Devil's advocate for why ontology is meaningless and vacuous.

[Arkilogue]

Is the "post 911 world" real?

Well... the date is 9/11 today and the future doesn't exist yet/isn't real yet because it by definition hasn't happened yet. So the world after 9/11 (starting with 9/12) -- or IOW: tomorrow -- isn't real.

So taken that way... the answer to your question is "no"

Post 9/11 2001 as opposed to 9/11 2016? Not necessarily real but certainly existent even if only solipsistically.

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What is solipsistic/imaginary existence? It's the presence of our minds. It's the fact that minds are present or 'there'. No one would be able to imagine anything, there would be no lights on, without the existence of minds.

That's just my definition of 'existence' again, though. I don't define existence to mean "not imaginary"... that's how I define real. Because to say our imagination/our minds are not imaginary/not mental makes no sense to me.

What does it mean to exist in an imaginary way? To me it's just the opposite of the absence of an imagination. We can't imagine what it's like to not imagine something but we can imagine the concept of there being things without imaginations. Either rocks have imaginations or they do not. I'm thinking, no, but of course I can't prove that. But that is indeed very different to rocks having imaginations. I wouldn't say the imagination of a rock with an imagination was "real" I would say its imagination existed and was by definition the totality of imaginary experiences in its mind.

It's just my own way of sensemaking. We could just as easily say "reality" and "existence" mean exactly the same thing and "imaginaryness" and "nonexistence" mean exactly the same thing... it's simply my own way of avoiding equivoation between the imaginary concept of "absent altogether both in a real and imagined way" and the imaginary concept of "present as an imaginary concept but absent outside of that concept". It just clears things up for me.

Like... there's a difference between a) the concept of an absence of a concept besides the own concept of the absence of that very concept of an absence of a concept and b) the concept of the presence of a concept that isn't simply present as that concept of a presence of a concept but also refers to another concept itself that is present.

IOW there's a difference between the vacuously self-referential concept of the concept of an absence of a concept and the concept of the presence a concept pointing to a different concept.

TL;DR: Even when only speaking of the attempt to conceptualize the unconceptualizable ((*)(or the conceptulization of the conceptulizable)(*)... such a self-referential conceptualization attempt is different to a conceptualization attempt pointing to another concept. It's valid to distinguish between the completely meaningless self-referentially vacuous conceptulization of nonconceptulization/conceptualization of conceptualization (*both are equally useless*) on the one hand and the act of conceptualizating something imaginary like "the concept of the character buzz lightyear", for example, on the other hand.

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I should have been more specific, what I meant by "post 911 world" is the way the politicians use it. While it's certainly real that the event happened (and may have happened quite differently than advertised), are we really in a "new era" of terrorism or is it a political fabrication? As with Buzz Lightyear, total fabrications have a way of becoming real. Especially when lie is repeated over and over and over like the feeding of a script.

So it makes me wonder, what other parts of our cultural milieu are total fabrications that have effectively become egregores in the mass mind? How do we exorcise those "demons" when many people are hell bent on defending them?