Dream argument

Short description: Postulation about the act of dreaming

The Dream of Human Life, by unknown artist, based on Michelangelo’s drawing The Dream, c. 1533

The dream argument is the postulation that the act of dreaming provides preliminary evidence that the senses we trust to distinguish reality from illusion should not be fully trusted, and therefore, any state that is dependent on our senses should at the very least be carefully examined and rigorously tested to determine whether it is in fact reality.

## Contents

* 1 Synopsis
* 2 Simulated reality
* 3 Critical discussion
* 3.1 Dream skepticism
* 4 See also
* 5 Notes
* 6 References

## Synopsis

Part of a series on

René Descartes

Philosophy

* Cartesianism
* Rationalism
* Foundationalism
* Mechanism
* Doubt and certainty
* Dream argument
* Cogito, ergo sum
* Evil demon
* Trademark argument
* Causal adequacy principle
* Mind–body dichotomy
* Analytic geometry
* Coordinate system
* Cartesian circle * Folium
* Rule of signs
* Cartesian diver
* Balloonist theory
* Wax argument
* Res cogitans
* Res extensa

Works

* The World
* Discourse on the Method
* La Géométrie
* Meditations on First Philosophy
* Principles of Philosophy
* Passions of the Soul

People

* Christina, Queen of Sweden
* Baruch Spinoza
* Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
* Francine Descartes

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In Eastern philosophy this type of argument is sometimes referred to as the "Zhuangzi paradox":

> He who dreams of drinking wine may weep when morning comes; he who dreams of weeping may in the morning go off to hunt. While he is dreaming he does not know it is a dream, and in his dream he may even try to interpret a dream. Only after he wakes does he know it was a dream. And someday there will be a great awakening when we know that this is all a great dream. Yet the stupid believe they are awake, busily and brightly assuming they understand things, calling this man ruler, that one herdsman—how dense! Confucius and you are both dreaming! And when I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming, too. Words like these will be labeled the Supreme Swindle. Yet, after ten thousand generations, a great sage may appear who will know their meaning, and it will still be as though he appeared with astonishing speed.[1]

The Yogachara philosopher Vasubandhu (4th to 5th century C.E.) referenced the argument in his "Twenty verses on appearance only." Attracted by dream culture in the book of Zhuang Zhou, Jacques Lacan and his followers applies Zhuang Zhou's thought about dreams to the realms of psychoanalysis and ideology.[2]

The dream argument came to feature prominently in Mahayana and Tibetan Buddhist philosophy. Some schools of thought (e.g., Dzogchen) consider perceived reality to be literally unreal. As Chögyal Namkhai Norbu puts it: "In a real sense, all the visions that we see in our lifetime are like a big dream…"[3] In this context, the term 'visions' denotes not only visual perceptions, but also appearances perceived through all senses, including sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations, and operations on perceived mental objects.

## Simulated reality

See also: Philosophy:Simulated reality and Simulation hypothesis

Dreaming provides a springboard for those who question whether our own reality may be an illusion. The ability of the mind to be tricked into believing a mentally generated world is the "real world" means at least one variety of simulated reality is a common, even nightly event.[4]

Those who argue that the world is not simulated must concede that the mind—at least the sleeping mind—is not itself an entirely reliable mechanism for attempting to differentiate reality from illusion.[5]

“  | Whatever I have accepted until now as most true has come to me through my senses. But occasionally I have found that they have deceived me, and it is unwise to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.  | ”

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— René Descartes[6]

## Critical discussion

In the past, philosophers John Locke and Thomas Hobbes have separately attempted to refute Descartes's account of the dream argument. Locke claimed that one cannot experience pain in dreams. Various scientific studies conducted within the last few decades provided evidence against Locke's claim by concluding that pain in dreams can occur, but on very rare occasions.[7] Philosopher Ben Springett has said that Locke might respond to this by stating that the agonizing pain of stepping into a fire is non-comparable to stepping into a fire in a dream. Hobbes claimed that dreams are susceptible to absurdity while the waking life is not.[8]

Many contemporary philosophers have attempted to refute dream skepticism in detail (see, e.g., Stone (1984)).[9] Ernest Sosa (2007) devoted a chapter of a monograph to the topic, in which he presented a new theory of dreaming and argued that his theory raises a new argument for skepticism, which he attempted to refute. In A Virtue Epistemology: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge, he states: "in dreaming we do not really believe; we only make-believe."[10] Jonathan Ichikawa (2008) and Nathan Ballantyne & Ian Evans (2010) have offered critiques of Sosa's proposed solution. Ichikawa argued that as we cannot tell whether our beliefs in waking life are truly beliefs and not imaginings, like in a dream, we are still not able to tell whether we are awake or dreaming.

The dream hypothesis is also used to develop other philosophical concepts, such as Valberg's personal horizon: what this world would be internal to if this were all a dream.[11]

### Dream skepticism

Norman Malcolm in his monograph "Dreaming" (published in 1959) elaborated on Wittgenstein's question as to whether it really mattered if people who tell dreams "really had these images while they slept, or whether it merely seems so to them on waking". He argues that the sentence "I am asleep" is a senseless form of words; that dreams cannot exist independently of the waking impression; and that skepticism based on dreaming "comes from confusing the historical and dream telling senses...[of]...the past tense" (page 120). In the chapter: "Do I Know I Am Awake ?" he argues that we do not have to say: "I know that I am awake" simply because it would be absurd to deny that one is awake.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett expanded on this idea with his cassette tape hypothesis of dreaming.[12] He conjectured that dreams are not real conscious experiences, and are instead pseudo-memories that emerge upon awakening from sleep. These pseudo-memories do not correspond to any real dream experiences, and are instead strictly fabrications of experiences that never occurred.

Philosopher Jennifer Windt has counter-argued against dream skepticism, drawing on the psychology of lucid dreaming, and has advanced a conceptual framework of dreaming as real imaginative experiences.[13]

## See also

* Brain in a vat
* Cartesian doubt
* Consensus reality
* Evil demon
* False awakening
* Maya (illusion)
* Multiverse
* Reality in Buddhism
* Simulated reality
* Social simulation
* Solipsism
* Zhuangzi (book)#"The Butterfly Dream"

## Notes

1. ↑ 莊子, 齊物論, 12. Zhuàngzi, "Discussion on making all things equal," 12. from Zhuàngzi, Burton Watson trans., Chuang Tzu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 43. ISBN 978-0-231-10595-8 [1]
2. ↑ HAN Zhen-jiang; LUO Qiao-juan (May 2018). "Butterfly: Žižek’s Mirror Image of Ancient China". Journal of Literature and Art Studies 8 (5): 729-738. doi:10.17265/2159-5836/2018.05.003.
3. ↑ Chögyal Namkhai Norbu Dream Yoga And The Practice Of Natural Light Edited and introduced by Michael Katz, Snow Lion Publications, Ithaca, NY, ISBN 1-55939-007-7, pp. 42, 46, 48, 96, 105.
4. ↑ Joseph Barbera, Henry Moller, Dreaming, Virtual Reality, and Presence.
5. ↑ Mazzoni, Giuliana A.L.; Loftus, Elizabeth F. (December 1996). "When Dreams Become Reality". Consciousness and Cognition 5 (4): 442–462. doi:10.1006/ccog.1996.0027. PMID 9063610.
6. ↑ René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy.
7. ↑ Knoth, Inga Sophia; Schredl, Michael (23 May 2011). "Physical pain, mental pain and malaise in dreams". International Journal of Dream Research: 17–23. doi:10.11588/ijodr.2011.1.9074.
8. ↑ "Dreaming, Philosophy of – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy". utm.edu. http://www.iep.utm.edu/dreaming/#SH1b.
9. ↑ Stone, Jim (May 1984). "Dreaming and certainty". Philosophical Studies 45 (3): 353–368. doi:10.1007/BF00355443.
10. ↑ Sosa, Ernest (2007). A Virtue Epistemology: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-929702-3.[page needed]
11. ↑ Valberg, J.J. (2007). Dream, Death, and the Self. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691128597. http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8416.html. [page needed]
12. ↑ Dennett, Daniel C. (1976). "Are Dreams Experiences?". The Philosophical Review 85 (2): 151–171. doi:10.2307/2183728.
13. ↑ Windt, Jennifer M. (2015). Dreaming: A Conceptual Framework for Philosophy of Mind and Empirical Research. The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-02867-7. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt17kk7qt. Retrieved June 24, 2024.

## References

* Ballantyne, Nathan; Evans, Ian (2010). "Sosa's Dream". Philosophical Studies 148 (2): 249–252. doi:10.1007/s11098-008-9309-y. http://www.u.arizona.edu/~wnb/Ballantyne-Evans_SosasDream.pdf. Retrieved 2017-02-03.
* Ichikawa, Jonathan (2008). "Skepticism and the Imagination Model of Dreaming". The Philosophical Quarterly 58 (232): 519–527. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9213.2007.546.x.
* Sosa, Ernest (2007). A Virtue Epistemology: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-929702-3. https://archive.org/details/virtueepistemolo0000sosa.
* Stone, Jim (1984). "Dreaming and Certainty". Philosophical Studies 45 (3): 353–368. doi:10.1007/BF00355443.

Malcolm, N. (1959) Dreaming London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2nd Impression 1962.

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Paradoxes

Philosophical|

* Analysis
* Buridan's bridge
* Dream argument
* Epicurean
* Fiction
* Fitch's knowability
* Free will
* Goodman's
* Hedonism
* Liberal
* Meno's
* Mere addition
* Moore's
* Newcomb's
* Nihilism
* Omnipotence
* Preface
* Rule-following
* White horse
* Zeno's

Logical|

| Self-reference|

* Barber
* Berry
* Bhartrhari's
* Burali-Forti
* Court
* Crocodile
* Curry's
* Epimenides
* Grelling–Nelson
* Kleene–Rosser
* Liar
* Card
* No-no
* Pinocchio
* Quine's
* Yablo's
* Opposite Day
* Richard's
* Russell's
* Socratic
* Hilbert's Hotel

|

Vagueness|

* Theseus' ship
* List of Ship of Theseus examples
* Sorites

Others|

* Barbershop
* Catch-22
* Drinker
* Entailment
* Lottery
* Plato's beard
* Raven
* Ross'
* Unexpected hanging
* What the Tortoise Said to Achilles
* Heat death paradox
* Olbers' paradox

Economic|

* Allais
* Antitrust
* Arrow information
* Bertrand
* Braess's
* Competition
* Income and fertility
* Downs–Thomson
* Easterlin
* Edgeworth
* Ellsberg
* European
* Gibson's
* Giffen good
* Icarus
* Jevons
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* Lucas
* Mandeville's
* Mayfield's
* Metzler
* Plenty
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* Prosperity
* Scitovsky
* Service recovery
* St. Petersburg
* Thrift
* Toil
* Tullock
* Value

Decision theory|

* Abilene
* Apportionment
* Alabama
* New states
* Population
* Arrow's
* Buridan's ass
* Chainstore
* Condorcet's
* Decision-making
* Downs
* Ellsberg
* Fenno's
* Fredkin's
* Green
* Hedgehog's
* Inventor's
* Kavka's toxin puzzle
* Morton's fork
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* Prisoner's dilemma
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Skepticism

Types|

* Academic
* Moral
* Scientific
* Philosophical
* Religious (Jewish)
* Local
* Environmental
* Pyrrhonian
* Cartesian
* Daoist
* Pseudoskepticism
* Zététique

Skeptical hypotheses|

* Evil genius
* Brain in a vat
* Dream argument
* Omphalos hypothesis

Responses|

* Here is one hand
* Semantic externalism
* Process reliabilism
* Epistemic closure
* Contextualism
* Relativism

Lists|

* List of books about skepticism
* List of scientific skeptics
* List of skeptical conferences
* List of skeptical magazines
* List of skeptical organizations
* List of skeptical podcasts

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