What Is 'Real?'

[mikkel_the_dane]

Do you ever use the word real?

Yes, in its doxa meaning depending on context and sometimes as here episteme. Notice doxa has 2 meanings and only one of them connects to episteme. And no, not doxa as watches and what not.

 

[night912]

We can't check metaphysics. What reality really is, is a matter of faith, if you believe in some version of what reality really is. And that has nothing to do with religion or not. That is so for all humans including the non-religious ones.

Define "faith"

 

[wandering peacefully]

In another (non-debate) thread, it was asked what 'real' is. A response to that question was the Google dictionary definition, "actually existing as a thing or occurring in fact; not imagined or supposed."

How can one be certain something is real given that definition? I'm fairly certain nearly everyone has had dreams that, while dreaming, they thought were real until they awoke.

What one perceives is merely a model resulting from sense organs that create electrical signals as interpreted by the brain. How can one trust that these are, indeed, real? How do you know you won't wake up from this reality into a 'real' one?

Because, if you are dreaming no one else knows what you are dreaming. If you ask them if they saw what you saw or experienced what you experienced in your dream, they will say no.

If both you and your friend sit on a dock by a lake a night, and watch and touch the spider traversing it's web, and gently touch the spiders leg and witness it together, you both know it is real. Nature is real. Nature as witnessed by two people or more, is the only thing for certain, which is real.

The rest is just dreams awake and asleep we create as humans to attempt to make sense of, live as the part of, control or destroy.