Five days later and here I am at it again. I didn't think I would come back to this to write down some of my thoughts, but I guess all it took was to come here. The rest of it seems to unfold itself as I begin to remember an idea.
Just yesterday, an idea was planted into my brain that dealt with dreams and reality. Again, touching on the subject of philosophy and what is real. My professor introduced us, or reintroduced me, to Rene Descartes and his philosophical views of what is real. He is widely known for his involvement in mathematics, but he was also a philosopher. He had a goal which was to develop a new system of knowledge that is skeptic-proof.
Descartes's method began with doubting everything that could be doubted, even with slightest bit of doubt, and stop until you can't doubt something anymore, then build ideas off of that one thing that can't be doubted. Now, that would seem like a very tedious task. To have to go through everything you have ever learned and see whether it can be doubted or not would not only be insane, but I don't believe it can be done in a lifetime.
So what he did instead was began from a different angle. He decided to start with what he perceived to be something absolutely certain; such as him holding a book or sitting in front of a fire while writing out his ideas just like I am doing so on my PC.
He then negated that by introducing the senses. We rely on our senses for just about everything in our every waking moment or at least what we perceive to be the real world. Descartes suggested that our senses are doubtful because we are often deceived by them. Someone walking in a desert is deceived by an optical illusion from his sight sense. A person on drugs may hear noises, but it is just their hearing sense distorted by the drugs.
That is when our professor asked us, "How can you tell a dream apart from this world? How do you know you are not dreaming at this very instance?" I quickly thought about movies that are related to this concept such as Inception and I kind of wanted to chuckle. However, I could not fathom these questions enough to come up with a solid answer.
I argued to myself internally that this world is of course the "real" one or... Is it really? What if I am dreaming right now? I have absolutely no way of proving it. Well, I do, but committing suicide is not legally and socially acceptable. Plus, what good would I be if I were dead? It would be somewhat difficult to tell about it if I am dead as well. Ha ha ha.
Well, I woke up this morning at 6:00am, but I am not certain if this morning was the beginning of a long day or the beginning of a dream. It could also be that the "dream" begins when we are born in to this world. That would mean that the previous realm is the real one and so once we die, we would sort of go down a level, retreating into the "real" world.
In contrast, what if the moment we are born is the end of the dream? That would indicate that in some strange way, everything we are experiencing in our lifetime is being played backwards so that when we die, that will be the beginning. Eesh, that sounds like a mouthful. In other words, the end is the beginning, is the end to us. The same would occur in which we go down a tier into another realm that may be the "real" one or not. This is what most of us perceive as ascending into the heavens.
At this point, I am not sure if any of these theories convince me. They are merely my opinions and boy can they be dangerous...
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