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Feb/Mar 2015
Question of the Month
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The real is the genuine, the reliable, what I can safely lean on. It is akin to
truthful, valuable, even delightful. Its opposite is not illusion, but the fake, the
counterfeit, that which cant be trusted, has no cash value. Theatre, television,
paintings, literature deal in illusion but can be real in the sense that they nurture
and enlarge us, help to make sense of experience. When they fail in this, they feel
unreal, they dont ring true. They are false, they fail as art. Theatre and everyday
life overlap although the murderer in the play is not prosecuted. Psychotherapists
know how people act out scripts which they can rewrite to invent a new reality. It
may not matter if the story of my life is real or invented, until a lawyer asks if I
am really the person mentioned in my long-lost uncles will.
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Electrons, energy, valency, spin are real in so far as the scientific structure they
form part of explains what we experience. Phlogiston no longer makes sense, so it
has lost its claim to reality, as a banknote which goes out of circulation becomes a
piece of paper. Promises, agreements, treaties are real only so long as they can
be trusted. Some plans and commitments are called unreal because we know they
will come to nothing.
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To take the big question: is God real? Real I find more meaningful than the
existence question. We cannot prove the existence of the electron or alpha
particles or even such matters as market forces, compassion or philosophy. But we
see their effects, and assuming they are real makes sense of great swathes of our
experience. God is at least as real as an idea like compassion.
Tom Chamberlain, Maplebeck, Notts
1. What Is The
Meaning Of Life?
2. A students guide to
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Humanism
3. Newtons Flaming
Laser Sword
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4. The Death of
Postmodernism And
Beyond
5. Critical Reasoning
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More articles
from this issue
Revelation resists and endures, because science gives scant comfort to the desire
https://philosophynow.org/issues/61/What_Is_The_Nature_Of_Reality
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Justin
Holme,
Surrey
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The Y-Monster of Reality
Gazing upon a beer bottle I hold in my hand, I consider that I am not seeing the beer bottle as it exists,
out there, in reality. Instead, I am looking at a picture of it as produced in my brain via my sensory
perceptions. That is, my senses provide data about the object of my perception (a beer bottle), and using
the sensory data my brain assembles a picture for me to see. At any rate, it is the picture in my brain
that I see and not the bottle of beer I hold in my hand. But because the picture in my brain is not the
object itself, one may come to doubt the very existence of the object out there, in reality. How can we
ever know whether objects really exist externally, if all we have to look at are images of them in our
heads? Is ours a world of ideas, or is our world really real? The answer is, Both. Reality is at once a world
of ideas, and an objective world of empirical reality.
Although one may never perceive physical objects apart from our perceptions of them, we can safely
conclude that the objects out there really are there, and so really are real, because there is general
consensus about them. People agree, generally, as to what objects are. If I were to throw my beer bottle
and hit a passer-by on the head with it, that person would tell the police I threw a beer bottle at him as
opposed to having been kicked in the head by a flying blue unicorn, for instance. If there were no such
consensus about the perceived external world, then the fact of ones experiences would be all one could
be sure of, with little by way of meaningful discourse with others. Yet, there is consensus about the
perceived external world. Like moviegoers in a theater, we all see the same movie.
Indeed, there is some consensus even concerning the world beyond our senses. Niels Bohr & Co explored
an invisible world on the basis of theory. Yet the world they thus observed and described is real, as
corroborated by subsequent discoveries and common experiences (well, sort of, at least to some extent).
So, how can the empirical world, about which there is general consensus, and the world that exists in our
individual heads, be reconciled? Behold: the Y-Monster of Reality.
The nature of reality is that it has two perceptual realms, or two heads, like a Y-monster albeit with a
slight qualification. Unlike a Y-monster with two heads perched separately on two torsos joined to one
spine, the Y-monster of reality has two heads, but one is inside the other. On the one hand [head], we
have our individual, subjective perceptions, individual to our own heads. On the other hand, however,
there is also a giant, external head which encompasses all empirical reality, including our individual
heads. It is science-based culture.
https://philosophynow.org/issues/61/What_Is_The_Nature_Of_Reality
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