my philosophy homework. assess, criticize

//note that it is supposed to be limited to 400 words, i am 177 past that...
//so i just stopped when i realized it
//i'm too lazy to edit it

//Pg. 34 from Philosophy textbook.

“Life is but a dream”
How would you prove that it is not true?

//and my answer is:

What is a dream? A dream is quasi-consciousness when we are asleep. We would know that we were dreaming if we wake up from it, and then we wouldn’t have to ask if life is a dream, unless we think we can dream about dreaming. But what if it was in the middle of the day and we somehow lost our memory of our last immediate state of consciousness?

We don’t remember anything prior to birth. Unless we somehow lost our memory during our dream, that means we weren’t awake. How could be dreaming without first falling asleep? Of course, we might have never have been awake, and started out dreaming all along. But then asking the question if we are in a dream would be pointless.

Dreaming is a brain activity. When we are not dreaming we are conscious, when we are, we are unconscious. We don’t know we are dreaming when we are. When we wake up from a normal dream, we knew we were dreaming because we don’t then remember any immediate conscious experience. When we were young we didn’t know we were dreaming. It is something we learn, when we wake up and don’t remember anything right before waking up, and right after going to sleep the last night. The point is, that to realize that we have dreamt, we need to have memory. And that memory is shared for our dreams and our conscious experience. The transition between sleep and consciousness requires a physical brain, which generates both states of dreaming and waking and provides the memory they use. The physical brain has to be there to store memory of dream and wake.

Also, it is impossible to dream without memory. All our dreams are based on memories of our waking life (including the dreams we remembered). When we dream, the brain is basically consolidating our sensory perceptions and thoughts when we were awake.

Can we be dreaming our dreams when we dream about sleeping? Memories that dreams produce are not consciously accessible until we are awake. Memories are also not consciously recallable when we are dreaming. That by itself might be evidence enough that we are not dreaming. If our life is a dream, we would have to dream up memory. But dreaming of memory and its use during two dreamt brain states (dream and wake) is absurd. And dreaming of another consciousness is even more so.

Or is it all just coincidence, that we dream our waking hours and our dreams and they somehow are coherent? There is also the argument of coherence of our dream and waking life. When we dream, our dreams are based on memories of our conscious experience. When we go to sleep, and then awake the next day, we see that it was some experience when we were conscious that gave shape to the dream. If life is a dream, then we have to dream of consciousness and dreams. So where does the memories that give shape to the dream of life and the dream of dream come from? And why are the dream of life and the dream of dreams coherent? Why do we have to dream a dream (life-dream) where we dream (life-dream-dream) about the dream (life-dream)? Why not dream about experiences when we were really, conscious?

And do we think when we dream? We don’t. Dreams are just replays of brain activity when we were awake.

And so we can only prove if we are dreaming if we change brain states. One way is to wake up, if we cannot wait, then we can take drugs…

malaysians of the senior boarding house of uwcsea

31st aug 2005 was national day for malaysians. even the malaysians at the boarding house too. they consists of (excluding me) three chinese and one malay.
on the national day(on the first second). three of them (boys save for the chinese girl) somehow got a malaysian flag and ran about the school with it. after that the draped the flags outside their windows.

then a malaysian day student came to the boarding house and saw it and laughed at it.
when one of the three came into the room. he said they are lame or something. and the guy replied that he was just being patriotic and the other guy was unpatriotic...
of course, he also said it was fun
then the other guy said that there was once malaysians who did something similiar too, and they got caught by the police(they were doing it outside a school thouhg)

what do you think?

malaysia is looked up upon

at uwc, i had a muslim friend from Sierra Leone. When i told him i was taking malay as a subject for the diploma. He has excitedly surprised, he said he wanted to take Malay but took French instead as he has studied it in his home country. He says he wants to know how to speak Malay because he looks up to Malaysia. I asked him about Malaysia being an admired Islamic country among the islamic countries. He said that was true. And he is excited about our boarding house's(he is a boarder too) trip to Pulau Besar.

this post is a rebuttal against the ignorant and bullshitting kilgarenone
who keeps bullshitting criticising about malaysia, as if he is any better...