Reality

[Allosaurus]

There is no such thing in the physical world as a perfect circle (sphere, cylinder or two-dimensional sketch, debatably physical as that is) Every object in this world will deviate slightly, too eliptical, wobbling, dented lines marring the perfection of the circular shape.

The question is, however, which is more real? The circle you can see and touch? Or the one that's in your head that is more perfect than the physical representation can ever be?





My personal belief is that the real circular object is the one you can see and touch. There are all sorts of imaginary concepts that cannot effect you, because they cannot exist- they are fundamentally flawed, from the characters in Twilight to imaginary numbers. The real alligator is the one that can bite, even if that individual is albino and deviates from the perfect imaginary form of a proper alligator.



—Allosaurus, Warrior of the Sun

[HAL8999]

I'm with you there, Allo. The corporeal and the Ideal have very little in common, except in the derivation of the ideal from similarities between corporeal things. There is no perfect object. Consequently, if we are to claim that our bodies are in any sense real, then perfect conceptions of things must be illusions, or at the most, real in a lesser, less rigorous sense. However, one cannot just toss aside the value of an idealization. When a large number of people, or a small number of very dedicated people, believe an ideal should be pursued, the world can change in very dramatic ways. Existence is not a prerequisite for power.

[Felldrake]

I'm going to have to jump on what seems so far to be the bandwagon. Despite the fact that I argued the opposite in my senior essay at Atheneum--my views have changed greatly since then.

In fact, while I do not have my essay in font of me, I will answer the two of the arguments I made therein that I remember at the moment.

First, I argued that common nouns prove that concepts are reality--since I can give you this common noun and you will know if something is part of that category, so there must be a true-that-ness that is in all of them.
This argument makes the bizarre-in-retrospect assumption that those common nouns are universal. This assumption does not make any sense. Even leaving aside that people speak different languages, if I take a dwarf birch from the Chugach Mountains, and show it to a botanist, and I ask him "is this a tree?" he will say yes. He will likely also tell me that it is a specimen of Betula nana, and several other irrelevant data. Now, if I take that exact same individual plant to a landscaper and ask him the same question, he will look at me like I'm crazy, and say "of course not, that's a shrub." So the question remains, if common nouns show the true concepts, does my little B. nana have the essence of tree-ness or not?

The other argument that I remember is drawn from mathematical-Platonism. This basically states that many things in mathematics were independently discovered by different people, and that therefore, they must have a higher reality, or everyone would have come up with different things.
This one is significantly harder to rebut, but I must point out--if the two people did the same thing, presumably they would come up with the same answer. If I make a figure that is all the same distance from a central point, it's going to be a circle just like Euclid's. This doesn't require that there be some mystical perfect circle in the Intelligible World (yeah Plato) just that I did the same thing as Euclid and got the same result. If you start from the same set of premises and apply the same logic, you should get the same result, regardless of what your premises are. There is a reason why science checks everything against experimental evidence.


Also, HAL, I think I've heard something to the effect of what you're saying before--in my sociology class, I think, we talked about that an unreal thing can have real effects if people think it's real. To use one of Allo's examples of a fundamentally flawed thing that can't exist, the supposed hotness of nonexistent Edward Cullen has had the real effect of rendering thousands of teenage girls incredibly stupid. I can see and touch and try not to listen to the Twilight-fangirl, who would not be so if flawed nonexistent people had not been thought up.