Please take a moment, in the midst of your busy life, to consider this question: Is anything real?
You might back this up with René Descartes’ statement “I think, therefore I am”
But,
Exactly, is there a way to proof any? furthermore, will this ‘world’ continue when you die? how can you draw the fine line between FANTASY and REALITY? Is everything taking place within your conscious?
This forum has some of the brightest students in U.S. and I would really like to hear your opinions!
Wow. Thinking about this has blew my mind, as I’ve not thought about it at this level before. I mean, I guess you could say most things are ‘real.’ I mean, if we can physically register something, then it can be defined as real. Some things, like math, energy, love, emotions, aren’t necessarily real…in a sense. You can’t buy love, it’s just a feeling that we perceived to be love. Having a particular fondness towards someone is love. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it’s just in a constant cycle, changing forms. You cannot feel energy, it’s just something that picks you up and moves you along the way. Math, even languages, are just made up. If we forgot everything about math, we’d probably create a similar system of using numbers. Similarly, with languages, if we didn’t know how to communicate we’d find a way.
Now, I could contradict myself and say that these things aren’t real and we’ve just made everything in our conscious. It could be like a dream: one that takes many years to complete. When we die, our dream ends.
In my own beliefs, I believe my first paragraph is how everything is. We’re a real world with things that we’ve made up to help our lives and to explain things.
Although I’ve not answered everything, I just think that philosophy is strange, but interesting.
Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
Is anything fake? Or is everything “real” and that which we cannot comprehend simply takes place in another realm that is just as “real” as ours? In the realm we live in, the things tht are real are the things we can experience. If it’s beyond the realm of comprehension and cannot be experienced, then it’s fantasy.
Ah, this question. I love contemplating about things like this.
Technically, everything exists within our own minds. One could ask someone with paranoid schizophrenia if their hallucinations are real, and they would say yes; but does that mean they are real? They are real to the person who is experiencing them. This entire universe could be a hallucination, a dream; something thought up whilst we were asleep. A lifetime could be a blink of an eye, and we’d never know. The boundary between fantasy and reality is very blurred indeed, but I’d say reality is whatever one thinks exists. As we think this universe exists, it does. You could bring up the example of 1984: history exists in our minds, no matter how hard others try to change it; therefore, reality exists simply because it exists in our mind.
@IrrationalPepsi @CaliCash @topaz1116 Your thoughts are insightful! To be quite honest, this has once in my life became an ugly excuse that I used to escape the reality. It had became THE maze that trapped me. Glad I walked out this troubled time. Philosophy has always interested me. Its very purpose is to encourage critical thinking!
And exactly like what @JustOneDad said, and from the Odes… Reality or not, this is the one life I got, I’m not GOD’s man, I live for myself, my family and my friends!
For anyone who might be troubled about my OP…Check out Rene Descartes’ Meditations… Wonderful read!
If that’s the case, then I think it would make sense to focus more on the self and using that mindset to shape your life to how you want it to be.
I saw this theory online somewhere but it’s very similar to your question. I vaguely remember it but it revolved around dreams and reality. Basically, the idea was in our dreams we experience reality and when we wake up we are really dreaming. I didn’t understand it at all.
However I’d like to bring up EMOTIONS and FEELINGS. How can this not be reality if we can feel things and react to them? (Sorry if this doesn’t make sense, in my mind it does)
Sometimes I think I’m the only real person who can think and there’s some person in the sky who put everyone else in the world just to see how I’d react. I mean, how do I know that other people can even think? I have no proof.
@dsi411 Omg. That’s exactly how I feel sometimes. Like I’m actually in a huge experiment and everyone else is a non-thinking human being controlled by the experimenters observing how I act towards different situations.
Yeah.
@penngirlpending sure you can feel things and react to them, but the whole issue comes back to the very fundamental question: how can you proof it? for example, you won the lottery. You will probably be thrilled. But nevertheless how can you proof afterall that this isn’t all a dream? You meet me, but how can you proof my existence? I could be someone you created. Its like a video game theory, you cant possibly proof if anything thay you aren’t focus on is real. Ultimately, it comes down to how each individual define reality.
@dsi411 like a role playing game, where the programmer is what you called the “someone in the sky”
I’m not a beilever of solipism, but philological question like that shows the limitation of our mind power. I guess we will never find out the truth
In Meditation I, Descartes decides to go on a “quest for certainty” in which he asks if there is anything of which one can be certain. He contemplates a “dreaming hypothesis,” where he postulates that if he were dreaming, he would have no way to know whether he actually is experiencing reality. Any action he could do to check whether or not he was dreaming could be done within the dream itself. He decides that one cannot be sure whether one’s conscious awareness is a correct representation of reality, and that while one cannot be positive that one is dreaming, one cannot be positive that one is certainly not dreaming.
In Meditation II, Descartes discovers that he must exist because he can doubt his own existence. In other words, if there is doubt, there must be a doubter. I think, therefore I am. According to Descartes’ ideology, we cannot be certain of our reality.
Nick Bostrom, a contemporary philosopher at Oxford, takes this theory one step further and proves that there is a significant possibility that we are living in a computer simulation.
@ACDC666 I just wrote an 8 page philosophy paper for my senior philosophy class, so this is really relevant. 7 pages were on Descartes’ Meditations, and the last page was on Part One of Hobbes’ Leviathan.
From what I understood, and lol I do not want to go back to the paper, Descartes knows without a doubt that he is a thing that thinks. What keeps him at first from believing that things outside of him are real is that he may be deceived by a god (Some of his arguments were religious, so many may or may not believe what he is saying based off of this) that the things around him are the way they are. However, he believes that God is not a deceiver, and that he can be sure about the nature of all things that he perceives clearly and distinctly, those that are not far away and obscured by uncertainty.
He does make the distinction between the mind and the body, though. He knows that his mind is connected to the body because he can imagine things, but he can’t imagine everything. He can understand things, and he can understand everything in at least some sense. He can understand and imagine a triangle, but he cannot imagine a 1000 sided figure, even though he can understand it. Understanding is of the mind, and because of some weird connection to god he has infinite capacity to understanding given some time (Though I think he talks about potentiality whereas god is in actuality), but his body is finite, and imagination is the mind producing the idea of a corporeal (physical) object through which he is able to extrapolate the qualities of through sensing.
I think from this you can tell that because he can sense something, and god is not a deceiver, things outside of him must be real. I may have jumped a bit though without explaining other stuff while coming to a conclusion on this.
I don’t really agree with all of what Descartes said, but it was a very good insight into what is real and how the mind is related to existence and the outside world.
Lol I wish I could just post my paper here.
Deleted my paper. I thought it was a good idea then thought of its ramifications like someone trying to write a similar paper and finding they have a lot of stuff similar to an online thing through turnitin checking.
There’s been a lot of controversy about plagiarism software. There’s lots of information available regarding such concerns. You might take a look at the Write My Paper site (http://www.writemypaper.net/?r=10).
I’m sorry, this sounds like your homework.
What do YOU think about it???
@bjkmom ugh…I doubt American High Schools would ever give this type of homework…