Real Or Imaginary?

[Mr Hyde]

My question goes as the following: How can somthing be real if it isn't ontological?

Another question: What about something that only interacts subjectively? For instance, the voices in a schizophrenic's head. They don't interact with anyone but the schizophrenic. Do they exist, not exist, or only exist subjectively to the individual person? In short, can existence be subjective?

What is the difference between reality and fiction? If fiction or fantasy is somthing different from reality can we properly call it as not being real at all?

We can only PROVE that things exist through interaction and experience, but through inference and inductive logic we can derive the existance of other things. Maybe reality is not real. Maybe there is no single definition of reality in a relative universe which blows our logic all to hell. Maybe all that exists is our beliefs which we paint onto everything.

( Noone knows.)

However to say that concepts like god and other myths are real even though they have no physical ontological presence is beyond my understanding no matter how impossible it seems to grasp the entirety of existence or that which we call reality.

People say things exist all the time. How can you prove somthing does not exist? We accept that many people's ideas are insane,absurd, fictional and delusional otherwise we wouldn't have insane asylums.

Under that line of thinking there must be a line between what is real and what is not. Either we accept there being a line between what is real and what is not because if we don't the only alternative to looking at this discussion is that all of existence may only be subjective.

And if all of existence is only a subjective one that opens up an entire can of worms. Which is it?

My problem with the discussion of relativity involved in this discussion is that if we perceive to say that all things that can be thought up as being perceived in the human mind is infact real we might as well describe that as saying all of existence is entirely a subjective one.

If no judgement or distinction of what is real and what is not real in existence can be made that automatically transforms the universe as being a subjective one.

[Mr Hyde]

So noone here knows the difference between what is actual and imagined.

[NikolaiI]

Sorry, I didn't have internet for a couple of days.

I think fiction is not true because someone made it up. It's not part of this world, it's not substantitive.

But then could the same be said for this world? In relation to eternity, our world doesn't exist either.

An individual's world-- an individual-- exists, but as it is, only to themselves. That is, no on knows my perspective, or your perspective, but me or you. If you go outside or external, then it's not perceived.

What is reality? Reality is invisible, or can you show me some object in this world that is 'reality'? But everything we see, that is all part of reality. It's all part of the matrix. But then, we only know things through our five senses, and can we be sure of them, or verify them?

Most religions and a lot of philosophers talk about different realities or levels. Buddhism speaks of awakening, this is very significant. Plato also describes in the allegory of the cave a similar type of philosophy. We see shadows of what actually exists.

Buddhism and Hinduism are great resources for interest in what's real or not real. A great deal of Buddhism is dedicated to the pursuit of the real, and knowing the difference between real and not real. "Stopping and seeing" is a Buddhist practice which has many meanings, one of which is stopping illusion, and seeing truth-- or what is real.

My own understanding is that we generally know things with sense-perception, we know things from the objects of the senses; but these are all fleeting. What is real is hard to describe but everyone has some sense of it.

[blp]

Bishop Berkeley makes a persuasive case for the idea that reality is sense perception with nothing any realer behind it. That is, not just that reality is only what we can perceive, but that it is itself only the act of perceiving.

His proof is, I think, that sense is the faculty of the perceiving subject, not the object and so sensible things cannot be said to be anything other than our sense of them. Furthermore, he shows that the senses aren't even consistent - something that appears blue in one light might seem green in another (and countless other examples), so how can we talk about what colour the thing is in itself?

So there are no things in themselves, there is only our perception of things. And God's, he thinks. That's how he explains how all these sense perceptions hang together (reasonably well - he makes a lot out of the mutability of perception) - simply, if there's no thing in itself that, for instance, can be simultaneously seen and touched, then there must be a governing consciousness that makes our perceptions of the thing consistent. The way he lays it out in Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/reader/0915144611/ref=sib_dp_pt/203-5253929-1427968#reader-link), (a relatively simple, short easy to read book and a lot of fun), it's actually a rather breathtaking proof of the existence of God - a lot better than the ontological proof that's trotted out here from time to time.

Full text here (http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/sctht10.txt).

The three possible flaws in the argument seem to me to be
1. That God sort of does become the realer reality behind the reality we perceive in Berkeley's schema; however this is just footling with words really and I don't think it undermines Berkeley's overall thesis.
2. That both the consistency and inconsistency of sense perceptions are necessary to Berkeley's overall thesis, which looks rather contradictory, but isn't necessarily. Still, he doesn't explain it. Is the inconsistency God's clue to us about the way things actually are?
3. More problematically, that Berkeley's observations on the mutability of sense perception don't apply as well to space (or, as he calls it, extension) as they do to what he calls the secondary sensory qualities: taste, touch, sound, colour etc. even weight. It's easy enough to accept that no object has an innate thing in itself colour, but not so easy to admit that its dimensions are mutable. Berkeley says it is because things look larger or smaller depending on how close we are to them.

Oh, I thought I had it all sewn up, but actually, not sure now. Anyway, it's late and I'm going to go to bed.