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What is real? We know from the principle of A=A that existence itself must exist, that absolute nothingness is incoherent and therefore unreal. From that we traipse to the realisation that absolute nothingness can't be real anywhere, including inside of things where their souls should be. In other words, existence is the sum of experience for all real things must have experiences, and these real things we call, after our esteemed and big-bewigged colleague Gottfried Leibniz, monads. The canny problem arises when we think to ask where are the monads, as in, what has a monad and what doesn't? For it's clear that humans and at least the higher animals have monads. We all experience, we know that much (get stuffed, Descartes). But what about a centipede? An amoeba? My sofa? Let's do some decomposing: never mind being real, to be noticed something requires three traits. One, it must participate in Form, having a distinct shape of some kind (e.g., “chair”). Two, it must participate in Number, having a quantitative element (e.g., “this chair”). Three, it must contain some degree of Beauty, to allow the observer to care enough to notice it (e.g., “this moderately beautiful chair”). These three dimensions should be enough for us to triangulate the location of monads. Let's see if it works: since existence is the sum of experience, if something could not be experienced it could not be said to exist. In other words an unexperienced thing would not be part of the universe at all since the universe (Leibniz again) is the sum of all monads which reflect each other ad infinitum. So all real things must be beautiful to some degree. (Even the devil! Of course the devil has made it an art and a science to make himself as awful as possible, so we can put him down as the minimum of beauty. But note that he uses beautiful things to seduce us, so even he cannot put pure ugliness to use—rather that is his reward.) Ugly things are not real, then, to the degree they are ugly. Allow me a syllogism: Nothing ugly is real Brokenness is ugly Brokenness isn't real In other words, suppose we have a skeleton of a cat. A thing with number, form, and beauty—a monad! But suppose we dismantle the skeleton and throw the bones into in a random pile. What has happened? The skeleton is now broken, leaving us with this pile. Does the pile have a form? No, or rather it participates in what we might call the Form of clutter, a sort of highly extended monad. In this it has number and beauty, but a rather chaotic number and a dim beauty, more interesting than beautiful. Things with nervous systems seem to be the lower limit of extending individuality to organic things. Things without nervous systems, like amoebae, should therefore properly be akin to organic clutter, or the Form of microscopic organic matter, another extended monad. And, the sofa participates in the Form of sofa, but in a more general sense in the Form of furniture, whereby it would have its extended monad. Extended monads are monads whereby the existing masses of things have a unity: tools, furniture, infrastructure, clothing, vehicles, microscopic organic matter, clutter, various sorts of raw materials, stellar bodies, and principles. So the galaxies, no respecters of scale, share a single monad, that is the unity of their beauty, their number, and their form. So what is real? Anything beautiful is real, and such would be accompanied by number and form. And anything wholly broken is unreal, just a conflation or confusion of manifestations of monads, perhaps forming the ultimate extended monad of the Void or minimum order, minimum of beauty—the detail where the devil is lurking.

People who advocate coercion used against you and are not willing to listen to you (let alone change) are hideous sinks of time and effort. How is that not akin to harm? Get them out of your lives.

Czechslovakia, Soviet Union (arguable), Breakup of the Benelux countries, just to name a few current ones. Hi, Will 001 In my humble opinion, the USA cannot be partitioned (for now at least) for the same reason that Switzerland cannot be. The country is founded on ideological grounds, not nationalistic, historic, ethnic, genetic or lingual. These aspects play a role, sure, but they are trumped by the American Idea. If however, the Americans choose to place genetics, race, or whatever else over ideology, then partitioning is inevitable. But I think that is far from happening, despite what the alt-right and the leftists have been doing. I would be far more concerned about France and Germany in your stead.

You are wrong. You are wrong because mathematics is the science of measurement. 1 + 1 = 2 is just shorthand for 1a + 1a = 2a. We drop the a and forget about it, thinking that 1 + 1 = 2 is somehow meaningful, it isn't. 1 of nothing + 1 of nothing = 2 of nothing is a meaningless statement. You are also wrong because you think man is apart from reality. I have noticed this in almost every thread I post in though. Man does not exist apart from reality, my dude. I'm am sorry this wasn't taught to you, but tbh, that science is measurement is not really hammered home anywhere. We need science because there exists facts of reality which we can not directly measure. We can not directly measure them because we can not directly perceive them (but we can their effects). Thus, we measure them indirectly, relating them to that which we can measure directly, which is to say to that which we can directly perceive. Referring back to momentum: we can not directly measure it. We can directly measure mass, but, we can not directly measure velocity, but, we can directly measure position and time so we can indirectly measure velocity. If you want to know more, research dimensional analysis.

Measurements can be made outside of reality............ Is it that reality is outside of reality, or man is outside of reality, my dude?