The Philosophy Behind Inception Christopher Nolan’s screenplay Inception (Nolan 2010) is about the mental-images of dreams that are shared by multiple characters. The movie is set in an era which the advancement of technology has made shared dreaming possible: computer users regularly jack in and populate worlds created by programming architects. The audience is first introduced to Cobb played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Cobb is known to be a thief of ideas; as he shares dreams with his targets in order to find the secrets which are hidden within their subconscious. His skills have brought him many profits in the world but they have also led to him losing all that he cares about. Cobb gets a chance at regaining what he lost and redeeming himself …show more content…
from a world of guilt by doing one last job. The job that he has been assigned to is different from what he has been doing in the past. His assignment is to accomplish Inception, which is to plant an idea into an individual’s mind and in this case it’s the mind of Robert Fischer who has inherited a vast business empire from his father. Cobb assembles his team and goes through with the task. Ultimately, when the team is up to the task, Cobb’s guilt prevents him from finishing the assignment which leads to the ambiguous yet brilliant ending of the film. Inception abounds with flashing insights, many of which seem to have been borrowed from philosophers.
This entire philosophical film is based on a well known premise of epistemology and metaphysics called the argument of the dream. The central question raised by the film is familiar from a number of sci-fi films. Questions range from, “How does one know when one is dreaming?” to “How can we differentiate the real world form a dream?” These questions originate back to over hundreds of years ago. Humans always want to know whether or not the world we live in is really our reality. For thousands of years, dreams represented a way of finding hidden memories, desires, fears and where regarded to as a passage way to another world. As a result, dreams have attracted our attention since the existence of time. Additionally, the second philosophical theme that the film brings to mind is that of free will versus determination. If someone can infiltrate dreams in order to make individuals behave a certain way, do they really have free will? Is free will that easily modified? While the film does not really cover the idea that the entire universe is determined, it does make you think about how free will can be used to manipulate or remove the free will of others, at least in a limited way. Inception portrays the theme of doubt about reality and our choices in a way that makes the audience question the existence of the real world constantly in the course of the entire …show more content…
movie. There are two distinct implications arising from doubts about dreaming. The first is that dreams can have the quality of being similar enough to waking life as to being indistinguishable from it. The second is the idea that there is no benchmark test for reality; that one might be dreaming at this very moment. In the movie, characters distinguish the dream from waking life by using personal items called “Totems”, which are unique to their users. These items cannot easily be recreated in the artificial environment of the manipulated dream. When these fail to act realistically, the dreamer can know that they are dreaming. Cobb’s totem is believed to be a spinning top that originally belonged to his wife, Mal. He uses his totem in a way that if the totem stops spinning he would know that he is not in someone else’s dream. This would take us to the ending of the movie where you see the totem spinning and then the screen fades out. As a result, the audience is unable to tell whether or not we are witnessing waking life or a dream. But if it is a dream, then we cannot trust any of the distinctions between waking life and the dream that the movie has previously created. The film’s cliffhanger draws on the apparent impossibility of knowing whether one is in a dream or not, and so we return to the apparent impossibility of differentiating dreams from waking life. By doing so, the director has emphasized the fact that there is no possible way to say that our world is the real world. What if we are dreaming and we don't know it; Cobb states, “Well, dreams, they feel real while we're in them right? Its only when we wake up then we realize that something was actually strange.” (25:34-28:00) Furthermore, Christopher Nolan, the director of the movie, has put many small clues which foreshadow and, to an extent, explain the ending of the movie. Whenever the characters are in a dream, their operatives in the real world would play a song called “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” which is 2:28 long and implies the end of the dream. Now, the whole movie is exactly 2 hours and 28 minutes and the same song is played at the end credits. This suggests the fact that the entire movie was in fact a dream and also states that for those who were watching the movie, there was no possible way of identifying whether or not the whole story was in fact a dream or not. However, now that you know it may have been all a dream, you will start to wonder about some strange scenes in the movie. Rene Descartes who is known to be one of the greatest philosophers the world has ever seen, pondered the same questions back in 1641.
He argued the fact that because we are not able to know that the world around us is our reality, we can not gain knowledge and the word itself will become meaningless. After years of research, Rene concluded that “it’s impossible in a dream for it to occur to you that you might be dreaming. What that means is that in order to consider the possibility that you might be dreaming, you need to be awake. This distinguishes dreams from reality, and provides a basis for holding that you aren’t currently dreaming.”(1) While the director is inspired by the ideas of Descartes, he rejects his argument. As it can be seen in the movie, when Cobb is dreaming, he is aware of the possibility that he might be in a dream. Additionally, Inception can be compared to the “Allegory of the Cave” by Plato. The film resembles Plato's allegory, where the dream acts like the cave where people are free to believe in their own reality. As you go into deeper layers of the dream, the more convinced you will become about that the events which are happening in the dream is your true reality. In the Allegory of the Cave, the man that was set free can be compared to Cobb in Inception. In the movie Cobb still accepted the true reality which was blasted right at him the moment he woke up from his dream. The other prisoners can be associated to Mal, who was convinced that their
dream is their reality. While the two stories seem to be similar, there is one major difference between them. In Plato’s allegory, each individual has the choice to believe in the reality that is deemed to be correct; whereas in Inception there is a time limit; meaning that you can only live in your own idea of reality just as long as you remain in the dream and ultimately that dream will come to an end. To put it in a nutshell, Christopher Nolan has emphasized frequently that[This is the best line to declare your overall thesis. I loved this line.] distinguishing between reality and the real word is futile and what’s really important is the ideas in our mind which shapes our reality and makes us who we are. This message is really clear in this quote by Cobb: “What's the most resilient parasite? An idea. A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules.”(2:40-2:56)Inception formulates a great question regarding dreams and reality. However, forming questions is the easy part of philosophy; the challenging part, which Descartes and the many philosophers which came after him learned the hard way, is to come up with reasonable solutions
dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” This quote by Carl Jung provides a brilliant overview of his concept
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.
The article “Freewill and Determinism in Psychology” by Saul Mcleod like all the other articles have something in common with the movie, and that comparison in this case is the idea that we can make our own fates with having free will. The Bureau best exemplifies this idea where at minute 1:37:57 the Chairman changes the plan the A.B was on for David/Elise so they can make up their own future. Likewise, Saul makes a statement in his article that there are people “…who believe that human beings have the ability to control their own destinies.” These two have the same idea for one reason: both agree that we are in control of our
Have you ever experienced a dream or a nightmare that seemed like reality? Most people in the world today would say that they have. Although this realistic dream experience does not occur often, when it does, clear distinctions are hard to make between the dream and reality. Theories exist that explain dreams as our subconscious
René Descartes first thought experiment examined the manipulation of the senses when unconscious and dreaming. When one is in a state of dreaming, the boundaries between both reality and the dream become blurred. A dream can be so realistic that it can trick one into believing that they are conscious. A mind can be lead to believe that a dream could be as real as what one perceives reality to be.
Today, many people associate the word “inception” with the award winning Christopher Nolan film, but what does inception really mean? All dreams aside, inception is the time at which something begins. However, Inception is also the title of a rap composed by artist who goes by the name of Logic. Logic, also known as Sir Robert Bryson Hall II, is a rapper from Maryland. Inception is on Logic’s 2012 mixtape, “Young Sinatra: Undeniable”. I admire much of Logic’s work; however, Inception not only resonates within me emotionally with its sound, but I find that the lyrics echo inspiration and motivation that I can relate to personally.
Thomas Moore, the irish poet, once wrote, “True conversation is an interpenetration of worlds, a genuine intercourse of souls, which doesn't have to be self-consciously profound but does have to touch matters of concern to the soul.” This quote relates to a theme of dreams, because communication is a key part of making dreams come true. Setting goals, whether they are to be achieved or not, are the first steps to success. Without goals, one will have no sense of direction, and would just wander around mindlessly. Also if there is nothing to work towards in life, then what is the point? In Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, Lennie, George, and Crooks all had dreams in their lives, but due to social and economic obstacles, the probability of their dreams coming true was lower.
In Plato’s Allegory of The Cave, prisoners are kept since child birth in a dark cave, they are only able to see nothing but shadow figures move on the wall of the cave. They perceive that as their true reality since that is all they have known all their life. A prisoner breaks free from his shackles and is blinded by the light of the sun. He realized that his reality in the cave was not real, he sees people and understands what reality is now. The prisoner goes back to explain to the others what he has seen but they don’t believe him because they believed in their own reality.
However, due to all these negative attributes that are attached to Descartes’s Dream Argument, it fails to create any claim. Works Cited Descartes, Rene. A. Discourse on Method and Meditations on Philosophy. Trans. Donald A. Cress. 4th ed.
Oprah Winfrey once said, “The best thing about dreams is that fleeting moment, when you are between asleep and awake, when you don't know the difference between reality and fantasy, when for just that one moment you feel with your entire soul that the dream is reality, and it really happened.” But, what actually is a dream and what do dreams really have to do with one’s everyday life? In essence, a dream is a series of mental images and emotions occurring during slumber. Dreams can also deal with one’s personal aspirations, goals, ambitions, and even one’s emotions, such as love and hardship. However, dreams can also give rise to uneasy and terrible emotions; these dreams are essentially known as nightmares. In today’s society, the concept of dreaming and dreams, in general, has been featured in a variety of different mediums, such as literature, film and even music. While the mediums of film and music are both prime examples of this concept, the medium of literature, on the other hand, contains a much more diverse set of examples pertaining to dreams and dreaming. One key example is William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. While the portrayal of dreams, in general, plays a prominent role in Shakespeare’s play, the exploration of many aspects of nature, allows readers to believe that dreams are merely connected to somewhat unconventional occurrences.
The unconscious has a huge part in shaping human behavior, yet many overlook the idea behind it. This is an idea that maybe these unconscious behaviors can be used to alter the future or the past mistakes or anything in between for that matter. Everyone dreams at some point in their life and what many people don’t realize is that dreams usually develop from past experiences or from actual occurrences and thoughts. This means that if someone happened to see a guy wearing a cowboy hat with a feather in it, in one of their dreams, they most likely saw this person at some point in their life and may not have even realized it. It is impossible to create a new face in a dream. In Inception (2009), Christopher Nolan portrays Dom Cobb as a special operative whose life mirrors a Freudian psychological reality in which his repressed guilt leads to self-destructive behavior.
Based on On Dreams, written by Sigmund Freud, and Spellbound, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, provide the most psychological significant aspect of dreams through the theory of dreams made by Freud. I partially agree with Freud’s theory on dreams and the dreaming process. Dreams have the ability to form a bridge from reality to transfer over to the unconscious mindset. Throughout his article, On Dreams, he gives explanations behind his theory. The human psyche has a vital role in psychology, including the way humans interpret dreams and their sequence.
All over the world different people, scientists, and civilizations have different dream theories. For instance, the Senoi tribe in Malaysia has a fascinating tradition of dream telling. Every morning the people of the tribe begin their day by discussing and interpreting their dreams with each other. The children, as they grow older, actually learn to control their dreams by simply wishing bad dreams into positive ones. It is observed that, by paying tribute their dreams, the people of the Senoi tribe learn to have faith in themselves. Also, they have very few, if any, mental problems “could working constructively with dreams be part of the answer” to mental issues? (Peirce)
The film( Inception) ends with a close up of the spinning top and then the film ends. Now the meaning of this final scene is to make the movie matter to our the viewers in a way that we will remember after watching the film. When Cobb hugs and embraces his kids he lets go of all the grief and guilt that he was holding in his heart since the death of his wife( Mal). This is shown in all the dreams that Cobb has with his kids in it, because he never sees their faces because of his grief and guilt. All his grief and guilt was gone when he let go of Mal when Ariadne shot Mal.