ExpectantlyIronic,
MG: Anything made intelligible is going to have to be done so through interpretation, and if an experience hasn't been made intelligible then it hasn't really been experienced. There would be no memory of it or anything.
EI: I was using the term 'interpretation' to mean conscious interpretation exclusively.
You can't do that; it's not fair.
Although, you may note that dreams would be included in the things considered the "bare bones of reality" by the way I described it. That seems rather absurd.
I don't understand what you're saying here, actually. You said
"I'd say it's whatever I experience without interpretation. As, really, isn't "interpretation" just another label for a seemingly related group of experience anyways?" Are you saying that there is a world beyond our experiences (the state of affairs), and that dreams are missing this world?
Thus, I'm going to revert back to my old whimsical definition of "reality" and say it's just the bullet that kills you regardless of what you think. That pretty much gets my point across, and ontology can be damned.
Well, getting killed goes along with the bullet. If the bullet hit you in the head and you got killed instantly then getting killed would never come into existence. Someone else may have witnessed the bullet and the killing, but that doesn't mean it has escaped consciousness. If you got hit by a stray bullet and killed instantly with no one around then the killing wouldn't exist. Someone may find you later and deduce that you have been killed, but until then it would be nothing.
MG: forming a coherent world-view is a very valuable activity for a rational person
EI: I wouldn't disagree. I'd also note that such only holds true for a person who might find themselves in a social situation. Coherence doesn't matter a lick for private understanding. For private purposes the rational person only needs to have a world-view that corresponds to the way the world really is, was, or will be. Or, at least, to the degree that a human can come by such understanding.
I was thinking when you said "coherence" you meant "logically consistent". That's how I always use the term.
MG: You want all of your experiences to be rationally related to each other because that's how they are in reality.
EI: Can you give me an example of experiences that aren't rationally related to each other? I don't know that I get what you're saying here.
When someone compartmentalizes things and tries to prevent one area of thought from influencing another then I would consider that area to be rationally unrelated to other areas. Like when there's a death of a child in a family and the parents leave their room in the exact same state it was in, that would be a manifestation of a case of compartmentalizing something and trying to protect it from reality. They want to preserve as much of the child as they can while the reasonable course, the course of 100% rationally related experiences, would be to clear out the room and totally forget about the now nonexistent child, but humans aren't very good at that, obviously.
