What is "real"? And what is "not real"?
When it comes to the matter of defining reality, we often stumble upon the notion that it is not so easy to establish a persistent set of criteria through which any unit of existence in our faculty of reasoning can be identified as either real or unreal.
When somebody asks, "Is X real?", one cannot rightfully reject the inner conviction that the answer to such a question heavily depends on the context to which it belongs.
First of all, what is "X"? We must know what X is in order to be able to tell whether it is real or not.
Secondly, what does "real" even mean? If we suppose that X is a tangible object, will the word "real" imply that a class of objects called "X" can be defined, just as a pink unicorn is capable of being fully described aside from whether or not it is physically present in our material universe?
Or, will it imply that at least one instance of such a class of objects is capable of being observed? And if it can be observed, what mode of observation should be deemed convincing enough to qualify itself as a proof of existence of such an instance? For example, does a pink unicorn which I saw during my last night's dream possess the right to claim itself as an existential evidence of a pink unicorn?
Due to the possibility of such speculations, defining reality and its constituents from a holistic perspective quickly becomes an inexplicably convoluted task whenever we try to reason through it. And this oftentimes urges us to regard the concept of reality as one which appertains to a specific context in which every piece of information is clearly defined.
When somebody asks: "Is 1+1=2 real?", the one who hears such a question typically responds by saying "yes" not because the question alone explains everything, but because both the questioner and the answerer are implicitly agreeing with each other that they are conversing within the context of standard algebra. The answer would've been different if the questioner mentioned beforehand that one is talking about boolean algebra.
When somebody asks: "Is algebra real?", on the other hand, one can be expected to respond with a counter-question such as: "What do you mean by 'real'?". The reason for such an inquiry is that the concept of algebra does not belong to any of the answerer's presumed contexts of reasoning in which it can be classified as either real or unreal. Mathematics defines its own scope of reality in its own context, but it does not necessarily mean that mathematics itself is defined as "real" within a wider context.
Therefore, an easy conclusion which can be drawn from the above observations is that our so-called "reality" is nothing more than a superfluous attribute that is attached to specific domains of reasoning, each of which is "artificial" in the sense that it is formulated out of a set of arbitrary symbols and their relations.
Yet, here is another question which naturally arises out of the mind of pretty much any metaphysical thinker. Is there any entity that is always "real" regardless of the context in which it is being conceived? In other words, does it make any sense to assert that there is a concept which can be defined as a constituent of "absolute reality", which encompasses the whole of our boundary of reasoning?
In order to answer such a fundamental inquiry, one must endeavor to identify the ultimate origin of reason itself, for reason is the source of our definition of what is real and what is unreal. One may disagree with this presupposition and say that not everything can be explained rationally and therefore reason-based thought process alone cannot possibly capture the full picture of what reality is, but I would argue that I am talking about "defining" reality here instead of trying to tell what it is based upon a mere assortment of unstructured impressions.
Such preference is justified under the premise that the words I am writing here are meant to be a discourse and not a dry narration of somebody's daydream. Their purpose is to prove something, and to prove something is to draw conclusions from a set of clearly defined pieces of logic. If somebody is so "creative" as to suggest that not everything can be explained in terms of "boring math equations", I will say that such a line of argument is completely off-topic here.
If we assume for now that the idea of reality itself has its context-free origin, it will be imperative that at least a segment of our faculty of reasoning ought not to be completely free from the necessity to classify units of definition into two disjoint categories: "real" and "unreal". The main reason behind this statement is that, if such a dichotomy is independent from any specific context, it must reside directly under the superset of all conceivable contexts.
Will it ever be feasible, then, to come up with a source of definition which does not depend upon any preceding set of definitions (nor contexts which contain them), yet still manages to yield a predicate which can either be evaluated as "real" or "unreal"?
In order to discover such an underlying fountain of truth, one must unlearn mankind's already established set of worldly prejudices and only retain the bare minimum set of ideas from which one is able to conduct an activity which could be referred to as "reasoning".
(Will be continued in volume 2)