Quote:
Originally Posted by Wpnfire
Tell me what's "real".
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Cogito ergo sum. You know your thoughts are real. Everything else requires some faith.
Your faith is better invested in things that seem consistent in that it applies to everyone or everything (even if it wasn't ultimately real). As an example, if there's a train coming towards you, I would argue that your faith is better invested in the belief that the train is real and will hit you than in a belief that the train is not real and will leave you unharmed. You could test the consistency of a train hitting things by placing things on the track and see if they get hit by the train. If a million experiments show that things get hit by trains, it's probably consistent in that it would also hit you if you stood on these tracks. That doesn't mean that the train hitting things is proven to be
real, but it means the hypothesis that trains hit things are about a million times more
credible than the belief the train doesn't hit things. As far as you know from experiments, the train always hits stuff in its path, so it seems fair to assume this will continue to happen in the future.
Whether it's ultimately real or not, it seems to be the way the world currently works and so it should work as a rule until reality somehow changes.
edit :
What I call
real is usually things that should be considered real for all practical purposes (until reality changes), like in the above example.