The thought experiment that motivated this question was one in which I was contemplating a collection of real and concrete things, and asked myself if this thought was basically the same kind of thought as the concept of “reality”? After all, reality is just the collection of all real things, right? In that case, if all these things are concrete, then the concept of reality itself must be concrete? But then I got to thinking of set theory and Bertrand Russell’s notion that reality is the set of all real things. Now, a set is an abstract idea - it’s the members of that set that are (potentially) concrete. So then reality must be abstract.
Finally, I settled on this conclusion: the concept of reality must be abstract because it is more than the thought of a collection of real things (regardless of whether they are concrete or not), it is the thought that this collection exhausts all real things. That is, it is the understand of “all”. This has to be an abstraction because it necessarily requires a positing of boundaries on reality - of a separation between what is real and what is not real - and therefore extends the mind into the unreal. Thoughts about concrete things can’t serve this function.
Does this sound reasonable (I’m still not totally sure of this myself)?
We humans abstract the idea of “reality” from our experience with real things. For us, this relation is necessary, but I think it is the abstract idea of “reality” that depends on the perception of real things rather than visa-versa. For other animals, like a dog or a cat, I suspect that they perceive all manner of real things, but they don’t necessarily conceive of “reality” (even though we humans would say this is precisely what they are seeing).
Yes, the concept “reality” is an abstraction, an integrated sum of perceptions. The abstraction as such does not exist, it is not an entity, but it represents all entities for the human conceptual level of consciousness.
The concept of reality doesn’t seem to be specifically tied to anything concrete. Reality could (hypothetically) be totally different and it’d still be reality.
It is actually ties to everything concrete: that is what the concept subsumes everything that exists, not any one thing in particular (though any one thing that does exist is part of reality), but the sum. Your right that the particulars could be total different and it could still be called reality, but it would still have to have the one “conceptual common denominator” that defines the abstraction “reality,” and that is that it would have to exist.
Reality is just a qualification for all things that are real. It’s just a set of things. If there was another reality which we weren’t experiencing for whatever reason, that would be the actual reality and our reality wouldn’t be real.
The way you seem to be looking at it is in viewing reality as an actual “thing” as opposed to a “collection of things,” and so reality becomes abstracted and the ‘reality’ of it’s contents comes into question. From this problem, I think you’re looking at it from a stance that’s too close to Plato, and that the primary concept of reality that came into being (and that can thus be validly debated on) was created by man’s need to explain and categorize things. I.E, real/unreal, clear/abstract.
this is different from (other?) concrete concepts, for example, television set–there is a set range of possible physical things that could fit that description. or ‘the eiffel tower’… if you tear it down it’s no longer the eiffel tower. sure ‘reality’ is at least in one sense the set of all physical things, but i think the difference could count toward its being an abstract concept rather than a concrete concept. it is all physical things, yet no physical thing or set of physical things in particular. kind of like the idea of ‘object’. is ‘object’ abstract or concrete?
you could make a name for reality that includes in its parameters that reality is THIS reality with THIS set of objects. sort of like the difference between ‘galaxy’ and ‘milky way’. or maybe the difference between ‘object’ and ‘milky way’. the milky way refers to this galaxy and no other. just step that up to the whole universe. so that if it were turned into a turnip over night, it wouldn’t be called the same thing anymore. then that concept of ‘reality’ would be more concrete than the current one, thus showing that the current one isn’t very concrete.
of course, hardly any concept referring to a physical object is 100% concrete. take ‘chair’. you could break it into 5 pieces and then it could still be considered ‘the chair’, just broken. or you could saw off part of one of the legs, and it’s still the same chair. so it’s somewhat plastic…
The stance I’m looking at it from is the difference between reality as a concrete thing or an abstract concept. If it’s an abstract concept, I would dispense with the notion that it is a “thing” in the metaphysical/Platonic sense. I’m not very keen on Platonism - I believe abstract concepts can only be “things” in the mind.
If “reality” could be reduced to a “collection of concrete things”, then I’d say that the concept of reality was itself concrete, because a collection is no less concrete than its members. You can easily consider it one concrete thing whose parts just so happen to be physical disconnected. But the reason I’m more incline to say reality is an abstract concept is because a “collection” does not necessarily imply “all”. For that collection to be “reality”, one must assume that there is nothing else in existence, and this brings in a whole slew of presumptions about what existence is, what the difference bewteen the real and unreal is, what the boundaries of reality are, etc. - all fairly abstract in my view.
I guess I just view reality as being one side of the coin, the other being unreality, and anything that exists falls into one category, and anything else falls into the other.
Reality is what you make of it. For example if someone sees and feels something noone else sees or feels does that make it not real, no it just means no one else sees or feels it, wether or not their mind created or its something natural it is still real. So the concept of reality is what ever you make of it.
“Reality†is a word denoting the abstraction of sensual information.
It is mostly used to refer to a common ground of sensual awareness and how it is defined and interpreted by diverse and alien consciousnesses.
Through this comparison and competition of meanings and interpretations and awareness one deduces greater patterns referring to a grander scale and a “reality†that is not immediately perceptible.
All thought is surely abstraction in so far as we “abstract” from our sense experience a “generalised” concept within a frame of reference. Aristotle called it a “universal”. Any word, any idea is a common noun placing that idea within a frame of reference, a system of classification.
Reality is the ultimate frame of reference asserting that this idea is part of the world we encounter through experience as opposed to an imaginary world.
Reality is not an “attribute” like other attributes whereby this tree can be tall or gnarled, a sycamore tree or an oak tree, but an assertion in the realm of true or false, “real” or imaginary.
Reality only has meaning in relation to mind, in relation to what is true or false, real or imaginary to a conscious mind. Our existence as a sensing, knowing and conscious being relating to other beings creates the possibility of such an inter-relationship. Before homo sapiens sapiens existed there was no such thing as true or false, real or imaginary; it is only when there appears an animal that can lie that truth becomes a possibility and only when there arrives an animal that can imagine and pretend that the real becomes a reality.
Excuse me, there is one absolute reality (which nobody knows) and then there are the perceptions of individuals which most individuals believe to be reality.
I don’t think that just because most individuals believe their reality is the reality we should call our individual perceptions reality. If we see a ghost then that doesn’t make it real. We might perceive it as being real, but that’s just our perception. This is a pretty old argument.
Reality is on one side of a glass wall, and we’re on the other, and we have to look through the glass at it. Our view is pretty changed by the glass filter, so you can’t call it “reality,” because calling it that is an insult to the actual reality.
“Reality is on one side of a glass and we are on the other”. Despite our intellectualising we always think within some imaginary box, some metaphor or analogy like this, but I contend that reality, of which we are always a part and product - including our mind - can never fit into our “boxes” or “metaphors”.
Despite Einstein we all still think of space/time as the Newtonian box and find the conundrum of what lies beyond the box unanaswerable. The same is our idea of causality (efficient causality)- whether the end point is the Big Bang, or Nothingness or God, we always want to ask about what happened before this.
I am pleased someone thinks reality is “out there” or “over there” but any such idea as that, as the glass idea, always places us, or our minds or whatever on the “other side”, but there is nothing on the other side, we are always “within” reality.
It’s sounds mad and is as unimaginable as relativity but I think reality is relational; we can only think about or understand anything in terms of relationships. “Things” as we call them only exist in relationship to other things. The idea or image that reality exists “out there” somewhere; that reality is a “thing in itself” hanging in nothingness is self-contradictory and meaningless.
Real things “assert” themselves in relation to other real things and only exist in relation to other things but depending on the different kinds of beings there are from inanimate, through animate, sensate and intelligent beings the existential way they relate to the other differs - there are different kinds of “reality”.