The Big Question

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Recommended: Night dreams vs reality

Thamar Callender-Leslie
Mr. Cowley
April/May2015
Philosophy3 249 (HZB3M1)
The Big Question (Reality)

How do we know the difference between Dreams and Reality? You may feel certain that you are not dreaming right now, but you're probably just as certain that you are not dreaming while you have been dreaming -- You see the issue here? Almost all of us experienced a dream that we were almost certain was real. Inception is a movie about a man named Dom Cobb who’s a thief with the rare ability to enter people's dreams, enabling him to steal secrets from their subconscious. Not to get confused with reality a totem is used to test if one is dreaming or not. Ariadne refers to this as “An elegant solution for …show more content…

He stated “I think; therefore I am.” He suggested that we should temporary pretend that everything is questionable. Furthermore, any statement you make about the outside world is uncertain. For example someone could say; “I just seen a ghost at the corner of my eye”. But in reality it could have been your cat running across the hall. Although this may be true it doesn’t necessarily mean ghost don’t exist. Why? Because the truth of reality is different from person to person -- it's what we experience with our minds, rather about the objective truth. On the subject of this thinking is something that can never be doubted. Our everyday sense can never be fully trusted, dreaming provides preliminary evidence that the senses we trust to distinguish reality from illusion can easily be fooled. Therefore any state that is dependent on our senses should be doubted and at the very least be carefully …show more content…

To refresh your memory Rene Descartes believed that ‘any state that is dependent on your sense should be doubted and at the very least be carefully examined’ For this exact reason a totem is used to differentiate the dream world and reality. Like Rene said; doubt everything. Another example is the infinite “Penrose Staircase” when the dreamer makes its victim believes its walking up a flight of stairs, when they’re really just walking a loop. This goes to show our senses can easily be deceived. Rene once said “our memory can never connect our dreams with each other and with the course of life, in the way it is in the habit of doing with events that occur when we are awake.” Long story short we never know when we’re dreaming until we wake up. This quote connects to the movie Inception when Ariadne is introduced to the dream world and is confused on how she spontaneously got to the Coffee

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