One position on this question is called solipsism. There is I and then there is the world and all the people, etc., in it that I create. The whole of what one experiences is an advanced form of dream. If the universe were like this, I probably ought to find it behaving according to the nature of my being. You, who don't really exist in this world, would be unlikely to come up with any ways of thinking that were not my ways of thinking.
Another position was taken by the ancient philosophers called Daoists. Their position seems to me to be very similar to the early 20th century physicists who gathered around Niels Bohr. Rather than step into the limelight of the physicists I will stick to the Daoists.
According to them there is a reality that humans attempt to conceptualize. However. it does not come broken down into spare parts such as we might collect to assemble an automobile. Instead it is a continuum. A rough analog for the Dao would be one of the old Lava lamps. Run the simulation.
Note that there are no visible discontinuities in the stuff within the bulb, and that the differently colored volumes are continuously moving and changing outline. That is somewhat the way the Daoists explain the birth, growth, and death of any creature as a human being, but also all other things. (The rates of change may all be different.) Like a subject being tested by the use of a Rorschach test, humans (and other creatures) may look at the same volume in space and see different things.
One "thing" shades off into another "thing," and creatures reach out and decide that this blotch is a potato and that blotch is a lichen. Sometimes humans detect where they have made a bad choice in "drawing lines around some kind of thing" and giving it a name. It turns out that a lichen is made up of two kinds of symbiotic creatures.
Jumping rapidly ahead, humans generally do a good job of picking out salient volumes in their environment and naming them so that they can think about them. But sometimes they mess up. They may draw a special kind of line around a woman and call her a witch, or draw a similar kind of line around a man and call him a warlock. They may then burn them at the stake. Most modern people whom society charges with dealing with those who march down the street staring wildly at people and muttering imprecations would probably have drawn lines around each of them and labeled them as paranoid schizophrenics, put them on some anti-psychotic meds and let them have a better life.
The Daoist believed the same thing that the people in Bohr's circle found out. Nature does what it wants, and if it doesn't fit with your ideas about how nature should, or can, behave, well, tough luck. Have a look at The Historical Development of Theory, volume 2, by Jagadish Mehra and Helmut Rechendberg, and you will find many indications that before Heisenberg wrote his "magic" paper of 1925, the whole group of them were going a bit nuts because they could not conceptualize or express as an equation what they were seeing in the lab. They were psychologically quite frazzled. Nature just wasn't cooperating, except that "we rule nature by obeying her, and that was something they had to admit to. Then they made a theory, which nobody can prove because that is the way of all theories, and the theory became one of the most thoroughly substantiated (supported by evidence) of all physics theories. So they made something by their own creative natures that is a good enough "useful fiction" that it hasn't failed us yet. That "thing," or those "things," however, are in our minds. They model, or mimic, or something like that something outside of us that we can never experience directly. If that idea is not disconbobulating, then I have failed as a writer. It's not supposed to make sense. If you don't believe me, ask Richard Feynman.
I've been teaching about Daoism since the 1970s, and never expected to be able to get beyond saying, "Well, this is the way that I put it all together. Try looking at it this way and see whether it rings true to you." Then one morning I was listening to the Diane Rehm show on NPR (I think it was). She was interviewing some lady who had suffered a stroke that wiped out the language (concept) section of her brain, and, guess what. She described experiences in which all the distinctions that conceptualization makes dropped away as her language center was progressively taken out by an embolism. She described losing the distinction between herself and the shower wall she was leaning on. She became unable to make sense of numbers and therefore had an almost impossible time getting help by way of the telephone. Everything was going back to the "lava lamp" state in which nothing was distinguishable from anything else. (Later, in recovery, her mother helped her to once again distinguish among things of different colors.) See Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight. Learn how humans experience the world when their conceptualizations fizzle into nothing.
So, to answer your question in her words, "Concepts are that by which we construct our world and by which we understand it." So what is real for us is what we conceptualize. My world is by that very fact not your world. It is the world that I construct out of (presumably) the same elements out of which you construct your world. But when I die, nothing of any great significance happens to whatever it is that I conceptualized and made into my world. (Your world is still safe. ;-)
Another position was taken by the ancient philosophers called Daoists. Their position seems to me to be very similar to the early 20th century physicists who gathered around Niels Bohr. Rather than step into the limelight of the physicists I will stick to the Daoists.
According to them there is a reality that humans attempt to conceptualize. However. it does not come broken down into spare parts such as we might collect to assemble an automobile. Instead it is a continuum. A rough analog for the Dao would be one of the old Lava lamps. Run the simulation.
Note that there are no visible discontinuities in the stuff within the bulb, and that the differently colored volumes are continuously moving and changing outline. That is somewhat the way the Daoists explain the birth, growth, and death of any creature as a human being, but also all other things. (The rates of change may all be different.) Like a subject being tested by the use of a Rorschach test, humans (and other creatures) may look at the same volume in space and see different things.
One "thing" shades off into another "thing," and creatures reach out and decide that this blotch is a potato and that blotch is a lichen. Sometimes humans detect where they have made a bad choice in "drawing lines around some kind of thing" and giving it a name. It turns out that a lichen is made up of two kinds of symbiotic creatures.
Jumping rapidly ahead, humans generally do a good job of picking out salient volumes in their environment and naming them so that they can think about them. But sometimes they mess up. They may draw a special kind of line around a woman and call her a witch, or draw a similar kind of line around a man and call him a warlock. They may then burn them at the stake. Most modern people whom society charges with dealing with those who march down the street staring wildly at people and muttering imprecations would probably have drawn lines around each of them and labeled them as paranoid schizophrenics, put them on some anti-psychotic meds and let them have a better life.
The Daoist believed the same thing that the people in Bohr's circle found out. Nature does what it wants, and if it doesn't fit with your ideas about how nature should, or can, behave, well, tough luck. Have a look at The Historical Development of Theory, volume 2, by Jagadish Mehra and Helmut Rechendberg, and you will find many indications that before Heisenberg wrote his "magic" paper of 1925, the whole group of them were going a bit nuts because they could not conceptualize or express as an equation what they were seeing in the lab. They were psychologically quite frazzled. Nature just wasn't cooperating, except that "we rule nature by obeying her, and that was something they had to admit to. Then they made a theory, which nobody can prove because that is the way of all theories, and the theory became one of the most thoroughly substantiated (supported by evidence) of all physics theories. So they made something by their own creative natures that is a good enough "useful fiction" that it hasn't failed us yet. That "thing," or those "things," however, are in our minds. They model, or mimic, or something like that something outside of us that we can never experience directly. If that idea is not disconbobulating, then I have failed as a writer. It's not supposed to make sense. If you don't believe me, ask Richard Feynman.
I've been teaching about Daoism since the 1970s, and never expected to be able to get beyond saying, "Well, this is the way that I put it all together. Try looking at it this way and see whether it rings true to you." Then one morning I was listening to the Diane Rehm show on NPR (I think it was). She was interviewing some lady who had suffered a stroke that wiped out the language (concept) section of her brain, and, guess what. She described experiences in which all the distinctions that conceptualization makes dropped away as her language center was progressively taken out by an embolism. She described losing the distinction between herself and the shower wall she was leaning on. She became unable to make sense of numbers and therefore had an almost impossible time getting help by way of the telephone. Everything was going back to the "lava lamp" state in which nothing was distinguishable from anything else. (Later, in recovery, her mother helped her to once again distinguish among things of different colors.) See Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight. Learn how humans experience the world when their conceptualizations fizzle into nothing.
So, to answer your question in her words, "Concepts are that by which we construct our world and by which we understand it." So what is real for us is what we conceptualize. My world is by that very fact not your world. It is the world that I construct out of (presumably) the same elements out of which you construct your world. But when I die, nothing of any great significance happens to whatever it is that I conceptualized and made into my world. (Your world is still safe. ;-)
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