Is there any way to solve my philosophical problem?

[Minotaur]

My philosophical problem is that i can know i exist (using Descartes thought 'cogito ergo sum'), also i can know people i percieve at least used to exist to me (using Wittgenstein's thoughts) but i cannot know that i'm not dreaming or not in a coma. That is my problem is there any arguements to make me know that i'm not in a coma or dreaming?

[Dean]

My philosophical problem is that i can know i exist (using Descartes thought 'cogito ergo sum'), also i can know people i percieve at least used to exist to me (using Wittgenstein's thoughts) but i cannot know that i'm not dreaming or not in a coma. That is my problem is there any arguements to make me know that i'm not in a coma or dreaming?

What does a coma or somatic state matter? You exist regardless. As far as I'm concerned, these are two totally different concepts you're talking about.

[Minotaur]

yes you exist 'cognito ergo sum', but you do not know if the the external world you are percieving is real or fictional and surely that still is a problem for surely that would be a motavational problem

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

All you have to ask yourself is what you mean by dreaming. If you mean a state you are in when asleep which you cannot distinguish from being awake, and so from which you never awake, then you have misunderstood the word. If you mean a state you are in when asleep, which you can distinguish from being awake and from which you quite often awake, then you are not now dreaming.

By the way, Descartes' 'cogito' argument is invalid.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Minotaur:


yes you exist 'cognito ergo sum', but you do not know if the the external world you are percieving is real or fictional and surely that still is a problem for surely that would be a motavational problem

Once more, all you have to do is ask yourself what fictional means -- but, you should now be able to work the rest out for yourself.

Let me know if you can't.

[I don't think you have read enough Wittgenstein!]

[Dooga Aetrus Blackrazor]

My philosophical problem is that i can know i exist (using Descartes thought 'cogito ergo sum'), also i can know people i percieve at least used to exist to me (using Wittgenstein's thoughts) but i cannot know that i'm not dreaming or not in a coma. That is my problem is there any arguements to make me know that i'm not in a coma or dreaming?

This is a mistake. You don't need to know you're not dreaming. You have to ask yourself "is there reason to believe I am dreaming?" Philosophers have been wrongfully presuming "conceivability" is sufficient for doubt for years.

I can conceive that I might be something in the imagination of Julius Caesar. I can conceive that I'm a brain in a vat. It's really an exercise in futility to try and consider all these cases. You have to ask "is there any evidence that I am not what I appear to be?" No.

There is evidence that you "are" what you appear to be. More specifically, this evidence is that "you appear to be." Once you solve the coma or dreaming case, you can just think up more cases to provide skepticism for your own "genuine physical existence."

I disagree with Rosa about Descartes, but I don't think Descartes is even necessary for these kinds of discussions.

Also, the quality of your existence does not matter. If you feel pleasure or pain, your existence has value. This is a basic utilitarian truth. Secondly, you can't "think you are feeling pain." If something presents as pain, it is pain (as Kripke shows).

I'd ask yourself what worries you about the fact that you may be in a coma or dreaming? Given that you still have value (via sensations), it seems irrelevant how one chooses to describe a state of existence.

Although there little evidence for the notion that we actually "are" dreams, I think we could restructure our logical systems under the assumption that we are. I don't think life would lose anything. All that would happen, in my view, is time would be wasted by the development of a science seeking to bridge the gap between our dream world and another world. Aside from that, our everyday existence would appear and feel the same, in my view.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Dooga:


I can conceive that I might be something in the imagination of Julius Caesar. I can conceive that I'm a brain in a vat. It's really an exercise in futility to try and consider all these cases. You have to ask "is there any evidence that I am not what I appear to be?" No.

I question whether you can conceive either of these things since in ordewr to do so you have to misuse words "I'm a brain in a vat"; anyone who thinks this of him/herself has already lost touch with what it is to be a human being, and with the words we use to describe ourselves. It's a bit like saying "I can imagine I was invited to the wedding ceremony between the king and queen in chess", or " I can imagine being checkmated in baseball".


There is evidence that you "are" what you appear to be. More specifically, this evidence is that "you appear to be." Once you solve the coma or dreaming case, you can just think up more cases to provide skepticism for your own "genuine physical existence."

Well, I fail to see what 'evidence' has got to do with this -- if we are all dreaming, then we are all dreaming this evidence too.

The weakness of all such theories that seem to raise doubts like this is that they are all based on a misuse of language, as I indicated.

[ComradeMan]

How do you know what is the dream and what is real? Perhaps when you think you are dreaming it is actually reality and when you think it's real it's actually a dream!

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!
:D

[Luís Henrique]

yes you exist 'cognito ergo sum', but you do not know if the the external world you are percieving is real or fictional and surely that still is a problem for surely that would be a motavational problem

What would the consequences of being part of a dream? Surely you could go to the top of a building and jump from there with no consequences, or drink a glass of inseticide?

The fact that we both know very well that we don't live in a dream stops us from doing those stupid things.

But perhaps you are right in that the problem is motivational. Sometimes you have to cross the Rubicon, or cut the knot, or, like Sartre's character, cheat on dice, and take a stand. There is no guarantee, nowhere, that there is a class struggle, or that our class is going to win, or that the beautiful girl next door will accept your invitation for the movies, or that you are going to succeed in your profissional life - or anything else. Anyone of us is having to take decisions on those and many more subjects, decisions that are far more impactful on our lives than deciding whether things are "real" or "onyrical" - and with much less guarantee that we are going to decide correctly on them than on your phylosophical problem.

Maybe it is time for you to cross the river, cut the knot, or cheat, too?

Luís Henrique

[Minotaur]

Thank you for the replies.

If you mean a state you are in when asleep which you cannot distinguish from being awake, and so from which you never awake, then you have misunderstood the word Ahh very good :D, but i surely still do not know the world if i have been asleep all my life, my reality is false for isn't philosophy about percieving true reality of the world, like plato’s cave and the free man leaving the cave to reality, isn't that just a analogue of the man becoming a philosopher. So therefore is philosophy pointless as i can't percieve true reality?




[I don't think you have read enough Wittgenstein!] Very true I need to.


You have to ask "is there any evidence that I am not what I appear to be?" No. Very true but isn't there atleast some level of doubt as my senses are not immuntable.


Also, the quality of your existence does not matter. If you feel pleasure or pain, your existence has value. This is a basic utilitarian truth. Secondly, you can't "think you are feeling pain." If something presents as pain, it is pain (as Kripke shows).Agreed with the first part completely but not so much with the second section. But the second bit surely would that not count to someone who has lost a leg, because they sometimes experience a symptom where they can still feel there leg as in it can percieve it as itchy. So with this ghost itchy leg surely the itchyness of the leg is present to there person, so it does not follow that the itchyness is present.

[mel]

Thank you for the replies.
Ahh very good :D, but i surely still do not know the world if i have been asleep all my life, my reality is false for isn't philosophy about percieving true reality of the world, like plato’s cave and the free man leaving the cave to reality, isn't that just a analogue of the man becoming a philosopher. So therefore is philosophy pointless as i can't percieve true reality?



Very true I need to.

Very true but isn't there atleast some level of doubt as my senses are not immuntable.

Agreed with the first part completely but not so much with the second section. But the second bit surely would that not count to someone who has lost a leg, because they sometimes experience a symptom where they can still feel there leg as in it can percieve it as itchy. So with this ghost itchy leg surely the itchyness of the leg is present to there person, so it does not follow that the itchyness is present.

The sort of radical skepticism you're involving yourself in, put simply, has absolutely no consequences to the way you interact in whatever world you exist in.

Live in the world in which you've found yourself (and which you necessarily presupposed in order to even ask the question you've just asked) and set aside this skeptical nonsense.

What would it even mean if the world you were born in is "real" or not? It's as real as it gets (and as real as you can know) until/unless you learn otherwise. It's a necessary presupposition for your basic functioning.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Minotaur:


but i surely still do not know the world if i have been asleep all my life, my reality is false for isn't philosophy about percieving true reality of the world, like plato’s cave and the free man leaving the cave to reality, isn't that just a analogue of the man becoming a philosopher. So therefore is philosophy pointless as i can't percieve true reality?

Once more, you have to ask what you mean by "sleep". If you mean "A state from which I have never awoken", then you have misconstrued its meaning. If you mean, "A state from which I have often awoken", then you haven't been asleep all your life.

And, traditional philosophy is indeed all about attempting to derive fundamental truths about reality from thought alone, but, as we can see from your 'problem', and others, the entire tradition is based on the systematic misuse of language.

More details here:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/self-t105849/index.html?p=1408653#post1408653

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1596520&postcount=20

[That's what you will discover if you read Wittgenstein.]

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Melbicimni:


What would it even mean if the world you were born in is "real" or not? It's as real as it gets (and as real as you can know) until/unless you learn otherwise. It's a necessary presupposition for your basic functioning.

Well, the word "real" finctions as a modifier, in phrases like "real leather", "real friend" or "real job", and as such it is used to distinguish the artificial, the sham, the counterfeit or the bigus from the genuine article. Hence it makes no sense when it is employed in traditional philosophy in sentences like the one you mentioned. In what way could the world be artificial, counterfeit, a sham or bogus? It is this world that gives content to words like "real".

So, this idea is based on a misuse of "real", and as such constitues an empty question -- rather like "Is the king in chess a 'real king'?"

[spiltteeth]

Lacan rewrites Descartes's phrase as
"I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think."

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

^^^Still an invalid inference; in fact this is even worse since it implies that Lacan is on Mars!

Always thought he was a space cowboy...

[spiltteeth]

According to Lacan, who described himself as an "anti-philosopher" the subject of enunciation is the "I" who speaks, the individual doing the speaking; the subject of the enunciated is the "I" of the sentence. "I" is not identical to itself - it is split between the individual "I" (the subject of enunciation) and the grammatical "I" (the subject of the enunciated).
Although we may experience them as unified, this is merely an Imaginary illusion, for the pronoun

"I" is actually a substitute for the "I" of the subject. It does not account for me in my full specificity; it is, rather, a general term I share with everyone else. In order to do so, my empirical reality must be annihilated; Lacan says "the symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing". The subject can only enter language by negating the Real, murdering or substituting the blood-and-sinew reality of self for the concept of self expressed in words. every word marks the absence of the thing it represents and standing in for it. I thought you were saying something similar with your "I am a brain in a vat" example.

The "I think" here is the subject of the enunciated (the Symbolic subject) whereas the "I am" is the subject of the enunciation (the Real subject). Lacan is just showing how the subject is split by language etc

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

^^^Which, if I said it was clear as mud, would be an insult to mud.

[spiltteeth]

If it helps, I think Lacan relates decartres "I" to the unconscious, not the ego, so he'd say "it thinks." Lacan says that the cogito is an empty space, what is left when the rest of the world is expelled from itself (which unfortunately I cannot expand on as I don't know what this is supose to mean exactly)
The Symbolic Order is what substitutes for the loss of the immediacy of the world and it is where the void of the subject is filled in by the process of subjectivization - and thus why people mistake words for reality etc

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

No, it doesn't help, since "I" is just a personal pronoun, not a clue to deeper mysteries of existence.

[saad]

Were you reading too much Immanuel Kant? You are not blind because you have eyes, silly. ;p

Think of it this way. "I think, therefore I exist" - "I am thinking of something, therefore I am conscience" - "Because I am conscience of something, it exists"

When you are in a dream, a low level conscienceless state, everything that happens is an illusion; In a dream, you can not forcefully think of what to dream, and when you awake, you know it is not real.

If you still have doubts, find an item. Describe it to yourself, and then ask a friend to describe it. boom.

[Number 16 Bus Shelter]

Were you reading too much Immanuel Kant? You are not blind because you have eyes, silly. ;p

Think of it this way. "I think, therefore I exist" - "I am thinking of something, therefore I am conscience" "Because I am conscience of something, it exists"

When you are in a dream, a low level conscienceless state, everything that happens is an illusion; In a dream, you can not forcefully think of what to dream, and when you awake, you know it is not real.

If you still have doubts, find an item. Describe it to yourself, and then ask a friend to describe it. boom.

Not that it's relevant, but you can in fact control what you dream of. Its called Lucid dreaming, and many subscribe to it, mainly philosophers, and artists such as Salvador Dali

My view on your problem, is that it matters not. Sure, you can never know. This could all be a figment of your wild imagination as you lie in a coma in an alien society. You could be a brain in a tank.
Its very interesting to think about, and I'm not telling you not to explore the possibilities, because I do myself. But I don't think there is any such thing as a general 'real' all-encompassing reality, anyway. We each create our own reality, so there is no such thing as a fake reality.
What can you compare your reality to anyway? It's impossible to see through everyone's head to find a common reality, so you can never prove the existence of such.


All this could just be the salvia talking.

[newsocialism]

I will answer your question with my philosophy. Well, if there is no way to know if you do dream and everything you perceive is not real while you live, why do you ask? Because you already don't know what is real, if everything you know is all about unreal things. You have no experience to compare the dream world or the real world(assumption) with your current life on earth. Therefore, it's meaningless to argue if it's real world or a dream world.