Dismiss Notice
Join Physics Forums Today!

Dreams and the real world

  1. Dec 26, 2003 #1
    Dreams flow illogicly, odd and inconsistent things often occur within them. We only notice this, however, when we are awake; during sleep the inconsistencies and paradoxes merge together and remain undetected- which one might consider nonexistant.

    We base our science and understanding on logic. We find a way for things to fit together without contradiction or paradox. But... What makes us so sure that things do fit together like that? There could be inconsistencies and impossibilities going on constantly. If we can be unaware of them in a dream (and in a dream, mind you, we are conscious; we experience and learn consciously, if not in the same way as we do when awake), why couldn't we be unaware of them in reality? There are many ideas which seem to have supporting evidence but are contradictory. Maybe we're reaching the point in our knowledge of the universe that we can no longer fit all of the complex truths into our "logic"- maybe it is our creation and it is flawed, or maybe it is not flawed at all yet doesn't always hold true... It seems possible, doesn't it?
  2. jcsd
  3. Dec 27, 2003 #2
    This reminds me of the movie "The Thirteenth Floor" where there was a population living in a city. One member one day found out that his world is not real and he is just a computer simulation and that all of his environment were just computer simulations. He was told that the computer simulation was created by someone in the "real" world. Well, the person in the "real" world who made the original computer simulation soon found out that his world was not real also but was running on a higher level computer.

    The point being, how can we ever know for sure what is real and what isn't? I don't think we can. When we asleep, we think our dream worlds are completely real, most of us have no idea it's a fake world (unless you can engage in lucent dreaming). So, for all we know, our current world can all be fake.

    Carlos Hernandez
  4. Dec 27, 2003 #3
    Most people adopt Methodological Naturalism. It doesnt rule out anything inconsistant or impossible, it merely notes that this is the "consistant logical reality" is the only one we have experienced so far.
  5. Dec 28, 2003 #4
    I didn't mean to imply that logical impossiblities happen that we havn't experienced; what I was trying to say was that logical impossibilities could be happening that we DO experience but don't notice, just as in a dream there are numerous such things that make perfect sense while you are in the dream. The flow of the dream's "plot", the dream's "reality" is consistent and unbroken, but when you wake up and examine the dream objectively and from outside of its confines you find obvious and blatant impossibilities and paradoxes.

Have something to add?

Similar Discussions: Dreams and the real world
  1. The real lost world (Replies: 0)

  2. Real world tesseract (Replies: 7)