Defining "Real"
I'll just be blunt. In my opinion, nothing that is real ever becomes unreal. Time and entropy don't determine anything in regards to what is real.
Things may pass, but they're still real, as if you can deny that anything has an impact.
The past is real. When you watch a really old movie, the dead are convinced they are real.
We need to get real.
Things may pass, but they're still real, as if you can deny that anything has an impact.
The past is real. When you watch a really old movie, the dead are convinced they are real.
We need to get real.
Comments (33)
It depends on how you interpret time. According to Kantian theories, time doesn't exist empirically outside our minds. There are even some debates that evolve to time paradoxes when we argue about past, present and future.
So, I am not confident enough to say that the past is "real"
Well, to be repulsively blunt, there has only ever been one now, and all moments are of the same now.
This is a pure fact many are desperate to escape. But it makes sense of everything.
The past was real, now it is past, a real past. We are in contact with the past constantly, as every moment incessantly falls into it. If the now has come to have special significance for us, it is due to the fact that we appear to be able to exercise a real influence on the state of affairs in which we find ourselves. So the "temporally inflated" now of a conscious being reflects a state of potential doing. If a large rock falls off a cliff face and then gets poised on the edge of another cliff, just barely balanced, that is a "now," a metastable state on the brink of altering to something else through human intervention.
Everything exists in and affects the present.
What does "immutably real" mean? The essence of property (?) real is that it is itself a complete characterization. Things are not "more real" or "less real." Or "apparently real."
For that matter, this would also be saying that mutability is not real, which is clearly false.
Is the future real?
Is time linear? past-present-future? or could time be multidimensional?
How do you account for time dilation in your description of 'real'?
Is 'real' a measure of what you personally experience? If it is, then you can experience the exact same event differently than I do, so what was real for you was not identical to what was real for me.
I think the term 'real' is not as 'objectively real' or universally real as you suggest. 'Real' is more nuanced than that.
Otherwise you're saying that facts become fictions.
And the parameters of reality have never made anything unreal. So I'm not sure what you're getting at. Cohesively, there is one reality with all its various parameters.
But what's fascinating is that the past is convinced it's real now. The passage of time can't diminish the nowness of past events.
We are the only ones capable of measuring the circumstances in time.
As it happens I'm just reading one of the longest novels in the world, whose main themes are the ways in which memories extrude themselves into life, and the ways in which things actually become memorable.
Don Quixote? ... In Search of Lost Time?
Based on what evidence? Time may not be linear but we don't know for sure.
Quoting neonspectraltoast
The time tenses would suggest that past tense means 'was real but is real no longer.' We can only look back in time at a large universal scale. The Sun as it was 8 minutes ago, the furthers galaxies as they were billions of light years ago. What we see in the sky is past tense and may or may not still exist.
You are correct that the sub-atomic parts that made up dead people are still around but they are disassembled and dissipated. We have no evidence that their consciousness is still intact either so they are past tense combinatorials. They are no longer real as the combinatorial they were.Quoting neonspectraltoast
So now you are saying people who are dead are real in essence only?
This seems to me to clash with:
Quoting neonspectraltoast
Enjoy it! :up:
How does saying "we" have no proof time isn't linear aid in obtaining proof that time isn't linear.
"We" in quotes, because I have witnessed the proof.
If I took your approach, nothing would be real, realness defined as sameness, as nothing has ever been the same.
[quote=The Irreality of 180 Proof (excerpts)]
'Whatever is real' is subject/mind/language/gauge-invariant.
The irreversibility of 'the past' is real.
The inexorability of 'the future' is real.
The ineluctability of 'the present' is real.
The inseparability of 'past-present-future' (e.g. origami-like, strange loop-like) is real.
'Whatever is real' encompasses exhausts reason and therefore cannot be encompassed totalized by, or within, reason.[/quote]
In a dilation sense time is not linear as speeds approach light speed.
Proper time change as speed approaches c.
Is that a serious question or are you just being childish?
Your second sentence makes no sense.
If we don't acknowledge the living past, there will be no progress, because that's truly how it is.
I am just captain obvious, pointing out that we persistently witness the past, deluded, believing...nay, convinced and absolutely correct that it is real.
Universe's, the child is always the one who diminishes. Many children are more genuine than you. Your identity is in being contradictory, right or wrong, but we've been through the looking glass seventy odd years. I'm slightly ashamed that I'm after clout, pointing out the obvious.
:smile: Nae bother mate! Each to their own!
Quoting Banno :lol:
You rang?
That's an interesting perspective to take on media watching; that those who are no longer living become reanimated through video and audio playback. I'm rather fond of thinking about media as time travel, so your thoughts are well-received.
What do you mean by 'reanimated?'
Are you advocating some sort of philosophical romanticism? Based on a description such as from wiki:
[i][b]Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism, clandestine literature, paganism, idealization of nature, suspicion of science and industrialization, and glorification of the past with a strong preference for the medieval rather than the classical. It was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, the social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific rationalization of nature. It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography, education, chess, social sciences, and the natural sciences. It had a significant and complex effect on politics, with romantic thinkers influencing conservatism, liberalism, radicalism, and nationalism.
The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as fear, horror, terror and awe especially that experienced in confronting the new aesthetic categories of the sublime and beauty of nature. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, but also spontaneity as a desirable characteristic (as in the musical impromptu). In contrast to the rationalism and classicism of the Enlightenment, Romanticism revived medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived as authentically medieval in an attempt to escape population growth, early urban sprawl, and industrialism.[/b][/i]
Perhaps someone dialled a wrong number! Some quirky opinions, that's all, no big guns needed, imo.
So fictions exist too, they're just not real?
Anyway, it seems like the opening post is more about temporality.
Other thread on the topic:
What's the big mystery about time?
What about when, say, an alligator dies? It loses its reality and was killed by the past.