When you produce a thread or link one that you care about feel free to invite me. You seem to care heavily about the philosophy of language. I recommended making a topic there.
Note: Dictionaries already represent the social equivalent of shared grounded truth using words. When you ask someone for their personal definition, it can be construed as saying that they aren’t using the word properly even if that isn’t your intention behind it.
When you watch a film, step into a modern video game, or immerse yourself in VR, you temporarily shed your baseline self. For the duration of that session, your focus, identity, and reactions belong entirely to that world. Physics shows a similar relativity through time dilation: one observer’s year can be another’s few minutes depending on their frame of reference.
When you pair these two concepts—immersive identity and relative time—an entire lifetime of experiences can unfold in what an outside observer considers a mere fraction of a second. This is why traditions like Advaita Vedanta view the material world as maya, an illusion. From this perspective, the meaning you assign to your physical life is transposed no differently than the weight you give to your avatar in a virtual world.
As for how much meaning is applied, it entirely depends on where the stakes reside. To a professional gamer, their competitive avatar and digital ecosystem carry more weight than their physical self because their livelihood and social reality exist within that space. Conversely, a professional pilot can log hundreds of hours in a flight simulator to master the craft, but regulatory standards still demand real-world cockpit time to earn a license.
Whether a simulation becomes “nature” depends upon numerous factors. One key one being is it alive?
If you have enough interest and curiosity then you will produce a thread. When you do feel free to invite me.
Okay.
Here is another prime example of making an Assumption, based on their own personal Past Experience, only, or what I call APE-thinking.
Now, if absolutely has construed that when I ask someone for their personal definition that I am saying that they are not using the word “properly”, then this could not be any further from the actual Truth.
To me, there is NO “properly” with regard to how words are used or defined.
There is, however, a Right way to use and define words, which becomes known when that usage and definition fit in perfectly with each other in the G.U.T.O.E. But as dictionaries demonstrate and prove, there is NO “properly” with regard to how words are used and defined.
If absolutely anyone has enough interest or curiosity, we can ‘look into’ and discuss this as well.
We can also discuss this and find out what the actual irrefutable Truth is exactly, instead of sharing and spreading these types of presumed truths.
A conversation can have the same effect. One can listen to another tell a story and be lost to ourselves.
The problem perhaps with this argument is that it conflates the relativity of our experience with the unreality of reality itself. Time dilation shows that different observers can experience different amounts of elapsed time; it does not show that time, events or the physical world are illusory. Nor does the fact that we experience the world through perception establish that our lives are equivalent to the experience of an avatar in a virtual world. The move from an observation about physics to the conclusion that the material world is maya seem more like a metaphysical assertion.
Sometimes when I go to sleep I wake up a few seconds later only to discover that it’s actually nine hours later. Other times I go to bed and feel as though I have slept for 8 hours, only to find out that a mere 60 minutes have gone by. Phenomenologists might argue that reality is not an illusion, but that our experience of it is temporally structured, shaped by expectation, and therefore never simply a transparent representation of the world. Perhaps we need to get real about reality. 
Sounds like you need a time cop. You have no idea how many media producers have stolen my time after watching their broadcast. I want my two hours back!
What do you mean by real about reality if you’re okay with sharing?
The Symbol Grounding Problem is what this argument is all about and directly targets the assumption that an avatar’s existence in a virtual world is equivalent to human existence in the physical world. I’ll tag you for my next post in case you want to contribute anything. I’ve already gone over a lot of points regarding this in that thread.
Done and I tagged you as requested.
On the fly, I guess I might take more of an enactivist view of reality. Reality is not a fixed world existing independently of us, but something that emerges through the ongoing interaction between living beings and their environments. But reality also contains non negotiables like needing to eat and drink and not being able to fly or be invulnerable to injury.
Interesting, you’ll like a study then that I just posted. I’ll tag you as well for that topic.
The study shows that non-negotiables of the physical environment set the structural boundary conditions, while the brain’s directional wave-tuning acts as the engine that transforms those raw physical constraints into a meaningful, navigable reality.
You are a tedious gaslighting troll. That is the last thing you’ll ever hear from me.
I am not sure I ‘requested’ anything, but I look forward to a discussion and will look for the thread or the post you tagged me at.
Okay…
I meant for the same chemical structure. That’s why I used the banana essence as an example. Nature does not make banana essence out of petroleum. Humans do. But the resulting chemical structure is the same as in nature. One is artificial, the other natural.
Easy to claim but apparently impossible to support.
A word can have a clear definition even if it applies to everything and fails to distinguish one thing from another.
Yet the process is sourced in nature.
Like the “flying pig” - to see a pig fly, would be unusual but we couldn’t truthfully say “unnatural”
We are best not to conflate “does not naturally exist in nature” as being “unnatural” because - even man-made - these things by consequence DO exist in nature.
Also, what this can show us is that nature (specific to what Earth produces) provides the potential for other things to be created from its raw materials as well as things which man had no hand in creating.
To suggest, or even claim that things humans create are unnatural appears to be overreaching resulting in a type of demonising of human existence…as if we are (as the saying goes) “parasites”…it is unhelpful…
That’s why in my first post, I mentioned specifically that unnatural or artificial is a human label because going back to my example of artificially made banana essence, all are found in nature, just not the process which was formulated by humans that the essence can be created from petroleum.
An example, rather than a declaration, might be useful here. The word ‘de-fine’ means to ‘make finite’, to specify something to which the word applies. If ‘natural’ simply comes to mean ‘everything that can happen’, then it is a meaningless term.
It also ought to be considered what ‘natural’ was intended to demarcate in the first place. Two geneaologies come to mind: (1) natural as opposed to supernatural or metaphysical (2) natural as opposed to artificial, man-made or manufactured.
SO you are not arguing that there is anything unnatural - just different but natural processes.
The word “everything” would be the most appropriate example.
Probably no more meaningless than the word “everything”…
When we make a phrase (a word string) - in this case “Everything that can happen is Natural”, the word “natural” retains meaning.
These are concepts which derived through nature (the existence of human beings and how they came to be through natural processes) and can be explained in that light. Nature is. Supernaturalist words invented through subsequent efforts to explain the existence of nature don’t take precedence over nature/natural processes. They are gap fillers designed through ignorance rather than through knowledge. The invention of such force demarcation where none is actually necessary.