is reality real??? can it be confirmed that things can and do actually materially exist, and that everything isn't just like a giant video game like 'The Sims'? how could we ever tell if something was ever telling us to do something, like in a game??? building on that, could there also be no 'free will' if so?
thats lame... i mean asking everything may sound cool but its not. if you are going to be philosopher or something, then go ahead and dont judge people by some sentences
If you don't like philosophing about some questions, then don't, and don't even comment on such threads. Saying how stupid the question is won't change or advance anything, unless you make a better offer on how the question should be asked.
You never really can know for sure. Don't waste your time trying to figure it out. Cause if what we think we know wasn't really real, What wold you do from that?
wowo, you guys sure do know how to talk about nothing well, and as for me, reality is cheese, thats all i care about, if my cheese is yellowish-orange, and tastes like delicious mild cheddar, and also goes wonderfully in cubes with a big glass of pepsi or mountain dew, then i am not concerned if it is real or not.
So this is a fun topic and there are a lot of aspects to it. I'd like to offer a response that might take us in a different direction, though. So, here's the response:
The term real is merely a contrastive notion.
So, when we talk about things being real, it simply picks out a set of things that actually obtain, in contrast to things that don't. An example might help. Suppose I say of someone that blonde is not their real hair color. I'm not saying that blonde itself isn't real, but merely that the application of the word "blonde" as a predicate of this person is false. Or consider the statement "Santa Claus is not real". This one is a bit different, because I'm saying that in our world there is no object or event that matches up with our description of Santa Claus.
But trying to say whether or not reality is real can't be assessed like this. It has the same format as the questions above, but that's merely an artifact of our language. Being real isn't a predicate, like having a beard and delivering presents to children. So the notion is inapplicable.
I'll leave the rest of the discussion at this, although for those interested, I'm going to explain the logic a bit because these two examples are logically the same, if not intuitively so.
Read only if you're interested in the logic: We have two statements to consider, and to ease the discussion, I'm going to change the first one a bit.
H: Blonde is not Liz's real hair color. S: Santa Claus is not real.
With both H and S, there is an existential quantifier in play that we're concerned with. We can read H as follows: ~(Ex)(Lx & Bx & etc) This says that it is not the case that there exists an x such that x is Liz, x has blonde hair, and blah blah blah... where blah are further descriptors of x (i.e., Liz). Similarly with S: ~(Ex)(Fx & Bx & Px & etc) It is not the case that there exists an x such that x is fat, has a beard, brings presents to children, etc.
So, it is the conjunction of these predicates that we are rejecting. Notice the denial of the existential quantifier is awfully close to what we mean when we say something isn't real. There is no such thing that has all these predicates.
