Does it matter if nothing’s real?

Dakota asked:

Does anything matter if nothing’s real?

Answer by Shaun Williamson

If nothing is real then you aren’t real and your question isn’t real. I am not real, the internet isn’t real and my answer isn’t real. Fortunately all these things are real so they all matter. What we need to explain to ourselves is how thinking philosophically can tempt us to think that everything might not be real.

Shaun Williamson developed the Ask a Philosopher cgi script question.pl. He did his postgraduate studies on the philosophy of Wittgenstein.