What does it mean to be real?
At first glance, this question seems to be the same one as described the first article, regarding existence, but there is a significant difference. Consider the concept of a unicorn. The immediate image is of a horse with a horn, perhaps with rainbow-colored hair and an angelic white body. Thus far, we do not know that such a creature exists in the world, and yet we are able to have this idea of a unicorn. The unicorn must exist because we can come up with this concept of a unicorn, but it is not necessarily real.
For many, this is the difference between reality and existence. For them, everything exists, because the moment we create an idea of anything, it exists. But reality is different, as only that which is material can be real. From a young age, we are told that our imaginary friends, fantasies, and stories are “not real” because they are all purely imaginary. So it seems that the accepted definition of reality deals with the material world, while existence can cover the immaterial world as well.
What exactly does the immaterial world contain? According to the arguments posed by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato (circa 428 BCE-347 BCE), there exists a “realm of ideas” where the perfect versions of everything are. Everything in the material world therefore is the human understanding of one of these ideas. For example, somewhere in the realm of ideas exists the perfect table. All other tables, regardless of color, shape, size, or other properties, are similar enough to this perfect table that they can be classified as tables. However, this argument has been attacked by opponents who claim it does not consider abstract concepts such as the idea of “nothingness” or the idea of “love”.
From our current understanding of science, everything that is real is made up of atoms and subatomic particles that combine with each other to create the reality we know. But science seems to have a harder time explaining ideas and abstract concepts. Neuroscientists have found that thoughts are ideas originate as electrical impulses. What we aren’t able to explain yet, however, is how these electrical impulses are able to create the complex emotions and consciousness that we feel.
The formal name for the branch of philosophy dealing with the fundamental nature of reality is called metaphysics, and it seeks to examine how we are able to interact with reality and know about reality. Metaphysics literally means “after-physics,” or everything that normal physics cannot explain. Ontology, which was mentioned in Section 1.1. Existence, is usually defined to be a sub-field of metaphysics, as it only specifically deals with questions of being, whereas metaphysics covers many more topics and is significantly more broad.
However, the philosophers Willard V. O. Quine (1908-2000) and Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), among many others, claim that the concept of existence and reality are the same; things that are real must exist, and vice versa. Going back to the example of the unicorn, what this means is that the unicorn does not exist, only the idea of the unicorn does. This is a strong counter to the first claim that something can exist, if only in idea. The simplest way to understand the difference between these dramatically contrasting ideas is to consider whether something can exist only in idea, and then also consider how ideas relate to the material world. Science does explain ideas with relatively high certainty to be simply electrical impulses, but then there is a distinction between what something is made up of in contrast to what something is. Perhaps ideas are made up of electrical signals, but does that necessarily make them electrical signals?
No comments:
Post a Comment