Would you live in VR?

[Edwardo Piet]

For example: I define things to be real, then I wake up. Doh! I was wrong, they weren't real. Except they were, to me; so they make up a "reality".

They weren't real but they were things

Hehe, sorry I feel like I'm derailing your thread, I don't want to do that.

I'll one final idea:

Everything exists in the sense that every thing exists and every thing is a present thing. God doesn't exist because he isn't anything at all, he is absent. The things that exist as things but aren't real are merely concepts in the mind.

This is just my own way of defining 'real' and 'existent' as separate, the former referring to 'not imaginary' the latter referring to when something is 'there' as opposed to being nothing at all.

It's all very confusing and bizarre but the alternative for me seems to be defining both 'existent' and 'real' with the same meaning, to refer to something non-imaginary, and then having to split that definition in half to also refer to something being 'there', and so any time we talk about something real or existent we have to specify whether we are talking about it existing outside the imagination or existing altogether. Perhaps that would actually be better though because instead I have had to go into explaining how I define 'real' and 'existent' slightly differently.

I think it feels less bizarre when we leave words like 'real' and 'existent' undefined and just use our common sense and intuition to think we know what we are talking about... I think this all becomes very bizarre because I am attempting a clear definition of it.

Okay so the alternative is 'real' and 'existent' are interchangeable and we have to specify whether we are talking about something being something as opposed to nothing, or whether we are not questioning whether it is something and are instead talking about whether it exists specifically outside the imagination

The following question is the one that always gets me thinking: Does the imagination exist?

What would be your answer to that? Mine would be "Yes in the sense that it is there, I have an imagination. No in the sense that it isn't real it's imaginary."