Wild and beautiful thoughts. Yes, life is dreamlike or dreams or lifelike. It's possible (I guess) that we could wake and find ourselves in yet another life --that we dreamed a long, long dream in which we dreamed yet again (Inception stuff). I can't really say I expect that, but I think there's a case to be made for all sorts of wild possibilities --if only for the eeriness and wonder.

Great response! I truly don't think there is an answer to my inquiry; I just like to hear what others have to input.

Dreams are but experiences of representations of life (memories, beliefs, pictures, descriptions). Life, however, is not a representation: e.g. it is not detachable by waking up, it is here and now, and flows continuously.

You cannot possibly be certain of that. Just because you haven't yet 'woken up' doesn't mean you won't and certainly doesn't mean you can't. Maybe that's exactly what what we perceive as death is; your exit from this dreamworld to become conscious that it was a dream after all (although of course you couldn't be certain that that itself wasn't just another dream from which you may or may not wake!)

I mean fine, for all practical purposes we have to conduct ourselves as though it's all real (well, not a dream anyway) but you cannot state as incontrovertible fact that it is any more than you can prove that we're not all just a figment of God's imagination.

. . you cannot state as incontrovertible fact that it is any more than you can prove that we're not all just a figment of God's imagination. — Barry Etheridge

But as Gilbert Ryle once argued: all of something can't be counterfeit, for then there is nothing left it could be counterfeit of. Seems fairly incontrovertible to me.

As Ryle's counterfeit argument has pretty much been blown out of the water by any number of critics I can only conclude that you are either attempting to pull the wool over my eyes or that you are too easily impressed.

It's a logical fact that all of something cannot be counterfeit

Even if life were counterfeit or fake, it sure feels real! But, the problem for me is so do my dreams.

When I'm in them I certainly feel it to be life and I think of myself as myself. Then I wake up and go about doing the same business only certain that this time it is actually true and the other was illusionary.

Ryle's counterfeit argument works. I would enjoy hearing a criticism of it.

Semantically, 'conscious'/'dreaming' rely of each other for meaning, a lot like the states of 'raw'/'cooked'. They only seem to make sense in relation to each other. The differentiation between states 'conscious'/'dreaming" is apparent in our experience, and our logical construction of the world around us.

A dream life has been imagined, but it's world could not cohere logically.

This doesn't seem like a good argument, since the fact that two words come to mean opposite things from use doesn't mean that we can't have been mistaken in thinking that more than one side of the dichotomy ever applied. We thought the difference was apparent in our experience, but we were wrong; we were always dreaming, and never 'conscious' in the relevant way we thought we were. The distinction in retrospect would merely have been two sorts of dreaming, and there is nothing unintelligible or unimaginable about this.

But that's just not true. Supposed people saw a bunch of glass objects on the water, but had no access to boats. They came up a word for these objects, and referred to them constantly. It was taken for granted they were solid and glass-like. When the boat was invented, people rowed out to them to pick them up, and it turned out they disappeared as they neared; they were optical illusions all along. Say the word was 'fabloo.' All purported fabloos would then have been counterfeit, precisely because there had been no fabloos, or genuine fabloos, at all, on the terms people thought there were.

At this juncture, you could either say (1), there are fabloos, but they are optical construcitons, not glass objects as was thought (so the boaters discovered something about fabloos), or (2) that there are not nor were there any fabloos to begin with (though there might be some day if they're made by an independent process). These both seem like reasonable things to say, and the linguistic community could go either way. But no matter which way they go, all of them were counterfeit in that none of them were what anyone purported them to be. And this is regardless of what linguistic distinctions are made. In fact, the people could have had another word, 'habloo,' for illusory fabloos formed as a result of an optical illusion on the water. Could we then say that because habloos are counterfeit fabloos, there must be some genuine fabloos? No, of course not; upon rowing out into the water, we discover all of them had been habloos, and there were no fabloos to begin with, even though these words gained meaning in experience in opposition to each other. There was something to counterfeit in principle, but that real instantiation simply never occurred.

I can relate to this. Sometimes in dreams I write poetry or record what seem to be profound philosophical thoughts, or find myself looking at extraordinary paintings that I know in the dream I have produced ( and of course in a sense I really have produced them, or at least they have been produced 'through me'), and I wake up feeling that divine revelation is surely possible, But sadly, I cannot remember the words of the poems, or the philosophical thoughts, or the exact appearances of the paintings.

Sometimes I dream about the most bizarre and unlikely scenarios, impossible landscapes, fabulous buildings and places, all with extraordinarily complex visuals, a profound feeling of being entirely in my experience and the beautiful feelings it evokes, in ways that I have hardly ever fully experienced in waking life.

I think dreams may be, in a sense, just like waking life; with this one important exception; if waking life is produced by human souls, then it is undoubtedly a co-production; whereas i don't think the same may be said about dreams, I don't think there is any reason to think that dreams are produced in collaboration with others.

"I don't think there is any reason to think that dreams are produced in collaboration with others."

What are the 'others' you speak of here?

Other human souls.

No it isn't. The whole of Ryle's argument is predicated on the ability to distinguish between counterfeit and real but that's patently absurd. Counterfeits only work when you do not and preferably cannot know they are counterfeits. If I was to take a new born baby into a Star Trek holodeck, for example, and let it grow up there it would be living an entirely 'counterfeit' existence. Nothing in the child's whole environment would be real though, of course, entirely real to the child.

In any event Ryle's argument need not apply at all in the case of the dreamworld for it is not necessary to even posit that it is a counterfeit of anything. It could be entirely different to the actual existence into which you finally wake (or not). The dreamer could, as I already suggested in the comment about figment's of God's imagination, be a timeless, non-physical being whose dream is complete fantasy.

But, the problem for me is so do my dreams. — saw038

Neuroscientists have discovered that brain activity is identical (or as near identical as makes no difference) for both conscious and unconscious (ie. dreaming) experiences, If you fall in a dream, for example, body and brain actually 'feel' you falling.

. . life . . sure feels real! But, the problem for me is so do my dreams. — saw038

The life that feels real to you feels real because it is the reality of life that you feel. The dream that feels real to you feels real because it is the reality of your memories and empathy that you feel, which makes it different.

In the argument from illusion it is (incorrectly) assumed that we'd never see reality as it is, which basically explains away the possibility to distinguish an illusion from the veridical case of perception, and then skepticism is off and running. But no such assumption is made in Ryle's counterfeit argument, and you don't get to sneak in unwarranted assumptions.

Nothing in the child's whole environment would be real though, of course, entirely real to the child. — Barry Etheridge

Only under your false assumption that the child would never see the real environment. In the arguments from illusion and hallucination representational perception is assumed, which makes them bad when used against arguments in which representational perception is not assumed.

In any event Ryle's argument need not apply at all in the case of the dreamworld for it is not necessary to even posit that it is a counterfeit of anything. — Barry Etheridge

Sure, but that was not asked in this thread. All can't be a dream, for then there would be nothing left to dream of.

But the argument from illusion doesn't assume that; it concludes it, at least as a possibility.

I think what it says about reality is that nothing is real (or everything that is experienced is real) for humans and that reality is a realtive term. Humans never experience true reality, the reality is always altered by the brain. If the reality is what we experience, then your dream was real, for you, because you experinced it as if it would be real, the same thing was happening in your brain as if it would be awake, with an exception of the fact that it didn't get any physical input, and it wasn't sending any physical outputs. A program doesn't tell a difference between an input received from a sensor, or an input written in the part where it takes the values from the sensor. A dream can be considered as if the values are written by your brain, instead of being received by sensors.

There is a theory saying that a dream happends, when your soul is in a different and undone pararell reality. What I mean by that, is reality that doesn't exist physically, that is one of infinitly many possible realities, that goes pararell to our reality. Imagine you have two choices, A and B, you chose B, then there's a pararell undone reality where you chose A. For me it's very hard to explain this, you can read about this theory in a book by Vadim Zeland (who invented the theory), 'Reality Transurfing', I don't remember which tom (because the book has a few toms).

This doesn't seem like a good argument, since the fact that two words come to mean opposite things from use doesn't mean that we can't have been mistaken in thinking that more than one side of the dichotomy ever applied. We thought the difference was apparent in our experience, but we were wrong; we were always dreaming, and never 'conscious' in the relevant way we thought we were. The distinction in retrospect would merely have been two sorts of dreaming, and there is nothing unintelligible or unimaginable about this.

Yea, good counterargument, but I still wonder if this problem does not arise out of how meanings are associate with words My hangup is that knowledge of the difference between being awake & conscious, and being asleep & dreaming, enables the logical argument:

We thought the difference was apparent in our experience, but we were wrong; we were always dreaming, and never 'conscious' in the relevant way we thought we were.

What we know about being awake or asleep, conscious or dreaming is based on our personal experience of these states of being which is then used to demolish what was learned in experience, which yes makes sense logically, but its not how we experience life. I can understand and accept that sun neither rises nor sets, but asserting the same sort of reality to my nightmares, misses something about reality and what it misses, I think, has to do with the language we use.

Stanley Clavell:
“A soldier being instructed in guard duty is asked: ‘Suppose that while you're on guard duty in the middle of a desert you see a battleship approaching your post. What would you do?’ The soldier replies: ‘I'd take my torpedo and sink it.’ The instructor is, we are to imagine, perplexed: ‘Where would you get the torpedo?’ And he is answered: The same place you got the battleship,’” The Claim of Reason, p. 151

What we know about being awake or asleep, conscious or dreaming is based on our personal experience of these states of being which is then used to demolish what was learned in experience, which yes makes sense logically, but its not how we experience life. I can understand and accept that sun neither rises nor sets, but asserting the same sort of reality to my nightmares, misses something about reality and what it misses, I think, has to do with the language we use. — Cavacava

As long as the possibility of waking up in a Matrix-like scenario makes sense to you (which presumably it does, since you can watch the movie without getting confused as to what's happening), then it is to that extent how you experience life. That is, you experience life in such a way that you recognize all of your perceptions could be non-veridical. The dreaming argument goes through.

Thinking more about this. I can imagine waking in a Matrix, I can imagine my self floating down the Mississippi in a raft with Huckleberry Finn, and I can lose my self in these narratives, but I also know I know the difference between what I can imagine and what is real. Many things mitigate in support of the difference such as pain, coherence and the massive impact the world exerts when we set aside our arcane pursuits.The logical argument might hold, but that is logic's problem, a ripple perhaps that is seen in logical paradoxes.

The thread title "our life is but a dream" reminds me of a hymn by Isaac Watts (1674-1748), one stanza of which is

Death, like an overflowing stream,
Sweeps us away; our life is but a dream,
An empty tale, a morning flower,
Cut down and withered in an hour.

usually sung to the hymn tune Amanda

What I hear in the phase is not unreality, but the swift transience of our lives. We are likely to find emptiness of meaning, though, in the swift demise of our child or our young spouse/lover. The 'empty tale' and 'dream' does point towards meaningless existence, but that wouldn't be proper for Christian thought or hymnody. It's more like, "life would be meaningless without God" or Christ's reconciling salvation, or the mandate given to believers, or the action of the Holy Spirit. Or for the pagan, life would be meaningless if it were not for the glory of the world, as the Romans observed, sic transit gloria mundi.

Not another Watts :-O

There's a very similar verse at the conclusion of the Diamond Sutra, which is one of the main scriptures of Mahayana Buddhism, recited daily in temples and monasteries throughout East Asia:

"So you should view this fleeting world --
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream."

The problem with this is that in Matrix-type scenarios there is always a reality that is not part of the dream. So reality is never totally reduced to dream, but rather just relocated at one remove from experience. And experience ( the dream) is always understood to be derivative of, and dependent on, that reality, just as we conceive our own dreams to be.

First, it doesn't matter since the dreaming argument will go through in that this purported reality, the only one you've ever experienced, will have turned out to be unreal and dependent on something you never perceived before, so the point is still made, and you could go your whole life never having a veridical experience and never 'waking up.' This is not only conceivable, but perfectly commonsensical, contra the pretensions; it is why a movie like the Matrix makes sense to a popular audience.

Second, even in a Matrix scenario, we can imagine Neo awaking yet again. And again.

it is why a movie like the Matrix makes sense to a popular audience. — The Great Whatever

In The Matrix, a multitude of people are jacked in to the same virtual reality. Who is the dreamer?

What fascinates me about the idea that reality is a dream is that the stuff beyond temporal and spacial boundaries is extrapolated from the content of Now. If we're talking about a multi-dreamer dream, then how would we account for commonality in those extrapolations? In The Matrix, it's the software. I'm not saying this couldn't be sorted out. It's that the further we go in addressing its conceivability, the more thoroughly we're describing the world beyond the dream.

The escape hatch is obviously solipsism. I think accepting that means accepting that I'm secretly alienated from myself. How would that be different from denying solipsism? Too tired to work it through tonight....