As I sit here writing this, in the living room of my 13th-floor apartment, I wish I could share with you the absolute splendor of the view from the big windowpane on the opposite side of the room. The greens of the forest foliage stretch out before me until they reach the horizon, where they hand off their duties to the soft shades of blue and white of the sky and its clouds.

At this time of year, the sun makes the colors so vibrant that the whole scene feels almost alive. There’s a palpable suggestion in the experience—a quiet force that draws me in, ever deeper, until I become convinced that what I’m seeing is the real world. After all, I’m seeing it, so it has to be real, no?

But what if what I am seeing is not what is really there, but merely a representation, just like a portrait does not contain the real person? What if seeing is not believing—but merely interpreting?

The real question is: how serious am I willing to be in answering that? Because the answers might shatter everything I believe to be true. Every conviction I hold might be up for some serious maintenance.

It doesn’t take deep insight—that would exclude me as it is reserved only for the best of thinkers—to realize that this impression of reality, this unspoken suggestion that the scene is truly “out there,” doesn’t actually travel from the outside to the inside. There’s no one out there suggesting anything to me. The suggestion arises from within. It’s the ever-present inner voice—the elusive man within the man—that delivers the suggestion. It’s a confabulated agency emerging from the workings of my brain, trying to convince me that what I experience is truly what is “out there.”

At this point, I have to resist the urge to chase that inner guy who just appeared on the scene. Who is he, and how does he fit into the puzzle? However interesting that question is, it’ll have to wait—we can’t lose sight of our endeavor.

If the suggestion is entirely an internal process, then we’re left with a harder question: what sparked it? Something must have triggered the process—some form of input. So what, then, is out there? Perhaps it’s better to speak of a message being received. But who or what is the sender?

I see green foliage and a blue sky. But does it make any sense to say there was ever a message sent by "foliage", or by "blue"? No, it doesn’t. These concepts only exist internally—and only after the message has been received.

And so, since any concept or idea of the external can only manifest after reception, there can never be direct contact between the internal me and the external sender. My understanding of the external is thus not reality itself, but an abstraction—an idea constrained by the nature of the message. I can never know who or what the sender truly is.

However, reality includes a piece of the puzzle that works in our favor: order. It turns out that reality is ordered. There are patterns and consistencies—recurrences that make perception and interpretation possible in the first place.

Without order and repetition, there can be no message, no coherence, no experience to make sense of. And so, if something does appear meaningful to us—if we feel as though something is being suggested—it’s only because there is enough order in the world to allow that suggestion to take shape. Patterns and repetitions are nothing more than expressions of rules—laws of nature unfolding over time. In essence, we could say the sender is not a conscious agent, but rather a representation of “the rules”—the underlying structure that makes the message possible at all.

In a way, we are not receivers of reality, but interpreters of regularity—forever decoding the grammar of the world without ever seeing the author. In that light, reality speaks not with intention, but with structure—and we, the interpreters, mistake the syntax for a voice.

So when I talk to you about what is out there, I know that you’ll interpret what I mean at some point to be matter, and at another point maybe you’ll understand it to be rules, depending on the level of abstraction required—by my explanation, and by your level of understanding or interpretation. There doesn’t seem to be a distinct boundary between the two. The fact is that when we talk about this, there’s always a certain level of abstraction involved by necessity, because there is no direct contact with the external.

And when I talk to you about matter, I don’t feel the need to explain what I mean. The word feels obvious. You know what matter is. You learned it in school. You’re made of it. You don’t need to look it up. You’ve seen pictures in science books, maybe even watched documentaries about how it's all just atoms and fields and particles buzzing about with some weird “emptiness” in between. Most of us, even those with only a vague interest in science, have picked up a mental image of matter—and this image feels good enough.

But as soon as you try to define it, that confidence begins to slip.

I presume the meaning of matter is so culturally embedded and habituated that it feels obvious—an amorphous, self-evident concept directly loaded with meaning, without the scaffolding of definition. That presumption is convenient. Because if you asked me to explain matter, I’m almost certain I’d produce a mess of circular definitions and vague metaphors. A word salad. Or, to borrow a line from former U.S. President Joe Biden: “You know… the thing!”

Is it atoms? Well, yes. But those are made of smaller particles—protons, neutrons, and electrons. Are those the matter, then? Maybe. But then what about quarks and gluons and the fields that make up those particles? What about energy? What about the Higgs field? What about quantum states, or wavefunctions? Does matter collapse into some mysterious math soup when you zoom in far enough?

Or worse, does it disappear entirely?

Because if it does, then what’s left of the thing you were so sure was real? You can say the word “matter,” but what are you pointing to, exactly?

And now we’ve stumbled upon one of the central confusions of communication: we use words like “real,” “physical,” and “objective,” without having any rock-solid idea what they refer to. They work well enough for practical purposes—don’t touch the stove, it’s matter and it’s hot. But when we slow things down and look closely, the bedrock starts to look like smoke. There is no stable ground to land on. The closer we try to get to the thing itself, the more it unravels into interpretation, probability, model, rule.

Still, the reason we get away with this vagueness is that matter is treated as a kind of baseline—an unquestioned reference point for what is real. When we say something exists, we usually mean it exists materially. Matter is what things are made of; it is the assumed substance of reality itself. So in everyday use, to speak of matter is to speak—implicitly—of what is.
Despite all this vagueness, we keep using the word. Matter. With conviction.


This chapter is about that strange conviction. Not to dissolve it, but to understand what holds it together.


The Circular Mirror

But if we ever want to gain any deeper insight into what is real, we will inevitably have to examine what this “real” is supposedly made of. And this is where the simple confidence behind words like matter begins to break down. Because in treating matter as the substance of reality, and in turn defining reality by its materiality, we complete a neat but circular loop:

Matter is what is real; real is what is made of matter.

The two ideas prop each other up like mirrors facing one another—offering the illusion of solidity while anchored only in the assumption of each other.

The Illusion of Shared Meaning

Language is our primary tool for sharing thoughts. We speak, write, gesture, trusting that our words will carry meaning from one mind to another. Often, this works well enough.

You say tree, and I imagine something tall, rooted, with leaves. You say anger, and I recall a set of feelings and expressions. We appear to be aligned.

But this apparent alignment rests on a fragile, often invisible, presumption: that we are all referring to the same thing when we use the same word.

This is the illusion of shared meaning.

The fragility of this illusion becomes clear the moment ambiguity creeps in. One person’s tree may be a birch, another’s a tropical palm. One person’s anger may involve shouting, another’s silent withdrawal. When the stakes of interpretation rise, we find ourselves needing to clarify, define, refine. We offer examples, analogies, exclusions. Each clarification reveals more cracks—more ways the original word could be taken, more meanings nested inside meanings.

What was once a single shared word becomes a conversation about the word itself. Communication shifts from expressing a thought to negotiating the boundaries of what the thought could mean. We add layers of specification, but no matter how much detail we append, there is never a guarantee that we have landed on a truly shared concept—only a version that seems pragmatically sufficient.

And even that is an assumption.

The very fact that we so often need to clarify, redefine, and restate is evidence that language is not a mirror of thought but a rough sketch—like a blueprint hand-drawn from memory, not a photograph. Each mind fills in the gaps differently.

When we say matter, or time, or justice, we’re not transferring some universal essence. We’re offering a token of meaning based on personal history, cultural influence, and pragmatic use. The other person accepts that token and matches it to their own internal landscape. Meaning, then, is less a shared structure and more a tolerated overlap—a fuzzy intersection we agree not to examine too closely. Communication proceeds only because we agree to treat that overlap as sufficient—even though we have no way of verifying how aligned our meanings actually are.

The Pragmatic Fantasy

This fragile, approximate nature of language shapes the way we build our understanding of reality. Our use of language enables us to construct what might be called a pragmatic fantasy—a model of reality that works well enough to build societies, conduct science, and write books like this one.

But it’s important to understand that this fantasy is not reality itself. It’s a simulation. A collaborative approximation.
We don’t know that the concept of matter maps onto anything ultimate or fundamental. What we know is that using this concept leads to working bridges, functioning smartphones, and testable predictions. And so we treat the word matter as if it refers to a solid, unquestionable entity. We build physics on it. We base metaphysics on it.

But in truth, what we’re working with is a tool, not a revelation.

This leads to a subtle but critical insight:

Agreement is not the same as understanding.

What we often take as mutual comprehension is sometimes just mutual convenience—a shared nod that bypasses the deeper question of whether our internal meanings truly align. Two people can use the same word, nod in shared confidence, and walk away believing they mean the same thing—when in fact they don’t. They’ve simply agreed to suspend the question of meaning long enough to get on with the task at hand.

This works. It keeps things moving. But it also means that pragmatism can operate even when the ground beneath it is fractured.

The illusion of shared understanding is often good enough to build on, but it’s still an illusion.

The Limits of Physics and Language

And yet, despite this semantic instability, we don’t live in a fog. Our models work. Language—imperfect as it is—lets us probe deep into nature, build predictive systems, and construct formal descriptions of the world.

Nowhere is this more evident than in physics, where centuries of conceptual scaffolding have culminated in definitions that seem to reach beyond metaphor, into the structure of reality itself. To be fair, we can offer definitions. Physics today might tell us that matter is energy localized in excitations of fields, or that it is a particular configuration of mass-energy interacting through fundamental forces.

These definitions are not meaningless—they work. They let us build machines, predict behavior, send rockets to Mars. But this is precisely the point: these are not descriptions of 'what is', but functional stories that work well enough for now. They belong not to the world-as-it-is, but to the ongoing human project of taming what we can never fully grasp.

This is how human cooperation thrives. By minimizing semantic friction, we get things done. But at the cost of depth. When we take agreement for granted, we lose sight of the cracks beneath our shared reality.

And when we finally stop to ask, What do we actually mean by this word?, the answers scatter.

Most of our most fundamental words—being, thing, real, true, self, world—are never defined in everyday life. We inherit them. We intuit their use. We improvise meaning through context and feedback.

But rarely do we ask:

What does this word actually refer to beneath the hood of language?

This is not merely a convenient philosophical stance—it’s a structural inevitability. The very notion of something being external implies its separation from the internal field of perception and cognition. If what we perceive were identical to what exists “out there,” the distinction would collapse, making the terms meaningless. So we are left with projections—interpretive shadows, like those cast on the wall in Plato’s cave. Whatever the world may be in itself, our only access to it is through its filtered and restructured reflection in consciousness. This is not a flaw in our thinking—it’s the condition that makes thinking possible.

This is precisely when the instability we prefer not to face begins to show. We find that real is not a thing, but a consensus. That matter is not substance, but a conceptual placeholder. That shared understanding is often just synchronized guessing.

But we continue nonetheless. Because the illusion, somehow, delivers.

And maybe that’s the most fascinating part: that something so abstract and uncertain can still be powerful enough to build rockets, define identities, and wage wars.

The Revolving Door of Thing and Meaning

Try to pin down what matter is, and you quickly find yourself caught in a loop. You say: Matter is the stuff things are made of. Okay, but what is stuff? What are things? These words refer to other words, other assumptions, never quite delivering on the promise of a stable concept. It’s a linguistic Möbius strip—twisting back onto itself with no clear inside or outside, no solid grounding.

We enter what I’ll call the revolving door between things and meanings. When we try to grasp the realness of something, we look for its ingredients, its substrate—we want to know what it’s made of. But before we can ask what something is made of, we need to know what the something even is. We need a concept for the thing, a mental boundary that gives it identity. Without that, the question dissolves into vagueness.

And to form that concept, we rely on an idea of what it means to be real. So we ask what makes a thing real—only to find that our answers once again lean on the idea of matter. And there it is: the circle closes. Matter is what’s real, and real is what’s made of matter.

Round and round.

We’re not grappling with reality directly—we’re orbiting it, using concepts that point to other concepts, hoping they’ll eventually land on something solid. But concepts aren’t reality. They’re mental scaffolding: useful, provisional, and ultimately self-referential. No matter how precisely we define or refine them, they remain abstractions—maps drawn in our heads, not the terrain itself.

And so the more rigorously we chase the essence of matter, the more we expose the emptiness of the chase. What we find isn’t substance. It’s structure. An agreement. A pattern of usage mistaken for contact with the real.

Nowhere is this more evident than in physics—the most celebrated attempt to describe reality in precise terms. Physics has tried to define matter through models: particles, fields, waves, strings. But these are ultimately constructs.

No scientist has seen a quark. No one has touched an electromagnetic field. These concepts are inferred, modeled, and statistically validated. They work. They predict. But are they real?

What we call matter may simply be the name we give to the observed consistency in patterns that behave in certain ways. And that behavior is always interpreted—through our senses, our instruments, our frameworks. All of which are shaped by perception and cognition.
In that light, perhaps matter isn’t a thing in itself, but a kind of placeholder—a token of successful compression. A conceptual interface. Much like icons on a desktop don’t reveal the actual structure of computer files but instead offer useful metaphors for interacting with them, our idea of matter might function as a perceptual shorthand for navigating a deeper, unknowable substrate.

In that sense, matter is not what reality is made of. It’s what our internal models say reality is made of. There is no ultimate thing behind the word matter, the idea of matter is an abstraction built atop abstractions. If we dig all the way down in search of something unambiguous, we may find only shifting probabilities, patterns of interaction, or even just equations.

What, then, does it mean for something to be real? Is the test of reality its perceptibility? Its consistency? Its usefulness in predictions?

Or are we simply projecting “realness” onto patterns we recognize—constructing the world as a narrative that feels solid enough to walk around in?

You Know… the Thing

So we return to Biden’s mumble: “You know… the thing!” It's funny because it’s vague. But it’s also profoundly honest.

Much of our language about reality is a performance of understanding. We gesture at “the thing” with confident words like matter, energy, substance. But when pressed to explain, we hesitate, defer, or spiral into jargon. We rely on shared illusion—on the assumption that others know what we mean, and that we know what they mean.

But if we’re serious about understanding what’s real, we’ll have to drop the performance. We’ll have to admit we’re standing on metaphor, not bedrock.

And that might be the first real thing we’ve said.