Life is but a dream.  Not.

A note on the logic of reality.

Going one-up on Bertrand Russell?

Burton Weltman

Adolescent Dreaming: Me, My, and Mine.

“Oh, life could be a dream, sh-boom.”  The Chords/The Crewcuts.

A fifteen-year-old boy is playfully arguing with his father: “I’ve been thinking.  In my science class, we were told that all we can know of the world is what comes to us through our senses – things that we can see, hear, touch, taste or smell.  But my senses are often erroneous and even deluded.  I frequently see and hear things wrong.  And if I can’t trust my senses, how do I know that anything is really real?  Maybe the world is merely an illusion that I am seeing?  Or just a dream that I am having?  And so,” the kid concludes in a taunt that was the underlying purpose of his argument, “maybe you’re not real and I don’t have to do what you say.  Right?”

As a parent and a long-time teacher, this is an argument that I have heard many times.  I made it myself when I was a teenager.  The possibility that life may be just a dream or an illusion is an idea that seems to occur like a bolt out of the blue at some point to most teenagers.  It is not an entirely serious idea to them.  Teenagers don’t really believe that nothing is real and that life is nothing but their own dreams.  But it is an interesting thought and a provocative idea to spring on your parents and teachers.  “If nothing is real and the world is my illusion,” the boy says to his father, “why do I have to conform to social norms, and why can’t I do whatever I want?” 

And a parent’s typical response to the argument is usually something in the nature of “Right.  I am not real and if you don’t do what I say, you won’t get your allowance.  But you won’t mind that since your allowance isn’t real anyways.  Right?”  That response generally ends the argument.  Having control over the purse-strings, the parent’s might makes his commands right.  It is a light-hearted interchange.  But despite its superficial frivolity, the boy’s argument reflects some serious concerns that young people often have about the world.      

These concerns stem from the dawning realization of most adolescents that the world is not as certain, safe and secure as they had thought it was when they were younger.  Adolescents become aware of significant changes occurring in themselves, and become uncertain as to who and what they are.  At the same time, they become aware of the fragility of things around them.  Their parents begin to seem old and fallible, and they sense dangers in the world from which their parents cannot protect them. 

Of course, not all of these changes are perilous.  Some are promising. Adolescents begin to see in the changing circumstances new opportunities for self-development, choices they might make to empower themselves, and possibilities for becoming successful in the world despite the potential pitfalls.  Between the hopes and the fears, it’s a turbulent time.  The world can be bewildering.  Almost like a dream.

It hasn’t always been this way in all societies or, at least, this tumultuous. The turmoil of adolescence in our society is largely a function of the fact that young people in our society are generally not expected to merely follow in their parents’ footsteps.  They are expected, instead, to step out from the shadow of their parents and develop identities of their own.  Adolescence is when this is supposed to happen.  It is not an easy time or simple task. 

It can be scary to feel that one must think about navigating the world as oneself, whatever that may be.  It can seem to adolescents as though the weight of the world was being hoisted onto their shoulders.  Playing with the idea that life is only a dream can be a way of distancing oneself from the intensity of the situation, lightening the emotional burden, and zapping one’s parents and teachers at the same time.  An ego-boost.  An idea that deflects, but also reflects, the egoism of adolescence.  

Adolescence is a time when egoism tends to run rampant among young people, filling them with a combination of grandiose self-pity and self-importance.  “Nobody understands me” is a common complaint, and it is mostly true since adolescents undergo so many changes so quickly that they usually don’t even understand themselves.  At the same time, adolescents often magnify their newly developed powers into feelings of omnipotence which, among other things, is a reason so many of them get into automobile accidents.  In any case, for better and worse, self-centeredness is a common affliction of adolescence. 

It is in that context, when adolescents think of themselves as the center of their own universe, that it dawns on them that maybe they are literally the center of the universe.  And, thus, is born the idea and, more importantly, the feeling that maybe everyone else and everything else is either just a dream that I am having or a projection of my own mind.  There is nothing but me and my thoughts, and I am the sole cause and the sole effect of the universe.

Other than for monomaniacs like Donald Trump, this is a conclusion that few people take seriously or believe for long.  But it is a thought that reflects uncertainty about the world.  In the midst of adolescent turmoil, nothing is as it seems and, in fact, maybe nothing is anything at all. 

That nothing is what it seems is a disturbing thought, but also a thought that enables young people to gain a bit of one-upmanship on adults who would venture to tell them what-is-what in the world.  “You think you’re so smart,” a teenager might say to a parent or a teacher,” but maybe all of this is just a dream.  Prove that it isn’t.”  And that is a difficult challenge, but one which we should try to meet.      

Philosophical Dreaming: I think, therefore I am.

“There exist no certain marks by which the state of waking can ever be distinguished from sleep.”  Rene Descartes.

The idea that the world may be nothing but a dream is not merely an idle adolescent musing.  It is a possibility that has been seriously considered by many philosophers around the world since ancient times.  In the seventeenth century, Renes Descartes, who is generally considered the founder of modern philosophy in the West, entertained that idea as he sought to counter skeptics who claimed we could know nothing about the real world. 

As a means of establishing a firm foundation for knowledge of the world, Descartes embarked on a project of systematically doubting everything that he could.  He hoped to find something which he could not doubt and from which he could build knowledge of the world.  As part of this project, he needed to get past the possibility that life is just a dream, and that what we experience as the world is just a delusion.  It was a challenge that he took seriously.

Descartes’ method was to doubt everything about which he did not have a clear and distinct idea.  He claimed that if he was able to conceive of something clearly and distinctively, then it must be real.  On this basis he initially found that he could doubt everything except for his own existence.  “I think, therefore I am,” he concluded.  That is, even if everything he was thinking or seeing was a dream or a delusion, he could not doubt that he was thinking and seeing it.  So, he could know for sure that he existed.

But what about everyone and everything else?  The conclusion that “I think, therefore I am” still left him without a foundation for belief in the world outside himself.  He was seemingly mired in a slough of solipsism, that is, of knowing about no one and nothing but himself. 

Descartes saved himself, and seemingly the rest of us, from the depths of solipsism through a leap of belief in God.  Descartes claimed that he had a clear and distinct idea of God and that he could, therefore, not doubt the existence of God.  In turn, since his idea of God was that of an omnibenevolent and omnipotent being, he could not doubt that God would create a real world for us to inhabit, and that He would not allow us to be misled with dreams and delusions.  In sum, Descartes overcame skepticism through positing the existence of a God who is good and who guarantees the reality of reality.  God saves us from our adolescent dreams.

God or a god of some sort has generally been the way in which philosophers have overcome the skepticism and the solipsism that is a result of trying to get from the evanescence of our sensory experiences to the permanence of things.  God, say these philosophers, makes things persist and makes a permanent reality, despite the vagaries of our sensory experiences.  God was the solution, for example, to the solipsism into which the eighteenth-century philosopher Bishop Berkeley had rationalized himself before calling on God to save him from absurdity.

Berkeley reasoned that since it is only through our senses that things exist for us, it is only through being sensed that things exist.  On this basis, but for God, if I saw a cat and then turned my head away, the cat would cease to exist, and then would come back into existence when I turned my head back.  That, he acknowledged, was an absurdity.  What saved the day for us was God, who was always watching even if we weren’t.  And the cat can thank God for saving him from jumping into and out of existence at the turn of my head.

On the same basis, but for God, no two people could see the same cat, since our perceptions of the cat would be different depending on where we were standing when we looked at the cat.  But for God’s omniscient perception of the cat, I and another person could not know that we were seeing the same now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t cat.  In sum, because God was always watching, we could be sure that we were looking at the same cat.

Berkeley’s solution may be satisfactory to those who believe in God, but what if you don’t believe in God or are just not satisfied with a deus ex machina answer to the question of whether life is just a dream?  Bringing in God to save the appearances of the world seems like an arbitrary solution to the problem, like the parent who tells a kid that if the kid doesn’t believe in the reality of the parent’s authority, the kid won’t get an allowance.  They are both appeals to might-makes-right power rather than to reasoning.  Is there no way through logical reasoning to answer the question?

Agnostic Reasoning: I think, therefore we are.

“All I have to do is dream.”  The Everly Brothers.

Surprisingly, it seems that most philosophers think there isn’t a logical response to the challenge of proving the existence of the world.  Bertrand Russell, one of the greatest logicians and premier philosophers of the twentieth century, did not believe in God and did not think the existence of the world could be proved.  He said that “it must be admitted that we can never prove the existence of things other than ourselves and our experiences.  No logical absurdity results from the hypothesis that the world consists of myself and my thoughts and feelings and sensations, and that everything else is mere fancy.”[1]  Russell concluded that as a practical, common-sense matter, we must acknowledge the existence of the world.  But we cannot rationally prove that the world exists, and must live in ontological and epistemological limbo. 

With all due respect to the late Lord Russell, I very humbly disagree.  As I understand the logic of the problem, which could be an illogical misunderstanding on my part, I think that logical absurdity does result from the hypothesis that all the world is but a dream.  And I think that one can logically prove the world’s existence.  My reasoning is twofold.

First, once you begin to analyze something, you have acknowledged that the something exists independently of yourself.  As such, once you ask “Is the world just a dream?” or say “The world is just a dream,” you have stepped outside the supposed dream in order to analyze the world you are perceiving.  That is, you have logically acknowledged that everything cannot be a dream and that at least some things must exist on their own.  And that existence even goes for your own thoughts which are objectified and given independent existence once you begin to analyze them.

Likewise, if you say that everything is an illusion, and that if God did not exist to save the appearances of things, everything would cease to exist when no human was looking at them, then you have stepped outside of the illusion in positing a God who is not illusory.  In any case, you don’t need God to save the appearances because, as with the idea that life is but a dream, once you have asked the question “Is everything merely an illusion?” or declared that “Everything is an illusion,” you have stepped outside the supposed illusion in saying those things.

There is, of course, the argument that when I step outside one dream in order to analyze it, I may be inside another dream analyzing the first dream.  But I don’t think it helps to suggest that when you ask “Is this a dream?” or say “This is a dream,” you may be just dreaming inside of a dream because in saying those things, you will have thereby stepped outside of the second dream.  The fact is that each time you say “This is just a dream that I am dreaming,” you have stepped outside of the supposed dream and demonstrated that everything is not a dream.  So that repeatedly saying “This is just a dream” only pushes the analysis back a step, and puts you into an infinite regression and vicious cycle of repeatedly saying “This is just a dream that I am dreaming.”

Such an infinite regression and vicious cycle is illogical and absurd.  And, among other things, it violates the logical principle of Occam’s Razor.  Occam’s Razor holds that it is vain (and Occam seems to have meant “vain” in a moral as well as logical sense) to explain something with greater complication when a simpler explanation will do.  In the case of the existence of the world, it is clearly simpler to affirm the world’s existence than to go through the gyrations of claiming it is but a dream.[2]    

In sum, if I have got my logic right, I conclude that it is illogical and self-contradictory to claim that everything other than your own experiences and thoughts is a dream or an illusion.  Your own thoughts prove this by stepping outside of the supposed dream or illusion in order to analyze it.  So doing proves that everything is not a dream or an illusion.

Second, once you say the word “I,” you have acknowledged the independent existence of others.  You cannot say that youare dreaming everything, and that nothing exists other than your own thoughts, because you cannot have a sense of yourself, and be able to say “I,” unless there are other people against whom you can compare and contrast yourself. 

There is no “I” or “me” without “You” and “We.”  There have to be people and other things that are not me in order for me to have a sense of myself.  People and things that are not part of a supposed dream of mine. It is illogical and self-contradictory to say that I am dreaming everything or everything is an illusion, and Descartes’ mantra should logically be “I think, therefore we are,” not “I am.”

We define ourselves in relation to others and, in turn, the way in which we relate to others defines who we are.  If we treat each other as enemies, obstacles, and the means to selfish ends, then we are that kind of person.  If we treat each other as friends, colleagues, and co-workers toward cooperative ends, then we will be that kind of person.  Really.  Not just a dream.    

Utopian Dreaming: We can be together.

“I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours.”  Bob Dylan.

All of this arguing about whether or not the world can be conceived as merely a dream or can be proven to really exist is not, I think, a matter of academic or linguistic quibbling.  It makes a difference if we respond to adolescents with confidence about the reality of things (facts are real and not just what you say they are) and if we promote a cooperative approach toward the world (it’s not just my world but our world and we are all in this together), instead of a skeptical attitude toward reality, a cynical attitude toward facts, and a self-centered individualistic approach to each other.

As I am writing this essay during February, 2022, we can see all around us the detrimental consequences when large numbers of people reject scientific reality and political facts in favor of their own personal prejudices and selfish self-interests.  Covid vaccine denial.  Climate change denial.  Democratic election denial.  Conspiracy theories.  Racism.  On and on.  It makes a difference if people don’t respect scientific reality and cooperative social norms and claim, instead, the right to their own personal facts, personal prejudices, and selfish norms. 

Instead of responding to the natural skepticism and egoism of adolescents with more skepticism, selfish individualism, and might-makes-right rationalizations, we should respond with the logic of reality.  If we did, it might take hold and we would all be the better for it.

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[1] Bertrand Russell.  The Problems of Philosophy. London: Oxford University Press, 1969. P.22.