I think we can all agree that reality (the ‘territory’) as a whole is real, but this is nigh-tautological.
For some reason, this sentence struck a chord with me and made a number of somewhat confused thoughts fall into place (a mini-epiphany). Indeed, real means the territory, whatever that is. I could have consoled myself in moments of panic fearing that reality wasn’t really ‘real’. However real reality feels, there isn’t something else ‘more real’.
So what did I mean when I felt that reality didn’t feel real?
Thinking about it for a few moments, ‘feeling real’ subjectively means not only empirically based (seeing it, touching it, hearing it) but that the sensory information is integrated and familiar. A very new environment, a chemical imbalance in your brain that make it difficult to process sensory data and even an inner ear infection all cause feelings of unreality.
Something abstract, likewise—“a mother’s love”, for example—can be considered subjectively real, if you have lots of familiar and empirical examples of such love (she held me, she drove me to school, I had happy feelings). I don’t know if this feeling of “real” isn’t just an analogy your brain makes. That is, that it feels integrated on all sensory levels and familiar like a familiar physical object.
Finally, by analogy, atoms and photons should subjectively feel real for someone studying them if there is a lot of integrated empirical evidence of them and they are familiar objects. Thus the subjective feeling of something being real is scalable: they feel somewhat real if you can see their effects, but more real if you can see/hear/touch them directly. And then regardless of the kind of empirical evidence, it’ll feel more and more real as you become more familiar with them.
All of this is relevant to the post only to the extent that the statement, “X is real” has a subjective component.
For some reason, this sentence struck a chord with me and made a number of somewhat confused thoughts fall into place (a mini-epiphany). Indeed, real means the territory, whatever that is. I could have consoled myself in moments of panic fearing that reality wasn’t really ‘real’. However real reality feels, there isn’t something else ‘more real’.
So what did I mean when I felt that reality didn’t feel real?
Thinking about it for a few moments, ‘feeling real’ subjectively means not only empirically based (seeing it, touching it, hearing it) but that the sensory information is integrated and familiar. A very new environment, a chemical imbalance in your brain that make it difficult to process sensory data and even an inner ear infection all cause feelings of unreality.
Something abstract, likewise—“a mother’s love”, for example—can be considered subjectively real, if you have lots of familiar and empirical examples of such love (she held me, she drove me to school, I had happy feelings). I don’t know if this feeling of “real” isn’t just an analogy your brain makes. That is, that it feels integrated on all sensory levels and familiar like a familiar physical object.
Finally, by analogy, atoms and photons should subjectively feel real for someone studying them if there is a lot of integrated empirical evidence of them and they are familiar objects. Thus the subjective feeling of something being real is scalable: they feel somewhat real if you can see their effects, but more real if you can see/hear/touch them directly. And then regardless of the kind of empirical evidence, it’ll feel more and more real as you become more familiar with them.
All of this is relevant to the post only to the extent that the statement, “X is real” has a subjective component.