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and what the world is) depends on how we answer the dreaming
argument and the argument from illusion, then we can try to get
out of the dreaming argument. Here are some suggestions for
answers to the question, How do I know I am not now (right
now, as I read these words) dreaming?
In waking life, I can control my actions.
Possible Positions
In the face of that problem of knowledge and realizing
that a tempting way of thinking (about what human beings are
granted, but the something does not exist in the way physical
objects exist, and therefore there is a disconnect between
perceptions and physical objects. The dreaming argument has an
important part to play in the construction of idealist epistemology
because the dreaming argument provides or can provide an
intermediate step toward the view that there are no such things as
physical objects. One could caricature this slightly by saying that
if there are perceptions in the way all psychologists think there
are, then Berkeley is simply and irretrievably right-epistemology has to have a different agenda from the agenda of
accounting for knowledge of physical objects in the external
world, because there is no certainty to be had regarding physical
objects and further there is no need to include them in an account
anyway. In a mirror image of the behaviorist/physicalist view,
we can look at our talk of tables and chairs and all the other
medium-sized dry goods (to use J.L. Austin's phrase) surrounding
us and realize that categorizing them as physical objects is a
mistake since all our knowledge of those alleged objects and all
our talk of them is really knowledge of and talk about our ideas
of them and they, the ideas, have no physical existence. W hat
the dreaming argument does for us is contribute toward the
insight that all sight is insight. The world, as Schopenhauer says,
is my idea. All is interpretation, perception, representation.
Husserl's advance on this is to realize how it undermines itself
unless one can isolate interpretations from the things of which
they are accounts, by a bracketing of experience in which we
notice our own perceiving and experiencing in the moment and
separate that from the content of our experience. Our ability to
do that, he thinks, saves the idealist view from the kind of
incoherence I mentioned above which one can realize underlies
behaviorism. There is still a contrast, which we need in order for
the terms we use to be intelligible, but it is a contrast between
experience of the self and experience of other--experience of
experiencing and the thing that fills out the phrase
"consciousness of . . ." or perception of . . . or dream of (or heft
of, etc.) when we fill it out with accounts of things which are
other than ourselves.
W hat the idealist position does, then, is reduce all reality
to something like dreams. The difference between when I'm
driving home and when I'm dreaming I'm driving home is even
more difficult to articulate for an idealist than it is for Descartes
or for the skeptic, and I'm tempted to say that idealism is where
one ends up if one believes in the skeptic's dreaming argument.
Im further tempted to agree that if there are such things as
perceptions, then the argument is a good one and Berkeleys
idealism is the inevitable position.
Logical M onism: Another position we might take with
regard to the dreaming argument is to regard the appearances of
things as neither mental nor physical but rather as the atoms of
which both the mental and the physical are made when we add
the hamburger helper of linguistic conventions to them. That is,
we might regard the things which come to us in dreams as just
like the things which come to us in waking life, which are neither
our ideas nor the physical world which causes ideas but rather the
moments of contact between the two or between each of us and
whatever else there is, of which the present moment is also made.
Not only that, the flow of these logical monads or atoms, which
we might as well call the flow of empirical atoms or the flow of
experiences--this flow is the only thing which is real (this is what
makes this a monism), and our ability to make sense of the
experiences and then to talk of all the things we do when
prompted by our experiences is what needs explaining. This is
the cartoon view of logical monism, the view John Cook
has a certain kind of dream which helps make his asking the
question, how does he know he is not now dreaming? a quite
reasonable asking. Here he is, writing for us across a gap of
three hundred sixty years, sitting by his stove wearing his robe.
But after he quits, the battery runs down and the laptop starts
beeping and he shuts it down, brushes his teeth, takes off his
clothes and crawls under the quilts, he dreams that he is writing,
dreams that he is sitting by his stove wearing his robes, and
sometimes he awakens and realizes he was dreaming that he is
doing the same thing he was doing before the laptop battery gave
out.
Some of us have dreams of doing the things which we
do when we are not dreaming, and for most of the rest of us it is
easy to conceive of doing this. W hen I first got the crane
operator's job in the mill, I went through a spell of dreaming that
I was walking around the mill with the hook and the cargo belts
following behind me. Several of us have similar accounts. A
few, perhaps, have dreams of coming to philosophy classes or
seminars and sitting listening to professors read papers about the
dreaming argument. W e will expect the result is a kind of
vertigo, a sense of deja vu which threatens to disorient us, as
philosophy often does.
W hen and where do we feel this disorientation, and how
much hamburger helper will it take before the disorientation
takes over all our senses?
Suppose that you belong to a group, Food and Thoughts
Not Bombs, that meets at Powell's house on Tuesday evenings,
that the group has been discussing the dreaming argument for
some weeks, and suppose that you dream on a Sunday morning
that you are listening to Powell read on Descartes' dreaming
argument.
W hen you awaken will you doubt that the dream is a
dream, or doubt that you have awakened? Further, when you go
to Powells' and the group finishes eating dessert and turns to the
dreaming argument, will you doubt whether the discussion might
be a dream? You will not--or, stronger, it is hard to know what
doubting such a thing would be so that we can say you will or
will not--despite telling the group your dream and despite
Descartes' supposition that the fact that you have dreamed the
same thing you are doing now not dreaming would or at least
could lead you to doubt whether you are not now dreaming.
It is only in the face of the dreaming argument that it
seems we are called on to account for the fact that we do not
doubt.
Something odd has happened. The dreaming argument
has the effect of making us feel we need to account for
something, something for which otherwise we should feel no
need to give an account. The something is equivocal, too--on
one hand, there is a need to claim and to defend the claim that I
am not now dreaming, and on the other there is a need to claim
and to defend the claim that I know I am not now dreaming.
That there is such a distinction and that Descartes does not see
the distinction needs some comment. Perhaps we need the kind
of case in which we could be brought to doubt whether we are
not dreaming.
Suppose Pat is working two jobs, sixteen hours a day in
two different factories on two different production lines. He
cannot get the hang of sleeping during the day when he is not
working. He gradually over several weeks becomes exhausted to
the extent that he is beginning to fall asleep in the lunch room
and sometimes has to stop on the shoulder of the highway to take
a nap driving home. He begins occasionally to hallucinate, and
the hallucinations seem to him dreamlike intrusions into his
waking life. Sometimes his dreams and the hallucinations seem