"You know you're an engineer if you've ever modeled a cow as a sphere."

- Ancient engineering joke

And here's where a lot of philosophy strikes me as superfluous - it's all about the reference frame.

Right now, I am at rest on my couch. I am not moving, my potential energy is zero, my kinetic energy is zero. Ahhh - but the couch breaks! Suddenly I am no longer at rest, for my potential energy derived from being above the floor unsupported transforms into kinetic energy hurtling my ass the fifteen inches it can go (*you know you're an engineer if you've modeled a couch as the void*) at 29 feet per second per second.

Or, we take out the building. Now I'm dropping 30 feet at 29f/s^2. My reference frame changes. And hey - there could be an alien on an asteroid with a reference energy of zero, sitting on his couch, that suddenly hurtles into Los Angeles with a reference energy of zero, and suddenly all sorts of kinetic energy erupts out of the nothing because the reference frame of the discussion is the zero between two very impressive vectors.

So which is real? Well, it's all real, but none of that shit matters at the moment. I'm at rest on the couch and if I concern myself with the other reference frames, I can have a nice flight of fancy (or terror, depending on one's attitude) but I cannot suddenly plummet to the earth through sheer force of will. Further, my reference frame is egocentric only out of habit. Does the bullet hit me or do I hit the bullet? The math is easier if I hit the bullet, actually, but from my perspective I'm much more interested in a me-centric analysis. That doesn't make it more valid, it makes it more selfish.

So is this a dream? Is this a simulation? What is real? Well, okay, yeah, we can go there. But what's the point? If it's all a dream, I have to play by the rules of this dream. If it's all a simulation, I have to play by the rules of this simulation. The morals I abide by are the ones that function here, regardless of where "here" is.

So until Deus ex Machinas his way out here, my "real" is as "real" as "real" gets, regardless of how fake it is from other reference frames. And should I suddenly find myself in need of a new reference frame to solve the equation, I'll do my best to model the situation to give me an answer. Maybe I'll even find the centroid of the cow since the spherical model tends to make it too simplistic.

TL;DR: Nihilism