What is Real?
The serious question regarding what we normally mean by reality
So, what is real? I don’t mean this in a silly or frivolous way, but in a serious and philosophical sense. I’m not asking a rhetorical question with the New Age notion that ‘we all have our own truth’ in mind. I definitely do not believe that. We all have our opinions about reality, but they’re opinions about the same reality. Yet the question is a valid one. What exactly do we mean when we say the objects around us that we perceive are real?
No professional physicist would claim that the atoms and laws that supervene to produce the objects we experience, such as tables and chairs, behave like those objects. They are different. One set of qualities are sensible, the other quantifiable at best, and behave strangely.
The philosopher George Berkeley, who believed matter was a myth, still insisted that the objects we perceive, which he called ‘ideas,’ were real. What did he mean by that? He said they were real because they were solid, obeyed the laws of physics, were permanent, were experienced communally, and were made by God. What else do we mean by real?
Immanuel Kant believed space and time were not real, but merely intuitive constructs we use to organize sense data in an intelligible way. Yet from a sensible perspective, we meet with these objects as if they were in space and time. And he believed emphatically that they are real. Only that in themselves they are not actually as we perceive them.
The idea that the world is, at its core, exactly as it appears on its surface, is called naive realism.
If ten people enter a room and perceive the same furniture, feel it, touch it, and report all the same qualities — what would be missing that one could insist on to classify it as ‘real.’
In The Matrix, Cyber betrays his companions and sells out in exchange for being rich. In the scene where he negotiates his compensation he tastes a morsel of steak, satisfied with the taste.
Is there something that Cyber is missing that we in ‘reality’ enjoy? If you think there is, meditate on what that is. And tell me in the comments.
This idea has been discussed over drinks and dinners by intelligent people for hundreds of years. Though, when a person hears it for the first time they are often left amazed.