Old Style Evie/Why "gods" are bullshit.

[Edwardo Piet]

Thanks very much Evie It sounds like you got the point I was driving at. A being in charge of our universe could also be sort of omnipotent regarding it in that it could fiddle with the reality however it wanted, and sort of omniscient in that it could just ask for readouts about anything from the simulator. The fact it's even being run suggests the eventual outcomes are not already known however to this being.

Absolutely!

But take a step back, and this being can be nothing special. No more special than us screwing about with our own computer program, blissfully unaware that it is somehow manfesting into its own reality.

Exactly. And thank you for making that clear in my mind, never thought of it quite like that before.

Is the imagination in some sense real? Well, the language is incredibly tricky. My own position, ultimately, is that things are as real as they appear to be, to any particular observer. So the imagination is as real as the output the brain gives about the (presumed) objective reality, it's just the mind "knows" one is being generated internally and one is a result of stimuli.

Very good and fully accurate answer.

My own answer is kind of the same but I like to try and open up words to reveal the equivocation at hand, this another reason I am especially interested in the equivocation fallacy.

The way I see it "real"/"existent" can mean both real/existent in the sense of "Present, there. As opposed to absent, or not there(/nowhere)" and real/existent in the sense of "Not imaginary". The imagination itself is therefore existent in the sense that it is present in our minds, it is existent. We obviously literally have an imagination in our brains. But, of course, the imagination is, by definition, imaginary and therefore in that sense the very opposite of "real".

I tend to use "existent" to mean the "there/present" sense of "real/existent" and "real" to mean the "not imaginary" sense of "real/existent"... if that makes any sense?

Every "thing" exists in the sense that anything that is actually a thing, is existent... because even a (so-called) "imaginary thing" would still be a thing present in the brain, at least as brain chemicals (clearly the image it represents in our minds would "look" completely different to how we experience though, but still) but "everything" does NOT exist in the sense that there are many conceivable things in the imagination to not exist OUTSIDE of the imagination sense of "real/existent" (as in not-imaginary) as opposed to merely the "present/there" sense of "real/existent.

Sorry if that's an abstract/philosophical thinking equivocative headfuck and/or I've explained it very poorly... I spent 4 years on lithium stuck in my head thinking like this and 8 months straight reading the dictionary daily (the lithium is relevant because I feel it made me much less extrospective and much more introspective due to the effects on my mood affecting my thinking).