Thoughts for philosophy group tomorrow.
What is real? We think we know, can sense it. Plato (Republic) disputed this in his allegory of the cave. Socrates asks his student, Glaucon, to imagine prisoners in a cave forced to look only at the shadows cast on the wall of people, animals and other figures walking by in front of the fire. The prisoners think they know what they are looking at, this is their reality, until one prisoner is set free. He cannot immediately recognize the things that cast the shadows for what they are, although they are more 'real' according to this allegory. Once given time to acclimate to the sun outside, the prisoner loses his facility with recognizing the shadows and begins to appreciate his freedom. Socrates argues that intelligence and reason provide access to an ultimate truth of ideal forms, besides which the reality of our senses pales like the shadows on the cave wall.
As a culture, we are still obsessed with this anxiety over what exists, or what is real, cf. The Matrix.
Aristotle disagreed with Plato, and held that there is no such hidden world of ideal forms, only the sensate world and the world of real human constructs, such as the law.
Kant pointed out the problem is that we are limited by our senses and intuitions. There may be qualities of an object, the thing in itself, which we are unable to sense or know. Bishop Berkeley argued that the world of our senses is no more real than the world of our imaginations, except that we can exercise our will on the world of the imagination, whereas the real world is governed by the will of God. [As an aside, Berkeley used an apple as his first example of a real object. Food for thought - the apple of God's mind's eye]. Hegel said very little with a lot of words, culminating in a predilection for everything to come in threes, in this instance 'being' (aka existence), 'ideas', and 'nature', where nature is the synthesis of the external and internal worlds when they correspond.
So there are a number of possible scenarios here. 1) Reality is not what we think it is, but the privileged few get to see it by virtue of their superior education, reason, or fortune - the freed prisoner in Plato's cave, Neo in The Matrix. 2) Reality may be different from what we think, but we are limited by our senses and will never know for sure, in spite of our desire to know (Kant). 3) Reality is more-or-less what we see and think (Aristotle). 4) Reality is the realm in which the will of God is exercised, instead of our own will. In other words, reality defeats us (Berkeley). 5) Reality is the intersection between what exists and our ideas of it (Hegel).
Incidentally, Berkeley's view was preempted in the creation hymn from the Rigveda (c. 1500-1000 BC): "Whence this creation has come into being; whether it was made or not; he in the highest heaven is its surveyor. Surely he knows, or perhaps he knows not."
Which brings us by a leap of faith to Nietzsche's method of genealogy, looking at the origins of ideas as a battleground rather than a building site, and postmodernism with its notions of reality by consensus or intersubjectivity.
What is the problem? I think it is this. We commonly encounter both agreement and disagreement about the real objects of the world. Where the objects are more abstract (God, money, politics, love) there are both more disagreements and stronger feelings. People on the whole don't feel very strongly about, say, apples. We need a theory of reality or existence that can contain both agreement and disagreement, but we are ill equipped to imagine topologically beings walking around with worlds in their heads, of which some parts are shared and some parts private. So we fall down the rabbithole of metaphorical collapse, insisting one way or the other (subjective or objective) and justifying our position by flagwaving on the totem poles of realism and relativism.
Maybe there is some bigger picture where the music and the dance synchronize together, like in a movie? Ah forget it, I'm just trying to be Hegelian.
I think we must concede the question is unanswerable.
Speaking of which, I just discovered the word epistemocracy today. It means a Utopian society governed by rulers with epistemic humility, meaning they know (and acknowledge) what they don't know. Supposedly coined by Nassim Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan, it is spreading throughout the blogosphere perhaps thanks to the fact that Google's blogger recognizes it (and coincidentally not the word blogosphere itself) as a correct spelling.
Why does the internet impose itself so unquestionably on our reality, like an apple and not like a God?
