Reality is what we mentally create through experience.

I am glad that you posted I was worried you were going to forfeit and that was no fun for me the last time it happened. I am thankful for the definitions, but the problem is that this is an attempt to define a new paradigm of all these things. Not that that necessarily invalidates them, but that is why I won't spend much time on them. As far as the definition of real goes I will talk about that for a moment. Things that are ostensible and nominal I hope I have not used. The main jab of this definition is, if I understand it correctly, linked to the presentations of the phantom limb and the optical illusion, which I discuss later, but would now like to prime by stating that as far as the pain of a missing limb is concerned it is by no means nominal only (the patient feels it and produces the biological symptoms of pain) and the optical illusion though admittedly, by this definition, is not moving the result is an abstraction of motion which was intended. The actual argument that you make is that reality can encompass no new things (I hope that isn't over simplified) if it is based on past experiences, but the problem with that is that past experiences themselves are an ever growing group (i.e. what just happened when you read the last sentence is now a past experience). The result is that my idea actually explains the production and discovery of new things as the raw materials of reality grow over time (I am not suggesting though that what we didn't know about didn't exist before, but rather I am suggesting that it has become more visible as experience accumulates through history and writing). As for imagination it is not exactly like reality, but is very similar to it. When we read a book not only do we build the reality inside it, but afterwards what we built is like an experience that we extrapolate lessons or facts from (for this is true even of technical non-fictional writing) it later. To say that imagination is dislike reality without qualifying this statement makes reading, writing, art, and music useless to any individual even on practical level (a diagram of something, a mathematical model etc. all have no meaning without the use of the mind to build these imaginary realities or experiences). I am not concerned with the fact that my opponent has not answered the questions of space and perception, but what causes me some alarm is his not acknowledging my, perhaps too briefly and ineffectually stated, arguments about the phantom limb and the optical illusion (in the comments on the illusion). As far as the phantom Limb goes I state again that the pain they feel is a real thing. How could this be created save by a mental construct? The fact that they under go physical as well as mental therapy is evidence of the self-creation by mental understanding that goes on. Here I would like to use Searle's Chinese Room in a semi-non-conventional way to express better how the optical illusion functions. The set-up is that some one creates a computer that can write in perfect conversational Chinese (i.e. it can pass a Turing test 100% of the time convincingly) and places it in a room where people write to it and it writes back. Then we say that instead of a computer we have a man with all the books, pencils, pens, paper, etc. that are needed for him to reproduce the same algorithm and that the man dose not understand an iota of Chinese. The final question is: where is the mind that understands Chinese? I propose that the mind that understands Chinese made the algorithm and that it passed along process of doing this without giving the interior knowledge to do so. So is the optical illusion; to the question, "where is the movement?" I posit that it exists in the creator's mind and he used this to pass it to our minds through his creation. He has effectively used reality to communicate a "non-real" idea through a medium of reality, or, in other words, he created a reality from the abstractions of his mind that we all experienced. I have lost almost all structure here and am going to clarify the statements I made about imagination. The imagination is required for basic understanding when reading any material. The creation of a mental construct of reality happens even in the least imaginative papers. The fact that we go to school to before actually operating on people is good evidence that these mental constructs can inform us as to the reality of things when coupled with the experiences we have (again remember that this is not inconsistent with my idea which relies on both these things). In the previously hinted at example of medical school there is both mental construction through study and perfection through the, eventual, practice of the science. Mark, however, that the mental constructs come before (in the prerequisites and initial training) the action implying that such constructs are the basis of an enhanced experience.