Philosophy Now Forum

One good thing about existing in your dream world: you don't die of pancreatic cancer or lead poisoning. People don't dream about long, boring illness - I suppose they lack the script-writing skill for scene after scene of gradual decline. Dream death is usually by falling off high places (with just time enough to take in the scenery) or immolation or lion attack - dramatic. But no actual pain. Pretty cool, if you can manage it.

I don't.

Skip wrote:One good thing about existing in your dream world: you don't die of pancreatic cancer or lead poisoning. People don't dream about long, boring illness - I suppose they lack the script-writing skill for scene after scene of gradual decline. Dream death is usually by falling off high places (with just time enough to take in the scenery) or immolation or lion attack - dramatic. But no actual pain. Pretty cool, if you can manage it.

When I was suffering a potentially fatal illness and undergoing draconian, painful and enervating treatment over several weeks, my sleep time was the best. My waking experience was was each morning the start of the nighmare.

I know. I spent as much of it sleeping as I could, too.

Skip wrote:I know. I spent as much of it sleeping as I could, too.

Are you ill?

Not now. Residual effects of treatment aside, all better. There was a time, a few years back, when either REM or anaesthetic-induced dreamless sleep beat the hell out of waking.
But I never for a minute confused reality, life, the universe and everything with figments of my imagination. Had I died, I'm convinced they would continue very little changed by my absence.

Jaded Sage wrote:the dream world lacks in robustness about as much as any given memory. So it seems it is possible that the only reason it appears unrobust is because we are always only ever thinking about it in the past, in memory, and are never directly observing it while it is happening.

We never experience any reality while it is happening because all of our experiences are informed by observations and we can only observe things after they have already happened. All of our interactions with the world are interactions with events which lie in our own past and thus exist no longer. We live our lives in the wake of passing time.

Jaded Sage wrote:What do we think about the brain being the creator of the universe?

A little self-referential, don't you think?

Skip wrote:Not now. Residual effects of treatment aside, all better. There was a time, a few years back, when either REM or anaesthetic-induced dreamless sleep beat the hell out of waking.
But I never for a minute confused reality, life, the universe and everything with figments of my imagination. Had I died, I'm convinced they would continue very little changed by my absence.

I know the feeling.

Plus, if the universe were being created in my brain, it wouldn't be so messy.

Skip wrote:Plus, if the universe were being created in my brain, it wouldn't be so messy.

My sentiments exactly. The surest evidence that the universe is not the created artefact of an omnipotent being is that a half-pissed engineering student could have made a better job of it with his eyes shut.