Kai
New
I agree, but there is no point in defining real to encompass things we cannot know.
I can agree that there might be "no point" but that is because human affairs have an emphasis towards utility. Since I took it to be a philosophical question about the possible *reality* of things, I do not see that the universe (or universes) operates according to our notions of utility for human beings.
But that's only the set that we are interested in by way of utility. It belonged to the set of real things, whether we were interested in them or not.And so then we will add it to the set of known real things.
But there's no actual definition. The requirement that something independently exists infers that said thing will be there whether you are or not, whether our perceptions are, or not, etc. It just does more philosophical work.My definition is the real things are things that have some effect on other real things. I don't think using the word exist is useful.
I'm not saying that interaction isn't a useful notion. It is. Nonetheless, there could be things that don't interact with us, or even our entire experienced world, and yet still exist. I don't think that can be ruled out in some a priori sense, therefore interaction alone gives a definition that could not be formally complete.I agree that it is reasonable to say "There are probably things we don't know about that interact with things we do know about." From that it follows that those things are real.
Why? That's again an epistemic issue, which is only of concern if we want to know what we can know, rather than wanting to know what *could* exist.We need to differentiate between the definition of real and the sets of known real things and hypothesized real things.