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| Eddie_the_Kid
Posts: 2,545 Status: Lord Karma: +377 [+1] [-1]   |
Subject: How can you be so sure that... | |||||
| 1) you are alive and not dead, or somewhere in between 2) that really do get up in the morning (e.g wake up) at all? There is a popular argument within dream theory (both psychological and philosophical) that puts forth the idea that you are not actually conciously "alive". There are a few propositions to the argument in question. 1. When you are dreaming, it is the subconcious mind which is in control of your experiances and not the concious mind (except of course in the case of a lucid dream). 2. While in the dream state, the normally accepted laws of nature no longer apply, as you can do anything your subconcious wishes while in a dream. A perfect example, and one crucial to this argument is the fact that time as we know it doesnt exist in a dream. Pretty much everyone has experianced situations in which they where dreaming for what seems like a prolonged period of time, only to "wake up" and see that in "reality" only minutes have passed. 3. It has been proven that the human brain remains active after the heart stops beating for aprox 6-12 min after death, durring which time the subconcious mind is arguably in complete control since you cannot wake up. If someone accepts the above three propositions (which most would have a hard time not accepting I think) then the root of the argument can now be explained. The idea is that when someone dies, they then enter a dream state for that 6-12 min. Due to the irrelevancy of time in a dream state, it would be easy to conclude that it is entirely possible that under dream time, a person could theorhetically live out an entire lifespan, in a world fully created by your subconciousness, within that 6-12 min gap. This of course has some serious implications to it as well if it holds true. For example, there could be only one conciousness that is stuck in a dream state, who's subconcious mind actually creates everything around them for their own benefit; fabricating history, knowledge, and even people with their memories. So this is an existentialist argument at heart. So to recap, if this is so, there is only one person in existence as we know it, and in terms of the physical realm, they are already dead. Everything else exists simply because their subconcious mind made it that way. That being said, you dont technically live for anything in such a situation, beyond what the subconcious mind allows for you to motivated by. Furthermore, since dead, there is no waking up in a physical sense, although the subconcious can create the illusion of sleep and waking time in your dream world. There are two additional implications to such a theory that while they dont really have much to do with the question, I will still list so as to complete the theory. The first of these is the idea of imortaility of the soul. Since dream time is so vastly different from time as we know it, it is argueably possible that instead of living only one life in this dream state, a person could actually live multiple times (for example, 12 min could be 12 lifetimes). Such circumstances support the ideas of life after death and reincarnation as a person moves from one lifetime to another (including the original physical lifetime). The second option is the idea of a lucid dream that I mentioned before. As the name implies, this is a dream in which you realise you are dreaming and can then take control of the dream from your subconcious mind. The problem with lucid dreaming is that without the proper training, it is hard to realise you are dreaming without actually waking up. However, if you are dead, you cannot wake up. This means that should the above theory hold true, and the person that is dreaming this lifetime where to realise they where dreaming, then they would be able to take control of a world that is quite litterly, all in their head. This would, for all intents and purposes, make them a god with complete control of everything (do not think that by god I mean the monothesitic God, as there are a number of other qualifications beside omnipotence which would not necisarily be met). |
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