The reality bar

Dec 2025

Alessandro Marcomini

I made it.

It took me four years. Crossing endlessly wide countries, fighting the breathtaking cold of the poles and the drying heat of the deserts, getting so close to desperation to forget even my own name, but not my mission. And, finally, I made it.

A shiver goes through my spine as I try to look through the blinding light in front of me. At the top of the secret mountain, in the middle of a perfectly heptagonal lake surrounded by seven waterfalls, as it was described in the ancient writings. Kept alive from the Truth and resonating of its own essence. Older than the history of time itself. There it is. My last hope. The Oracle-That-Knows-Everything.

I feel my legs trembling as I approach the source of that intense radiation. The mixture of emotions running through me is suffocating every effort of saying a word. I find myself contemplating, for a moment that feels longer than my whole journey, given how still everything seems to be around me. When I come back to my senses, I eventually remember why I endured every challenge that life threw at me so far. And before I can realise, I find myself finally speaking.

“What is reality?”

The silence that follows is so loud I can distinctly hear my heartbeat accelerating. Can it be the wrong place? No, there is no chance… It must be… Maybe I was not loud enough? Maybe there is a formula, a ritual I must oblige to?

As ecstasy and disbelief are clashing in my mind and I am at a loss of ideas, figuring out what could have gone wrong, I hear the Oracle’s answer. I was ready for any incredible revelation, any unbelievable truth, even the most impossible of verdicts. Yet… what I am hearing still defeats any logic, any rule, any imagination.

The Oracle is bursting in a laugh. A loud, spontaneous and exaggerated laugh. Something I have not heard since that time I asked my father how old was I when I was three years old.

“What is reality?”

Now, I certainly respect Oracles as very venerable and knowledgeable entities, but having one answering my question with a mocking laugh and the exact same words I spoke seems a bit off… Still, I did not survive lion fights in the jungle and parties in Ibiza to arrive here and leave empty handed. I need my answers. I need that one answer.

“What is reality, really?”

My voice is more resolved this time, as I ask once again the question I have spent my whole life trying to answer. Maybe it is my tone, or my begging aura, yet, this time the Oracle finally replies in its own words:

“I possess knowledge of every answer and every truth, but no truth exists upon your question, as reality is really nothing but the daughter of time”

It could be because of jet-lag or maybe because of my lower-than-average reasoning skills, but I begin to question myself and my quest once again, after hearing a such poetic and deceptive answer. As the latter is still something I am not satisfied with, I must insist with my interrogation.

“And what is this reality that I live in, the daughter of this epoch?”

The Oracle replies immediately:

“Reality is everything, and everything is real for you, today. Reality is the world, the nature, the way you experience and sense it. Many wise people have spent their whole lives haunting the essence of reality. They are known as the Lovers of Knowledge. Together with them, the People of Science fight every day to unravel reality by exposing the laws according to which it manifests. And in this millennial history, every new law changes the perception that humans have of reality, and consequently reality itself.”

And it continues:

“The very last of these revolutions occurred when the People of Science discovered that the laws of the Very Big and the laws of the Very Small are completely different, suggesting the fact that reality itself can be different at different scales. Inhabitants of the Cosmic Worlds, in the Very Big, do not care about the laws of Quantum, the Very Small. Similarly, in the Very Small, citizens have their own struggle in deciding whether to materialise as particles or waves, unbothered by most of the Relative rules of the Very Big. And for your people, the people of the Very Average, reality has always consisted of whatever you can know. Humans are too scared to acknowledge as real things they cannot predict, control, or define. That is why they would not consider a mirage or a dream as real. Similarly, they question the reality of things they have limited accessibility to, such as whether the moon is a space ball or a projected image, or whether Australia exists.”

To which I reply:

“You say real things are those we can predict, control or define… this resonates with my everyday experience. But why do you say this is only the reality of humans? I cannot conceive any other reality definition that would make sense.”

And the Oracle says:

“It is all about the reality bar. Unconsciously, you are putting a threshold on the amount of certainty required by something to feel real to you. Suppose the following: you see a bear in the woods. You hear its grunts, wooden sticks cracking under its paws. Its image matches the one you saw in documentaries and that you studied in school. As you trust your mind, your eyes and ears, you are now quite convinced that there is a bear in front of you. Maybe you can only be 99.99% sure, as you did not touch it, or you have not been eaten by it, but that high level of confidence is enough for you to state « I met a real bear ». Similarly, if you hear some news on TV, or a close person tells you something happened, the reality of the scenario is directly proportional to the trust level you have towards the source. You would be convinced of the reality of a story only if it is credible enough. You set the reality bar very high.

When it comes, for example, to the world of the Very Small, things change radically. The Mechanics of Quanta teaches that everything that is possible is indeed real. No matter how credible or incredible. If there is even the slightest possibility of something occurring, it must be seen as part of reality. People of Science see this as complex equations with infinite solutions, other humans tend to look at it by imagining infinitely many parallel universes. In the end, reality in the world of Quantum is simply much larger than that of humans because the reality bar is lowered to any event whose probability is even a tiny bit above zero. And, crucially, this allows the Mechanics of Quanta to be the most accurate theory of your time.”

I am impressed by this revelation. Indeed, there is no specific reason for me to find “real” something I find 80% credible, but not real something which is only realistic at 75%. At this point, I guess I can only find real things I am 100% convinced of (but then probably nothing would be real to me), or things that are at least 1% plausible. And in the latter case, I have the impression that the whole universe would be reality to me. But if this is what dictates the Mechanics of Quanta, whose predictions are unbelievably good, I guess that would be the answer… we live in a world of possibilities, and every one of them is crafting new branches of a big Reality.

My head is spinning. Maybe it is due to the high altitude, or the exhausting journey, or the divine revelations which are crammed in my brain. I start questioning my whole experience, whether this is just a dream or I am indeed facing the biggest of truths. In this state, I cannot help but ask the Oracle a final question.

“Oh Oracle, but then, is all this real, or is it just a dream?”

“I do not know, you tell me. Where does your reality bar stand?”