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Snowyowl comments on Were atoms real? - Less Wrong
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When I hear "Are atoms real?" I imagine zooming in on some object until I can see an atom. Could they just be asking if, given the technology required to magnify/compress/measure some form of sensory input about something, it would make some kind of intuitive sense to a human brain?
Like, if you could stand above the solar system and look down on it, the Copernican model would say it makes more sense to hover over the Sun and imagine everything rotating around you than to hover over the Earth and imagine everything rotating around you while pirouetting .
Similarly, if I could put "drops of something" in the luminaferous aether and watch it eddy and swirl, I'd be convinced its real. That something doesn't exist, but that's only evidence of its non-reality.
If something "really" happened, I would expect that, if I had a time machine that didn't cause paradoxes and whatnot, I could go back in time and watch it.
Though, this version of "real" doesn't really account for questions about more abstract things, like "Is this love for real?" or "Is free will real?". (Though, free will is a disguised query for something else, but digressing...)
Interesting idea, but it seems a little badly-defined. Some aspects of quantum physics don't seem intuitive to me (mostly small details). Does that mean that those details aren't "real" to me, but they are real to other people?
In a nutshell, yes. That doesn't make reality subjective, it just means that different people hold different things as real. I'm pretty sure that given a long enough conversation, people would agree on if something is real enough.
To clarify the definition, I'm basically reading the question and post as "Are electrons real objects?" Most of the examples given were about objects, or easily observable things about them, like what's going around what. Its less of a question of being intuitive, and more one of whether it would be observable given basically magical senses.
This dissolution doesn't really hold that well for theories. I can be convinced that things are true (like the early chemists who see atoms are yielding good predictions, but not necessarily existing), but without knowing if they're real.
Something that illustrates this split nicely is the question "Is Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle real?" Its certainly true, you can't be sure of a particle's position and momentum because as you shorten a photon's wavelength enough to make the position more certain, you increase the photon's energy and make the particle's momentum less certain.
When I learned that, I felt jiffed. "Hey!" my reality-asserting subroutines complained to me "That's not uncertain at all! It happens to be that in real life you can't be certain, but if I could observe a particle without light or interacting with it any way using some magical impossible version of sight, it would totally have a definite momentum and position!"
It wasn't until the teacher demonstrated the unit rearrangement to phrase it in terms of energy and time, and talk about particles going through things that they didn't have the energy to penetrate for me to be convinced that it was real, and not just an accurate theory.