Alan D
Group: Members
Posts: 3670
Joined: Aug. 2004 |
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Posted: Feb. 27 2011, 07:47 |
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Quote (Ugo @ Feb. 27 2011, 12:11) | Someone (maybe Gary, I don't think it was Alan) remarked that the mantis looked especially thin. |
Yes, it was me. I was just messing about though, pretending to show a concern for the mantis as if he were an old chum. Which, in a sense, he is.
Quote | I replied that a real mantis looks like that, to which Alan reacted by saying that the mantis he saw is not real. While the mantis itself (the one in the game) is very obviously not real and, being oversized and motionless, not realistic either, this sparked a philosophical discussion. |
By this time I was getting slightly alarmed, because in truth I was just being a bit silly!
Quote | Alan, instead, stated that the MVR/Tr3s Lunas world actually exists as a fully developed world within a game, so everything within it is just as real as everything that's outside of it, in the so-called "real" world. |
Did I actually say that? I was still in a phase where I wasn't quite sure whether we were all now being silly, or being serious, and really I was 'pretending' to be surprised to learn that the world of Tr3sLunas was only an illusion.
Quote | So now I would like to ask to all the philosophers in here to give me a very basic, down-to-earth definition of what is real, of what constitutes reality. |
Impossible to answer, I should think. Dr Johnson, when asked how he would refute the idea that there was no reality 'out there', but only mental activity, replied 'I refute it thus, and kicked a stone. That, though witty and fun, was really an evasion of the question, but for most of us, I suppose we do the same.
The only thing we can be sure of, I think, is that every mental conception we have of the world is only that - a conception - a kind of mental map. This desk here in front of me is, I'm sure, nothing at all like my conception of it. The very notion of 'desk' is conceptual - and has no existence, 'out there'. We can talk about its constitution in terms of atoms, and so on, but that really just pushes the questions deeper in. We feel as if we've found some answers, but we haven't really. The nature of reality simply can't be known, I think. We just change our mental maps as we test the world and get different responses. The two are obviously linked (I mean the world out there, and the mental maps) but I can't imagine what the relationship is, except in Dr Johnson's stone-kicking pragmatic sense.
Maria is a real philosopher - she might have more to say.
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