s being claimed and to clarify what I myself believe.

The framework divides things that are sometimes claimed to be “true,” or that we might say “exist,” into seven different realms (or “spaces”) in which they might be said to be true or to exist.

I’ll introduce the framework and show how it can be used with some example applications. Note that this framework is intended merely to provide useful language and categorizations for thinking about these sorts of philosophical questions; it is not itself intended to make any metaphysical claims about what’s true.

The seven realms of truth (brief overview):

There are a number of ways that something can be claimed to be “true” or different “realms” these truths can be about. To make it easier to clarify thinking, I divide these truth and existence claims into different “spaces”:

(1) Some things “exist” in the sense that they are in physical reality, like atoms (in “Matter Space”).

(2) Other things may “exist” in the sense that they are real experiences conscious beings have, like the taste of pineapple (in “Experience Space”).

(3) Other things may “exist” in the sense that they are shared constructs across multiple minds, like the value of money (in “Consensus Space”).

(4) Other things may “exist” in the sense of being conclusions derived from frameworks or sets of premises, like consequences of economic theories (in “Theory Space”).

(5) Some may “exist” in the sense that they are represented in systems that store or process information, such as the information in a database (in “Representation Space”).

(6) If universal moral truths “exist” (e.g., objective facts about what is right and wrong), then we can talk about moral rules existing (in “Morality Space”).

(7) Finally, if supernatural entities “exist,” such as spirits (meaning that not all beings inhabit Matter Space), then these beings are in a different realm than us (in “Supernatural Space”).

To further explain the spaces themselves, we can use the consistent example of atoms:

(1) It is true that atoms exist (Matter Space).

(2) It is true that I have internal experiences that are caused by the existence of atoms (Experience Space).

(3) It’s true in English that “atoms” are constituents of matter (Consensus Space).

(4) It’s true that the existence of atoms is a consequence of the standard model of physics (Theory Space).

(5) It’s true that Wikipedia contains information about atoms (Representation Space).

(6) Many people think it’s true that moral claims are not just claims about whether atoms have a particular configuration (Morality Space).

(7) If supernatural entities exist, it’s true that they are not merely made of atoms (Supernatural Space).

But if you say “it’s true that atoms exist,” do you mean “true” in the same sense as when you say “it’s true that in English “atoms” are constituents of matter?” Are these notions of truth identical? What about when you say, “it’s true that murder is immoral?” Is that the same meaning of “true”? Or when you say that “atoms exist,” does the word “exist” as used there mean the same thing as when you say “numbers exist”? If we have a claim that something is “true” or is “real” or “exists,” then having these “seven realms of truth” in mind allows us to follow a process of clarification.

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So suppose that we are considering a particular philosophical claim about what is true or existent.

1. First, ask yourself about which “space” this claim is being made. For instance, does the speaker mean “murder is wrong” as a claim about Experience Space or about Morality Space, or about some other space?

2. Second, consider what we mean when we say that something in that Space is “true”/”real”/”exists.” For instance, we may think that claims about Morality Space are true in a very different sense than claims about Experience Space or Matter Space. We might even think that there are no such thing as true or false claims about some of these spaces.

Once you have determined what Space the claim is about, and you know how you think those sorts of claims should be interpreted for that Space, you now have a way of evaluating that claim!

A few very important points before continuing:

• I do not intend to imply that all these spaces actually “exist” or are “real,” and I especially don’t intend to imply that they all “exist” or are “real” in the same sense as each other. For instance, it could be that some of these spaces don’t exist at all, and it could be that some of those that do “exist” do so in very different senses of the word “exist.”

• I also don’t intend to imply that these spaces are necessarily all different from each other or that they don’t subsume each other (e.g., someone might think that space X is just subsumed into a combination of spaces Y and Z, which is fine).

• This post is NOT intended to make metaphysical claims about what’s true; rather, its purpose is to provide a simple “language” and process for clarifying thinking and communication around difficult-to-think-about philosophical questions. For instance, with this language of “spaces,” you can ask yourself questions like, “do I think that Experience Space is just a part of Matter Space, or is there an important sense in which they are different?”, or questions like, “do things in Theory Space actually exist in the same sense that things in Matter Space do?” This language of spaces is intended to provide concise mental categories that we can then ponder and discuss.

• There are many (perhaps an infinite number) of such “spaces” one could imagine adding to this list. This list is merely intended to be pragmatic: it is designed to cover many of the cases that non-philosophers tend to debate with each other. I sought to include the most important cases only.

• Another use for the concept of these “spaces” is that they can help you disambiguate your beliefs. For instance, you can ask yourself, “when I say that it’s true that 1+1=2, do I mean that it’s true in the sense of Theory Space, or do I mean it in some other sense?”

Let’s now dig into each of these seven realms of truth more thoroughly.

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The seven realms of truth in detail:

(1) Matter space: the realm of what physically exists, such as atoms, waves, and photons.

It is true (in Matter Space) that hydrogen atoms can be divided into subatomic particles and that electrons have a certain amount of electromagnetic charge.

A claim like “this painting is not art” is not a claim about Matter Space.

If someone claims “everything is subjective,” a natural clarifying question to understand their claim is to ask whether they are saying this applies to Matter Space: “do you mean that the question of how much electrical charge an electron has is also subjective, or do you only mean to claim subjectivity for cultural beliefs (Consensus Space) or internal experiences (Experience Space)?”

Physics (as in the theories that humans have invented about reality), being a set of ideas, are not part of Matter Space directly, but they attempt to describe Matter Space.

(2) Experience space: the realm of what we experience internally, such as emotions, colors, and sensations.

It is true (in Experience Space) that the ocean is blue (as experienced by me), that food tastes good (to me), and that being pricked with a pin hurts (me).

A claim like “French fries are not a French food” is not a claim about Experience Space.

If someone claims that a particular painting is not “art,” a natural clarifying question to ask is whether they mean this only in terms of Experience Space: “do you mean that your own experience when you view the painting is not the experience you would require to call something art, or do you mean that you don’t think this painting satisfies the shared cultural understanding of what art is (Consensus Space), or something else?”

If there were no conscious beings in the universe, then Experience Space would be empty.

(3) Consensus space (i.e., “intersubjective facts” ): the realm of shared ideas whose truth depends on a simultaneous belief by multiple minds, such as cultural, linguistic, and societal constructs.

It is true (in Consensus Space) that money can be used to buy things, that the U.S. is currently a country, that “man” is the singular form of “men,” and that murder is illegal. If only one person in the world believed these things, they would cease to be true in Consensus Space. So their truth is inextricably linked to some form of consensus across minds.

A claim like “the player moving first in the game of Connect Four has an advantage” is not a claim about Consensus Space.

If someone claims that “some rights exist, but healthcare is not a right,” you could ask a clarifying question regarding whether they are making this claim purely about Consensus Space: “Do you mean that there is no societal consensus that healthcare satisfies the properties of a right, or do you mean that according to a specific theory of morality (Theory Space) healthcare is not included as a right, or maybe you mean that when you reflect on healthcare you don’t get the same feeling (Experience Space) about its universality and importance that you do about other things that you’d say are rights?”

If conscious beings were unable to communicate with each other (that is, there was no language, even in rudimentary form), then Consensus Space would be empty.

(4) Theory space: conclusions that are implied by a set of premises (or modeling assumptions, or rules), such as implications of theories and frameworks.

For instance, it is true (in Theory Space) that in standard economic theory, the price of a good will be exactly the price where the supply and demand curves intersect (even though this is not precisely true of real markets in the physical world). And it is true, according to Newtonian mechanics (i.e., the simplified/approximate theory of physics, but not necessarily precisely true in actual physical reality itself), that if you start exerting a constant force on a stationary billiard ball, it will accelerate with an acceleration inversely proportional to its mass.

A claim like “my social security number is stored in some government database” is not a claim about Theory Space.

If someone makes a claim like “increasing the minimum wage does not increase unemployment,” you might follow with a clarifying question like: “are you saying that standard economic theory (Theory Space) does not imply that increasing minimum wage will increase unemployment, or are you saying that you think that, due to inaccuracies in theory, in the real world (Matter Space), measured unemployment does not rise when the minimum wage is increased?”

Even though human minds can invent and remember theories, Theory Space does not hinge on the existence of human minds. If, for instance, all humans were to die out, but one day an intelligent alien race were to invent a theory mathematically identical to Newtonian mechanics, truths about the consequences of that theory would be identical to truths about the consequences of our version of it (since those truths merely follow from their premises).

(5) Representation space: truths about systems that store or processes information, such as truths about what’s stored in (or available to be experienced in) video games, VR worlds, databases, books or websites.

For instance, it is true (in Representation Space) that in the game Minecraft, there are six kinds of “wood” you can make stuff out of, or that Wikipedia has more than five million articles in English, or that the book Moby Dick contains discussions of whales, or that my computer has files on it.

A claim like “animals have souls so go to heaven when they die” is not a claim about Representation Space.

If someone makes a claim like “it is impossible for software to ever be conscious or feel pain,” you might ask a clarifying question like “do you mean that it is impossible for software to store the same information and do equivalent information processing as a human brain (Representation Space), or do you mean that even if the software were to store the same information and do the same information processing as a human brain, it still wouldn’t be conscious and capable of feeling pain (Experience Space)?”

Representation Space encompasses questions about what information is stored or what ways information is processed, regardless of the storage or processing medium (e.g., software running on silicon, writing on papyrus, or neurons in a rat or human brain).

(6) Morality Space: the Space for moral “facts,” if such facts “exist” or are “true” in any meaningful sense.

For instance, many people think that moral claims like “murder is always wrong” can be objectively true or false, much like it is objectively true or false whether you are reading this right now.

A claim like “the more accurately you measure a particle’s position, the less accurately you know its momentum” is not a claim about Morality Space.

(7) Supernatural Space: where non-physical spiritual and religious entities would exist (not the idea of them, but the entities themselves) if they were real.

For instance, if you believe in God/heaven/hell/ghosts/spirits etc., then you think they exist (in Supernatural Space) unless you think that, say, hell is literally inside the center of the Earth, or, say, heaven is literally on a particular planet. If you are completely non-spiritual and non-religious, then presumably, you’d say that Supernatural Space is empty (i.e., there is nothing in Supernatural Space).

A claim like “it is wrong to lie” is not a claim about Supernatural Space.

If a person were to claim that they believe in souls, you might try to clarify their belief by asking, “by that, do you mean that you think that after we die, there is a place we continue to exist in that is not the material world (Supernatural Space), or that there is a physical part of us that is our soul that is in principle detectable scientifically (Material Space), or something else?”

If we want to say that supernatural entities exist, but they never reside in Supernatural Space, then, by definition, they either (a) don’t exist or (b) are merely physical entities (in Matter Space), not actually supernatural ones. A “spirit” that was in our world permanently and completely made of atoms (obeying all the known physical laws) would be not so much a “spirit” as an animal or form of human or physical phenomena that scientists just haven’t yet developed an understanding of (just as it once was that we had no scientific understanding of clouds).

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What about beliefs?

You may wonder: where do beliefs fit into these seven spaces? The answer is that they can be perceived in many different ways, depending on which Space’s perspective you are adopting. So the different spaces can provide different perspectives on the same phenomena.

Through the lens of Matter Space, beliefs are patterns of molecules in our brains which, if removed or sufficiently altered, would cause us to no longer have those beliefs. From the perspective of Experience Space, beliefs are those thoughts that come with a feeling of “I believe this” or that produce a memory of our believing them when we access them, or that are immediate and obvious consequences of other things about which we experience the feeling of “I believe.”

Through the lens of Consensus Space, we note that there is a subset of beliefs that can only be true by virtue of them being believed by multiple parties. For instance, some might argue that you cannot “be in a relationship” with someone who doesn’t (on any level) know you are in a relationship with them. If you buy this, then the truth about your belief that you are in a relationship hinges on this belief persisting across multiple minds. Consensus Space is about those beliefs that can only be true if they are shared.

Through the lens of Theory Space, we note that some of our beliefs are merely beliefs about the consequences of sets of premises; for instance, we may believe that given the rules of the game of checkers, if both players play perfectly, it will always produce a tie.

The perspective of Representation Space, I think, tells us most fundamentally what beliefs are: information coded in our brains in a certain way. Much like a database may contain facts, our brains have information stored in them that corresponds to what we believe. We decode this information when we think.

From the view of Morality Space, there is a special class of beliefs that are claims about what is moral. For instance, if you believe that it is morally right to do a particular thing in a particular situation, it may be that you’re expressing beliefs about Morality Space.

Now that you have an understanding of the “7 realms of truth” framework, I can more succinctly describe to you a number of things I believe regarding complex philosophical questions (whether or not you agree with my conclusions).

For instance, here are some of my tentative beliefs about reality.

(1) I do not think that all of these spaces “exist” in the same sense. For instance, I think that Matter Space exists in a very different (and much more “real”) sense than the way in which Theory Space “exists.”

(2) When people take psychedelics leading to experiences that they consider spiritual and profound, I think these experiences can only be helpfully understood as being in Experience Space, not Matter Space or Supernatural Space.

(3) I think morality can be best understood in terms of both Experience Space (an evolved sense we have that is then programmed via culture), Consensus Space (a set of norms adopted in societies), and Representation Space (beliefs encoded in our memories about what we consider good or bad) but I don’t think morality can be made sense of via Matter Space (i.e., I think there is no objective morality in the sense of it being a property of certain configurations of molecules, analogous to the way that particles have mass).

(4) I think that Supernatural Space is empty.

(5) I think that math, like theories of physics (but not physical reality itself), is best placed in Theory Space. By that, I mean that “1+1=2” is true only in the sense that “1+1=2” follows as a consequence from the premises of our mathematics (or as a model of certain aspects of physical reality, like putting one ball in a bag and then another in the same bag). Plenty of philosophers and mathematicians disagree with me on this. There is also, of course, a shared cultural consensus that “1+1=2” (Consensus Space), but what’s interesting and useful about math is usually not the consensus aspect (and highly complex mathematical statements don’t have this consensus property because nobody remembers them).

(6) I think the question “what is beauty” is a lot easier to answer if we ask it about each space one by one. If we consider ONLY Matter Space, beauty can’t be found. In Experience Space, beauty is whatever causes the experience of beauty to conscious beings. In Consensus Space beauty is whatever we agree to apply the word beauty to, as well as whatever properties are required for beauty according to cultural consensus. In Representation Space are our beliefs about what things are beautiful (not because we are experiencing them at that moment, but because somewhere in our brains, the information about what things we believe are beautiful is stored). Beauty, in Theory Space, only exists as the consequence of logical theories about beauty (“something is defined to be beautiful if and only if it has properties X, Y, and Z”). And, some people associate god with fundamental beauty (e.g., “that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple.”), which could place some beauty in Supernatural Space.

So the next time you’re wrestling with a philosophical question about what is true, what exists, or what is real, I suggest you consider the problem from the perspective of the seven realms of truth: Matter Space, Experience Space, Consensus Space, Theory Space, Representation Space, Morality Space, and Supernatural Space. These realms do not necessarily actually “exist,” and if they do “exist,” they may not exist in the same sense as each other. Nor are they necessarily all distinct from each other. What this “space” approach does, though, is it provides a language for thinking about and discussing tricky philosophical topics, to hopefully make it easier for you to figure out what you believe and why.

This essay was first written on March 25, 2019, and was first released on this site on August 29, 2021.