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The Power Of Fantasy And Reality

Good Essays
William Porter
Phil 6
Stuart Campbell
Fantasy and Reality Dreams, fantasy, reality, life, we’ve had years to distinguish the worlds that are different and the main perception to what our reality currently is. It brings the question of if fantasy has an impact on reality, and the philosophers that are looked at in this essay do point a heavily influence of reality with fabrication of life such as imagination based fantasies or dreams. As the mind is powerful philosophers have taken the time to address the influential power of the imagination and dreams. Some talk about the power of hallucination as well, separating dreams from the visions people imagine awake.
Jennifer Windt talks about dreams and dreaming in the stanford encyclopedia for
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An omnipotent yet evil genious would be off to the side controlling the scenes in this virtual world that the person would be perceiving. As far as that person was aware, that computer environment would be their reality controlled by the evil genius. This was meant to undermine Descartes sensory based theory as that scenario would explain how to get around the ideal that senses control what’s dream and what’s reality. What seems to be in the three scenarios of “brain-in-a-vat”, “evil-genius hypothesis”, and the “Matrix-style” is the appeal to logical or nomological possibility being a regularly recurring activity. Jennifer then looks at other philosophers critiquing Descartes “Sixth Meditation” that contradicts his own statement of “First Meditation”. Saying that it was worthless to propose a test where you can dream you succeeded, as the lack of logical understanding and deception of sensory makes it unreliable as a test. Grundmann’s thought was that we as humans had an innate ability to tell we were awake due to an introspective noticing of our ability to use critical thinking while we are awake, and critical thinking being absent while we are asleep. The author Windt had a retaliation saying critical thinking is not uniformly absent in dreams and is usually corrupted when it does occur, and that rational thought did occur in dreams but wasn’t recognizable. This would confirm the ideal that dreams, as it would be self defeating, can’t
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