“Real” is whatever actually exists, and we experience this as it relates to us, which is also real, since we’re real.
People seem to assume that something is “false” if it’s not unique. But the principle of relativity applies to truth.
All thoughts, ideas, and things like logic don’t actually exist physically, all they are is self-consistent formal systems. They’re real, they’re just not universal or fundemental. They’re arbitrary creations.
I don’t think anything universal can exist, as everything which exists is specific, and the more general you get, the less specific you will be. I also don’t think anything exists “in itself”, since boundaries seem to be our scope of abstraction rather than something fundamental.
But this doesn’t matter beyond our need to believe in things as real (for the sake of mental well-being), and of course scientific research, where mathematics and experimentation seems to work out, regardless of how correct our explanations are.
Right now I’m communicating using language, which is just a self-consistent formal system. This system can only speak and reason about itself, anything outside of the formal system is out of reach. When we speak of things, we attempt to re-create them within another system (like language or math) as we think they are, and then draw various conclusions, and hope that these map back to reality. We’re approximating a blackbox through trial and error, and all we can verify is that the two seem similar.
Our desire to explain this question doesn’t make it valuable or important, it just reveals the human tendency to make sense of things and model them, and for the same reasons I expect this comment of mine to be an uncomfortable read. And you can probably argue for why I’m wrong, simply by choosing a self-consistent system which conflicts with what I’ve written.
An infinite amount of different self-consistent systems can exist, and they’re all seem real and correct from the inside, and they all look like various degrees of nonsense from the outside.
I think we overcomplicate things.
“Real” is whatever actually exists, and we experience this as it relates to us, which is also real, since we’re real.
People seem to assume that something is “false” if it’s not unique. But the principle of relativity applies to truth.
All thoughts, ideas, and things like logic don’t actually exist physically, all they are is self-consistent formal systems. They’re real, they’re just not universal or fundemental. They’re arbitrary creations.
I don’t think anything universal can exist, as everything which exists is specific, and the more general you get, the less specific you will be. I also don’t think anything exists “in itself”, since boundaries seem to be our scope of abstraction rather than something fundamental.
But this doesn’t matter beyond our need to believe in things as real (for the sake of mental well-being), and of course scientific research, where mathematics and experimentation seems to work out, regardless of how correct our explanations are.
Right now I’m communicating using language, which is just a self-consistent formal system. This system can only speak and reason about itself, anything outside of the formal system is out of reach. When we speak of things, we attempt to re-create them within another system (like language or math) as we think they are, and then draw various conclusions, and hope that these map back to reality. We’re approximating a blackbox through trial and error, and all we can verify is that the two seem similar.
Our desire to explain this question doesn’t make it valuable or important, it just reveals the human tendency to make sense of things and model them, and for the same reasons I expect this comment of mine to be an uncomfortable read. And you can probably argue for why I’m wrong, simply by choosing a self-consistent system which conflicts with what I’ve written.
An infinite amount of different self-consistent systems can exist, and they’re all seem real and correct from the inside, and they all look like various degrees of nonsense from the outside.