Introduction to Philosophy

(DLSU_MAD)

Topic: Epistemology (Philosophy of Knowledge) and Metaphysics (Philosophy of Reality) Discussion Questions (Waking Life/Matrix)

1. The couple lying in bed together discusses a version of Chuang-tzus dream paradox: a man dreams hes a butterfly, but he might really be a butterfly dreaming that hes a man. The young woman thinks that her waking life might be the memories of an old woman in the last moments of her life. The young man suggests that recent studies of the brain activity of sleeping or dying people show that a lifetime of experiences could be condensed into a few actual minutes of activity. What does this say about our waking/dream life? If this is true, what are its implications? 2. The second half of the film Waking Life focuses on lucid dreams and explores the philosophical issue of appearance/reality, much the same way that Descartes in the Meditations raises the question of whether he is dreaming. One character argues that, to the functional system of neural activity that creates our world, there is no difference between dreaming a perception and an action, and actually the waking perception and action. How does this explain the nature of we call reality? 3. After Neo is expelled from the Matrix, Morpheus gives him the following lecture on appearance/reality: What is real. How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. This is the world that you know. The world as it was at the end of the twentieth century. It exists now only as part of a neural-interactive simulation that we call the Matrix. You've been living in a dream world, Neo. This is the world as it exists today.... Welcome to the Desert of the Real. What does this say about the reliability of the senses? How do we then define what is real?The Cartesian Exercise

1. Reflect upon all the sorts of things you believe to be true then make a list. 2. Ask yourself how you know that these things are true. Or, you might ask how you came to believe the things you believe. 3. You believe so many things that it would be virtually impossible to individually examine each one of your beliefs. But notice that there are only a few methods by which you acquired your beliefs. Perhaps most of your beliefs come about through conditioning by various people in a position of authority: parents, teachers, religious leaders, politicians, celebrities, and so on. Now ask yourself: have you ever been deceived by any of these methods? If so, then throw out all beliefs derived by that method. 4. The idea, then, is instead of considering each belief individually, find the principles on the basis of which the beliefs were acquired, test the general principles rather than the particular beliefs, and throw out any and all principles that led to any erroneous beliefs. If there is some method by which you acquired a false belief, that method is unreliable. 5. After performing steps 1 - 4, list down the methods you think are reliable, and the beliefs that you think are certainly true.