Posted: Nov 22, 2010 9:32 pm
seeker wrote:my_wan wrote:I'm with katja z on the social side, but needed to narrow the definitions to their foundations to something more concrete and absolute.
But such narrowness doesn´t fit the examples. I guess such fitness is one of the main goals of giving a definition, so how do you solve this problem?
The point was that the absolute tightest physical definition of "real" needed to be defined. Much like limits in physics are instrumental in setting goals. Now we can start making exceptions, and explicitly disregard mental states as physically real for definitional purposes, to see where we stand. So long as we understand that these exceptions are well defined and do not entail absolute claims.
Once we remove mental states from our operational definition, all sorts of this loses the definition of "real". I still haven't worked out a way to fully classify them. The OP just made me thing in ways I haven't fully explored.