I think it's too easy to get sidetracked with the science aspect and not pay enough attention to the language/philosophy aspect. I have 2 olives in my martini

I think it's too easy to get sidetracked with the science aspect and not pay enough attention to the language/philosophy aspect. I have 2 olives in my martini glass right now. I can see, feel, smell, and even hear them if I throw them. So we say they are "real" and it makes perfect sense for 99.9999% of our lives. But "real" has a very specific meaning that we never think about. Then consider subatomic particles. You can't feel or see them. But the theories that describe their behavior have gone undefeated for decades. But we'll never be able to see one, so does it exist? 2 more examples: does something exist after it passes the event horizon of a black hole?you can see it, frozen and red shifted. But you can't be guaranteed that if you crossed over that you could touch it. You might get spaghettified and die but there's no way to report this experience to anyone before the event horizon. there's effectively two separate realities. Next, consider 2 identical marbles mixed up in a box. If you measure both of them before and after shaking, you could still tell them apart because at the macro level, nothing is perfectly identical. One marble will have more protons or defects or higher temperature, etc. But now try that with 2 atoms or molecules in a box. If you shake it, and discard any measurements on the box like vibration, you absolutely can not tell them apart. They could have disappeared and regenerated for all we know. My point is that "real" isn't the only concept that leans heavily on language. But also the concept of "same" and for the black hole, even seeing it isn't enough to establish proof that what you're seeing is real. Even though it's the gold standard we constantly rely on. (Not to mention that the very perception of "sight" itself is just subatomic particles hitting a detector! Which is then carried by an EM field to the brain. But I'll stop there).