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Dreams and their meaning essays
Dreams and their meaning essays
Dreams and their meaning essays
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How do we know whether or not we are dreaming or just being affected by a particular experience? Or if we are dreaming all our experiences in this world… When we dream, we fantasize imagines and occurrences happening, often, with the same sense of reality as we have when we are awake. Rene Descartes; a French Philosopher discovered the theory of the dream argument, affirming that there are no reliable signs distinguishing the liability of being asleep and wide awake. Quoting from Descartes, he states: For all we know right now, we might be dreaming at this very moment. (Rockney 102)
When Descartes remembers the occasions that occur while he is dreaming, he falsely believes that he has a conscious mind, as in being awake. Reflecting on this, Descartes believes he cannot tell whether or not he is dreaming. In Descartes own words, he quotes:
I remind myself that on many occasions I have in sleep been deceived … I see so manifestly that there are no certain indications by which we may clearly distinguish wakefulness from sleep. (Rockney 102)
This statement claims Descartes belief that...
In “Bad Dreams, Evil Demons, and the Experience Machine: Philosophy and the Matrix”, Christopher Grau explains Rene Descartes argument in Meditation. What one may interpret as reality may not be more than a figment of one’s imagination. One argument that Grau points out in Descartes essay is how one knows that what one think is an everyday experience awake is not all a part of a hallucination. He uses the example of dreams to draw a conclusion about is claim based on experiences one would experience with dreaming. He asserts that there are times when one wake up from a dream that seems to be “vivid and realistic” however soon finds that it was not. The experience of reality in the dream was all a part of the mind. If dreams seem to be reality and one would not have any concept that one is dreaming how does one know that one is not dreaming now? Descartes point is that one cannot justify reality in the sense that one could be dreaming right at this moment and not know therefore one cannot trust the brain as an indicator of what is reality.
Rene Descartes’ third meditation from his book Meditations on First Philosophy, examines Descartes’ arguments for the existence of God. The purpose of this essay will be to explore Descartes’ reasoning and proofs of God’s existence. In the third meditation, Descartes states two arguments attempting to prove God’s existence, the Trademark argument and the traditional Cosmological argument. Although his arguments are strong and relatively truthful, they do no prove the existence of God.
Just because the person is so engulfed in a dream that it is impossible for that individual to recognize disparities between these 2 experiences, these same person can nevertheless tell the difference once he or she has awakened. Moreover, a sensation as clear as pain cannot feel the same as the pain we feel when awaken, some argue. After all, Descartes premise is based on the idea that there is nothing in reality that a dream cannot replicate so vividly that we are unable to tell the difference. But he also said that dreams borrow, in a sense, some but not all things from reality so these may not be but somewhat plausible events made up by our
Before students can judge others ideologies they must understand the philosopher first. Rene Descartes, the father of modern western philosophy, was born in 1596 to French parents. Rene Descartes excelled in mathematics. By 1616 Descartes received his baccalaureate and became a licensed lawyer. In 1618 Descartes joined the army of Prince Maurice of Nassau. During his service Descartes never saw combat, but while in the service he was able to travel and explore the world. During his time in Germany Descartes began to inquire about life’s hardest questions regarding logic, reasoning, arithmetic, God and knowledge. By the early 1830’s Descartes continued his conquest of knowledge; he secluded himself from all temptations and began to write. Descartes
In the New Merriam Webster Dictionary, sophism is defined as a plausible but fallacious argument. In Rene Descartes Meditation V, he distinguishes the existence of God, believing he must prove that god exists before he can examine any corporeal objects outside of himself. By proving that the existence of God is not a sophism, he also argues that God is therefore the Supreme Being and the omnipotent one. His conclusion that God does exist enables him to prove the existence of material things, and the difference between the soul and the body.
One of Rene Descartes’s most famous arguments, from his not only from his first meditation but all of the meditations, is his Dream Argument. Descartes believes that there is no way to be able to distinguish being in awake from being in a state of dreaming. In fact you could actually be in a dream right now. Rene Descartes’s theory that one is unable distinguish being awake from dreaming, as interesting as it is, can be at times a little farfetched, along with a few contradictions to himself, Descartes’s dream argument does not entitle himself to any sort of claim.
Descartes’ dream arguement that he engages in within the ‘First Meditation’ is very complex and tends to have readers feeling skeptical if they are truly awake and no whats going on in the world around them, or if they are actually just dreaming. His arguementcan be both easy to understand as well as breaking down claims to know certain things going on around the world. Descartes describes how people believing they are awake and not dreaming right now may be shaken and wary. At first glance, it came to my perspective that Descartes is delusional to believe that one might believe that they are dreaming and are not awake. I believe this because when one wakes up in the morning they are awake and no longer dreaming, when they open their eyes they see the world and they begin to once again exsist within the world, therefore to be dreaming is not certain and therefore would not make sense to a regualr person. Descartes highlights in his defense the lack of insight a person has in the condition when dreaming, while not awake. In “First Meditation”, Descartes states:
case that Descartes would consider a case of thinking but you would not? Does dreaming count as a
Any truth that can exist in one can exist in the other. Because of this, there is no definite way to tell if an experience is dreamt or not. The arguments against this are purely speculative, based on personal experiences, and perhaps experiences of others, but that is not enough. Just because one person may not feel pain during a dream, signifying some sort of differentiation between the two states, does not mean another person doesn’t. Because all the evidence against this argument are purely speculative and circumstantial, it proves that we cannot prove consciousness at any given moment with Cartesian certainty. A waking state does exist, however, our ability to differentiate it from a sleeping state is impossible, leading to confusion about experiences. Having Cartesian certainty about whether or not we are dreaming at any given moment allows us to evaluate all the other aspects that might be skewed our findings. Because we may be asleep at any moment, who is to say our knowledge and experiences aren’t all dreamed? The brain, although a complex mechanism, is not complex to come up with the ideas that we have experienced within them. We may form new ideas based on our experiences, but the basis of it must have been experienced at one point or another. Our brain’s need reference for knowledge, and for us to know absolute truths, we need to understand that some truths may not be as
With Descartes’ ideology of the senses and how they allow for deception of the individual, how are we supposed to be able to differentiate between when we are in a dream or when we are actually in reality? When we are in a dream as well as in reality, the senses seem real and we believe that what we experience is true; however, according to Descartes, the only way to determine whether or not an individual is experiencing a dream is through the use of their thought processing. Within reality, there are certain aspects that allow one to realize that they are presently living in reality. These two main aspects are routine and patterns that are performed on the daily basis such as, going to work, eating breakfast, or even brushing your
He quickly releases that this is the foundation of most of his beliefs. He first acknowledges that sometime our senses can deceive us, but say that our senses is mostly sturdy. It is after this that Descartes realizes that there has been times where he has been sleeping and in his dream he was certain that he was awake and sensing real objects. Though his current senses may have be dream senses, he suggests that even dream senses are drawn from our experience of us awake. He then discovers that there are times in which he cannot distinguish whether he is in his waking state and his dream state.
Rene Descartes, a 17th century French philosopher believed that the origin of knowledge comes from within the mind, a single indisputable fact to build on that can be gained through individual reflection. His Discourse on Method (1637) and Meditations (1641) contain his important philosophical theories. Intending to extend mathematical method to all areas of human knowledge, Descartes discarded the authoritarian systems of the scholastic philosophers and began with universal doubt. Only one thing cannot be doubted: doubt itself. Therefore, the doubter must exist. This is the kernel of his famous assertion Cogito, ergo sum (I am thinking, therefore I am existing). From this certainty Descartes expanded knowledge, step by step, to admit the existence of God (as the first cause) and the reality of the physical world, which he held to be mechanistic and entirely divorced from the mind; the only connection between the two is the intervention of God.
Descartes offers a naturalistic solution in the final paragraph of the sixth meditation in the form of a continuity test: since continuity with past experiences holds only of waking but not dreaming, checking for the requisite continuity is the test for ascertaining that one is awake. The most famous pop culture example of this is seen in the movie Inception. In Inception, Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio’s character) and the other members of his team, carry around a totem that distinguishes the difference of whether or not they’re in their own reality or in a dream state. A totem has a special modified quality (such as a distinct weight, balance or feel) in the real world, but in a dream world, the characteristics of the totem will be off. In the movie,
Sleep and dreams have defined eras, cultures, and individuals. Sigmund Freud’s interpretation of dreams revolutionized twentieth-century thought. Historical archives record famous short sleepers and notable insomniacs—some accounts reliable, some not. When Benjamin Franklin counseled, “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” he was using sleep habits to symbolize his pragmatism.
“Cogito ego sum” - this is a famous quote from Rene Descartes. This quote means," I think, therefore, I am." His beliefs are considered to be epistemological and he is also considered as the father of modern philosophy. In his letter of meditation, he writes about what he believes to be true and what is not true. He writes about starting a new foundation. This meant that he was going to figure out what is true and what is false.