Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality):
"Reality is the conjectured state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they may appear or might be imagined."
I believe philosophy should be goal-oriented. Just as language. The goal of reality would be to create a concept of perceptions that can be shared and accepted among a group of people. If everyone gets caught up in their subjective perceptions (think phenomenology), that has it's merits, but reality only becomes relevant when asking whether another person shares your perceptions.
Thus reality could be defined as positive feedback of your perceptions provided by other people. If they share a perception, something becomes real. If they don't, it's unreal. That doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't exist or is meaningless, but reality gives one an anchor in society and a perspective. For that reason, it's so easy to destroy one's sense of reality through gas-lighting.
E.g. if everybody around you told you they feel the love you do, you would be led to assume that love is some kind of force that travels independent of you. You could call that thing God. Isn't it plausible to assume that this mistake is very prone to happen in a little community or indigenous tribe where people synchronize their emotions?
That's your weak point. If you don't define what it means, it can mean anything and thus you can basically make connections from anything to anything, which appears fascinating.
Imagine I asserted that apples are "guddly". Then I would assert that thoughts are guddly, too. That would, obviously, make for quite a lot of confusion. What exact similarity is there between thoughts and apples. How fascinating. It would be a great argument for the relativity of everything. But in the end, it's a constructed mind game that means nothing.
A friend of mine once asserted that life is cell division and multiplication at the same time. That a man and a woman can create a child, thus 1+1=3. Yeah, that's kind of witty, but what's the point?
Are we discussing a specific property of thoughts or are we trying to find a plausible use for the word "real"?
For me, one of the big challenges of being rational is to be as rigorous as possible in asking goal-oriented questions. What are you really asking and where do you expect the answer to lead you? If nowhere, why bother asking? Is your goal possibly to have some sort of realization and experience a state of euphoria due to feeling intelligent? Or is your goal to take away the meaning of a word to distance yourself from the feeling you associate with it? (typical for relativism)
"Reality is the conjectured state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they may appear or might be imagined."
I believe philosophy should be goal-oriented. Just as language. The goal of reality would be to create a concept of perceptions that can be shared and accepted among a group of people. If everyone gets caught up in their subjective perceptions (think phenomenology), that has it's merits, but reality only becomes relevant when asking whether another person shares your perceptions.
Thus reality could be defined as positive feedback of your perceptions provided by other people. If they share a perception, something becomes real. If they don't, it's unreal. That doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't exist or is meaningless, but reality gives one an anchor in society and a perspective. For that reason, it's so easy to destroy one's sense of reality through gas-lighting.
E.g. if everybody around you told you they feel the love you do, you would be led to assume that love is some kind of force that travels independent of you. You could call that thing God. Isn't it plausible to assume that this mistake is very prone to happen in a little community or indigenous tribe where people synchronize their emotions?
Quote: (04-03-2015 03:18 PM)RexImperator Wrote:
I'm not being terribly rigorous here
That's your weak point. If you don't define what it means, it can mean anything and thus you can basically make connections from anything to anything, which appears fascinating.
Imagine I asserted that apples are "guddly". Then I would assert that thoughts are guddly, too. That would, obviously, make for quite a lot of confusion. What exact similarity is there between thoughts and apples. How fascinating. It would be a great argument for the relativity of everything. But in the end, it's a constructed mind game that means nothing.
A friend of mine once asserted that life is cell division and multiplication at the same time. That a man and a woman can create a child, thus 1+1=3. Yeah, that's kind of witty, but what's the point?
Are we discussing a specific property of thoughts or are we trying to find a plausible use for the word "real"?
For me, one of the big challenges of being rational is to be as rigorous as possible in asking goal-oriented questions. What are you really asking and where do you expect the answer to lead you? If nowhere, why bother asking? Is your goal possibly to have some sort of realization and experience a state of euphoria due to feeling intelligent? Or is your goal to take away the meaning of a word to distance yourself from the feeling you associate with it? (typical for relativism)