What counts as being "real"?
As a secular humanist ad an atheist I'm often asked some pretty weird questions in an attempt to bait me into a long and unproductive religious debate. Don't get me wrong - I'll almost always engage in such debates mostly to see religious folk desperately try to apply logic to an inherently illogical concept.
Last night I was high on weed and found myself staring into the fireplace thinking existential thoughts. I got to wondering: do I consider myself a Physicalist? Can I accept the philosophy "everything which exists is no more extensive than its physical properties and that there are no kinds of things other than physical things"?
So my mind took to wandering a bit, and I began to really ask myself if I could come up with an example of something that is said to be "real" but yet is not strictly physical. The mind is the first and easiest stop on that particular road of inquiry but I am of the opinion that the human mind is very much a product of its physicality and that without the brian (and all of its complex structures and functions) the mind doesn't exist. So scratch that.
But then I hit a stumbling block. I began to consider the question of emergent phenomenon and wondering about their place in the question. Specifically, can an "idea' be said to have any existence beyond the brain that is currently thinking it? What about 'love'? Does it exist as something apart or is it merely something each individual brain experiences? The same could be asked about "culture" in general. Certainly, at no particular time does a society's culture ever exist wholly inside one person's brain, but yet most people would argue that it does still exist.
While certainly far from any sort of religious experience, the whole thought process has got me thinking about the nature of what we consider "real" and how our minds categorize things within reality.
Everyone can plainly see a tree is real, but how real is the forest?
As a secular humanist ad an atheist I'm often asked some pretty weird questions in an attempt to bait me into a long and unproductive religious debate. Don't get me wrong - I'll almost always engage in such debates mostly to see religious folk desperately try to apply logic to an inherently illogical concept.
Last night I was high on weed and found myself staring into the fireplace thinking existential thoughts. I got to wondering: do I consider myself a Physicalist? Can I accept the philosophy "everything which exists is no more extensive than its physical properties and that there are no kinds of things other than physical things"?
So my mind took to wandering a bit, and I began to really ask myself if I could come up with an example of something that is said to be "real" but yet is not strictly physical. The mind is the first and easiest stop on that particular road of inquiry but I am of the opinion that the human mind is very much a product of its physicality and that without the brian (and all of its complex structures and functions) the mind doesn't exist. So scratch that.
But then I hit a stumbling block. I began to consider the question of emergent phenomenon and wondering about their place in the question. Specifically, can an "idea' be said to have any existence beyond the brain that is currently thinking it? What about 'love'? Does it exist as something apart or is it merely something each individual brain experiences? The same could be asked about "culture" in general. Certainly, at no particular time does a society's culture ever exist wholly inside one person's brain, but yet most people would argue that it does still exist.
While certainly far from any sort of religious experience, the whole thought process has got me thinking about the nature of what we consider "real" and how our minds categorize things within reality.
Everyone can plainly see a tree is real, but how real is the forest?