What would happen if someone discovered the world wasn't real?

According to Rene Descartes, I must be a living entity (I think, therefore I am). If everything is an illusion though, I imagine it would only be a trivial matter that most of the world would not believe, and it would only bear any meaning for metaphysics academics.

We must always act according to the most likely scenario. If there is a chance I will win a raffle, I will be more likely to buy a ticket than if I know it has been rigged against me. As far as we know what we observe is ‘real’, so we must work within the confines of the construct we call ‘reality’. No other course of action makes sense. The way people live and survive right now has proven quite successful, so there is no reason to make drastic changes in the light of some academic discovery unless it is proven to be beneficial to do so.

If it could be definitively shown that the world was not real… I think people would generally ignore it. I don’t think people would be able to cope with it and as a result, most people would find some reason to keep acting as they do.

We’d all go >>> poof. <<<

Or, more likely, the discoverer of this truth wouldn’t be able to get any but a few to listen to him. He’d probably be declared a nut case and locked up. Who knows how many other truths have been lost to us that way?

@Jeruba 17.
18 if you count that thing about the aliens.

we’ll find out if and when it happens.

They would eventually have to break the bad news to the rest of us and eventually reveal that we’re all just part of the Matrix. There is no spoon and unfortunately, no Neo either so it looks like Agent Smith and his cronies might actually get their way. Bleak. Very bleak.

So things would be unreal as well as pointless. Not much of a leap.

@Bluefreedom So are you telling me I swallowed that Red Pill for nothing? Dang thing was huge and tasted like poo!

How much have you been smoking?

I already feel that the world is illusionary in the sense that what we see is NOT what necessarily is.

If we see only the bad and negative we get bad and negative, if we see the good and noble we get good and noble.

This is a truth, therefore the world is a mirror as is everything, everyone else, and reflects back to us exactly what we are projecting outwards.

Transcending the illusion is nothing new, the old ‘be in the world but not of it’ mantra.

There is no one absolute reality, so in this sense the world is a place of multi-dimensional reality and no two relalties, like no two snowflakes are exactly the same.

Laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone.

‘Reality’ is all perception based and non-static dependent on the eyes that are looking, the mind that is perceiving and everyone knows that the only thing that ever really changes is one’s outlook, attitude, perception. Seeing with new eye’s changes the mundane and the ordinary to the magical and extraordinary!

The saying ‘familiarity breeds contempt might better be phrased as ’ familiarity breeds apathy’.

Everything shiny loses it’s patina, and this is the scourge of mankind, the never ending quest for something lasting, which cannot be found in the world of form but onlyin the ethereal.

I don’t think it would change much of anything. Whether existence is real or not, I’d still have to pay my damn bills.

I love that you asked this! GQ!
And I love these thought provoking answers!!

Anais Nin says, “We don’t see the world as it is, we see the world as we are.”

It’s time for another MATRIX 4 movie would come out that went even deeper down the rabbit hole and out the backdoor!!!

We can’t understand the ” ? ” using our matrix trained software that has been programmed with the Love/Fear duality jamming control default program that we currently are running on. The light is so bright it blinds us from knowing. To be able to see beyond the 3D world, we need to not use our 3D eyes and 3D brain.

And those parts might be sold separately with some assembly required, and not available at Wallmart!!!

These are the kinds of questions that make me zone out while riding my bike so that I end up crashing into telephone poles. These are also the kind of questions that I feel like I can almost come up with answer to in my head, but in such an abstract way that if I sit down and try to write it out I really can’t.

Descartes claimed that the only a priori knowledge he could have was that he existed. Hume, on the other hand (and I’m not exactly sure how he arrived at this conclusion—I’ll have to reread his Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding) thought that our idea that we have “selves” is flawed, and that we are simply “bundles” of sensations, which simply creates the illusion of a self. Basically he argued that if you strip away the qualities of a self, there’s no underlying essence called a self, therefore the self is simply the group of qualities.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure I exist. Even a solipsist would probably agree that they exist, even though they might not be sure in what form. Even if my selfhood is an illusion, as Hume suggests, and I am merely a bundle of perceptions and sensations, then that’s fine with me too; I’m quite happy with my bundle.

There was a time when I could sit on my bed and stare at the wall until the objects around me lost their names and became just their forms. I haven’t had the happen to me in a while, but it’s a really weird experience, and it makes you realize how confined your ability to think is. Brains store information in very specific ways, and the way we think is dictated by the design of the brain. That kind of creeps me out.

I dunno. I don’t know anything. I only know what I feel and perceive, and the only knowledge I get from that is that I feel a certain way and perceive certain things.

I dunno.

The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau. I haven’t seen the movie, but the book (as easy a read as it may be) may have been written along the same lines as your question.