Here's an Arts student kind of Question

What is actually real?

It's almost a cliche it's been asked so many times and I for one kind of ignored it and didn't give it much thought until a discussion came up in Anthropology the other day.

My opinion? I think it depends on what you class as real, is it something solid and unchanging? that you can taste, smell, touch, see and/or hear?

If that is what you define it to be, then nothing is real, anything can change at any moment. I don't mean that a dog will suddenly become a chicken, what I mean is that our perspective or belief of something can change.

For example the "Dog Biscuit" prank that was pulled by a lecturer.
He handed out biscuits to the people sitting in the front row of his class, saying they were a delicious biscuit. All the students accepted the biscuit and ate it happily, claiming that it tasted really good.
At the end of the class, the teacher revealed that the biscuits were indeed dog biscuits. Most of the students who had eaten them reacted badly and some even became instantly ill.

In this example, the biscuits themselves didn't change, our belief of what they were did. The biscuit's taste didn't change either, but they went from tasty to horrible.

Science is also another great example, ironically, because it is contantly changing and proving itself wrong.

Wrap your mind around that one and let me know what you think.\

Shanti