I'm not asking people to give a "what the 'experts' say" definition. I'm asking what they mean when they use the term. Also I'm puzzled why the meaning of a term would be debated by philosophers. I'd guess that they have a definition and are mulling the application of that definition. But . ..[shrug]
Chill, bro .
What people might or might not think depends largely on their own cultures , beliefs or world views , education, nurture, experience , knowledge, intelligence in the larger sense ....
People do not think out of a vacuum, so to speak .Every one here and elsewhere would try to answer your question through the filter of his /her own world view or beliefs that do shape their consciousnesses and thus behavior .
There are also biological psychological environmental cultural and other factors that do shape human thought and thus behavior ,especially when it comes to what they 'think " reality might be thus .
What we take for granted as reality , for example, is mainly just a product of the mutual interactions between our consciousnesses and between the "outer " environment through our senses and thus brain= through perception .
Materialists positivists , for example, would say that only what is observed is real , only the observed physical or material is real .
Only what we feel, see , hear , learn , touch , smell ,taste is "real " : only what we sense or perceive is real , except optical and other illusions and delusions that is .
Non-materialist world views think differently : they assume that there are levels of reality out there people can reach or approach only through the corresponding higher levels of consciousness,as they assume also that some sober forms of extra-sensory perception is also real .
On the other hand , mentally ill people like schizophrenics , psychopaths , people with hallucinations, , depressed people , anxious people , people with obsessive compulsory disorder , people with some specific brain damage have different views of what reality might be from relatively healthy or happy people .
So,You're implicitly asking a question about the very nature of reality , not just what reality means . When one asks what is reality , or what reality means, that's not a question about just the meaning or definition of reality but also about its nature .
What is reality ? = what is the nature of reality ?
What does reality mean ? = that's not just a matter of definition but also a matter of meaning thus ,and meaning is also a matter of morality and ethics or world view .
Furthermore , the meaning ,definition or nature of any concept such as reality are also philosophical questions and hence a matter of world view .
Even science itself tries to answer the question regarding the nature of reality, its own way ( science used to say that reality was just a mental construct , and philosophy used to say that reality is just a social construct ..)
.QM. for example, has been challenging classical realism , classical locality as well as classical determinism ,which means that what we take for granted as the nature of reality might not be deterministic ,causally closed or objective as classical physics made people believe it was .
Religions do deliver also their own versions of what the nature of reality might be .
But if you 're just asking people what they think reality is or what real is ,then , each person would have his/her own definition or meaning of reality , and mainly in accordance with one's own culture or system of beliefs, experience . knowledge , education.....
Our own conceptions of what reality might be or mean depend thus largely on our cultures , beliefs or world views , nurture , environment , education, knowledge , experiences ...
Western cultures ,for example, have been dominated by the materialist world view or conception of nature , philosophy ,ideology ....at all levels , not only at the level of philosophy , exact sciences , but also at the level of human sciences , history writing , politics , ethics and morality,society ...
Democracy.for example, , its economic capitalist wing , liberalism ,secularism , humanism ....are thus just products of a certain secular world view regarding the nature of reality .
Eastern cultures, on the other hand , have their different take on the nature of reality .
Long story thus .
P.S.: I personally think that the ultimate nature of reality is spiritual ,which also means that the so-called physical reality is an illusion .But then again , i am a child of my own culture , upbringing , education, relative knowledge .....in that regard too ,so .
Better still , i also think that if one wanna know about the real nature of reality (what is reality or what it means thus, really ) , one has to look within by trying to know the self and hence by letting go of the false illusory ego .
But , that's just me indeed .
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