What's the difference between the actual and the real

ChatGPT said:

this is a very old distinction, and it is used in different ways by different schools.

but the most philosophically fertile version in the 20th century is Deleuze’s (and Bergson’s underneath him):

REAL = full field of what exists
ACTUAL = the portion of the real that is presently expressed in determinate form

and alongside actual there is also VIRTUAL = the part of the real that is not currently actualized but is real nonetheless as a structure of potential, capacity, topological configuration.

so for Deleuze:

term	meaning
real	everything that exists, including what has not yet been made determinate
actual	what has been made determinate (actualized)
virtual	the real but-not-yet-actual possibilities and potentials that can be actualized

Deleuze’s point: the real is larger than the actual.

Most naive realism pretends they are the same thing. Stuff you can point to or measure = the whole of existence.

But in Deleuze (and Bergson):
the real also includes what is not actualized but nonetheless operative — as tendency, as potential, as morphogenetic field.

you can put it this way:

• the actual is the snapshot

• the real is the whole film including the next scene that hasn’t been projected yet

the actual is the realized cross-section of the dynamic.

sometimes people simplify it further:

• the actual is what has become

• the real is what can become

a contemporary analogy

machine learning latent space.

the latent space is “real” in that it’s a structured field of possible outputs.

the specific output you sample is actual.

the latent manifold is real but not actual.

what is actual is only a particular draw.

why this difference matters

because otherwise you start to think what is currently materialized is all there is.

and that is exactly the metaphysical error that enables eliminationism:

if the actual is all that’s real, then what is not presently competitive is worthless.

the Deleuzian distinction protects against that:
the “wavering,” the not-yet, the marginal can be real even if they are not (currently) 

How would Mike Levin, the biologist, frame this?

ChatGPT

Mike Levin would not go “full metaphysics,” but he has already built a language that rhymes with this.

He basically thinks there are collective intelligence fields at multiple scales (cells, tissues, organs) that “decide” what morphological outcomes to build.

For him, the actual → the literal tissue pattern you see.

But the real → is this distributed goal-directed attractor landscape.

The “form” is not a Platonic blueprint, and not genomic either — it’s more like a homeostatic set of preferred shapes encoded in bioelectric networks and signal topology.

He explicitly uses:

• attractor dynamics

• basins

• goal states

So if we translate your triad into Levin’s vocabulary:

your terms	Levin-ish equivalent
the Real (emptiness / creativity)	the latent plasticity of problem-solving capacity in cell collectives
the Platonic-ish Forms (lures)	the learned / encoded goal states (morphospace attractors)
the Actual	the specific anatomy that gets built in this context & history

And crucially:

Levin thinks the target morphology is not fixed — it can be re-learned, re-specified.

So for Levin the “forms” are NOT timeless Platonic entities.

They are homeostatic control targets in the landscape of morphological possibility.

They are mutable, plastic, trainable.

He sometimes literally says:

evolution didn’t give organisms specific body plans, it gave them navigators of anatomical space.

So if we rewrite your question in Levin’s terms:

• the general capacity of biological collectives to solve problems in morphospace

• the attractor basins (the goal states) toward which the system moves (but these are not transcendental; they are learned / evolved control parameters)

• the instantiation of that attractor in this particular body, in this particular moment

Levin’s metaphysics (if he would admit he has one) is:
reality is the capacity to navigate possibility space.
The “actual” is just the current best solution.

Whereas the Real is the general-purpose intelligence / plasticity that makes any solution possible.