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What is "real?"

Eveleivibe

Eveleivibe

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These questions are taken from the film, The Matrix. But I'm interested in your answers.

"What is real" "How do you define real?"

Before you give an answer think about how you are interpreting / perceiving the question and in what context would you like to answer it! For instance you could discuss "reality" in terms of our everyday living; existing, use of the senses, space between objects including living objects (eg human beings and / other animals), while another person could think of / argue about "reality" in terms of things we cannot explain not being "real" because one cannot "sense" them or because one cannot find evidence to explain away their senses.

OK, let's see what this brings.

Evey xxxx
 
What is real to me:

I am typing on this phone (seemingly at least) and for each letter, if it works right, I tap I get a sensation- feedback letting me know it registered. The screen on the phone is lit up, and the frame and body of the phone is not.

I can feel its weight in my hands.

I feel discomfort in my throat.

I seem to be respiring. I seem to experience, and process. I do.

I have this hair on my face that I must shave every week at least or it gets to the point where it itches.

Its real that I want to have sex.

Its seems real to me that there is more than I can immediately sense, going on.

And many more things.

Its also real to me that often the thought of nothing, in absense of everything, brings me certain comfort that I don't find many other places. And although I am not religious and my mind isn't made up, I have had times where I felt I was supposed to give it all to Jesus- it felt right, and I felt good. Maybe letting go.
 
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alasdairm- yes. I question every day that (or something like). I just didnt want to write "seem/seems like" or "appears to be", every time. My experiencing is real, to me. At some point for transmission purposes I just avoid somewhat unanswerable questions like that, hence my focus on feelings, like pain, annoyance, wanting to have sex, comfort.

I tend to have sometimes an idea of being some kind of computer, processor, or some engine or power generator. That what I'm experiencing is rather unimportant really... but it might serve the function of something else. Like nothing means what I think it does, even if it does. Something about the "The Matrix" that resonates is how humans are batteries. That I am being used. My emotions coaxed. I am fucked with. I'm limited. My emotions might produce something of value. The flux. The experience. Love. Pain.

I've also thought of myself as like a silkworm.
 
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What 23 said:
What is real to me:

I am typing on this phone (seemingly at least) and for each letter, if it works right, I tap I get a sensation- feedback letting me know it registered. The screen on the phone is lit up, and the frame and body of the phone is not.

I can feel its weight in my hands.

I feel discomfort in my throat.

I seem to be respiring. I seem to experience, and process. I do.

I have this hair on my face that I must shave every week at least or it gets to the point where it itches.

Its real that I want to have sex.

Its seems real to me that there is more than I can immediately sense, going on.

And many more things.

Its also real to me that often the thought of nothing, in absense of everything, brings me certain comfort that I don't find many other places. And although I am not religious and my mind isn't made up, I have had times where I felt I was supposed to give it all to Jesus- it felt right, and I felt good. Maybe letting go.
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Fair points. However, how do you know that all those above points signify "real," that we are not somehow being deceived? No one knows where we are / what we feel / sense before and after "life" as we know it. So the "real" to us, as we know it - could be an illusion, could be wrong.

Right now I "exist," I feel that I exist, think that I exist, because I am living with the whole world in my eye, a complete autobiographical timeline. Everything that happens, I'm there, I hear my thoughts, I think my thoughts, I know they are my thoughts, I own them, I possess them. I am existing as a character in an autobiography. To me this is "real" and I suppose in the materialistic sense a lot will be similar but a lot will also differ. We both sense and feel yet we both live different lives. I assume you to be a male and I am a female. But I can only feel my existence, my autobiography so I don't know if for sure it is "real" or even what "real" actually is.

When a person has a strange experience such as "near death experience" where they experience they're seeing all this stuff, feeling all these feelings and what-not, who is to see that, not is not "real" and that what we are living is simply an illusion?

Why are people so closed off from things such as this? Automatically disbelieving? "Where is the evidence?" a lot ask or remarks will be throws out such as "You're crazy," "get help, you're imagining it." People will become defensive, will automatically believe that "that is not real." Who is to say it's not real? Or maybe the lived experience and the near death experience are both "real," yet in different ways? If a person claims to "astral project" for instance, where is the evidence to say that this is not as "real" as I am sitting on this chair right now, at this table, near my laptop, thinking, feeling, breathing, feeling my hair against my skin, wet from having not long washed it. When one dreams, who is to say that, that dream was not "real" maybe not the same "real" we know, but the dream was "real" in that it happened. Yet it did not happen in "the person's lived experience, merely as a "movie/slide show" within someone's head during their sleep."

OK... I'm going on, that's enough of that!

Evey
 
I'm wondering if anyone can delineate (preferably operationally) the precise distinction between reality and simulation. Indeed, our everyday engagement with reality involves the construction of a largely symbolic simulation of reality before us, tailor made to facilitate navigation of this underlying reality in terms of the goals we develop within it. Yet part of what allows this simulation to function is the way in which it imbues us with the belief that this simulation is reality itself. From another angle, imagine that you have a simulation in which there are conscious agents. When they cease to be simulated, the cease to exist all the same. So what makes their reality "just a simulation"? We cannot say that it is just because the percepts of the simulation do not accurately map onto the underlying reality, as this is a key condition of consciousness in our reality as we know it too.

ebola
 
We can't operationally differentiate between reality and simulation because of the fact that we can use our imagination to design potentially possible simulations that are identical to our phenomenological experience of life.

However, if Pope Bob has taught me anything, it's that "real" is first and foremost a word - a concept. So is "simulation." Both of these exist as categorical qualities used to sort our experiences into schemas - patterns of thinking about and dealing with life. The distinctions between them are arbitrary, and different cultures have different semantic definitions of what is real.

In my opinion, real is experiencing. Anything that is experienced is real, and I try not to use "real" as a categorical quality to sort my perceptions or ideas. Although I imagine a lot of this still happens automatically and subconsciously for me.

Everything I can encounter is real, I don't wonder WHETHER things exist, I wonder HOW they exist - are they physical or metaphysical, am I encountering them in my sense perceptions or in my mentality, etc. The answers to those questions don't ever answer whether something has "realness" for me - if it's in my awareness, it's real on some level.
 
^that

i think therefore i am. thats all i know to be real. even if what i am is nothing like how i seem to be. for example a fetus attached to a computer program. i accept the world (that i perceive) as it is for the sake of my own well being.
whether or not this world exists without me to experience it i dont know.

something ive taken to enjoy thinking bout is that we are the candles that light up this world. and experience itself is the only thing thats real.

but when it comes down to it. what is real? i am.
 
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I got it like an hourglass, and what is real depends on the state of the hourglass..

The top half is my mind, my character, my subjective experience
The bottom half is my body, my senses, my objective experience

It twists, turns, get jammed and maybe even the amount of sand changes..

various things or activities may shift the state of it..

i guess when all the sand is at the bottom an hourglass doesn't even need to exist
 
I define 'real' by what I can experience at any given moment. Whether I'm high, low, whatever. That's real. There's no universal 'real'. Whether I'm on LSD, drunk, depressed, sober and content, Laughing, crying. Not sure how I feel. I dunno: bored, curious, sad, spirtual, lost, found, suicidal, balanced. Sometimes I can stare into the wall and watch it shimmer, fall asleep, wake and need water, need food. Drop a big shit in the morning. When I'm sick, puke til my throat and belly ache so hard. It's real. When I dream. Good dreams, nightmares...and everything else. :)
 
I use a definition of reality that is pretty logical, I think. Reality is simply what holds true through consecutive waking days. If you go to sleep with a certain circumstance, and wake up and it is still in effect, then it is real.
 
Experienced reality and consensus reality are two similar but different things. Neither are necessarily the "true picture" of anything, because humans only directly perceive a little fraction of their environments, technically speaking.

Experienced reality is an individual's mental model of the world, how they experience it, blemishes and all. Consensus reality is what is likely to happen as well as what people agree happens - usually the "worldline" that has the most evidence pointing towards its existence, or the average of several ones with minor variations.

A good example of this distinction is the Japanese short story In a Grove. Several varying accounts of a murder are contrasted to question the idea of objective truth.

With modern equipment and deductive skills, we can examine things apart from people's memory, though, and that can give us clues towards interactions with our nvironment. Let's say Jack and Jill go up a hill and Jack does a bunch of ketamine. Jill drags him back down the hill and puts him on his kitchen floor with dirt all over him. Jack remembers none of this. Instead he claims Greys descended on a shaft of light, compressed him into a pixel, and shot him through hyperspace in one of their pixel starships, when he crash landed into his kitchen. He swears it's really what happens, but most rational observers would note the skid mark leading down the hil to the door, the presence of dirt all over Jack, ketamine residue on his nose and in his blood, slurred speech, etc. and decide that "reality" was otherwise.

Is objective truth achievable? Probably not in every circumstance. But with the right evidence, we humans can usually use logic to decide. Application of the scientific method, Occam's razor, and reliance on things other than our fallible senses is definitely required though.
 
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What's "real" is semantic. It's mind. Asking what is real immediately puts you into projection and intellectualization.

All there is, is present awareness. Quiet the mind and you will experience this.
 
I think that it's a lot more viable to rule out descriptions of the world as false than it is to establish them as real. I also think that Godel's first Incompleteness Theorem speaks to the limits of our models of the world. Godel established that for every consistent logical framework powerful enough to allow derivation of arithmetic, there will be true theorems within that system that it cannot prove. Alternately, any system capable of proving all true theorems within it will allows for the establishment of logical contradictions through valid derivations. I think that this presents implications for cognition, in that because we emerge as manifestations of the universe perceiving itself, we cannot generate an adequate, consistent theory of the universe at large, since the universe contains us. However, we may want to discuss this further, as cognition is not an axiomatic system in a strict sense. However, I think that it is fair to say that there is a set of unconscious (or pre-conscious?) conditions structuring the space of possible conscious states.

ebola
 
The big bang could have been a fart. We might just be getting to that stage where everyone's like, "That fucking stinks, I'm getting outta here."
 
sekio said:
Experienced reality and consensus reality are two similar but different things. Neither are necessarily the "true picture" of anything, because humans only directly perceive a little fraction of their environments, technically speaking.

Experienced reality is an individual's mental model of the world, how they experience it, blemishes and all. Consensus reality is what is likely to happen as well as what people agree happens - usually the "worldline" that has the most evidence pointing towards its existence, or the average of several ones with minor variations.

A good example of this distinction is the Japanese short story In a Grove. Several varying accounts of a murder are contrasted to question the idea of objective truth.

With modern equipment and deductive skills, we can examine things apart from people's memory, though, and that can give us clues towards interactions with our nvironment. Let's say Jack and Jill go up a hill and Jack does a bunch of ketamine. Jill drags him back down the hill and puts him on his kitchen floor with dirt all over him. Jack remembers none of this. Instead he claims Greys descended on a shaft of light, compressed him into a pixel, and shot him through hyperspace in one of their pixel starships, when he crash landed into his kitchen. He swears it's really what happens, but most rational observers would note the skid mark leading down the hil to the door, the presence of dirt all over Jack, ketamine residue on his nose and in his blood, slurred speech, etc. and decide that "reality" was otherwise.

Is objective truth achievable? Probably not in every circumstance. But with the right evidence, we humans can usually use logic to decide. Application of the scientific method, Occam's razor, and reliance on things other than our fallible senses is definitely required though.
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This.
 
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