So not having the tool to measure something makes it not part of reality? Makes me think of how our worldview every now and then expands, from geocentrism to heliocentrism and so on. Surely the earth revolved around the sun before it was understood to be that way. And surely our experiences are real even though our minds are isolated from eachother. In Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, the devil told Adrian roughly this: Your brain is sick, yes you are hallucinating me, but that doesn't make me less real.
You're confusing the words "true" and "real". It is true that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and the orbit is also real. That 2+2=4 is true, but it's not real. The electrochemical activity in your brain is real, and the fact that it causes your subjective experience is true. Your subjective experience is true to you (you're experiencing the things you're experiencing), but it's unknown to me. It is also of unknown realness, i.e. of unknown correlation with reality. You can see things that are not real and not see things that are real, or feel things for no reason (e.g. intense fear not because there's something frightening, but because there's a drug in your body).
Thank you for your reply. In most ways I agree, in all ways actually. But my point is that the term "real" doesn't mean strictly material. The picture I'm painting is to bring away "reality" from strictly material and external. I do this to argue with the point above your original reply, saying that the scientific method is incompatible with these things. We're in philosophical territory and I won't pretend to be an expert but I think we will have plenty of tools to bring the scientific method even to our most personal experiences.
Which is why I originally asked what was meant by "real". From a consensus-realistic perspective, things that are purely subjective and non-material things are definitely less real or at least less-obviously real. From a solipsistic perspective the only real thing is one's subjective experience, and everything else is in doubt. But most people are not capable of consistently maintaining a solipsistic perspective, so I didn't assume that's what was meant.
Even the solipsistic must surely realise that there are simulacrum of external reality that can be dismissed as, say, 'it was just a shiver' rather than being a 'real' part of one's subjective experience.
Reflecting, I guess I'm questioning if the solipsist really believes all that which is put before their minds is really "experience", per se.
Necessarily, that which is experienced is experienced. The belief that one merely thinks is experiencing something but is actually mistaken is untenable. The question is whether the feeling of these keys under what I think are my fingers is caused by something that exists more or less as I perceive it, rather than some contrived hallucination or an illusion. But I'm not able to doubt that I am in fact feeling what I feel. Besides mathematical truths, it's all I can be certain of.
Fun fact: unlike linear motion, rotation is absolute. Accepting that the Earth does not rotate would require us to accept that distant galaxies circle it at tangential speeds many times greater than c. It can be logically consistent, but we would have to come up with an explanation for why the entire universe rotates around a particular object, and for why the speed of light has an exemption for this particular type of motion and none other.
