This post is an extension of the question, "What does one have to believe to be a red pill?".

Let me raise some philosophical questions, and allow the red pill and the blue pill people to answer them.

Is reality real? *Let us first think of Platos cave. Imagine for a moment you spend your entire life in a cave with two other people, watching a movie about the world over and over again. One day, you escape the cave, and realize that the world is different than the film. You go back into the cave, and you are unable to convince your peers, who kill you out of anger. This little stories raises the issue of how we validate our experiences. There are many different ways people try to validate our experience, positivists believe that to validate your experiences you require evidence from your senses, math, and or logic.

*TRP is a positivist dogmatic. It refutes empirical evidence from scientists and senses to prove it's points. However, there are some major issues with this stance: How can we trust our experiences and our senses, when we know our senses aren't always right? The solution to this is to have faith in other's experiences, to seek confirmation from them. There is no real, logical answer to solve this problem. This problem has been debated over and over for hundreds of years. However, one must acknowledge that positivism cannot solve everything because of the dishonest nature of our senses.

Nature vs Nurture

*Another basis of TRP beliefs is the belief in nature venus nurture. Due to ethnics, we cannot prove that it is completely one way or the other because this would require raising a human in inhumane conditions (without influence from society) to determine the answer. Wikipedia describes one positivist stance: Scientific approaches also seek to break down variance beyond these two categories of nature and nurture. Thus rather than "nurture", behavior geneticists distinguish shared family factors (i.e., those shared by siblings, making them more similar) and nonshared factors (i.e., those that uniquely affect individuals, making siblings different). To express the portion of the variance due to the "nature" component, behavioral geneticists generally refer to the heritability of a trait. Again, we find ourselves with the issue of the validity of experience. It is ultimately impossible to determine if it is nature vs nurture in science, it is like asking if the width or length of a triangle contributes more to its area.

Ultimately, I reside to the opinion against positivism and against the "nature" side of nature vs nurture. As an undergrad studying to be a psychoanalyst, I believe we are born with instincts but we are highly influenced by society and can be changed from it or to it. I am an idealist and a materialist at the same time, on one level, reality is highly subjective because we must relay on faith on others to validate our personal experiences given the nature of our senses and how they warp reality. On another level, we can infer that the world we experience through our senses is a material world (at least that is how my personal senses depict reality, I am unable to say that extends to anyone else).

I hope other red and blue pillers can suggest their answers to these inquiries, and what they believe to be right, so we can compare and deduce the root of the differences between the blue pill and the red pill.