16.6.04
Real, Unreal, and Stuff
A cliche. Been hanged out to dry and chewed up thousands of times. I know. So shoot me. And just so it's known, I blame a Deep Space 9 episode for this.
I had a talk once, in one of those late hours of parties when everyone turns into a philosopher, with a friend who, shall we say, experimented with substances. We discussed, in the light of his experiences, the nature of reality. What is real, what is not, is this all just somebody else's dream, and so on.
Well, Mr Descartes thought he got around that with his 'cogito, ergo sum' thingie, but that's just a load of BS if you ask me. It doesn't prove anything, except that very elaborate dream characters would be able to pretend they're thinking, wouldn't they?
The thing is, you can't prove it either way. And it doesn't matter All this is either real, or it is not. How could you know the difference? And what difference would knowing make?
I had a talk once, in one of those late hours of parties when everyone turns into a philosopher, with a friend who, shall we say, experimented with substances. We discussed, in the light of his experiences, the nature of reality. What is real, what is not, is this all just somebody else's dream, and so on.
Well, Mr Descartes thought he got around that with his 'cogito, ergo sum' thingie, but that's just a load of BS if you ask me. It doesn't prove anything, except that very elaborate dream characters would be able to pretend they're thinking, wouldn't they?
The thing is, you can't prove it either way. And it doesn't matter All this is either real, or it is not. How could you know the difference? And what difference would knowing make?
