I want to wake up from this dream!

     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...

What is this shit on my side-mirror?

Today was just another one of my long days from this semester. I was at school from 7:30am to 4:00pm or so. You can probably associate with what I am about to tell you next. So after I walk over to my car, I notice there is an advertisement on it. Nothing new. I will give you a piece of mind over that matter in just a second. So before that, I must give credit to this person as this person was clever and stuck into a not-so-typical place. It wasn't on my windshield or on my driver window. In fact, I did not notice it until I was sitting in my car and igniting my engine. The piece-of-shit ad was stuck into my side-mirror. I just said to myself, "Ha ha ha... piece of shit." This is one of those little things that really gets to me and I have to sit in my car and argue with myself for a couple minutes over such a small matter. I think, "Why must they put all this shit on my car?" I don't care for about 99.9% of them. No, I don't want your food. I can cook myself. No, I don't want to call your triangle-scheme business. No, I don't want to go to your club as I really don't dance and I am not desperate to hit on girls. We are fed with so much bullshit ads and sometimes we don't even realize it. Anyhow, my point is that I don't enjoy finding anything on my car. As I hold some of these ads in my hand sometimes, I think, "What if I just tossed this on the floor?" Then I would be just like the people leaving these ads on every individual's car. This would violate one my personal notions and that is that I should treat people the way that I would expect them to treat me. So instead of throwing the papers on the floor, I throw them into my backseat and accumulate a bunch of them and just throw them away at home later.

Ah, where do I begin... ?

Hmm, is that even right? Can you put a question mark after an ellipsis? Ha ha ha... Well, I was sitting in my introductory course of Philosophy today and I realized that I always have an opinion about several things unless I am spacing out, which I do quite often, and that I never share it out of my own accord or I am afraid to when the professor asks us if we have any comments or questions. That is when it occurred to me, that I should start up a blog and posts my opinions there. Even if no one ever finds out about them, I though that it would be a great idea so that I may possibly expand on them. By the way, I am listening to Arcade Fire's The Suburbs. They have really great music if you have not already listened to them and are reading this. Anyhow, I digress. Today, in my Philosophy class, we, I shouldn't say we since the professor does most of the talking, were talking about what is real. We were going over certain "isms" and were shown the allegory of the cave. If you are unfamiliar with this allegory, I would recommend looking it up as it provides an interesting insight into some of the ways we perceive our world today. Continuing, throughout lecture I was just having an internal discussion with myself and thinking, "What is real?" Plato suggested that an idea is more real than the physical. This is called idealism or idea-ism. That is when I asked myself, "How can someone, or something, not so real as a human think that an idea is more real than they are?" That is when my internal debate began in the middle of class. I thought to myself, I don't believe a thought is more real than matter. Then I refuted that thought with what I believe to be a great philosophical perspective, that everything is an opinion. It is important to recognize that that statement in itself is an opinion as well and I don't expect anyone to believe it. Here was a man who had an opinion, like many others such as Socrates and Aristotle, and many do not seem to realize that. After having realized this, I went on a different tangent with my philosophical view of this universe. Could it be that perfection does not exist? Could it be that we don't exist and that everything is false? I mean, if perfection did exist, then there would probably be no room for anything, no room for imagination or opinion. We simply wouldn't be, as in non-existent. On the other hand, what if this universe is perfect and everything is the way it should be? I didn't elaborate much on the latter theory, but I thought it was interesting to consider as I believe everything to be an opinion. This is pretty much where my thoughts ended on that topic before class ended. Thanks for reading. We'll see if I come up with thoughts on other matters and post a second blog or more.