Reality is a Set of Points

Reality is all things. It includes everything and so basic logic would dictate that since reality is all things in existence, "reality is a thing in existence". You can flip it around any which way you wish "since x is real, reality, then reality is real, x". There is absolutely no error on my part. Guaranteed.

 

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On the contrary. Take a proposition "x is real", therefore reality is hence a proposition "x" since reality is all things.

 

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There are supposedly broader definitions of reality that subsume "everything that is and has been -- whether or not it is observable or comprehensible -- to reality including everything that has existed, exists, or will exist". Which apparently forces reality as a label for such a set or community of all entities to include that very label as a member of the set.

But a complaint from most here might be that this becomes a trivial analytical activity. That is, the effort of investigating "reality" eventually seems to uncover nothing new in the internal structure of the concept or adds / introduces nothing new to it. Like continually pointing out that assorted items such as bank and supermarket and park belong to the contemporary idea of "city"; or that monkeys and elephants and ostriches are expected to be part of a zoo.

One can contend that we do need to re-examine from time to time our most basic expressions as well as definitions of less common terms to test yet again their consistency or their adequacy for a changing era. Or to avoid just taking for granted that the majority fully understands them or that their original meanings and intent are not being abused by this or that faction. But when it is the same concept being addressed week after week ad nauseam -- as if driven by some devout fervor -- then rather than stimulating public interest it may instead be getting consigned to the background with other monotonous written signs and droning sounds.

 

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Agreed. However, the word "reality" carries with it a certain meaning that encompasses all other words. Imagine assigning an importance to every word and its meaning. Another word that carries this type of superior meaning is "God". So we have reality as Being as well as matter. And since reality is nothing other than itself, this forms a dual aspect monistic one or reality.

 

'Real' and 'reality' aren't synonyms here. 'Real' is the profoundly mysterious predicate that's attributed to whatever isn't fictional, imaginary, hypothetical, illusory or whatever. 'Reality', as you suggested yourself, is the set of everything real.

If we agree that some particular x is real (whatever that means) and with your own statement that "reality is all things", then what justifies our concluding that 'x is all things' and that 'all things are x'?

You certainly seem to be falling prey to the fallacy of composition, as Sarkus has pointed out.

 

What you're saying amounts to "the set of all x is not-x." Where it in fact is.

It is because reality is one.

Then Sarkus would be wrong.

 

The set of all x needn't always be another x. In fact it usually isn't.

The set of all igneous rocks isn't an igneous rock. A crowd consists of human beings, but a crowd isn't a human being. A library is a collection of books, but the library isn't a book.

Reality seems like a heterogeneous multitude of different kinds of thing, to me.

There are microscopic subatomic particles, there are macroscopic physical objects, there are fields of various sorts, there are forces and relations, geometrical and otherwise, there is space and time, there are universals and general concepts, there's mathematics, logic and the so-called laws of nature, there are processes and information, there are ideas and values like beauty and good, there's 'qualia' and phenomenal experience, there's causation...

While it might be possible to 'reduce' some of these to others, one can certainly argue that the single mysterious predicate 'real' applies to any and all of them. But it would probably be foolish to insist that any one of these arguably real things is "all things" or that "all things" is any particular one of them.

Your first remark, up above, suggests he was right.

 

If reality is "all things", and if reality is also "infinite" (implied by that statement), then logically, one cannot do math or logic of which reality is the subject, because infinity is not a number, and 1 <> 2.

Counting is not cognition. Neither is logic, and for the same reasons. Symbols have serious cognitive limitations, and are merely tools necessary to finite minds.

 

I see. Thank you for pointing out my error. However, other than this fact you presented the logic of using reality as anything real still stands as CC noted above.

 

Actually, if everything real is real, then all is one. I.e. everything is reality itself.

 

But its emphasis on "real" is the very bugbear: In more common usage the word "reality" is singling out an "actual existence" from states of affairs which do not qualify for that (hallucinations, dreams, erroneous beliefs, etc). Hallucinations and dreams would have to be included in a legitimate "all-that-exists" or "all-manner-of-kinds-that-exist" category or set which leaves nothing banished for supernaturalists to claim in their rival dualism.

But this supposed broadest meaning of reality sported in specialized lexicons and wikipedia (which amounts to "all-that-exists") seems to conflict with what's emphasized about the narrower definitions of the term in everyday dictionaries, if reality included imaginary experiences. To avoid such, it could only embrace the neural activity that hallucinations, dreams, erroneous beliefs, etc correlated to (or the public appearance as opposed to the private appearance).

To clarify a bit: One can't assert that the publicly detectable electrochemical patterns in the brain which imaginary events correspond to are not real; and yet there's the quandary of what those patterns privately are ... having to be classed as unreal (like a meds-deprived man experiencing himself having a conversation with Abraham Lincoln and a flying pig in the living room). A truly valid "all-that-exists" category should include both the public and private appearances ("facts and illusions" would be a suspicious equivalent) so that the latter, again, is not left as something for dualists to point-out that the monists can't either explain or must outrageously deny / eliminate. "Reality" serving as that, however, is stifled by its conventional distinction of some "actual kind of existence" from some "illusionary kind of existence".

This is why some philosophers disparage "real" and its assorted offspring [realism, reality, etc] as a word that apparently has some practical application in everyday life; but when analyzed for how well it hangs together internally it is an ambiguous mess that would be better left for philosophy to discard.

 

A useful distinction for me is that between the phenomenally real and the empirically real. A dream for instance is phenomenally real. As an experienced event, it has qualities and properties and a logic that makes it real to me. But it isn't empirically real in the sense of something that happened in a commonly shared world. I can't point to the dream empirically and confirm its existence for others. It is accessible only to my mind, but not to the minds of others. Some may say the dream was empirically real because it correlated to a pattern of synaptic firings in my brain. While that may be necessary to providing empirical evidence of the dream, it isn't sufficient for it. Synaptic firings in one brain in no way objectifies the dream as an event phenomenally accessible to others. At best it only provides a third person objectification of synaptic firings imagined as going on in someone else's brain.

 

Mathematics is real Spellbound , thats not the problem , its when mathematicians think that reality is based on mathematics , thats the problem .