Saturday, November 29, 2008

If Descartes had only known

This explains the difference between being awake and dreaming. But I suppose it is not sufficient to reassure us if we think we're brains in vats.

Ht: Rosa Ortiz.

2 comments:

Gordon Knight said...

my students usually come up with those.. but I am never quite convinced.

IlĂ­on said...

These items are episodic descriptions, but they don’t really touch the core, do they? Or, putting it another way, itemization of observations is not explanation.

To get to the heart of the matter (following CS Lewis): the difference between the real world and the dream world is that the dream world can be encompassed by (fit into) the real world but the real world cannot be fit into the dream world.