Rather, I took it for being part of the second half through skimming. Not much a difference, but whatever.
In any case:
The dream-within-a-dream scenario does occur ( I seem to recall my brother talking about a dream that went some five or so levels deep, on a random note ) . The fact that we do not know of a "truly-awake" state to which our current one is a dream does not rule it out. A literal homonculus could be the basis of our vision without necessarily implying that it is the basis for vision in its entirety.
Maybe we've not really been in a 13-16 year long dream. Everything we remember is just part of the "setting". ;D

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 13 2009, 2:01 am by EzDay281.

I've been busy replying to the posts you and others have made so thus I skimmed through posts looking for quotes related to me and posts that had my name in. Anyway, here are my replies.

What kind of rules are you talking about?
I think I understand what you mean by this so I will create a scenario:
Bob's life is a dream. If John came up to Bob and Bob told John about his theory of life being a dream, John could say "You're being illogical because I exist as well as others." So John can either be part of Bob's dream or Bob is part of John's dream. So if Bob is part of John's dream, it is still possible that John could have experienced an interaction within his dream. So it is still very much possible that John's life is a dream without him realizing it (because of how some dreams in your sleep seem so real that when you wake up you question what happened and you look for answers in "reality")


Well, lets see. Lets say you believe in a form of afterlife and you worship a God. Can't it be possible that life is a dream and when you wake up you are in the afterlife with your God? If you don't believe in an afterlife or a God, like myself, and you don't believe in life being a dream, you're in the same position as if you were wrong about there is no God... if you didn't believe in life being a dream and you wake up after death, you were wrong. If you did believe in life being a dream but still didn't believe in God or an afterlife, you would either be proved right or wrong. It's the same way religion works. You just have to have faith in what you believe and not what others tell you.


I will continue using God and the afterlife example as I used for the above quote to explain things.
If God, if you believe in him or not, gave you a "life" to live in this dream, but you would eventually die in this dream and "wake up" to see your maker.
If there isn't a God, you are left with whatever is true. That is why its called a possibility.

It is irrelevant if there is a God or not that we will wake up to meet. If we are in nothing but a dream right now, so long as there is no way to tell otherwise, the dream itself is our foundation for all things and as such we must treat it that way, as reality. If we someday wake up, well, then the dream was nothing but a dream, and we're still in reality. (See previous post for logic concerning this). When you say:
This is meaningless, because for the duration that we are living the dream, the dream is the only reality, and for the duration when we wake up, we see that this afterlife is reality. Was it true that you were "in" a dream before? Well it might be. But if we have no way of knowing we're in a dream then it makes no difference at all and the dream is the reality.

However, this stuff about "waking up" from a dream is meaningless. If you "wake up" from a dream, then you see that your dream was just a dream after all and reality is unaffected. Either the entire sequence of all events that you can have knowledge of is a dream, and therefore also your reality by the prior logic posted, or it's just a dream and you'll wake up to your actual reality, in which case the dream was just a dream and everything isn't just a dream.

Then the dream is just a dream, and when you wake up you'll see reality.

Well, "whatever is true" is going to be either you existed in your reality, or you existed in your reality, so, really kind of a redundant statement.

It sounds to me like all you want is to call "life" a dream and the "afterlife" reality, with death being some sort of "awakening." If that's how you want to define your terms that's fine, but that's not what I'm arguing against, and if that's all you want please tell me so that I can stop myself from looking like a fool for arguing against nothing.

Yes, but you wouldn't know what reality is if you've just woken up from what you thought was reality. Then you would question "How am I sure that this isn't just another dream and that I just had a dream about having a dream?"


I said in my post that I was using those for examples.

Here's what my homunculus arguement stipulates:
I am a person who lives in this universe. We suppose that this whole universe is a dream. We know from experience that this universe follows a set of rules. Since the universe is a dream, these rules are composed by the dreamer themselves. Now we regress to this person who is dreaming, they too, can therefor be a dream of someone higher who is likewise, composing that person's universe's rules. We find ourselves in a state of infinite regress where we cannot ground where the process of rule creating occurs.
We therefor have a fallacy -- either th assumpution that I am in this universe is wrong, that the universe is a dream is wrong, or that someone is composing the rules to the person composing the rules of our universe.
Taking Occam's razor, we can cut out the elaborate fantasy and state that the universe just exists.

I didn't read you other posts in this topic, but can you clarify one thing about this argument:

What makes the assumption that the entity that is dreaming is another entity's dream true? In other words, what gives you the right to go into an infinite iteration of inserting the set of rules each dreamer exists in into another, higher dreamer's dream?

Life isn't a dream - It's a nightmare.

"You create your own reality"

So if you want your life to 'be a dream', truly believe that it is, and it will be. The human spirit is all-powerful.

Ever heard the phrase: "Mind Over Matter"?

Same applies.

Mind over matter -- You create your own reality = Dream life.

Well, we can think about it this way: the only way we could possibly claim that this life is a dream is because there are governing rules to it that must be made by something/someone. We can claim that these rules are made by someone dreaming them, but this person will obviously obey SOME sort of rules, which can be associated with someone else dreaming them, and we are therefor stuck in a state of infinite regression.

So, since A, maybe B. B, maybe C. C, maybe D. It's best to use Occam's razor and state that A just exists. Eleborate constructs to explain phenomona can usually be boiled down to key components.

But, because I'm nice, I'll post a another arguement:

If life is a dream, then, is there really a point in knowing that? Does it some how increase awareness of the self? No, it doesn't. It implies absolutely nothing except that you are here, and you may contribute a verse (as Walt Witman said). Now, what if life is not a dream? It's the same thing, but without resorting to elaborate constructs and philosophical issues. So, which requires less work, but still leads to the same end result? Life not being a dream.

You still did not explain how one assumption that this universe is a dream result in infinitely many alike assumptions, which your argument is based upon. Why not end the chain right after the first one? "This universe is a dream of some entity from another universe, and that entity exists in the REAL universe." And after that, use any supposition you like to explain where the REAL rules came from (which is, the ultimate mystery, I suppose).

You must come up with an argument that defeats the possibility of any number of 'dreams' from one to infinity.

Well, how can you possibly ground it if the person dreaming it has rules just as we do? What actually STOPS him from being a dream himself?

Nothing, just like nothing is stopping him from being 'real'.

And yes, looks like you can't ground it any other way. Whatever. Time to get less serious in this thread again.

You take the blue Mike n Ike, you wake up, the story ends and you go on to belive what ever it is you want to belive...

Again, we're talking hypotheticals. Nothing needs to "stop" him if it's not absolutely necessary that he be doing it in the first place; Occam's razor has no place in the discussion.
It does imply the existance of a "parent" reality to which we could awaken at any moment... not that that's of any significance, as what that would consist of would be unrelated to what we do/what we should do within our current existance.
But then again, it's a hypothetical which some people will reject on no, or unreasonable, basis. That in itself gives it some discussional value, and apparently enough to realize relevant discourse in this case.