'Cause I'm bored of hanging out, in your cold.
I wish there was an ultimate objective reality I could die to wake up to. I've said this about Descartes' dream argument, that the reason it's so difficult to tell you're dreaming when you're dreaming, is because the passage from wakefulness to sleep lacks a concrete demarcation as opposed to the jarring shock of awakening from a dream. I'm not trying to play blind skeptic here, but there is a rather pertinent point - that it's pretty damn near impossible to be sure what something is when you can only reasonably figure out (usually in retrospect) what it isn't/wasn't. Then they never make it home alive.
Friday, August 13, 2010
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sounds like you've watched inception recently :)
ReplyDeletedoesn't the demarcation serves as a tool for dichotomizing. in a sense serving our system of dualism? [sounds like a "structural" argument huh]and we call one "reality" the other "dream" just to establish stability through hierarchy. i agree with your last point! haha but i thought thats the main point which inception was trying to make. we have to anchor ourselves into one if not things would fall apart. but the celebration is that we can choose(?) reality like penrose stairs is a point-of-view.
ah sorry for rambling HAHA
you're not rambling! that's what i thought of the movie as well, but i think most people would prefer to believe they have an intuitive grasp of the different dream and waking realities. you think so too?? i've always thought dreaming reality was every bit as real as wakefulness, just not in the same way as how waking reality has come to define 'real'. i doubt many would agree though.
ReplyDeletei don't think i'm in the lobby with these people though. it's hard to say intuitive when i think the problem of how we started defining realities happen when we had our first dream/nightmare. suppose you're back to being a toddler and you admittedly "sleep" more than half your time away. there you "woke up" to yourself crying after a terrible dream and if mommy hadn't come down to console you saying that it wasn't real you wouldn't have had that "instinct" developed in you. i guess my point is that we've been socialized into thinking this way that it's hard to be conscious of the fact and we conveniently label it as an instinctive thing.
ReplyDeletei'm also of the mind that if we dream for more than the time we spend "awake" perhaps our labels could come reverse. personally, i think that if cobb (di caprio) had wanted the top to drop it would have. and perhaps the camera lingered on at the top spinning only because nolan wants us to make that choice ourselves.
I AGREE WITH YOU!! you know about cobb being able to make the top drop if he wanted to (even if he was dreaming), kenneth and i were discussing that right after the movie lol. i just really like how the movie makes people think twice about the things they think they know and take for granted about what's 'real'. and i found the ending a little unsatisfying actually; i mean, after all they went through! but it makes the point, which matters much more i guess.
ReplyDeletehaha yeah. i thought the ending was superb though! from the perspective of spectatorship theory that is. it was like we were all dreaming this collective dream called Inception and even though we knew that we were "dreaming" we sutured ourselves to the fiction. When the people around us sneezed or when the fella behind you "kicked" your chair accidentally, they were our kicks in that dream. Yet we negated them and suspended our beliefs for that two hours plus. And to our reward, we are afforded voyeuristic pleasures and a deception of our own omnipotence as a spectator peeping into this dream. if the screen hadn't blacked out and the lights come on we would have continued 'dreaming' into the fabric of nolan's world maybe even to the point that we won't remember how was it that we came to the theatre to "dream." so for two and a half hours, fiction/dream became reality and we ourselves had chosen to do so. i loved it lah. its awesome! nolan's awesome. can you tell i'm a fan? hahaha
ReplyDeletehaha YES you're so obviously a fan! it's pretty cool that the whole dream shit can be about anything, anywhere if you think about it haha =D
ReplyDelete