Do you think the universe is real?

[bennyboy]

Yep.  All my human experiences depend upon my current notion being at least partially true: in my experience, my computer is real, and I can really send text messages and receive responses.  However, that part has little to do with the real nature of the universe.  It has more to do with experience with objects and their properties, and of ideas.

Au contraire, lol.  It has -everything- to do with the nature of the universe, so far as we can tell.  The reason, for example..that your toilet paper roll can't send a text and your phone can..has to do with the manner in which materials interact - and that has -everything- to do with their nature as materials, and the nature of the universe in which those materials reside.  Your experience, itself, seems to have everything to do with the materials of which you are comprised (and that which those experiences relate to is comprised).  Why you see some wavelengths, and not others, why you hear some bands and not others, why you feel some pressure, and some energy..but not others.

Surely, you can have at least some confidence...?

I have confidence in objects and their properties (toilet paper not having, for example, the ability to send text messages), not in my knowledge of the framework or underlying "reality" which supports their existence.  My desk is real enough for me, whether it is really a purely physical object, or an idea in some massive Mind of God, or the Matrix, or a collection of a gazillion statistical wave-functions interacting in a purely mathematical (yeah, I said it, bitches! ) "space". So yes, the universe is real.  But I can only confidently state so because I'm talking about the collection of objects and their properties, and not making assertions about what underlies them.