The Mind: Aristotle Kant And Socrates :: essays research papers

Daniel C. Dennet said in A Glorious Accident that, "our minds--if you like-- [are] just as real as our dreams"(Kayzer, 37). The implications of this statement are substantial, for if this is true--if our minds and our consciousness are just dreams or the constructs of our brain, what we perceive, our memories, and our sense of reality are nothing more than illusions. Not only is this scientifically a valid statement, but it forces us to question who we are, and what we know . It is the latter that is of interest at this moment. What I wish to do in this essay is to tie together this concept of perception and the mind with what we have read in Text and Critics, as well as to discuss the need for science to find "reality" and "knowledge." But, first, we must understand what Dennet means by â€Å"our minds being as real as our dreams†. Dennet's point is profound and a point that should not be dismissed as a whim of a philosopher but, instead, a scientific reality-- not the construct of a man's subjective mind. One is led to believe that the best way to describe the mind as an illusion is to describe it in terms of dreams. When we sleep, our external sensory input is shut down. However, our minds, when we dream, are not in a very different state than when we are awake, other than as said before that our external sensory input is shut down. Thus, we can conclude that, our waking state is just as illusionary as our dreams, though with supplementary external sources of information. When dreaming, we obviously receive sensory input that enables our minds to create dreams with sights, sounds, touch, taste, emotions, experience, and sometimes even smell. If there is no external sensory input, we must logically imply that it is coming from internal sources in the brain, the most obvious one being memory. Immediately, we can agree that memory is a subjective source of reality, as we can see in the ease in which memory fills in its missing gaps with often incorrect information (often influenced by our personal bias) as well as the ease in which memory can be altered or repressed and false memory can be created. So, immediately, by looking at S. Brown 2 dreams, we can see that one source of our perception is subject to all sorts of editing by the brain. While the subjectivity of the memories is most evident during the dream state, our memory is