What is reality? How do you define what is real?

Mr. Ed said:
Reality does not exist, all things are figs.
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figments of our imagination...but reality does exist in our mind. If everything is the universe...stars, galaxies, planets, earth, animls, humans...all the same stuff of everything that IS. thoughts and imagination are still just a part of the universe. Humans have evolved to a super sensitive survival apparatus. The big two lobed brain. It is fun to think about how our darkest and most painful thoughts and feelings are just an infintesimal part of the universe, but we believe they are happening to us personally. They too are just a wee part of the whole.
 

Paco Dennis said:
figments of our imagination...but reality does exist in our mind. If everything is the universe...stars, galaxies, planets, earth, animls, humans...all the same stuff of everything that IS. thoughts and imagination are still just a part of the universe. Humans have evolved to a super sensitive survival apparatus. The big two lobed brain. It is fun to think about how our darkest and most painful thoughts and feelings are just an infintesimal part of the universe, but we believe they are happening to us personally. They too are just a wee part of the whole.
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Didn't someone once say, "I feel therefore I am"?
(French or Swiss guy, maybe Rousseau, or some other philosopher?). :)
 
About reality, this 73 y/o has this recent personal memory story I'll share many of we urban folk will find familiar. But first to make this thread more fun, here is a challenge some might report back on. The evening of a day when you visited a familiar supermarket for whatever food items, whatever, after closing your eyes but before fading into darkness of sleep, think about that journey entering the store auto door system and episodic isle journey, moving along a route of usual store items.

When I did this, I was surprised to remember isle by isle in sequence with flashes of visual memory say grabbing for a can in the back of product, at each stop picking up maybe a dozen items along the way. Missed one I immediately fit in later. The executive pilot of our minds has structurally evolved from the perspective of the macula on each of two eyes on Earth creatures our brains mold into a single visual experience perceiving off the brain's inner model of the external world. Thinking of what I did entering the store from that visual eye perspective may have triggered an ability for the brain's tissues to preferentially follow those axon surfaces. Axon buttons have complex chemical and electrolyte processes that through neural plasticity are part of memory functions.

Thus this is a kind of material delay. The effect is such that traveling and standing brain electromagnetic oscillations even hours later as in this example, can be revisited simply when a person's executive pilot buzzes over that specific brain tissue area. That more advanced creature brains do such has huge advantage lest an animal not clearly recall how to return after hours of feeding, hunting, back to the safety and warmth of that hole in the ground or tree. Of course being able to recall recent events better than memories further into the past is common human experience common sense. Neuroscience does not understand at the physical neural level, how time has structure allowing mind to perceive it so.
 

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Elsewhere in cyberspace in a discussion of the fallibility of the human brain someone mentioned he read somewhere (i'll have to search to see if i can find who) that there are some who make a distinction between actuality (what actually exists/happens) and reality (what humans percieve of actuality). I like that distinction in part because it acknowledges the existence of the universe independent from our perceptions of it.

The difference is why people raised in same household sometimes describe their parents very differently, also why eyewitness accounts are less reliable than unedited film footage.
 
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My mother speculated that maybe our dreams were our "real" life and what we think of as "real" life is actually our dreams.
 
Pepper said:
My mother speculated that maybe our dreams were our "real" life and what we think of as "real" life is actually our dreams.
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Most of my life i felt like i had whole other lives in my dreams. I had lucid dreams from an early age. Tho i had no idea not everyone did, or what they were called till my late teens. (And even then most 'experts' were sure lucid dreamers were misremembering, imagining).
 
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