Tuesday, April 28, 2020

A Dreaming Mind

It is logically possible for a mind to metaphysically depend on another mind so that if the latter willed for the former to vanish, it would disappear.  Similarly, it is possible for two minds to have a relationship such that the nonexistence of one would necessitate the nonexistence of the other.  What is not possible is for a mind to be a figure in another mind's dreams, for a dream occurs only within a given mind; a dream character is not its own consciousness!

The idea that one is only a dream in the mind of another being is one of many asinine concepts that might nonetheless be described as if it a legitimate possibility.  It is far simpler to disprove this notion than it may initially seem, despite the fact that a multitude of more foundational truths must be grasped before one can understand why this is the case.  There are two specific reasons why one cannot be a figure in another mind's dream, the first having to do with what a dream itself is and the second being that the only way to prove that one is not dreaming at a given moment also disproves the idea that one is in someone else's dream.

The first reason is that one's own consciousness could not exist due to someone else's dreams by nature of what a dream is.  By definition, a dream does not dictate or necessarily reflect reality outside of the dream, or else it would not actually be a dream to begin with.  Dreams are nothing but constructs of mental imagery, after all.  Even the divine mind of God cannot violate logical truths, and it is logically true that dreams do not sustain anything other than themselves.  As for the second reason, a far more esoteric set of truths also establishes with absolute certainty that no mind exists within the dream of a separate mind.

Just as it follows from the fact that I experience any perceptions at all that I must exist as a conscious mind, it follows from the fact that I experience physical sensations that my consciousness must reside in some sort of body [1].  The immateriality of consciousness means that a mind is not capable of generating or otherwise experiencing physical sensations unless it is within a body.  However, in proving to myself that I have a body, I have not only proven that I am not dreaming; by demonstrating that I am contacting an actual world of matter while awake, I have also proven that I cannot be dreamt up by another being because a material world can only exist outside of mind, since the latter is strictly immaterial.

To think that one's mind is a product of something else's dream is to approach phenomenology from a completely backwards standpoint.  The seemingly autonomous minds of other people, after all, cannot be proven to exist.  They might be illusions, things which only appear to be real due to inaccurate perceptions.  The inverse is not true, however: one's own mind cannot be an illusion in another being's mind.  My own consciousness can perceive illusions, and yet it is impossible for the perceptions themselves to only seem to exist within my mind.  To perceive anything at all proves that the experience of perceiving is real.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/07/dreams-and-consciousness.html

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