The Real Dream

Zukustious

I've just been thinking about reality recently. I was also thinking of sleep at the same time and how my dreams seem not to make sense. They are all just random images/sounds to me.

Anyway, I was wondering if "this" is the dream. What we know as reality. Every time we think we are in reality, we are really asleep. I thought about this a lot and it started to make sense.

My belief for this is that dreams don't seem to make sense. That might be because they are more complicated than what we know as reality, and our minds may not be able to fully percieve it.

We go to sleep to recharge ourselves right? We only sleep for eight hours every day. Maybe we really sleep for sixteen hours every day because the other reality is very hard on our minds to comprehend it and we need more time to rest.

It kinds of makes sense. It's something to think about. The more complicated reality is, to me, more likely to be the real one.

Koopa

pointless to argue for or against anything unless there is some information to begin with (aka 'facts').

the only reason i cant argue that the earth is on the back of a giant turtle, is because ive accepted that NASA etc are not all lying about the photos of earth from space, so we have "facts" which show us that we're definitely not on the back of a giant turtle.. if we lived in the stone age, you could argue that we live on a giant turtle, and noone could disprove you.. it wouldnt make you correct though.

DadaKopf

William James had a good answer to your question: we know we're not dreaming because dreams are crazy and unpredictable. 'Reality' on the other hand feels more real. Simple.

'Facts' are different: they operate on different levels but most work on the basis that they just tend to work really well in a particular time frame.

Kell

Originally posted by DadaKopf
we know we're not dreaming because dreams are crazy and unpredictable. 'Reality' on the other hand feels more real. Simple.

I would tend to disagree. I for one cant say that reality is easy nor would I say could most people. Reality nearly always represents a struggle and a compromise of some description. Life is crazy and unpredictable. Take a person and put them through good education, great college qualifications and they come out the far side and the arse has fallen out of their chosen profession. If thats not crazy and unpredictable I dont know what is. Or perhaps this- person spends life tending to needy and saving lives and gets toasted by a nutter in a hi-jacked bus/car/choice of transport. Crazy and unpredictable. In fact, it's that crazy that a friend of mines brother was killed by an ambulance and no I am not taking the píss.

I have considered Zukustious's point of view several times and have drawn no conclusions. I think it unfair to write off this point of view, considering that we do not definitively know the exact mechanics of the brain and how many levels it operates on.

K-

DeVore

I Refute It Thus!

DeV.

DadaKopf

I would tend to disagree. I for one cant say that reality is easy nor would I say could most people. Reality nearly always represents a struggle and a compromise of some description. Life is crazy and unpredictable. Take a person and put them through good education, great college qualifications and they come out the far side and the arse has fallen out of their chosen profession. If thats not crazy and unpredictable I dont know what is. Or perhaps this- person spends life tending to needy and saving lives and gets toasted by a nutter in a hi-jacked bus/car/choice of transport. Crazy and unpredictable. In fact, it's that crazy that a friend of mines brother was killed by an ambulance and no I am not taking the píss.

I have considered Zukustious's point of view several times and have drawn no conclusions. I think it unfair to write off this point of view, considering that we do not definitively know the exact mechanics of the brain and how many levels it operates on.

First off, that view was William James’ view, not mine. Nonetheless, I think its deceptive simplicity is its strength. James wrote over 100 years ago and was one of the first philosophers to espouse what we would now call a psychological theory of mind. What your reply seems not to include is the historical setting, the centuries of philosophical nonsense that just had us going around in circles.

Take the most famous philosopher who asked the question “How do we know we’re not dreaming?”, Descartes. He attempted to explain existence mathematically (i.e. purely rationally) by utilising geometry, which he himself invented. As a mathematician, he tried to find a first axiom from which he could explain things like existence, connection with the outside world, certain knowledge and consciousness. His first axiom was “I think, therefore I am”. That’s fine but he therefore inferred that existence depends on having a soul composed of a substance that thinks. He also inferred that physical existence and human existence are separate so he therefore had to explain how mind is linked to the material world. He had various biological explanations, the most important of which was the role of the pituitary gland which was the hub where mind/will and body interacted. But he still didn’t answer the question. If mind and material world are isolated from each other, if there’s no explicable causal interrelationship between these two, then mind is just some free-floating soul which may as well be dreaming because it hasn’t access to certain knowledge of the material world. Descartes’ solution amounted to saying that we have access to the world because God tells us about it; since God is perfect, and lying is a form of imperfection, God wouldn’t lie to us therefore what we see is really what we get. Any amateur logician can tell you, though, that while Descartes’ theory may be internally logically valid, his assumptions are groundless which means his theory is invalid. As philosophical enquiry went on over the centuries, things became even more abstract as subsequent thinkers refused to refute the existence of God and the soul.

Descartes dominated philosophy up until the 19th century because all metaphysical theories’ starting point was the self-evidence of the existence of mind – the task of philosophy was to bridge the chasm between mind and world.

Empiricism claimed that knowledge relied only on the special way that the mind structures sense data so that it makes sense to us; David Hume said that the real world may be one-dimensional but our mind, because of its structure, made it look three-dimensional to us. The problem was that it didn’t infer any direct access to the world – our mind was still an abstract entity which simply processed random information in a shape that was intelligible to each individual but there was no proof of how or from where that information was arriving. Humes’ theory simply did not discriminate between a conscious and an unconscious state – everything was crazy. However, empiricism later re-emerged as pragmatism, of which William James was a chief exponent.

Then Romanticism came on the scene: Kant tried to reconcile Hume’s subjectivism with Decartes’ and Leibniz’s rationalism. He had the same problem; the mind retreated even further from the world in Kant’s theory. In fact it retreated so much so that subsequent reinterpretations by the Romantic philosophers like Fichte and Schopenhauer effectively gave up on finding any connection with the material world and said that everything is mind – therefore, as one interpretation may suggest, everything is a dream. So by the time William James was writing, he was fighting against the philosophy of G.F.W. Hegel (in a way, we’re still fighting against this towering giant of Western culture). It would be like if someone came along today and claimed that Darwin was completely wrong.

James broke with tradition. Like Marx, he flipped metaphysics on its head. He took material existence, not mind, as the starting point. This meant that mind, if not entirely materially composed, functioned as a result of biological operations. He effectively equated the mind to the world so by radically altering the question and radically simplifying the argument, he forced the previous centuries’ philosophical theories into the dunny. Clearly, Kant and Hegel said a lot more than just stuff about dreaming and crap, which is why they’re still so relevant today, but it certainly overcame the previous centuries’ irreconcilable dichotomy.

Basically, James was extremely pragmatic about these questions. The mind was explained as a bundle of desires, wants, dispositions and so on – like, when we’re hungry, we want food; when we’re horny, we want sex; when we look at roadkill we feel sick, or sad or excited. Like Freud, the vital element to the question about whether we’re dreaming or not is quite Freudian: it depends on the overall feeling or quality of our wish fulfilments. It also returns to Hume’s empiricism: central to Hume’s theory was ‘contiguity’. For example, how do we know that when we leave a room, we know that the room will still exist when we go back in? Well, we do it once and we gamble that it’ll happen again – things eventually make sense because they become habitual. If, for example, we’re born a blank slate (which is an empiricist and a social-psychological tenet) from birth, we’re always already building up little theories for ourselves as to how the world works. We walk in and out of doors all the time so, most of the time, we know by experience that (1) the room will still be there when we walk out of it and (2) we know what’s going to be at the other side of that door. So the quality of our wish fulfilments is such that they just ‘make sense’ – the idea we have of the result of our thought or action is intelligible to us, even if we don’t get what we want. They follow a perceivable logic. We know we’re not dreaming because dreams usually tend to defy these logics. I mean, walking out of your kitchen and ending up in Umm Qasr is clearly crazy unless you live in Umm Qasr and can explain how you got there. Obviously things can go wrong, like scizophrenia, and diseases like this still pose a challenge but schizophrenic hallucinations can do later become known to the schizoid as visions when they come out of an episode and their hallucinatory state doesn’t tally with the overwhelming weight of reality.

Now, when I made that initial post, I accept that I was being very glib but I hope that by now it’s making more sense. James reframed the question by adopting a materialist starting point, thereby overcoming history’s mistakes, and rescuing the sensible simplicity of Hume’s original 17th century theory.

Basically, reality feels different. I've come full circle.

Zukustious

You know, there's a reason I put this thread in humanities. It's because it is not a scientific theory. They can be disputed, but this is an opinion. If it was a scientific theory, it would go to science. I just put it in here to see if anyone had an open enough mind to consider that reality as we know it is not real.

Think of the possiblity that nothing is as it seems.

DadaKopf

Originally posted by Zukustious
You know, there's a reason I put this thread in humanities. It's because it is not a scientific theory. They can be disputed, but this is an opinion. If it was a scientific theory, it would go to science. I just put it in here to see if anyone had an open enough mind to consider that reality as we know it is not real.

Think of the possiblity that nothing is as it seems.

Opinions must be based on knowledge. What you're talking about is the construction of knowledge, so to say "this is an opinion" sounds like you're refusing to explore various avenues of explanation, including the scientific. My post was only intended to clarify my original statement but also to show that there's a long history to that question and to give the idea that there are many ways to approach the same question, but ultimately, all explanations are inadequate.

For an idea about this, watch Donnie Darko.

DeVore

I understand where you are coming from Zuk but its a bit nebulous to discuss something which, even if it were true would make little meaningful difference.

I often wondered about stuff like this before but I've come to the "I Refute It Thus!" argument (a famous quote from philosophical/mathematical debate on the nature of reality between the Bishop Berkley and Dr Johnson).
Basically, he kicks a wall hard which makes everyone wince and him recoil in pain. Thus the world is real because everyone accepts it as real.

Now the logical possibility exists that I am hallucinating this website or dreaming it or whatever but most people accept the logical "loophole", take a look around them and go "naahh...".

DeV.

DadaKopf

I understand where you are coming from Zuk but its a bit nebulous to discuss something which, even if it were true would make little meaningful difference.

I often wondered about stuff like this before but I've come to the "I Refute It Thus!" argument (a famous quote from philosophical/mathematical debate on the nature of reality between the Bishop Berkley and Dr Johnson).
Basically, he kicks a wall hard which makes everyone wince and him recoil in pain. Thus the world is real because everyone accepts it as real.

Now the logical possibility exists that I am hallucinating this website or dreaming it or whatever but most people accept the logical "loophole", take a look around them and go "naahh...".

DeV.

What about times when the mind can't determine reality versus unreality, like Schizophrenia? Or people who can't perceive motion? Or narcaleptics? Or people who mistake their wives for hat stands?

Or the role of propaganda in the manufacturing worldviews? Or conditioning?

I find the question "how do we know we're not dreaming?" a symbolic question. It's a question that's there to provoke examination into various aspects of existence. I wouldn't therefore infer that it's OK to overlook the question as a logical "loophole" because it's a question that is still valid because it links up ontology, metaphysics, ethics, logic and epistemology (the branches of philosophy) to our current paradigmatic disciplines like physics, biology, chemistry, psychology, sociology and so on. Your response about Berkley is only convincing now because of the paradigm we're living in that enshrines pragmatism. That said, I don't think you're wrong .

It's just that in spite of our more 'grounded', pragmatic approach, mental (mal)functions like Schizophrenia or worldview-altering techniques like propaganda still present the same problem about reality vs. unreality, albeit in significantly revised form.

DeVore

Are you channeling Typedef?

Anyway, mad people are no basis for proving or disproving a theory of reality


DeV.

DadaKopf

On the contrary, examining points at which 'reality' starts to break down is an excellent place to start. When things pull away from what we're used to, it poses a problem for us to solve because it threatens the integrity ('normality') of our taken-for-granted daily buisness. It'd be pointless to ignore that.

Check out this fella: http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/m/merleau.htm.

Kell

Originally posted by DadaKopf
On the contrary, examining points at which 'reality' starts to break down is an excellent place to start. When things pull away from what we're used to, it poses a problem for us to solve because it threatens the integrity ('normality') of our taken-for-granted daily buisness. It'd be pointless to ignore that.

Think theres a bit of misinterpretation of what I was getting at in my post earlier, but your most recent one Dadakopf got me thinking about something else.

My bleating about this "Reality" being crazy and jumbled was not meant to imply that I dont think it is real, more that I dont think that it stops here. For me there is nothing to say that I dont occupy a separate "place" (dont know how else to put it) simultaneous to this reality so in effect, me dreaming in this reality potentially could be me "living" and alternative reality and so on.

Your point about reality breaking down and having to readjust perceptions of normality actually got me onto thinking about those Tibetan monks and also in turn back to Berkeley kicking the wall. Berkeley subconciously thought "that should weigh about x and if I kick it real fúckin hard it should hurt y" so when he did it his subconcious wasn't put out but his toe was. Now flip to those Tibetan guys. Logic would tell you that having a brick smashed over your head would fracture your skull, yet it does not to these dudes. Also, leaning on a spear with your throat should kill you, but not these guys. So, if this reality is the "real" reality yet the rules seem to apply to some and not to others, what reality applies to them?

bonkey

Originally posted by Kell
Logic would tell you that having a brick smashed over your head would fracture your skull, yet it does not to these dudes. Also, leaning on a spear with your throat should kill you, but not these guys. So, if this reality is the "real" reality yet the rules seem to apply to some and not to others, what reality applies to them?

Ahhh, but here the logic is flawed, and thus the "reality" it appears to support is not the "reality that is".

Consider....there was a paper some years back which - based on a significant amount of research - concluded that in international Tae Kwon Do competitions, approximately 1/4 of all kicks contained enough force to break whatever bone they impacted with (from the neck down). Now, even allowing for exxageration, the fact that many blows wont land squarely, etc. etc. etc. the question remained (or appeared to) as to why these people didnt suffer more broken bones. After all - by your logic - they work with the same reality as the rest of us.

Only they dont work with the same reality in one sense. They know how to move with a hit - how to absorb the impact - how to avoid broken bones.

Same applies to the Shao Lin monks. I've seen them push cars with spears braced against their neck. I've seen a guy throw a needle through a plate glass window...without smashing the window (it drilled a neat little hole, just wider than the needle/dart itself). It looks paranormal....but it isnt. When its studied properly by the right people, they can show how its done - a combination of extreme muscle control and as-close-to-perfect co-ordination as a human appears capable.

You might as well ask "why can he speak 7 languages, while I can only manage 1 - why doesnt reality apply to both of us equally?" Here, I'm sure you'd agree that it is the concept of what reality is that is clearly at fault.

Yes, there is plenty that science cannot explain, but this does not mean that they will remain inexplicable, nor that they in any way "alter" reality.

For this to not be our reality, you would also have to assert (as you have done) that we are not really "ourselves", but rather a manifestation of something else. Well...fine....but I have no awareness of that something else, nor does it have any existence in this reality, and thus - until this reality is altered in such a way as to change that - then this is my reality.

jc

DapperGent

Originally posted by DeVore
I Refute It Thus!

I remember Gary Larson asking:

If a tree falls in a forest. And hits a mime. Does anybody care?