Rene Descartes – one of the most recognized philosophers of all time has presented us with many arguments in his pursuit to demolish skepticism in his book “Meditations on First Philosophy. ” The subject of this paper will be the argument for dreaming which he assesses in said writing.
The argument seeks to prove or disprove the fact that one can know that one is not dreaming at any given moment. It is easy to jump to the conclusion that the idea that you are sleeping right now is preposterous – but is it really? In this text I seek to prove that the dream argument is a solid one and cannot in all seriousness be debunked.The arguments for and against will be discussed, both met with criticism and the dream argument will stay standing strong. First, let us examine the argument more closely.
Descartes says in his readings that the knowledge that we have of this world could be all just an illusion due to the fact that we can never really be sure that we are not sleeping – that is the main point of the dream argument. We have all had dreams that have certainly seemed and felt real, so how can we be sure that we are not sleeping and dreaming this very moment?The arguments against it would include the pinch test, the EEG, which measures brain activity while one is asleep, and one that says that if we can remember how or why we got to where we are, if we can trace our steps, then surely we must not be sleeping. All good arguments, but none of them disproves the argument for dreaming as I will prove in the subsequent paragraphs. Taking into question the pinch test argument I come to realize that I do not know where the idea of it came from – I do not have recollection of it.
If I was dreaming right now and pinched myself, then I would wake up, right… and I know that because?It is just something that I have heard sometime somewhere. The fact of the matter is that I have no way of proving whether it is true or not and surely in my dreams far more intrusive things have happened. I have gotten into fights with dragons and bears – if those punches did not wake me, why would a tiny pinch? All this leads me to conclude that the pinch argument does not stand strong against the argument for dreaming since it is not conclusive and the doubt still remains. Another great argument against the argument for dreaming is one that goes to prove through science that we are in fact not dreaming.
Electroencephalograph or EEG is a machine that measures brainwaves and can tell the difference in our brain functioning when we are awake and when we are sleeping – sounds crazy enough to be a dream to me. The problem with this argument is that there is a high degree of possibility that whilst dreaming one might have come up with the idea in his own head that he now believes to be true. The thing is, that our dreams can be as simple as the reality that we perceive and the EEG might just be another illusion that our mind has created to make us believe that we are in fact awake.Some might say that we cannot be dreaming right now because we know that we woke up this morning and we know what we did the night before and how we got to where we are in our lives in general.
Then again there have been instances where I have woken up in a dream and gone on about my day only to realize later that it was in fact a dream – so there really is no way of knowing that I am not dreaming at this very moment. The human mind is very good at making up stuff that is not actually true or reality – looking through science fiction books and movies goes to show that perfectly.This goes to show that this elaborate string of events that we call life might just be a creation of our own minds – just a dream. Everything that we smell, feel by touch, or see could just be a scheme that our own mind has come up with. The life that we are living could in fact be a dream that we have not woken up from yet.
In trying to attack the dream argument people have said that dreams are vague or not in accordance with the principles of science, or just weird but that does definitely not go for all dreams and this moment might be one of the normal ones for all we know.If a dream can be as much akin to real life as some of them are, then all the counterarguments that I have addressed do fall short from being substantial enough to debunk the dream argument. If our mind can come up with conceptions such as seen in various science fiction movies, then why can it not come up with EEG, or the pinch test or anything else to try and fool us into thinking that we are awake? Everything that takes place in reality could take place in a dream and so far I have not come across a solid ground to prove with certainty that this very moment is not in fact a dream. Lucid dream??
